Of Scars and Stardust

by Andrea Hannah

  No, all with the name Graham.

  I heard Grant breathing behind me, probably trying to process the same thing I was. I pulled away from the counter and stepped behind it.

  “What are you doing?” Grant whispered. “You can’t do that.”

  “Grant,” I snapped. “My name is all over this lady’s store. Like hell I can’t go back here.” He turned quiet then, and I immediately regretted the sharpness in my voice. I looked back at him. “I’m sorry, it’s just … this is freaking me out, okay? Just give me sec.”

  He nodded, and I turned back to the board.

  All of these articles, every single one of them, was about my family. I pulled off one that had a picture of the house that looked like mine—because it was mine—and started reading.

  Amble police chief Mike Graham faces local retaliation after stepping down from the Sarah Dunnard missing persons case. The home where he resides with his wife and daughter was vandalized late last night. The case is currently under investigation.

  I squinted at the grainy photo of our house. Everything looked the same except for the deep hole near the back, so dark and jagged it looked like something had tried to take a bite out of it. But I knew better; it was the damage caused by the arsonists. And just above it, two lines of sprawling, angry letters, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  I reached up to put the article back in its place when another headline caught my eye. The date on this one was from January 2nd. The same date as today. The same date as on my one-way ticket to New York, the same date stamped onto the sticker on my suitcase only two years ago.

  Victim’s Sister Named a Suspect in Attempted Murder Case

  Carefully, I plucked the article from its pushpin.

  There was a picture of the cornfield where I’d found Ella that morning, only now it was all wrapped up in police tape. I skimmed the faded letters. It was mostly about the incident, how Ella was found by her older sister, how she was in a medically induced coma for the week following her reconstructive surgery.

  But there was one paragraph lingering at the end, kind of as an afterthought. Only to me it meant that the whole universe was crashing down on me and the stars snapped from their strings and got tangled in my hair.

  A paring knife with the victim’s blood on the blade was found in the older sister’s possession the following day,

  automatically making her a suspect. Following an

  investigations by the police, Claire Graham was

  released without further questioning due to the evidence being circumstantial.

  I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until Grant was behind me, patting me on the back and whispering “Breathe, Claire” into my ear.

  I spun around to face him, my cheeks hot and everything else inside me numb. A flicker of an image, white-hot and dangerous, sliced across my memory. “Ella’s blood was on a knife. In the cornfield.”

  Grant’s head dipped below his shoulders. He didn’t say anything.

  “How many more, Grant?”

  He took a step back, palms raised. “How many more what?”

  “How many more articles are like this?” I took a step forward and rubbed my hands against my eyes to blot out the tears. “How many more are out there? And what else is in the police records that we can’t seem to find?”

  Grant’s whole body slumped and he closed his eyes, like just looking at me was too much for him to bear. “I don’t know. But I swear to God, Claire, I don’t know why the records aren’t in the database.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I stood there, in front of Grant, gasping for breath. “That’s why the whole town’s furious I didn’t get charged—there was a freaking knife on me.”

  Suddenly, the floor started to tilt beneath my feet and my head got all fuzzy. I leaned over and pressed my forehead to the cool glass of the counter, forcing air into my lungs.

  When I blinked open my eyes, a smear of silver and brown swallowed up my vision. I blinked again, and a knife tucked into the glass case took shape.

  I pulled my face from the counter, still blinking away the black spots dancing before my eyes. The knife was nestled in an old wooden box. At first, it looked just like any other knife, but when I got past the blade, I saw that the handle was wooden, carved into the jagged image of a wolf.

  “I’ve seen this knife somewhere before,” I said to Grant.

  “Of course you have,” answered a warbling voice that was definitely not Grant’s. I spun around to find Candice Dunnard leaning up against the entryway to the shop’s back room. She tilted her pointy chin up and looked down at me. “Your father bought one from me years ago. Why don’t you ask him to borrow it the next time you’re out hunting wolves?”

  In my mind, the same wooden box tumbled out of the hall closet while Ella dug through the mittens and hats. “Ew,” she’d said, slamming the box shut. “Dad has the weirdest stuff.”

  I must have looked like my brain wasn’t working for a second as I stood in front of her, open-mouthed and stunned into silence. She didn’t wait for me to respond. “Your family ruined my life. Now get the hell out of my store. You’re not welcome here.”

  I shook my head. “But I don’t understand—”

  “Your father hid evidence in my daughter’s case. I’m sure of it. Something that might have led to a conviction, to closure for me and my family. And then all the drama of the resignation,” she said, throwing her hands in the air, “and the rumors about how there were wolves out there that took Sarah. And then your sister’s various cases, which have completely overtaken any investigative powers the police mustered for my daughter these past two years. Your family is nothing but a bunch of liars.” She gritted her teeth, disgust practically radiating off her skin. “There are no wolves, unless you count the ones with the last name Graham.”

  Just then I felt heat and light and safety. Grant’s arm looped around me, gently guiding me away from Candice Dunnard. I let him pull me away from her vile words, from her twisted Graham-collage splattered throughout her rundown store.

  “Get the hell out!” she screamed, one last time for effect. We were already on our way out the door. The words sounded muffled, like my ears were stuffed with cotton balls, and I knew I needed to sit down—and fast—before I passed out.

  I took a shaky step onto the sidewalk and slammed directly into Lacey Jordan.

  “Watch it!” she yelped as she pushed me away from her. I gasped, my lungs choking on the icy air. Lacey brushed back her hair and glanced at her friend, who had a face I kind of remembered. History class, I think. Third period. A million years ago.

  It was right about then that I noticed that Lacey and her friend weren’t the only ones staring at me.

  A group of kids about my age was clustered around the door to the diner where I’d found Grant. A dozen pairs of eyes watched me, their mouths zipped into tight lines. Two people I didn’t recognize stared shamelessly at me from the shop across the street.

  It felt like the entire town had been put on pause, and all of its residents were trapped in place by the concrete that filled up their heads. And every last one of them was watching me.

  Hunting me.

  Like I was the wolf.

  There are no wolves, unless you count the ones with the last name Graham.

  My back tingled as Grant’s fingers brushed between my shoulder blades. An alarm pinged in my chest; I needed to tell him not to touch me, not now. It was too dangerous. I was too dangerous.

  But it was too late, anyway. Their eyes bounced between us, pausing for a fraction of a section over Grant’s hand making contact with my jacket. He wasn’t even touching my skin, but the fact that he was within a centimeter of my clothing seemed to be enough to classify him as crazy and criminal, too.

  “You missed my New Year’s Eve party the other night. Don’t worry, thoug
h, I’m having another little get-together tonight. You’re coming, right, Grant?” Lacey asked, her eyes narrowing. It was a loaded question, thick with a meaning that she tried to keep smothered but failed: You’re still one of us, right, Grant?

  Grant gave a quick shrug of his shoulders. “Depends on when I get off work, I guess.” He stared at the crack in the cement between us when he said it.

  Lacey watched him for a long second before saying, “It’d probably be a good idea if you came. Alone.” She didn’t even bother to pretend to be nice to me this time, and now I knew why—it had less to do with my dad and everything to do with Amble. I was everything this town didn’t want to believe in. And I’d sucked one of its best assets into my little orbit of crazy. Just a little too close for any of them to bear.

  Grant nodded and pressed his fingers into my back. “Come on, Claire, let’s go.” I let him guide me to the truck, even though his fingertips felt like knives. Well, I assumed it was his fingertips I felt poking through the fabric of my jacket. But even after we were in the truck, my skin still stung.

  And I realized it wasn’t Grant at all.

  It was the bitter warnings from everyone else in Amble—watching me, threatening me with tight-lipped mouths and angry eyes. Their warnings nipped at my skin all the way down the street.

  “Get out,” they whispered. And I knew they meant it.

  Just how long I had until they threw me out, I didn’t know.

  twenty-five

  It wasn’t hard to convince Grant to take me back to the station to search through the database. Even though I knew he was worried about getting caught again by Seth, he was more worried about me. At this point, there was no place safe for me in Amble.

  There were still no case files in the database, just like before. There were articles, though, and they were mostly about Ella. But every once in a while one would mention me. After almost an hour, the words began to melt away until all I could see were the facts beneath the surface of the story.

  I was Ella’s older sister.

  I was fifteen years old.

  I was wanted for attempted murder.

  Despite the evidence, there was some kind of conclusion the police had come to that kept me from rotting in jail for the rest of my life. But without any official police records, it was impossible to tell why.

  Why?

  I rubbed the skin between my eyes and stared at what seemed like the hundredth article on the screen. Grant sighed, his back turned toward me as he stared out the window at the dying sunlight.

  I clicked off the screen. “I’m done looking.”

  He turned around and plopped into the chair next to me. “Good.”

  I sighed, burying my face in my hands. “All of this doesn’t even matter anyway, not without records or a file.”

  Grant looked at me for a long second. I could almost see the gears churning behind his eyes. “But the thing is, you did have a file. At least, you did a couple years ago, when I first started my training.”

  I blinked. “I did?”

  Grant tapped his lip. “Yeah. I remember an actual, physical file labeled with your name. Like, one on paper. I remember seeing it in a pile on your dad’s desk when he was entering stuff in the database. See, we used to keep physical files, but then when Seth took over he wanted to put everything in the same place so it couldn’t get lost. So he had your dad input records digitally. I think we still have some of the old files, though, the important ones that Seth wanted to keep copies of.” He shook his head. “I didn’t even think of that file. There’s a chance we still have it.”

  My heartbeat quickened. “Did you ever look in it? In my file?”

  His face changed then, like the light dimmed in his eyes and the creases above his cheeks gave away that he remembered something he’d long since pushed away. He cocked his head to the side, observing me like he wasn’t quite sure if I would bite his hand off it he got too close. It was the first time he’d ever looked at me like that. It made my heart drop into my stomach.

  Then he reached out and placed his hand on my knee. “I’ll be honest. I tried to look in it, but I couldn’t get ahold of it for long enough. I only saw a couple of pages.” He cleared his throat. “Can you remember anything else about those few days after the incident?”

  Could I? There were only flashes of that week, starting with the night of the party, like someone had taken a fat eraser and rubbed away all the parts I wouldn’t be able to stand. I remembered the way the Robbie and his friends smelled like sweat and cigarettes. I remembered the icy feeling in my chest when Rae said that Grant wasn’t coming. And I remember the way the stalks smelled like Cherry Blast body spray, and that was how I found her. And bloody orange mittens. And snow.

  The next week was even foggier. There was the wet smell of the police station. The therapist making scratching noises with the pencil when she wrote. There was the smudged glass outside Ella’s ICU room. And there was a cameraman for Channel 6 standing on the front steps of the hospital with snowflakes in his dyed hair. There were Dad and Mom’s hurried whispers wafting in from the kitchen before they thought I was awake. And pills. I remember pills. Little pink pills that Mom and Dad and the therapist said were for anxiety. Pills I stopped taking when I met Danny because you’re not supposed to mix those with vodka.

  I turned to Grant. “I don’t remember a lot. I drank a lot that night. But I loved my sister, Grant, and I would never try to kill her.”

  Grant nodded slowly. “I know you wouldn’t. And that’s what you said in your statement.”

  “Oh yeah? What else did I say, since you seem to know me better than I do, Grant ?” My voice was sharp and the words were bitter on my tongue, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why I was panicking over the fact that Grant had seen the inside of my real file. The inside of the real me.

  Grant scrunched his nose and the Big Dipper folded in on itself. “I do know you better than you know yourself.” He took a tentative step toward me. “I always have.”

  When I didn’t answer, he kept going without even stopping to clear his throat. “I thought it was strange, too, how you never got charged, even with all that evidence piling up. But that thing about the knife in your possession … they didn’t find it in the field near Ella.”

  My heart fluttered with hope. No knife next to Ella meant that my memory was faulty, webbed with cracks caused by trauma. It was a lot better than being a suspected murderer.

  “Your mom found it,” Grant said. “In your jeans pocket, the next day.”

  Every ounce of hope I’d built up rushed out of me, a flood of heartbreak, as he continued. “She gave it to your dad, and the department sent it in for a DNA scan,” he said. “It was Ella’s blood on the tip.” He started to pick at a hangnail, but thought better of it and kept going. “But your Dad testified for you, said that Ella had cut her finger with it earlier in the day cutting an orange.”

  “And did she?” I asked, my cheeks growing hot. It was a strange thing, hearing about myself from someone else.

  Grant shook his head. “I don’t know. But that wasn’t the only thing that saved you.” He took a deep breath. “Ella saved you, too. She told the police she didn’t even remember you being there, in the field, until the very end when she heard you singing.”

  I closed my eyes, and for a second I saw Ella, her face in stitches and her eyelids purple, her hair in matted ringlets around her head in the hospital bed. “She probably didn’t remember anything after leaving the party. She didn’t remember a lot after the surgery, I know that.”

  “Maybe,” Grant said, pushing in the chair.

  Panic swelled in me again and I inched toward him. “Maybe? You don’t believe me, do you? You know, for someone who knows so much about everything, you could have told me.”

  Grant stepped back, watching me like I was a wolf, snarling and snapping, but I
couldn’t stop. “You already made up your mind about me a long time ago, didn’t you? You’ve thought I was crazy this whole time, and you didn’t even have the guts to tell me.”

  “I swear, I—”

  “So what do you believe, Grant?” I took another step toward him. I was close enough to him now that I could bump his chin with the tip of my nose. “You read my file while I was in New York, and they all said I’m a murderer. I’m crazy. But then I come back here and you help me try to find Ella.” I clenched my hands to keep them from shaking. “You’ve been helping me try to find the wolves, even though you didn’t tell me what was in my own file. Even though you don’t know if they exist. What is that?”

  Grant rubbed the skin on the bridge of his nose and shook his head. I held my breath, and everything in the moldy little office waited with me. I swore even the clock stopped ticking. Whatever Grant said right now, in this stretched-out second, mattered more than anything he’d said in the past week. The past seventeen years, really.

  He let out of a puff of air. “I don’t know.”

  My heart deflated and sank into my stomach. I couldn’t look at him, so I stared at the watery brown stain on the carpet instead. “How do you not know?” I whispered.

  “Claire, listen.” He lifted the tip of my chin. “What I mean is, I don’t know what really happened out there that night. But I only needed to read a few pages of your file to know that I believed you. I’ve never thought you were guilty. Not for a second. Whatever else that file says, it doesn’t even matter.”

  “What about the wolves?” I whispered.

  Grant sighed. “I don’t know. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but there are some things I can’t explain.”

  I pulled my chin away from his fingers. Same as Grant, some things with the wolves I couldn’t explain. But that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. It was just so hard to grab hold of the truth through the secrets and lies. If I could just find the truth—the whole truth—about one thing, maybe I could figure out the rest by deduction.