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beside him and stared at the damage.
“Can you . . . fix it?” she asked tentatively.
“The landing gear is trashed. Look at that—tires blew out, each one of them. No way.” He rubbed at his face and winced, looking up the runway. Maybe the cracks in the pavement were worse that he’d thought. “But the floats are still intact.” He dropped into a crouch to get a better look. The floats were dented and scraped and a bit loose, but if there were some way to get the plane into the water . . . She could do it. Maybe. He’d have to patch the holes in the floats and then do a complete engine check, to be sure there wasn’t any internal damage. The only other option would be to ask for help from Sophie’s mom, perhaps. There had to be a phone on the island, or some way he could contact his dad. He felt ill. Of all the places to be stranded . . . “Some holes in the floats. I’d have to patch it up.”
“How? There isn’t exactly an airplane shop around here.” She swept her hand, indicating their isolation.
“Duct tape,” he said.
Sophie raised one eyebrow. “Duct tape.”
“Oh, yeah. I use it for everything, and it’s never let me down.” He climbed back into the cockpit, dug through a compartment in the back, and emerged with three rolls in each hand. “See? The stuff is practically made of miracles.”
“Right.” Her tone was flat and skeptical.
Jim sighed and studied the damage, knowing that even with the tape, it would take a real miracle to get the plane back into the air.
Sophie was edgy, looking around and pacing to and fro, wondering where her mom was, Jim guessed. He pulled his eyes away from his plane. “See her?” he asked.
She shook her head and mechanically shrugged her backpack onto her shoulders and then stood still, staring around. From where they were, Jim could see the entirety of the little islet. Unlike its much larger neighbor, this island was mostly flat, composed of a thin scattering of palms, a lot of sand, and the airstrip. Tall grasses shimmered around them, bent by the salty wind, and old coconuts littered the ground.
Skin Island looked closer than it really was, rising out of the sea into a series of green peaks. It was probably too mountainous for an airstrip, which is why they’d used the smaller island, Jim reckoned. He knew Skin Island had once been a posh resort in the seventies and eighties, but had shut down for several years and fallen into disrepair. Then a group of scientists moved in and set up camp. They never seemed to use the airstrip, at least from what he could tell; the helicopters landed elsewhere. He’d never known anyone to ask questions about what went on there; people seemed to sense that whatever it was, it was best left alone. It was one of the few things his neighbors actually didn’t pry into. Jim had a running theory based on what he’d seen of the island communities in and around Guam—the smaller the island, the more time everyone spent in each other’s business. Half his neighborhood had known about his parent’s split before even he did. In fact, the morning his mom stormed out with all her belongings in two suitcases, there had been a crowd gathered to watch. They were all huddled in the neighbors’ yards, trying to be surreptitious and failing miserably, and Jim had refused to speak to any of them for months.
But when it came to Skin Island, even the most notorious gossips he knew kept their lips sealed. Even when Nandu had returned from his ill-fated trip there, no one had asked questions. Skin Island was something of a local horror story, their equivalent to a haunted house—a haunted island. “Jim?”
He shook himself and slowly stood up. Now that the initial shock had died down, the pain was setting in. His chest and stomach burned from the seat belt digging into him, and he knew the whiplash would only get worse in the next few hours. He stretched his arms, wincing a little as the movement sent a spasm of pain down his back.