by Taylor Hale
Everyone is quiet as they exchange uneasy glances.
“We can’t do anything the police can’t do,” Miles says.
“But it’s better than nothing, Miles,” I say.
After a moment, Miles nods, unsure. “Okay, I’ll help.”
Dean lets out an annoyed sigh. “Fine, looks like we’re all going. Shawn, get your shit together.”
We split into three groups: me and West, Miles and Shawn, and Dean and Faye. We began on the outskirts of town, but now West and I are deep in the forest. West marks an X on every few trees we pass, as he’s done for the past two hours we’ve waded through the trees. The deeper we get, the hotter it becomes, the more terrified I am for Keely’s safety. The sun reaches its peak, bleeds through the leaves, and blinds me. When something stings my leg, I slap it, and a black fly buzzes around me. I wag my arms in a useless attempt to scare off all these terrible bugs.
“You okay?” West asks from in front of me.
“Fine,” I mutter, “let’s just keep going.”
I take his hand and he hoists me over a fallen tree. I hop over the other side but stop to catch my breath, dizzy from being in the heat for so long. Dehydration creates a dry, sandy sensation on my tongue. A canteen materializes in my hand, and I immediately twist off the cap and chug some water back.
“Didn’t realize you were so thirsty,” West says. “Sorry.”
“Thank you.” I wipe my mouth and give him back the canteen. “You’re always prepared for everything.”
“Yeah, I was a serious Scout. Becoming an Eagle was the proudest moment of my life.”
“I remember.”
“I wanted to say sorry, by the way.”
“For what?”
“‘Scout’s honor.’ I messed up. I didn’t get you home on time.”
“It’s okay. I just want to find Keely.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” West gets down on one knee and scans the ground.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
He grabs a handful of brushwood and throws it to the side. “A trail. I thought I had something, but it could’ve been a deer. Come on, let’s keep moving.”
The emergency signals on both our phones blare from our pockets again, cutting into the sounds of the forest. I take mine out, and it’s another AMBER alert for Keely. She hasn’t been found. It’s already noon.
“Hey, hold up.” West gets down on one knee. “Looks like something cut through this way. These branches have been stepped on.” He brushes twigs away from the dirt. “This part of the forest is really wet. Check this out.”
It’s barely visible, but there’s a partial shape of a footprint. That diamond pattern belongs to a Converse.
“That could be Keely’s shoe!” I exclaim. “I have to text Roger!”
“Yeah, and tell him we’ll keep going. We’re onto something.”
I text Roger and send him our GPS location, hoping it will be enough to guide him. West moves more sticks out of the way.
“There’s too much shit in the way, but I think I’ve got a trail.” He holds up a branch and allows me to pass. “Come on, this way.”
After climbing over the thin trunk of a fallen down aspen, my feet get caught in nettles that scratch at my ankles. I duck beneath a spiderweb as birds squawk above us. More fallen-down trees and thick, unruly foliage, and then we find ourselves in a sparse area of trees. West is focused on the ground the whole time.
“Shit,” he says.
“What is it?”
Pressed into the dirt is another footprint, but this one is way bigger than the last. Bloodcurdling images of Keely being attacked make their way into my mind, but I snap my elastic to keep them out.
West takes a picture with his phone. “Looks like the trail splits. Bigfoot took off over there, but Keely’s footprints go that way.”
“Does that mean she’s okay? If there was a man here, he didn’t hurt her?”
“I don’t know.” West marks an X on a tree and circles it. “But we can’t stop now. It’ll rain soon, I can feel it. I swear this is the rainiest summer I’ve ever seen in my life.”
West is right. Before long, dark gray clouds roll in as the wind brushes the tips of the trees. The smell of rain drifts into the air.
Up ahead, there’s a pointed roof of a structure between the trees. I think it’s an old fort or something, until we reach a rough trail that leads into a clearing.
A log cabin. Not one like the Hendrickses’—this one’s a real cabin made out of stacked, decaying logs. The door is topped by a set of antlers, and a window is on each side—no glass, but they lead into the pitch darkness of the cabin like two inky eyes. Leaves and branches cover the ramshackle roof, and the wood rots at the joints so the structure half collapses into itself.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“An old hunting cabin, by the looks of it.” West squints into the light. “There’s lots of abandoned shit in these woods. Hey, Keely, you in there?”
A distant caw from a crow resounds through the woods and rustles through the trees. Other than that, dead silence. The cabin’s obscure gaze traps me. Part of me wants to see what’s inside. A bigger part is too terrified to budge, scared something will crawl out of those pitch-black eyes if I make a wrong move.
But Keely could be in there. I take a step toward it, only to be gently pulled back on by West.
“Olive, don’t. It could collapse on you.”
“But we have to check. We saw Keely’s footprint, West. She could be in there.”
His jaw tightens, but he nods. “Then let me do it.”
West moves toward the cabin. Just as he’s about to turn the flashlight on his phone to peek in the windows, something flutters in the corner of my eye. It’s a monarch butterfly—but on the ground near it is another footprint.
“West, look!”
He hurries over. “Fuck, she has to be here somewhere. I think they go that way. Come on, let’s go.”
We wind over roots and crunch over twigs. I now have a crosshatch of cuts all up my legs, and the fully gray sky casts a shadow over the entire forest. When the sound of trickling water reaches my ears, I stop.
“Wait,” I say. A distant memory flows in, something I haven’t thought about it years: when we were kids, Keely and I loved roaming the forest, but Roger always told us that if we ever got lost, there was an easy way to get back to town. “The river leads to the ocean,” I say.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s something Roger used to say when we were kids. He said that if we ever got lost in the woods, we can follow the river, because the river always leads to the ocean.”
We’re running now, and rain begins to splatter my arms. The trickling gets louder. I reach the river and skid to a halt. Upstream, beneath a tree, I see her: legs bent, yellow dress barely covering her body.
All the hope I had stops, settles over me the same way the wind calms and leaves the forest in a quiet, solidified state.
She isn’t moving.
I run, trip over my own feet, and skid on my knees until I’m beside her. Her legs are sliced up from sticks, and bug bites have created fat red hives all up her arms. Mud splotches her skin and her eyes are shut peacefully.
“Keely, oh God, no, no, no.” I hover my hand over her cheek, too afraid to touch. “West, she’s dead, she’s—”
West gets down on his knees. Gently, he presses his fingers to her neck. My brain throbs, and I snap my elastic over and over again, wishing I won’t feel anything, wishing this is nothing more than another one of my fucked-up nightmares.
“She’s dead. Oh God, West, she’s dead.”
“Olivia, calm down. She isn’t dead.”
West smooths Keely’s hair from her face. She grumbles as he lightly shakes her shoulders, and her head falls to
the side.
“Keely!” I say.
“Huh? Liv? West?”
The relief is enough to cripple me. “Keely, you’re okay.”
Her eyes lull into her head. “Guys, I was so thirsty I drank river water, and now I feel really sick . . .”
“Here.” West pulls the canteen to Keely’s lips, and she slowly drinks. “There, you’re all right. Who did this to you?”
“I don’t know, I just woke up in the woods.” She relaxes, but her brows pinch in pain. “I really don’t feel good. I want to go home.”
“Everyone’s looking for you, Keel,” I say. “We were so worried.”
But Keely doesn’t reply, just falls back asleep. So I do the only thing I can: I call Roger and tell him to follow the river to us.
I’ve never been the type of person to hate hospitals, maybe because there’s something sobering about being surrounded by life-saving medicine and machines. After my fall, I remember feeling safe waking up to white lights and my friends and family.
But right now, I hate it. Because the anticipation of finding out what happened to Keely has me caught in a time loop—it’s only been three hours, but it feels like ten. This is the second time Keely’s been in the hospital, but I’m even more worried now than I was before.
Rain slams against the windows of the waiting room, and West returns with a bag of chips and a soda from the vending machine. He sits next to me. Just as West is opening the chips, Roger emerges from the hall. We both jump to our feet as he comes over, thumbs hooked to his belt, his face drawn with exhaustion.
“How is she?” I ask.
Roger is quiet. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you found her,” he eventually says. “Keely doesn’t remember anything about who took her or why, just that she woke up confused in the middle of the forest and kept walking until she found the river.” Roger places his hand on West’s shoulder. “Taking a picture of that footprint was smart thinking, West. It could be anyone’s shoe, but it’s the only lead we’ve got. The team is still investigating for evidence in the woods, but the rain’s almost surely washed it all away.”
“I just hope you find who did this to her,” Wests says.
“We will. Nothing like this has ever happened here, not in my thirty years on the force.”
“Can I go see her now?” I ask, and Roger nods. Sun is talking to a nurse in the hall when I slip into Keely’s room. She sits upright on her bed, surrounded by white sheets. The nurses have combed the sticks out of her hair and tied it into a ponytail. I want to hug her, but hold myself back when I see the tears dried on her cheeks.
“Hey, Keel,” I say delicately.
She wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her hospital gown. “Hey.”
“How are you holding up?”
“I don’t know. I feel like shit.”
Taking a seat in the vinyl chair beside her bed, I can’t stop fidgeting.
“Come on, Liv, please don’t look like that,” Keely says with a groan. “It was super uncomfortable, but the doctors, like . . . checked me out. Nobody did anything to me. I’m actually fine.”
“Trust me, I’m really glad about that, but I still don’t understand what did happen.”
“Honestly? Me neither. I was at the party, then everything went black, and suddenly I was wandering through the middle of the woods, totally confused.”
“Did someone drug your drink or something?”
“Apparently not, they ran tests and I just had a lot of alcohol in my system. Which is kind of weird because I only had a few mixed drinks. Guess they were stronger than I thought.”
“Well, what’s the very last thing you remember?”
“God, it’s all so foggy. But I remember being at Emma’s party with Shawn and them. Then I ended up losing them. I went to the bathroom, but I remember it being occupied for like, ever. Pretty sure people were doing coke inside, so Emma told me to just go to the bathroom in the backyard, which is so gross, but I did it because I was dying. The last thing I remember is looking for a place to pee.”
“And that’s when you could have gotten lost.”
“That’s what people are telling me.”
“But we found you so deep inside the forest, and when West was tracking you, he found a guy’s footprint.”
“Yeah, my dad showed me. But if some guy took me out in the woods, why wouldn’t he, like, do anything to me? As messed up as this sounds, I’m almost more freaked out that he’d drop me in the woods and just do nothing.”
“That is really weird. Maybe he wanted to, but chickened out.”
“I don’t know, or maybe the footprint was totally unrelated. Either way, crisis averted.” She holds up her phone. “To make everything worse, stupid Shawn just texted me and said we’re done hanging out. Apparently, I’m too much drama.”
Anger soaks up some of my anxiety. “He’s such a dick.”
“I know!” Tears gloss over her eyes. “But honestly, he’s right. I am too much drama. My freaking cop dad questioned the guy I like over all of this and when I got alcohol poisoning. Drama literally follows me.”
“Screw him, Keely. You’re worth so much more than some idiot guy who disappears at the first sign of trouble.”
“Yeah, I know. But I still really like him. How dumb is that?”
“It’s not.”
Someone knocks at the door, and we turn to see Roger and two younger cops.
“Lemon, we need to get an official statement from you now, if you feel up to it.”
Keely sighs. “Fine.”
After telling Keely I’m glad she’s okay again, I leave the room and meet West in the hall, and we walk together past the vending machines to a vacant part of the hall.
“Don’t you think it’s weird?” I say to West.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of that going on here lately.”
“But before I came here, things were normal, weren’t they? Someone had been killing squirrels, but after I arrived, it was a deer, and then a dog—and then all of a sudden Keely gets dropped in the forest?”
“Yeah, it’s fucked up, but what does it have to do with you?”
A nurse rolls an elderly man on a gurney past us, and I keep quiet until we’re alone again. I hesitate. I don’t fully understand what I’m thinking—maybe I shouldn’t say it at all. “I . . . I don’t know. Forget it.”
West scans my face, like he’s trying to read me, before he pulls me into a hug. I melt against him, and he smooths my hair down.
“You’ve been through a lot, Olive. You should get some sleep.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right.”
But something tells me sleep won’t take this feeling away.
Strange things have been happening in this town. And I can’t help but feel like I’m the cause of it.
14
Because I helped get Keely home safe, Roger and Sun didn’t ground me for missing my curfew. But I don’t leave the house for three days anyway. Now Roger is at work, still trying to make sense of what happened to Keely, while Sun has taken her out shopping for the first time since she was discharged from the hospital. The house is too quiet, so I step out for an evening run.
Pink and blue sweeps over the sky like a watercolor painting. My lungs heave as I suck in breaths of ocean air and jog down the quiet road, past houses and stretches of trees. I’m sweaty under my volleyball hoodie and acoustic music blasts from the headphones in my ears. Back in New York, jogging alone around the park was one of my favorite things to do. It’s much more peaceful here. There’s a tree on every lawn, and children draw hopscotch on the road with sidewalk chalk. I catch my breath outside of a single-story house with white paneling and a green roof.
My old house.
I’ve been avoiding visiting it, because the memories are as painful as they are nostalgic. I’ve missed it here
so much. Everything is the same, yet so completely different. I remember azaleas, white curtains, and a butterfly-shaped lawn ornament—but I see tulips, purple curtains, and a concrete birdbath. Instead of my mom walking around in paint-splattered overalls, an old woman hobbles from the side of the house with a watering can. She catches me staring. Not wanting to be a weirdo, I wave politely and keep running.
So many days of my life passed by on this street. Sometimes when I think about the time before the fall, it’s like looking through a cracked mirror, an outsider viewing home movies of a girl I don’t know with friends I don’t recognize.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and West’s name appears on the screen. I’m glad, even after five years apart, we at least found our way back to each other.
When can I see you next?
Since I’ve been staying home and West has been busy with work, we haven’t had a chance to continue what almost happened when I went to his apartment. My face tingles at the thought of him wanting to see me. Wanting to finish what we started.
I text him back and say we should meet soon, just as someone shouts over the sound of music in my ears. I tug out my headphones. A familiar chuckle makes my hair stand on end.
“Olivia! You in there?”
Dean, Shawn, and Faye sit under the awning of a panel house. An American flag hangs over the living room window, and a pile of garbage bags sits at the end of the broken-up driveway.
Right, the Bowmans live here. Another thing about living on this street was that I always saw Dean and Shawn attempting to skateboard or hogging the road with their street hockey. Now, they’re draped over chipped wicker furniture on the porch with cans of beer in their hands. They ditch the beers and walk across the lawn. I don’t want to see them, but we meet on the driveway anyway.
“Where’s Keely at?” Dean lights a cigarette. He wears a faded leather jacket. “Or did she get lost again?”
He and Shawn laugh. I ball my fists. Maybe it’s just some joke to these two, but they aren’t the ones who hear Keely’s quiet sobs through the walls at night.