Firefly Island by Lisa Wingate

in any way, tell my mother about this. She’ll send in a SWAT team.”
    â€œYeah, you’re gonna have some issues with the kitchen, too. It’s kind of . . . bare bones.” Daniel shook his head, but he was grinning. “I think Jack said something about this place having been a hunting lodge over the years.”
    I groaned. My curiosity about the kitchen floated on a wave of dread. Maybe I wouldn’t even go look. Maybe I’d just stayhere on the porch all day and watch the trees sway overhead and the water twinkle in the distance as Nick played in the sand while a stranger’s dog stood guard over him, all signs of human activity remaining strangely absent.
    Maybe I would just close my eyes, listen to the breath of God, and let it rock me along until finally I woke in the real world and discovered that all this was just one of those silly dreams, like the lions outside Barbie’s Dream House, or the bear trying to make off with the Clean Energy Bill.
    I was probably talking in my sleep, and Daniel was probably laughing, especially at the part about the bobcat over the shower stall. . . .

All things which make noise on the side of the path,
Do not come down the path.
    â€”African proverb
(Left by Aaron Anderson, who just found out the cancer’s gone)
Chapter 7

    I had an unfavorable opinion of Jack West before I ever set eyes on him. Aside from the unsolved murder issue, my first reconnaissance mission inside the house ignited an inner simmering that had nothing to do with the spicy breakfast burrito. My dislike for the man grew each time I opened a cabinet door, peered into a dark corner, or looked inside one of the tiny, dark, musty-smelling closets.
    The size of the closets wasn’t the problem. The real problem was that they were already occupied. When I opened doors and turned on lights, the current residents scampered in all directions, fanning away from the light like drops of rain on the windshield of a car going seventy miles per hour. They disappeared beneath the layers of old wallpaper and cheesecloth that hung over dirty, loosely pieced slats of wood.
    In dark corners dust motes gathered, filled with Brillo-like wads of human hair, animal fur of some kind, bits of rodent-eaten cardboard, the droppings that mice leave behind, assorted body parts from crickets and spiders, and the kind of giant roaches that slide quickly between wallboards. Thekitchen cabinets were similarly objectionable, although someone had lined the edges of each shelf with baby-blue powder that I had a bad feeling was intended to kill the roaches.
    As disturbing as I found the mess in the cabinets, the mice didn’t seem to be bothered by it in the slightest. I saw two of them, and evidence of more. My mother had often preached about the disease-carrying potential of rodents and insects, and as much as I was determined not to become my mother, I’d never in my life been in a place this repulsively filthy or filled with vermin.
    There was no way we were unpacking the U-Haul here, much less the shipping crate when it arrived in a day or two. I wanted to grab my suitcase and purse, run out the door, and never come back.
    I wanted my mommy. But if my mother saw this place, she’d have me hospitalized and checked for communicable diseases. I couldn’t believe I’d slept here last night. On an air mattress. On the floor. No telling what might have been crawling underneath, over the top, under the covers, back and forth over my skin . . .
    The sound of a vehicle rattling up the driveway interrupted the horror-movie scene in my mind as a shudder descended down my body.
    I seized the only ray of hope I could come up with: Perhaps the person in the white truck was a ranch worker. Perhaps Jack West was out of town—Daniel had said his oil-company offices were in Houston—and he had no idea what shape the house was in. Perhaps whoever was supposed to prepare