Past the Witch's Wall

Palm Beach, summer 1955. The Season is over. The trains have taken the winter people north, the great houses sit behind their hurricane shutters and the island lies hot, still and nearly empty. Caretaker Nora Calloway has it almost to herself. The man who raised her no longer knows her most mornings, and at night the pump still hums somewhere beneath her cottage floor.

Then a blue swirled marble turns up on her doorstep. Nora knows it at once. She set it on the ledge behind the small barred window at the Coral Cut when she was seven years old, on a Sunday bike ride with her grandparents. Island children call that road the Witch's Wall. They leave gifts on the ledge for the souls said to be sealed in the rock, and on still nights some swear they hear crying behind the bars.

Someone kept that marble for twenty-two years. Now pages begin sliding under Nora's door, torn from a handwritten record of her whole life. They know where she hid as a girl and what she said in her own kitchen last week, things nobody above ground could know. The woman in the old coral house above the Cut, the one the children call the witch, tells Nora to stay away from the ledge. Then Nora finds a tobacco tin buried under home plate at Connie Mack Field, holding a nurse's card for a baby the world was told was born dead.

Her mother Constance spent twenty-eight years hidden in the closed houses of the island. Now she finally tells Nora about a spring night in 1930, in a locked room with the windows painted shut. She heard her baby cry, strong and angry. Then the doctor said he was born dead, and the nurse said it too.

The next page is signed with a single word. Brother.

Past the Witch's Wall, in the oldest tunnels beneath the island, the coral is full of small sealed hollows, each one marked in chalk. Someone tends them every night by lantern light and knows the name that goes with every mark. He has never felt the sun on his face. He has watched Nora all her life, and now he wants her to come home to the dark and take her place beside him.

Past the Witch's Wall is the fourth novel in the Bones in the Coral series, and it stands fully on its own. It is a story about what an island keeps in the dark, and a sister who goes below to find the brother she never knew.