Of Scars and Stardust

by Andrea Hannah

  She looked at me with watery eyes. “The reporters from Channel 6 have been here all night. The police think they might have found something that was Ella’s.”

  I looked at Grant, who was digging furiously through his pocket. “No, Grant. The police wouldn’t have called you,” Mom said, sighing. “It’s a holiday. Mike said trainees aren’t supposed to work on holidays.”

  “I could help,” he said softly, more to himself than to either of us.

  Mom smiled. “I know, honey. You are helping, by being here with Claire.” As soon as she said it, fat tears began to slide down her cheeks.

  I closed my eyes. As angry as I was with my mother for letting Dad send me away when I needed them both, I still hated to see her cry. She was one of those criers who could be in movies, she was so good: a single tear trickled down to her chin, big eyes, quivering lips. I replaced her face in my mind with Ella’s smiling, happy one and screwed up the courage to ask, “What did they find?”

  “Claire, we shouldn’t discuss—”

  “Mom!” I yelled, standing over her now. “Stop treating me like I’m this glass window that’s going to shatter if I get some bad news. Tell me what they found. Please.”

  This time, she closed her eyes and set her full tea mug on the table. “They found one of Ella’s mittens. The orange ones she made. At a bus station in the Upper Peninsula.”

  “The Upper Peninsula … in Michigan?” Grant asked.

  Mom nodded solemnly and pretended to sip her tea.

  All of a sudden, I wasn’t there anymore. I was back in the cornfield two years ago, looking at Ella’s damaged, bloody body lying in the snow, her hands smothered in orange wool. “Did they have blood on them?” I breathed.

  Mom burst into a choking sob and said something I couldn’t understand. “Mom, stop, it’s okay.” I grabbed her hands and pulled them away from her face. “Those are the mittens she was wearing the night the wolves—the night of the accident.” Grant handed me a paper napkin from the counter and I gave it to her. “It was probably just old blood.”

  Grant nodded. “Or it might have been someone else’s orange mitten.”

  Mom and I both shook our heads at the same time. The odds that anyone else had a lumpy orange mitten with speckles of blood on the thumb were slim. But then Mom surprised me with something else. “The guy who works at the snack station at the bus stop in Marquette said he saw her there after they showed him her picture.” She dabbed under her eyes. “Why was she there?” she asked, looking at me now. “Why would she be there?”

  I looked at Grant, and read in his eyes that same thing that was going on in my head: Was that where she headed after she left Rae’s?

  “I don’t know, Mom.” I said, patting her hand.

  “Claire and I are trying to find her, too.” Grant stepped forward and placed his hand on Mom’s shoulder. “Do you think you can help us?”

  I tried not to cringe. The last thing I’d wanted was to remind my parents that I was still searching. They already thought I was crazy enough, looking for wolves they didn’t think existed, so what would they think about me scouring remote towns and diary entries to find Ella?

  But Mom just nodded and put her hand on top of Grant’s. “I’ll do whatever I can to find her.”

  Grant nodded again. “We need you to tell us where all Ella’s old stuff is, like stories and things she made when she was little.”

  I scrunched my nose at Grant, but he pretended to ignore me. He must have a reason for wanting to dig through Ella’s old Barbies and sticker books.

  I waited for Mom to make the same face that I did and to tell us both to get out. But she just nodded and said, “I’ll show you where I keep all the girls’ old things.”

  I looked at Grant, who just smiled his crooked grin back at me. It was funny, because I’d always thought that Ella was magic, and now Grant thought that I was magic. But maybe Grant was magic too, and his magic was that his sincerity in everything he did made people do crazy things, like open up a box of construction paper stories and trust that he’d be able to find the answers hidden there.

  “You can stop staring at me like that now,” Grant said, not bothering to look up from the box he was digging through.

  “Like what?” I asked. “Like I think you’re a little unbalanced for wanting to search through a box of baby dolls for clues? No can do.” I smiled, and Grant lifted his head just in time to catch it.

  “You told me the diary you found said Part Two, right?” he asked, pulling free a stuffed hippo with a missing eye.

  “Yes, but I wasn’t anticipating searching through a box of moldy stuffed animals to find Part One.”

  “What better place to look for an old diary than in a box of old stuff? Besides, in my deputy training program, I learned that you’re always supposed to go through the victim’s possessions, every time, whether you think they matter or not. You never know what you might find there.”

  Victim. He said the word “victim.” Not missing person, not runaway. Victim.

  My heart sank with disappointment. If Grant considered Ella a victim instead of a runaway, which police case, exactly, was he thinking about? The case of the girl who slipped out from under Amble’s heavy fist, or the case of the girl whose face got shredded open on a star-speckled night?

  And if he was thinking of that case, then what was he thinking about me?

  Crazy or criminal?

  Or something else entirely?

  “What are you thinking about?” Grant asked, his mouth hitched in a tentative smile.

  I shook away the thoughts polluting my brain. Grant knew me, trusted me. Just because the rest of Amble considered me crazy, it didn’t mean he did. “I’m just thinking that I don’t think we’re going to find the first diary in that box.”

  “Why not?”

  I tossed aside a sock monkey with a missing eye. What was with all the stuffed animals with gouged-out button eyes? “I think the first diary is from just over a year ago, and Ella hasn’t looked at or played with this stuff in ages. I just don’t know how it would’ve ended up in here.”

  Grant shrugged. “You never know. And at the very least, we could find something else important.”

  I guessed I couldn’t argue with that.

  For the next twenty minutes we sifted through Ella’s past: her stories, her stick figure drawings, her first mangled attempts at knitting and sewing. I suddenly found a lump in my throat that I had to keep swallowing down.

  “What about this one?” Grant asked, tossing a faded, green-construction-paper story at me. This one was tied together with starred ribbon.

  I read the title: Why Fairies Aren’t as Good as Whales. Only Fairies was spelled “Farees.” I shook my head and laughed. “This, right here, is going to tell us where Ella is. I mean, at the very least, don’t you want to know why fairies aren’t as good as whales?” I winked and tossed the book back to Grant. “I do.”

  Grant flipped through the book, his eyebrows furrowing at the pages. “Hey Claire, did you know that fairies can zap you into dust but whales eat millions of pounds of stuff that looks like dust?”

  I smiled, but the hole where Ella belonged hurt when I did. I pressed my hand to my chest. “Makes sense to me.”

  I started to dig through the box again when Grant flipped open a notebook and scribbled something on it. I leaned over. “What’s that?”

  Grant finished what he was writing and shut the cover. “Just taking some notes. It’s a cop thing.” He grinned when he said it, like he knew it was corny before it even came out of his mouth.

  We both reached into the box at the same time. Grant pulled out some kind of fabric-covered book and I grabbed a yellowing paper from the bottom. The top of the paper was covered in scrawling pink letters that read, Claire is so Good! I smiled as I ran my fingers across the bumpy wax letters, imagini
ng Ella’s tongue sticking out as she wrote them. There was a picture of the two of us that she’d drawn: two wiggly little stick figures with bows. I guessed I was the bigger one. Under the drawing were the words Dear Claire. Thanks for being the best in the world. Thanks for giving my unicorn a bath. Thanks for giving me extra cookies. Love, Ella.

  I let out a choking sound, but I wasn’t sure if it was because I was about to laugh or cry. This was the Ella I knew, the one we all knew. Not the Ella who wrote strange poetry and half-eaten words in her diaries. Where was this Ella, the one who was a terrible artist and dressed up as a narwhal and ate too many cookies for breakfast?

  “What’s this?” Grant asked, more to himself than to me. He flipped through the pages of what looked like just another construction-paper story. But the jagged drawing on the cover made me freeze.

  A wolf.

  “What does it say?” I breathed, but Grant didn’t reply. His eyes scanned the pages, and as he read, the skin between his eyebrows began to wrinkle up.

  After a minute, he glanced up at me, shock stretched across his face. “I think you should read this.” He handed me the book.

  I flipped to the first page and saw two stick figures: one short with a mess of blond hair, the other tall with a thin smile and a bald head. Ella and Dad. The words on the page read:

  Once upon a time, Dad and I were walking through the cornfield when he got scared. He told me to go wait by the road.

  I flipped the page.

  He was gone for a long time. When he came back, he looked even scareder. That’s when he told me about the wolves.

  Dad says there’s wolves all around and that he has to protect us. That’s what he was doing in the cornfield. He was trying to find them.

  But afterward, he said it’s our secret. He said I can’t tell anyone or it will scare them. So I wrote it in this story because it’s a story and stories can be real or made up. You never know.

  I handed the story back to Grant, dumbfounded. “Why would she make that up?”

  Grant cleared his throat as his hand swept across the page. I waited for him to tell me whatever was on his mind, but he just kept kind of growling, like he was on autopilot, as he wrote, forgetting that he’d wanted to say something. He scribbled furiously.

  Finally I said, “Okay, seriously, what are you writing?”

  He snapped the cover closed again and picked up the paper book. “I don’t think she was making this up. Ella’s other stories were all about creatures and magic and all that. This one is a little too … real.”

  I picked up the book and tried to see what he saw, but I couldn’t. “I mean, yeah, out of all the stories, this one could have happened. But I’m pretty sure it didn’t. My dad thinks the wolves are total bullshit. No way he’d go ‘hunting’ for them one day.”

  Grant muttered something and raked his fingers through his hair. I blinked at him. “My dad thinks they’re total bullshit. Right?”

  “I overheard something one time, when I was working late at the station,” he said slowly, his eyes still on Ella’s story. “Seth was on the phone with someone—I don’t know who—and he said something like, ‘I’m going to catch that Mike Graham in a lie one day soon. I’m going to make him admit he thinks he saw wolves out there on the Dunnard case. This town deserves to know the truth about him.’”

  “The truth about him? What’s the truth about him?” I couldn’t keep the panic from edging its way into my voice.

  Grant shook his head. “I don’t know. All I know is what the paper reported: that your dad screwed up some kind of evidence on the Dunnard case and resigned shortly after that. I have no idea if he did it on purpose, or if something made him go crazy out there, but Seth is hellbent on proving that’s what happened.”

  Just then Grant’s phone began to buzz in his pocket. “Hold on a sec,” he murmured, touching the screen to read the text.

  I thumbed through the pages of Ella’s book. Had Dad ever given me any indication that he believed in the wolves, ever? I forced my brain to stretch back in time.

  No, I didn’t think so. Not that I could remember.

  I shoved all of the stories and one-eyed stuffed animals back into the box and started to haul it to the basement, my mind still reeling.

  “Hey Claire. Come here.”

  I set down the box and turned. Grant was bent over my TV, pressing buttons with one hand, his phone in the other. “How do I turn this on?”

  I jabbed the power button. “What’s going on?”

  He pressed buttons until he got to the local news. Splashed across the screen were the flickering lights of a bus station. A reporter with bushy hair stood in front of it, her lips moving over the microphone:

  “ … Single mitten was found at this bus stop early in the morning. The attendant has positively identified the girl as fifteen-year-old Ella Graham, the missing person from Amble, Ohio. Although records show Ms. Graham seems to have bought a ticket head toward Iron River, Michigan, she never boarded the vehicle. Local and state police are still searching for her at this time.”

  Then they flashed a picture of Ella across the screen; what was left of her mouth was raw and pink. I had to look away.

  The walls were churning and groaning, shifting against the floorboards and pressing in all around me.

  She never boarded the vehicle.

  I knew where Iron River was. A boy that went to my high school—Gabe, I think—used to live there before his parents moved to Amble when he was six. I remembered him telling me that Iron River was so cold, his snot used to freeze to the inside of his nose in May. It was in the Upper Peninsula, right at the Wisconsin border.

  Was this the place Ella had told Rae about, the place she was going to meet someone that could help her?

  And if it was, why didn’t she get on that bus?

  What got to her before she could escape?

  I closed my eyes, trying to force away the thoughts eating at me. The police were looking for Ella. The media were looking for her. Grant and I were, too. But it seemed like the more people looked, the faster time ticked and the world crumbled around us and the further Ella slipped into the darkness.

  twenty-four

  I was frozen. I didn’t know where to go next. But luckily, Grant did.

  He didn’t say anything the entire way into town the next morning. When the reflection off the snow fell on his face a certain way, for a second I couldn’t see his mouth. A ribbon of white light slithered across his skin like a scar. It made my stomach lurch and I had to look away.

  I jumped out of the truck as soon as he parked it along the curb. It seemed like I was doing everything faster since the news story: brushing my teeth, eating, even sleeping. But time was moving quicker, and so was Ella, and if I wanted to find her I had to keep up.

  “Come on,” Grant said, guiding me toward a tiny cafe across from the diner. “We need to get something to eat, regroup. Strategize.”

  I had to admit, the thought of a massive latte and a sandwich was pretty appealing.

  Grant’s fingers grazed my back as he led me past the shops. When we walked by the bead shop, I couldn’t help but glance inside. I’d never be able to pass it without thinking of Ella. I almost passed the stationery shop up completely, but something in the window caught my eye.

  It was a wolf.

  “Hold on a second.” I pulled away from Grant to look in the window. Yes, that was it—the same wolf journal with glued-on eyes Grant had given me two years earlier. I squinted at a small sign under it that read, More wolf items inside!

  I turned back to Grant. “Hey, can we stop in here for a sec?”

  Grant shrugged, rubbing his eyes. “Sure. But seriously, I need a coffee. You can only stare at stuffed animals and stick figures for so many hours without caffeine.”

  I stood on my tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Ten minute
s. Promise.”

  The bells to the stationery shop jingled as we walked in. But they didn’t really sound jingly; it was kind of like there was a sock stuffed in them so the sound came out muffled. In fact, everything in the shop looked kind of muffled in a way. The walls were muted gray, and the rugs were a hodgepodge of faded blues. Even the cards and stationery that lined the walls looked smothered in dusty light. While everything else outside seemed to be moving faster, it had come to a screeching halt in here.

  I walked the perimeter of the shop, searching for wolf-related things. Candice Dunnard’s had shop opened shortly before I’d left Amble, so I’d never been inside, but I’d heard about it. Mrs. Dunnard had always been known around town as a little bit of a “wolf freak”—she was always touting Amble’s legendary wolves to the (few) tourists who came here, and when there were reports of a rabid wolf in Minnesota attacking an elementary school playground, she tried to capitalize on the news by selling little beaded Wolf No More talismans out of her house. Then she opened the shop and started stuffing it with journals and carvings and books, all about wolves.

  Ironic that her own daughter had gotten snatched up by them.

  There were rows and rows and dusty cards, and a table full of rose-colored stationery in the middle of the shop, but no other wolf things. Finally, after another loop around the store, I found a single, lopsided shelf near the back. But there was only one row of wolf journals on it, and that was it.

  “I thought this place was supposed to sell a bunch of wolf stuff?” I said. “There’s, like, nothing in here.”

  The skin between Grant’s eyebrows puckered. “Yeah, I know. There used to be a ton of weird stuff in here—at least there was when I bought that diary a couple years ago. I don’t know what happened.”

  I stepped toward the glass-case counter and reached to ring the service bell. Maybe I could at least talk to Mrs. Dunnard about the wolves. My fingertip had just grazed the surface of the bell when something on the corkboard behind the counter caught my eye.

  Graham.

  My last name, smattered across a news article headline. But another yellowed article covered up the rest of it. I stepped back and took a good look at the corkboard. Dozens of articles were splashed across it, some with pictures of winter cornfields and black-and-white houses that looked eerily similar to mine. And some with just the name Graham.