twenty-two
The rumble of a howl woke me from my sleep.
I jerked forward, dizzy, and fumbled for my phone on the end table. I squinted into the blue light: 6:37 a.m.
I blinked back the dreams that were starting to ebb away and took in my surroundings. An ancient, pearl-colored sewing machine loomed in the corner next to the space heater, which had kicked off sometime during the night. Plastic bins full of oblong buttons and tangled ribbons clustered together in every inch of free space in the room.
The craft room. Rae’s house.
I remembered.
From somewhere outside, another howl pierced my ears, my heart, and I tried to breathe, breathe, breathe.
“Mmm,” Grant murmured next to me. I looked down at him, at his hair poking out in a million directions and his lashes looking like tiny dandelion seedlings, delicate and ready to float into the wind.
“Do you hear them?” I whispered. I brushed my hand through his hair.
“Mmm,” he said back. And then he curled into his sleeping bag.
There was no way I was going back to sleep now. My mind ticked through the possibilities: Were they in the wooded reserve we’d passed, a few miles from here? Were they slipping through the icy streets, searching for me?
Did they have Ella?
I slowly unzipped my sleeping bag and tiptoed into the hallway. I was almost to the front of the house when a patch of buttery light spilled into the mouth of the kitchen. Quickly, I shoved myself into the shadows lining the hall.
Someone banged open one cabinet, and then another. Then a grumble, followed by a string of curse words.
Rae.
I tipped my head out of the shadows and watched her. Her spiky hair was even more chaotic than usual, except for one side that lay limp above her ear. She must have been sleeping. Or at least trying to.
She practically stomped through the kitchen, swearing, unearthing a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a fat, chipped bowl. After she poured her milk, she plopped into a chair and sighed so heavily that I swear the floorboards shook beneath me.
The kitchen lights illuminated the swollen, purple skin under her eyes as she pushed the cereal around with her spoon. After a minute, she dropped the spoon into her bowl with a clang and started to flick through her phone.
“I can’t believe this,” she groaned, staring at something on the screen. “Where the hell are you, Ella?”
I swallowed the sick feeling congealing at the back of my throat.
Where the hell are you, Ella?
So Rae had known something about Ella’s disappearance all along. And still she hadn’t said anything to me, to Grant. She’d lied.
Again.
I bit on my lip to keep myself from spewing out all the things I wanted to say. I balled my hands into fists and squeezed.
Something click, click, clicked through the kitchen and I drew myself back into the shadows.
“Harold, go back to bed,” Rae said, but the pug snorted and wriggled at her feet. “Go,” she repeated, nudging him with her slippered foot. Harold snorted, and started click, click, clicking again.
Toward me.
“Crap,” I said under my breath as I watched the lumpy little dog waddle toward me. Now what?
“Harold, get over here,” Rae hissed, her chair scraping the tile as she stood up. “Don’t go back there. Come on, let’s go outside.” She patted her pajama pants, and Harold made a quick U-turn back toward the kitchen.
The back door slid open and shut and I let myself breath again.
If I was going to do this, I knew I only had a minute—two, tops.
I crept silently through into the kitchen, careful to duck as I passed the sliding glass door where Rae stood next to a knee-high snowdrift, holding Harold’s leash. When I got to the table, I snatched the phone, hands shaking.
I slid my finger over the unlock button and the phone yawned to life.
I knew Rae was hiding something, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
Rae’s face smiled up at me from the screen, and she actually looked pretty. Her hair was smoothed down and the way the dusky sunlight soaked her face made her look younger, less worn.
And next to her stood Ella.
My Ella, with her arm wrapped tightly around Rae’s shoulder. Her hair fell in straw-colored waves over her fleece jacket and a knitted cap created a halo around her head. Only this hat didn’t have ears.
She was beautiful—all sunlight and strawberry-stained cheeks. And she was smiling, the real kind. With teeth. I could barely see her scars in this picture.
Her scars.
This picture was taken after I left Amble.
I pinched the screen to expand the background. Rows of scraggly beech trees jutted out from the snow. My head snapped up to look out the sliding door.
Beech trees. And snow.
This picture hadn’t been taken that long ago. It could have been just weeks ago. Maybe even days.
My fingers fumbled over the screen as I hurried to type in a phone number. My heartbeat slammed against my rib cage as I pushed send.
The sliding door flew open and Rae stumbled into the house, practically dragging Harold in behind her. She froze, her eyes darting from me to the phone in my hands and then back to me. There was a stretch of time where I thought she might not freak out, where she might just calmly ask for her phone back and then ask me what the hell was going on here.
But this was Rae. And, of course, I was wrong.
She let out a low, guttural sound and lunged for me. I screamed and shoved an elbow into her chest to keep her back, but she still managed to grab hold of my hair and pull.
Hard.
She dragged me to the floor and knocked the phone out of my hand. Ella’s face skidded across the tile and bumped into the island with a thump.
“That’s none of your business!” Rae screamed in my ear. “You think you own everything, that you can do whatever you want to anyone. You can’t! You can’t just take things from me!”
Just then, the spark of animosity I’d started to feel toward Rae when we were both back in Amble burst into a full-fledged inferno. I reached up and dug my nails into her wrist until she howled and let go of my hair. Then I scrambled to my feet, and as soon as I was vertical, Rae wound back to hit me.
“No,” I said, snatching her wrist and squeezing. I stared into her eyes, all wild and feral and furious. “You aren’t going to hurt me anymore.”
“Claire?” Grant’s voice, still heavy with sleep, wafted into the kitchen. His mouth dropped open as he glanced back and forth between me and Rae. “What’s going on? And what the hell is this?” Grant held up his phone, where both Ella and Rae smiled back at me from the screen.
Rae jerked her wrist free, panting. She made a lame attempt to smooth her hair back. It didn’t work. “It’s a picture. Obviously.”
Grant stepped forward, still holding the phone out in front of him. Dawn had just begun to spill over the horizon, and a patch of morning light stained his face as he moved toward us. For a flash of a second, I caught a glimpse of his expression.
And it was furious.
“Tell me what the hell is going on here. Right now,” he said through gritted teeth. He clamped a hand on Rae’s shoulder and practically shoved her into a chair. “No more stories. No more lies.”
Rae sighed, rubbing her wrist. She wouldn’t even look at me. Good, I thought.
“Fine,” she said, glaring up at Grant. “I saw Ella about a week ago. But I didn’t ask her to come here. I didn’t even know she was coming. All of a sudden, she just showed up on my doorstep with a backpack.”
My heart thudded to a stop. If the wolves had taken Ella, why would she have a backpack?
“She said she took the bus up here, that she was on her way to somewhere else,
but she didn’t tell me where.” At this, Grant lifted an eyebrow, but Rae raised her palms and said, “I’m telling the truth. I don’t know where she was going. Anyway, she was only here for a half a day at most. And then she left.”
“What did she want from you?” Grant asked. He still hadn’t removed his hand from Rae’s shoulder.
Rae shrugged. I could tell she didn’t want to say anymore, but Grant wasn’t about to give her a choice. “She just asked a lot of questions about … escaping. That was her word, not mine. ‘Escaping.’ She wanted to know how I’d managed to get out of Amble—and stay out—without getting dragged back in.” Rae swallowed. “She asked how to get away from something you don’t want to be around anymore.”
“What else?” Grant asked.
Rae shook her head, pressing her fingers into the corners of her eyes. She looked miserable, and I didn’t care. She continued, “She said she was on her way to meet up with someone who could help her. I told her to call me whenever she got where she was going, but she never did.” Rae’s fingers began to shake. “She seemed really freaked out when she left. She—she kept saying she had to get away from ‘him,’ but she didn’t tell me who that was.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell us?” I whispered. And then fury washed over me again, sharp and dangerous, and I yelled, “WHY WOULDN’T YOU TELL ME?”
Rae’s head snapped up and in a flash she was back to normal. No more shaking, no more tears. “Because you don’t deserve to know,” she hissed. “You hurt her, didn’t you, you psychopath? You left her out in that cornfield to die. And now you’re pretending to actually give a shit about what happens to her, and dragging my brother along with you? Fuck you, Claire. You don’t deserve Ella. You never did.”
“No, fuck you, Rae!” Grant roared. He snatched his hand away from her shoulder, as if her skin was laced with as much poison as her words. “I came with Claire because I wanted to. I have a mind of my own, you know. You’d know that if you’d stuck around, maybe called once in a while. Do you know what it feels like to watch someone you love run away, to disappear? DO YOU?”
Grant towered over her, panting, waiting, but Rae said nothing. She just stared up at him with empty eyes and without a hint of remorse. I watched his fists clench.
I gently touched Grant’s back and said, “No, Rae, you don’t know what it’s like. You were always the one leaving, and you never once thought about anyone but yourself, about what you were leaving behind. I left Ella because I had to, not because I wanted to. And I came back for her.” I balled up the edge of Grant’s sweatshirt in my fist. “If anyone deserves Ella, it’s me. You’re just a lying, conniving bitch and you deserve no one.”
Grant’s chest rose and fell for what felt like the first time in a minute. I slid my hand into his. “Come on, Grant, let’s go home,” I told him.
I didn’t look back.
twenty-three
When we were about ten miles from Amble, Grant said, “Rae was never the same after that Robbie guy dumped her.”
I rubbed my eyes and blinked at him. The sun cast geometric patterns across his skin: stars and squares played around his eyes. The worry lines in his forehead, the way he drove with one hand looped over the top of the steering wheel and the other looped around my wrist—he looked like one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
The thing about Grant was, he was what I’d call super innocent. Not that he hasn’t kissed a girl (obviously), or done whatever else, but that whatever he did, he meant it. He held words on his tongue as if they were razor blades that could cut and he needed to be careful. He only went to places when he needed to be there, and only smiled when he felt it. That was what made his smiles so much more special; like finding a twenty-dollar bill on the street three days in a row. You never thought it would happen to you, but when it did, you were dumbstruck with wonder. So when he held my hand and told me about Rae on the way home, I knew he meant what he said.
He told me that what he’d said in Alpena was true; he’d been devastated every time Rae threatened to leave. And that before she ran away for the last time, with Robbie, she used to feel bad about that. She used to make Grant banana pancakes and hug him and play Twister with him and their old basset hound, Murphy. But after she left and went to Chicago, she never called. She never came back home. Even after Robbie left her in Chicago only two weeks later, Rae refused to come home. She spent the next year doing odd jobs like waitressing and lawn cutting and living God knows where, until she ran out of money and boyfriends and decided to move up to Alpena to live with Aunt Deb. She never did come back to Amble, or to Grant.
“It’s hard to feel like someone’s going to leave you any second, any day, you know?” Grant swallowed. “Like they’re just going to disappear into thin air.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I know how that feels.” I did know, unfortunately. I’d always known that Rae was going to leave. I’d felt her slipping away before she got into Robbie’s beater and drove down the highway. That pain was supposed to be temporary, though, because I was going to leave too.
I was supposed to go make dresses in New York, even if Ella had sealed her fate with a bottle of orange nail polish and a bench that now said Ella Graham lives here.
I guess, when it came down to it, I always knew somehow that Ella and I wouldn’t be able to stay together forever. Even if neither of us left Amble, there would be jobs and boyfriends, and then husbands and probably kids, and then we’d see each other on Christmas and Easter. I guess even when you love someone with everything you have, there’s still no way to guarantee that you can keep them with you.
My mind drifted back to the map, the visit to Rae, the diary. It was looking more and more likely that Ella had chosen to leave Amble, that she’d packed up her toothbrush and headed north on her own. But the questions of why and who—or what—she was running from still lingered like a pungent scent that clung to me and wouldn’t let me go.
I had to find the other diary.
If The Diaries of Ella Graham: Part Two was from the past year, then Part One had to be from the year immediately following the accident. I’d only been gone two years, so it made sense that there were two diaries. And I knew that Ella hadn’t kept a diary before, not when I was in Amble. And when I’d searched her room before I found her in the cornfield, I’d found that same purple notebook, and it had been empty then.
Part Two left me clues about Ella’s planned escape, and that she was afraid. I hoped Part One would tell me what she was afraid of.
I sighed. Lacey Jordan’s sharp words bit at the back of my brain: Mmm. Rumors. Just like those rumors about how your dad screwed up the evidence when he was out looking for Sarah Dunnard and couldn’t wrap up the case. Some people even said he hid it on purpose, that he went all psycho out there. But those rumors turned out to be true, didn’t they? Runs in the family, I suppose.
And then Rae’s: Crazy. I always knew you were crazy.
Crazy.
Crazy or criminal?
Lies or the truth?
Was there anything that fell in between?
There was this sliver of light between what was real and what was a lie that I couldn’t quite reach on my own. The news articles and missing police reports and endless rumors had clotted up my mind. But lingering beneath the headlines was the whisper of something else—something closest to the truth—that could explain the thread between what Dad had found at the edge of the Dunnards’ backyard and what had attacked Ella in the cornfield.
Like always, there was a space between the wolves and the print on the computer screen, between possibility and what everyone in Amble preferred to believe.
I was starting to realize that this was somehow bigger than finding Ella. This was about finding the truth.
“Grant.” I chewed at the corner of my lip. He stole a quick glance at me and kept driving without a word. Waiting. My pulse quickened. I
was losing it. “I need to know the truth. About something. About everything.” My voice cracked. It was all I could get out.
I expected him to put on his cop face and scrunch his nose as he pondered his question. He’d want to know the specifics: if I meant the truth about the wolves. Or Ella. Or Dad.
Or me.
How could I explain it was all those things, but most of all, I needed the truth behind what stitched them all together?
But Grant didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t furrow his eyebrows or pick at a hangnail or otherwise stall. He just reached for my hand, slipped his fingers between mine, and said, “Yeah, I could use a little more of that myself right about now.”
The tires crunched on the ice as we pulled into my parents’ driveway. As I hopped out of the truck, I noticed ribbons of tire tracks weaving across the driveway. Lots and lots of tire tracks.
“Hey,” Grant said slowly, scrunching his nose. “I thought your parents didn’t have their New Year’s Eve party last night?”
My eyes scanned the tire markings. There had to have been at least six or seven cars here at one point. “Yeah,” I said. “They didn’t.”
We both looked up at the windows, which were lit up like fireflies. Except for the broken weathervane in the front yard, everything seemed normal, quiet even.
But as soon as we stepped through the front door, the hairs on my arms pricked, and Grant held his breath next to me. Something was very, very wrong.
“Claire?” Mom called out from the kitchen. “Claire, come in here please.”
I grabbed Grant’s hand and pulled him forward. He didn’t even try to talk me out of making him come with me.
Mom sat at the kitchen table, cradling a cup of tea and doing that kind of rocking thing she and Aunt Sharon do. Her eyes had this glazed-over look, and even though she said, “Oh, hi Grant,” when we came in the kitchen, her eyes never left the wall behind us.
I dropped Grant’s hand and knelt down in front of her. “Mom, what’s going on?”
Of Scars and Stardust Page 14