“You must be Lucy.” The sheriff smiles, just a little, at me as he releases my mom. He steps forward, hand extended to shake mine, and I take a tiny, involuntary step back. He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment.

  Don’t say fuck the police.

  Don’t say anything.

  To anyone.

  Katy’s words echo in my head, sharp and painful in contrast to the warm hug she just gave this man she asked me not to trust.

  Finally, I reach out and shake his hand, my grip firm, just the way Katy taught me.

  “I’m Cliff,” he says, squeezing my hand with a sympathetic look. “Terrible circumstances, of course. But everyone in Haeter Lake has been dying to meet you. We’ve missed your mom a lot.”

  The use of the word dying feels wrong and cruel and horrible. I reach out a hand and steady myself on Katy’s Jeep, my stomach tightening.

  Haeter Lake, Tennessee. A family friend. A body by the roller coaster.

  A cop who knows my mom.

  These people are dying to meet me? They know about me?

  I shiver again.

  The sheriff—Cliff—is smiling, friendly, kind. Hugging my mom. All of that is discordant and strange and surreal.

  Why does this town know me?

  Katy barely looks at me, but I already know better than to look for answers there. “He texted me today,” she says finally. “It’s Pierce, Cliff. Pierce Anselm is dead.”

  Cliff’s eyes dart to the body, his face pale.

  Behind Katy’s car, there is a sharp crack.

  I scream again, high-pitched and fierce.

  Katy’s hand clamps down on my shoulder. “Lucille.”

  “Just a rabbit,” Cliff says reassuringly, but the sound of his voice makes my stomach hurt.

  It’s too big to be a rabbit, I want to say, but Katy said not to say anything. Anything at all.

  Not even about the person I saw in the woods?

  I look at her for answers, but her gaze is fixed on the roller coaster and the body. The body I can’t look at.

  “Christ.” Cliff shakes his head. “I thought—Well, when you called earlier and said he’d reached out, I called the house and asked if he was all right. He seemed in good spirits then, Katy.”

  He hesitates, his gaze flicking to me.

  I want Katy to say, No, don’t talk about this in front of my kid, but I also want our spring break trip to Hawaii. Some wants stay wants and nothing more.

  “What is it?” Katy asks. She shifts slightly, placing her body between me and the park.

  “Do you think he jumped?” Cliff runs a hand over his beard. “I—I’ll call the medical examiner and the deputy to help with—God—to help with the body.”

  Mom hesitates for too long at his question. “I don’t investigate the dead,” she answers finally.

  Both of those things—her silence and her answer—sound like No, nope, it was definitely murder, no jumping happened here.

  Comforting as she always is.

  “Katy.” I say her name snappishly, because that’s usually the only way to get her attention when she’s gone cold and distant like this.

  Her eyes snap to mine, startling a little bit as if she had forgotten I was there. She settles a hand on my shoulder, her grip tight.

  “We should go,” I say.

  It’s selfish, and wishful, and Mom isn’t going to leave. I can already tell by the grim set of her jaw.

  She squeezes my shoulder, almost gentle for a moment. “I know,” she says.

  “Katy,” Cliff says. “The—the family. We have to tell the family.”

  He says we, like it’s not just his job.

  But Mom is nodding. “I’ll come with you,” she says. “Call Veronica first. Tell her we’re coming to their place now.”

  Mom must realize how tightly she’s holding my shoulder, because her hand opens, her knuckles nearly white from the pressure. “We’ll go to our motel after,” she tells me quietly. “We’ll know more in the morning. Cliff can handle it from here.”

  “Veronica will want you to be part of this,” Cliff says. There is regret in his voice as he says it. “Especially since Pierce asked for your help.”

  Katy’s hand spasms on my shoulder.

  I lean into her, because she is warm and strong and if I am not right beside her, so close we’re touching, I will disappear right into the forest, vanish behind those bushes that sway, those trees that lean close enough to nearly touch me. That girl with the dark eyes and the knife in her hand—the girl I might have imagined—will find me.

  “Can we go home?” I ask Katy.

  If she notices that I sound close to tears, she doesn’t react.

  She shakes her head. In the sharp light of the moon, her pupils look dilated. “Not yet, baby,” she murmurs. “Not yet.”

  “I hate to keep you out any later for this,” Cliff says, not at all sounding as if he regrets it. “I’m going to—” He clears his throat, looking at me again. “I’ve got to secure this scene and make a call to the medical examiner. Why don’t you head up to the big house and talk to the family? I’ll send my deputy with you.”

  Katy deals with the police often, and she rarely does as she’s told. She usually fixes them with that cold, unimpressed look that says she won’t be doing anyone’s plan but her own.

  But now, she nods woodenly. “Of course,” she says softly. “I’m happy to help.”

  Cliff hugs her again. “I’ll stop by the house after I’m done here,” he tells her, and then nods to me.

  Katy puts her hands on my shoulders again and guides me back toward the Jeep, her posture tense.

  She breathes out once we’re in the car, but when I open my mouth, she holds up her hand. “I know you have questions,” she says.

  I have always had questions. I’ve gotten vague answers out of her in the past—I knew she had lived in Tennessee when she was younger, though I had assumed a city like Nashville, not a small rural town at the edge of nowhere—but now I have a hundred more, swirling around in my brain. “Of course I have some fucking questions—”

  “Not now.” She is back to the version I know: calm and commanding and utterly in control of herself.

  But as she drives the Jeep out of the parking lot, away from the body, up, up, up into the darkness of the mountains, I watch Katy’s face in the rearview mirror. And now that we are out of Cliff’s sight, she doesn’t look calm at all.

  Her eyes are wide, pupils round, and her chest is heaving as if she is trying and failing to catch her breath, one breath away from a panic attack as if she is, for the first time, just like me.

  Audrey. 10:47 p.m.

  I stagger off my motorcycle—well, Dad’s old motorcycle—in the dark gravel path outside our home, the small trailer at the edge of the trailer park. My hands are shaking, dirt caked beneath my fingernails and embedded in the soles of my new running shoes.

  Dirt everywhere.

  And Pierce Anselm is dead.

  Pierce Anselm is dead.

  And I shouldn’t feel relieved, but when I swing my leg over my motorcycle, Dad’s motorcycle, it feels. Good. And terrible. But good, too, and that scares me more than the body did.

  Our one little streetlight flickers, its yellow dome a halo—for Mom. She is standing outside in her work shoes, her arms folded, her brow furrowed.

  Fuck.

  She’s in her scrubs, her black hair pulled into a ponytail. She’s not wearing makeup, and the dark circles under her eyes are even more pronounced than usual. “Audrey Nadine,” she says. “Where the fuck were you?”

  I can’t even pretend I was with my friend Chris, because he already dipped to spend his spring break with his grandparents in Arizona.

  Before the accident, before everything, I wouldn’t have made it to the Friday before spring break without at least half a dozen invitations to hang out at bonfires or cabins or down at the lake.

  But now, with five bitter years stretching between me and the accident, and more than a few fistfights, after asking everyone and anyone to choose, to choose a side, to choose me, they have all drifted away.

  “I—I just wanted to go out for a bit,” I say. The Post-it note that was stuck to my locker earlier is still crumpled in my pocket, the scrawly handwriting with its lie. I swear I didn’t know. “Just drove around a bit on the bike.”

  Her eyes flash, and for a moment I wait for her to call me on the lie. But then she tilts her head, considering something. Finally, she says, so softly it sounds that much more dangerous, “It’s past curfew.”

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  We’re talking about curfew, and Pierce Anselm is in a pool of his own blood back at the park.

  “Did you expect me to be at work?” Mom’s voice sounds tense. She’s not usually that strict, at least not about curfews, because I can handle myself, because Chris is steady and kind and watches my back. Because I grew up too fast to act like the other dumb teenagers from Haeter Lake. But tonight, the worry in her voice is unmistakable. “I had tonight off,” she says when I don’t answer. “But I just got a call. They need me.”

  “Why?” I swing my leg off my bike and knock the kickstand into place. When I try to move past her, she adjusts her stance, blocking my path.

  “Who were you with?” she asks. “I know Chris is out of town.”

  If it were any other night, I would be both devastated and angry at the implication that Chris is the only person who would hang out with me, but she’s right.

  Chris said as much before he left, said, I’m sorry you’re spending spring break—

  And I’d cut him off, said, Don’t say alone. Don’t say it. Don’t say it.

  “I was alone,” I tell Mom.

  Her eyes drop to my shoes, to the mud caked there.

  And mine drop to hers.

  Her work shoes, sensible, slightly worn gray runners, are caked in dark, muddy clay.

  Mom’s gaze snaps to mine. “They called me in,” she says quietly. “Because someone found a body.” Her dark brown eyes are intent, piercing, like she’s searching for something when she looks at me.

  I drop my eyes. Back down to that packed mud. “A body,” I repeat.

  After a long moment, she steps back, a little bit of the mud from her shoes falling from her shoe onto our front step. “Come inside.”

  I huff as I toss open the metal door to our trailer and kick my muddy shoes off inside. My knife is still tucked in my sock, hidden away, and there’s—there’s no blood on me. Or at least I couldn’t see any under the light of the moon when I left the park behind. So there’s no way. No way Mom can know.

  I toss my leather jacket over the back of my chair, and something flutters to the ground. The Post-it note, the one from my locker. I pick it up and catch Mom looking at me.

  Her stare is still intent.

  “Someone left a note on my locker today,” I tell her, though she didn’t ask. “Don’t know why I kept it.”

  Mom is like that. She’ll wait long enough, quiet and sure, and you’ll find yourself spilling your secrets before you can stop yourself.

  Most of your secrets, anyway.

  Her gaze flicks to my mud-caked shoes and then back to me. To the Post-it note.

  My heart thumps inside my chest.

  “I’m really not hungry,” I mumble. “Can I please go to bed? I’m sorry I missed curfew.”

  After a long moment, she sighs. “Yeah, baby,” she says finally. “Yeah, okay. But you stay here tonight, you understand me? If I find out that you’ve gone out again tonight—” She glances at the shoes, her gaze so intent I think she might burn a hole right through them.

  “I won’t,” I promise quickly.

  I disappear into my room and crawl into bed as quickly as I can. I lie there trembling for a long time, my body shaking so hard that the bed itself wobbles.

  Sundress saw me. I know she did. I don’t know her, or why Sundress and her mom were there, or what they might have wanted with Pierce Anselm, but she saw me. And Mom—I don’t know what Mom knows, or thinks she knows. Or wonders.

  There is a thud behind the trailer, in that gap of dead grass between our trailer and the forest. It’s an empty space mostly, something that could be called a backyard only if you were being generous.

  I jolt upright.

  There is another, softer rustle.

  And then the sound of water running.

  I hook one finger on the blinds where they are already bent from the old days when Dad was here and we’d sit together and peek out at the stars or the moon or the forest together. Now, alone, I peek through.

  Mom is back there, her face illuminated by her phone’s flashlight, and she is hunched over something on the ground.

  A pair of shoes. No, two.

  She is running the hose carefully over the bottoms of the shoes, scrubbing roughly at the mud caked there, glancing over her shoulder every few seconds or so, even though no one lives close enough out here to see. In the harsh light of her phone flashlight, her eyes look hard, determined, fierce as the day she stood toe to toe with Pierce and Veronica Anselm and said, You will pay for my husband’s death.

  A moment later, Mom kills the light completely, and then it’s just the gurgle of the hose and the soft scrape as she scrubs the mud from both our shoes. And I just lie there, trembling, wondering what exactly Mom knows—and what she is covering up out there in the dark.

  Katy pulls over at the end of the road in front of a gate—and looming behind it, a mansion bigger than any house I’ve ever been this close to—and waits until the deputy joins us.

  “Katy,” I say shakily. “Why do you have to do this?”

  She squares her shoulders and looks past me, her face illuminated by the red-and-blue flashing lights of the deputy’s car and the lights along the private road leading to the mansion.

  “I don’t need questions right now, Lucille,” she says, in that I’m-on-a-case voice that means she doesn’t have time to entertain me.

  “Mom,” I attempt. “I’m scared.”

  She turns to me suddenly, her body jarring when I call her Mom.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she says woodenly, but she is at least looking at me now. “I’m sure you’ve got questions, but I need you to do something for me, Luce. I need you to wait until we’ve left Haeter Lake in the dust before you ask me any of them.”

  And then she’s driving again, the mansion looming through the twisted branches up ahead, distant and magnified at the top of the hill. The lawn that slopes toward the house is well groomed, the grass close-cropped and well maintained.

  A pool, still covered for the winter, stretches out behind the house, and then wooden steps lead up to a deck high above the ground with a covered pavilion, lawn chairs, and a grill. Beyond all of that is the long, low silhouette of a building, something that could be a greenhouse, and then past that a path winds its way into the forest.

  When we get out of the car, I follow Katy so closely I nearly step on the back of her heel, something that always annoyed her when I was young and clingier.

  Katy pauses for a long moment before she knocks, again waiting until the deputy joins us before she lifts her fist and knocks.

  The sound makes me jump, but I force myself not to lean close to Katy.

  We are on a case. We are professionals. Well, she is. And me clinging won’t help anything.

  The woman who answers the door is tall and silver haired, and though she looks as if she’s ready for bed—silk pajamas, her hair loosely pinned, her glasses on—she looks elegant all the same.

  She is—

  Regal.

  That’s the only word I can think of.

  She pauses and then gasps, putting her hand over her mouth. The gesture feels practiced; the emotion only allowed after she weighed it and decided it was acceptable for public display. “Katy?” she says. “Oh, darling, what are you doing here? Is everything all right?”

  A hundred emotions pass across Katy’s face and then she steps forward and wraps her arm around the woman. “Veronica,” she says. “Veronica, I’m so sorry.”

  The deputy ushers me backward, a short way away so that I’m standing at the bottom of the steps. She tells me, very kindly, that I shouldn’t have to hear all of this, and that it’s law enforcement business, and I manage not to say anything rude about the police.

  I do still watch all of it unfold.

  This Veronica, who calls my mom darling, who my mom hugs—this woman does not fall apart at the news that her husband is dead.

  She stands very still, in a way that looks as if she is trying to contain everything that wants to spill out, and then she presses her hand to her mouth and steps back inside, face crumpling into grief.

  Katy follows, as if I am forgotten here.

  The deputy does not glance back either.

  The door shuts, and I let it, and then I am alone in the dark on the steps of the mansion, shivering against the wind and wondering what else is just beyond the ring of the lamppost that illuminates the steps.

  I am frozen there—making no move to knock or go inside, imagining the flash of eyes I saw in the forest, the glint of steel, the panicked look of a girl, a girl, I know I saw her, before she turned and ran.

  And then the door swings open with a bang, and Katy descends the stairs, her eyes fierce. “Get your bag. Come inside,” she says sharply. “Don’t linger out here.”

  Her hand is heavy on my shoulder, fingers digging in, but I don’t complain.

  The light of the entryway is welcoming and warm. Veronica is crying, her well-manicured, ringed hands still pressed against her face, and there is a boy next to her now, a kid close to my age with high cheekbones and a shock of wavy blond hair. He looks pale and scared, and he is holding tightly to Veronica’s hand.

  “Stay close to me,” Katy hisses in my ear.

  Finally, Veronica stands, her hands a little shaky. She squeezes the boy’s shoulder once and then her gaze settles on me.

  “Katy,” she says in wonder as she takes in the sight of me for the first time. “Oh, Katy, this is your baby girl. I’ve wanted to meet her.”

  She cups my face in soft, wrinkled hands, though her eyes are sharp when they take me in. “She looks just like you.”

 

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