Does chocolate slow mental processes? I can’t seem to produce coherent thought, still so shocked by her being in my kitchen. “Well, where’s she supposed to be?”
“Home! She had some party with her dance class right after school, and then she was catching a ride back here. I made her promise”—sharp, dismissive gesture—“because of what happened to you the other night. I figured maybe the party ran long, or she stopped by Jasmine’s after and left her phone in the car—”
“So she did get a ride with Jasmine’s mom?”
“Probably. She usually rides with them. But I can’t get ahold of anybody. Jasmine’s not answering, my mom won’t pick up—”
“Call her work—”
“No, she’s off tonight. She’s pissed at me and not answering, that’s all. I’ve left, like, three messages.” Her phone chimes then, and she swears in relief—“Jasmine, finally”—scanning the text, fingers flying over the keypad in response. A couple seconds later, she looks up at me, expression dull. “They dropped Hazel off around four.”
I stare, unmoving, no clue what to say.
Bree texts again, reading Jasmine’s response off the screen: “Dropped her off at the turn-in to the Terraces. She said she had to check the mail.” I think of the two outdoor pedestal mailbox units down there. “That was an hour and a half ago.”
I feel the spike of fear that shoots through her, my empathy on overdrive, thinking of Hazel. My mouth’s gone dry, and it’s hard to swallow. “Okay. Then she must be in the Terraces somewhere. Where would she go?”
Bree’s shaking her head, hard and fast. “Nowhere. Her friends don’t live here—”
“Yeah, but it’s Halloween. Somebody must’ve seen her walk by and asked her to hang out for a while. We’ll find her, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.” I grab my coat from the closet, pull on my sneakers, some small, shameful part of me exhilarated that I can help Bree, try to win her back. “Do any kids from her grade live here?”
“Um. There’s that Peyton girl—and Jackson Adelman, I guess. He lives up in the high numbers.” Bree’s heading toward the door, talking like she’s in shock, like deep down, she’d expected to find out it was all a mistake, that Hazel was still at the rec department after all, eating orange-frosted cupcakes and showing off her dip and step.
“Wait for me. Hold on.” She’s already heading down the steps, the door left gaping, so I grab paper and pen, writing a quick note to Dad, hoping to hell that I’ll be back long before he has a chance to read it.
We try four different apartments, all the middle school kids Bree can think of. Nobody’s home at two of them, and at the other two, our knock is answered by a kid doing what I was doing before Bree showed up, watching TV and giving out candy. Neither of them have seen Hazel.
Bree’s walking faster, faster, and the sun’s lower every time we emerge from behind one of the units, a fiery orb stretching out tendrils of orange and purple along the horizon. “Let’s go back to my place,” I say, squeezing my hands together, wishing I’d paused long enough to grab my hat and gloves. “My dad will be home before too long, and then we—”
“Do you think he took her? That guy from the other night?” Bree turns, and there are tears on her cheeks; she’s been walking and crying and I didn’t even know it, because no other part of her reveals a thing. “Do you think that’s what happened? She’s out in the woods?”
I shake my head slowly. “Come on . . . there are trick-or-treaters everywhere tonight, people coming and going—it wasn’t even getting dark yet when she got dropped off.”
“Was it dark when Aidan chased you?” She’s got me there; I say nothing, and she shakes her head. “What if somebody grabbed her, or tricked her? Got her to go out on the trails with them?” She presses her fist to her lips for a long second, then turns and heads down the slope toward the street.
I know where she’s headed. “Stop. Let’s call the cops.”
“Call them, if you want. I’m not waiting.”
“Bree! Don’t be stupid! Come back!”
She breaks into a run. I curse, kicking the ground, watching her cut by the laundry building, heading toward the trails.
Call Dad. Call Ma. But they’ll tell me to go home, to sit tight while they deal with this, when Bree’s running away from me now, doing something really stupid now, and I’m the only one here to stop her. And I’m her friend. Supposed to be.
I take off after her before she gets too big a head start.
The light fades so fast.
I sink with it, acknowledging some self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, all this would begin and end in the woods, with Bree and me in the dark heart of this place. Everything started here, our first pilgrimage to the marsh, when everything with Kincaid was so new. His hand taking my arm for the first time as we stared down the nightmare on the opposite bank; the darkness taking Ivy, leaving only a trace for Bree and me to find.
And now maybe it has Hazel, but even as I shout her name, I’m trying to figure out how to call this off, go back before it’s too late. Find a way to reason with Bree, who I know is way beyond that. I’ve never seen anyone cry like she is, like her chest has been torn open but her body won’t stop going, won’t stop calling for her sister, expecting to see her behind every tree.
At last I stop, saying, “Let’s go back,” my voice exhausted, flat, because I know she won’t listen, watching as she keeps on going down the trail. “The longer we stay out here, the more time we’re wasting. Hazel could be anywhere. We need to call the cops.”
Bree does an unsteady half turn, gaze moving over the woods to me, almost like she’s ready to faint. “We haven’t checked the marsh.”
“She would never go to the marsh!” Déjà vu all over again: Landon, Ivy. You go if he takes you there. “I don’t want to be out here, Bree. I’m scared.”
“I’m not.”
“We should turn around!” I’m yelling now.
“Just go, Clara!” Bree’s words echo in the trees. She steps through brush onto a side trail, leaving the main path.
And I stand, hands useless at my sides. She left me. Or I left her, take your pick. I’ve never felt so disconnected in my life, so lost. I fumble Ma’s phone out, check the bars. No service. Naturally.
I thought I knew the way. Thought I’d been down this trail with the others before, remembering a curve, a blaze-orange marker on a tree trunk, then a right turn. But there’s no marker, and the curve is too gradual, with no right fork appearing as I follow it. The dark is coming down, and I have to outrun it, won’t admit to myself that I’ve done it again—lost myself in these pitch-pine woods.
And the heartbeat that followed me through this day, the thirty-first of October, is back, my eardrums pounding with it, filling my rib cage as I turn again, and again, staying to the path in the vain hope that it will keep me safe this time, that I won’t end up on the banks.
Tired, cold, trying to convince myself it isn’t becoming night around me, that I don’t need the phone flashlight, not yet, I stare half-blind at the trail, where anything could be familiar, or completely unknown.
When I turn a corner and it’s there, a huge, dark, immobile shape in the center of the path, I can’t register surprise. Because it was always leading to this.
I stop, weaving slightly on my feet, a daytime creature on this nocturnal plane, all my defenses stripped away.
He waits. I stare, my lips cold and stiff. “I’m not afraid of you.” I hear the words in my head, not sure if they reach him. “I don’t believe in you.” Back up a few steps.
For a long, long time, no movement. Then, something unexpected—a burst of light, like a lightning storm in his hand. Whiff of ozone. I back up. Turn. Run.
Pain forks into my lower back, an electrical impulse that takes out everything, my body gone below the waist. I fall.
Twenty-Seven
A WEIGHTLESS PAPER shape circles an orb of light. Tickaticktick. Settles, whispers its wings, lifts off.
Focus on the moth. An exercise in concentration. I’m coming back, shedding the soft gauze of semiconsciousness, feeling a bolt of pain screwed into my lower back, my dry cotton mouth. Squeeze my eyes shut, look again. The filament in the bare bulb overhead burns like the tip of a white-hot soldering iron.
I take a breath, reach for my back, expecting to find blood, shredded skin—but what my fingers explore is a swollen lump above the waist of my jeans, like I was bitten by something small and extremely venomous. No light here except the bulb over the cot I’m lying on, and, in the far corner, the seething red grate of a small potbelly stove. The walls and ceiling are rough-hewn, exposed beams, unfinished.
The muscles of my torso jump and twitch in some delayed reaction as I realize I have no idea where I am. I remember Bree, running away from me. A hand, playing lightning between its fingers. Not lightning. Electricity. A Taser.
There’s a motor running steadily outside, and another sound, murmuring and soft, like flowing water, or a conversation so distant that the words lose all form. I sit up stiffly. Someone’s taken my coat.
He lets himself in, then, granting a brief glimpse of twilight before he shuts the door. I move back, knowing the big silhouette, the darkness of it, blending so well with the shadows as he goes to the stove, taking a second to warm himself. A rustle as he sheds some outer layers, a heavy coat, maybe some gloves. “There you are,” he says in his soft, modulated voice. “Took you long enough.”
Mr. Mac comes closer, dressed in what helps him look like part of the night: dark Carhartts, a black fleece vest over a black hooded sweatshirt. A ski cap he removes, gently squeezing it in his hands as he lowers it, never taking his eyes off me. They’re a mild shade of brown.
“What . . . ?” I shake my head, and maybe I’m not fully awake yet, because I feel like I’m floating, up there with the moth, and the questions I should ask won’t come.
“Go ahead and lie back.” He sets the hat on an unseen shelf, carries a big metal toolbox to a bench near the cot, opens it, brings out a handful of black plastic strips. Zip ties.
My body’s never given signals like this before—air traffic control with all the boards lit up, alarms blaring, flaggers signaling go, go now. I make a slight move to push myself off the cot; he turns, and I’m completely blocked by his bulk, my face level with the broadest part of his thigh.
We stare at each other for a moment, and then Mr. Mac sets the ties down, walks around the end of the cot, grabs a flashlight as he opens a closet door. He shines the beam straight down into a face: eyes huge, mouth covered in a strip of duct tape, dried blood all down one side of her head and neck. Hazel sees him, then me, and starts thrashing; her cries behind the strip are what I was hearing, that babbling brook.
He hunkers down beside her, glancing at me. “Okay, Clara? For every bit of trouble you give me”—he swirls the beam in Hazel’s face, watching her wince—“she’ll lose a little piece. One piece at a time.” He sniffs, maybe a touch of fall allergies. “You think about what piece I’ll start with, the next time you want to make this hard.”
He shuts her away.
I’m frozen. He makes another spinning gesture at my legs. “Pick them up.” I force myself down on the thin mattress pad. It’s covered in a white fitted sheet that smells fresh from the package, but it’s soaked into the walls, what’s been done here, a psychic assault that makes me retch, quietly, swallowing. No doubt he’s scrubbed the bits and pieces away—I saw gallon bottles of bleach on the closet floor around Hazel—but horror is a residue, molecules I inhale. “Let me go,” I whisper. Nothing; he’s busy getting his tools out. “You killed those kids.”
“Don’t tell me what I’ve done.” Conversational. He brings out a power drill. A hammer. A plastic box rolling with nails and screws. The light flickers overhead, and he tsks, tossing over at me, “Generator. It happens.”
I’m rigid as he kneels beside me. “Somebody will hear.”
He gives a half smile, gaze traveling from the crown of my head down to my arm, which he takes in a light grip, looping two zip ties around my wrist, strapping it to the metal frame of the cot. “Don’t worry, nobody’s going to hear us.” Jerks the ties so there’s no slack; I cry out. “Used to come out here hunting with my dad, before the state bought up the land.” Exhales as he sits back on his heels, gaze going over the ceiling, the light, with its moth. “Camp’s still here, though.”
State-owned land: we’re still in the marsh. “I just want to go home. Please.” Strain my arm against the tie. “We didn’t do anything to you.”
“You know what you do.” Mr. Mac drops to my level, folding his forearms on the pad, and my senses recoil from the normal-guy smell of him: Ivory soap, coffee, toothpaste, like some olfactory checklist of how he prepared for tonight, as if it were a Lady Elks’ playoff game. “I think you know exactly.” He reaches out, playing with the earrings in my lobe, flicking them. “But it’s different when we’re alone. Nobody laughing then.”
I shake my head, tears stinging, escaping down my face. “I’m not—”
“Ah. It’s okay. That’s just school.” He releases a sigh. “It was the same way when I went there. Everybody laughing.” He looks at the wall for a second, working the sheet between his fingers. “But now I’m big. And it’s so easy.” Nods toward the closet. “That one there? Got right in the car when I said Bree had had an accident. That her mom was waiting for her at the ER. All you guys did just what I wanted. I’ve been watching you, you know. Figuring you all out.” He moves down to my feet, secures my right ankle with two more ties. Pats my leg, pausing thoughtfully. “I’ve never done two at once before.”
My gaze is riveted on the last four ties. Can’t let him put those on me. “Nobody’s going to believe Hazel and I both ran away.”
He smiles slightly. “Maybe they’ll think the Mumbler did it.” He looks at me from the foot of the cot, expressionless, zip ties held loosely in his hand. Blinks rapidly, pulls his glasses off, pinching the bridge of his nose for a second. “I just—I always wonder—you know, if it would be different. If we could just be together before. Let you get to know me. Instead of those other boys.”
I clear my throat, words coming slowly. “Just you and me?”
“Or any of the others.” His gaze works over my skin by the millimeter. “I really am good with kids.”
I swallow. “I think you are.”
His brown eyes, so close, as he leans farther over the bed. “You do?”
That’s when I jam my thumb into his eyeball.
Twenty-Eight
HIM, YELLING. ME, throwing my free arm up to block my face, trying to roll to the side before he comes down on me.
His fist slams my head, sending cascades of stars through my vision, but he’s off target—can’t see yet. I grab at the bench, trying to knock the tools down. I make contact, dragging the heavy thing to the side.
He clambers onto the cot, cursing, straddling me, one hand still pressed to his leaking eye. I scream, jerking my left leg up between us, lunging at the bench again as he draws back to hit me.
A groan of wood over wood, and tools rain down from the surface above, bouncing all over the floor and cot. This time, his fist hits me square in the mouth—lips jammed into teeth; ripe, blossoming pain; bright taste of blood—but my left hand’s latched on to a heavy metal thing, and I heave my entire body into the swing.
I catch him drawing his arm back for the next punch; he doesn’t have time to move. The hammer claw connects with his left temple. I think maybe I scream, horrified by the blood it brings, splitting his skin, splattering me, dragging across his forehead in a vivid streak.
His fist hangs in midair. No time—I sweep my arm back, hit him with the business end.
Mr. Mac’s eyes squeeze shut, contorted look of pain, and I jerk the hammer back. He doesn’t need it. Sways, eyes still closed, then slides over, a slow collapse onto the floor beside the cot.
Hyperventilating, breath sobbing ou
t of me, I roll onto my right side, stretching my free hand for the sharpest thing I see—a hacksaw—and manage it with my fingertips.
Three saws and the zip ties on my wrist snap, then the ones on my ankle, and I’m over the cot. He’s up on one knee already, head hanging low, clinging to consciousness.
I open the closet, dragging Hazel out by her arms. She falls into me; her wrists and ankles are zip-tied. “Damn it!” I grab the hacksaw from the cot, dropping to my knees to yank the blade across the plastic binding her legs—once—twice—he’s getting up, using the cot for support.
Snap, the ties give. “Run!” I shove her at the door.
Sound of wounded rage as he comes at us, his hands dragging down my back, catching my clothes, bringing me down. Hazel’s fighting with the dead bolt—her wrists still bound—and I won’t roll over, won’t give him my face, my throat, hunching my shoulders against his blows as I crawl toward the door. Burst of fresh cold air—she’s out—fanning the radiant heat of the stove across me, so close. I see the silver coil of the burner lid handle above me, the disc-shaped surface for heating a kettle or pot.
I scream as I grab the handle, hot metal searing into my unprotected palm; then I wrench around, pressing the lid into his cheek.
He screams, pulling back. I’m on my feet and running, out the door, into overgrowth and reaching branches, where Hazel waits, terrified to leave, too afraid to go back inside.
The woods draw us in, covering our path.
Twenty-Nine
THEY SAY IT’S over now.
After all the shock, the outrage, the questions, the interviews, we’ve been informed that we can all feel safe again. Mr. Mac confessed to the murders of Ivy and Dabney Kirk. He claimed Dabney was his first, followed by Ivy, who he picked up while she was walking home that night, ready to apologize to her stepmom and dad after their fight; Mr. Mac offered her a ride. Acting out his revenge fantasies, they say; getting back at the bullies from his teen years, the kids who picked on him, made him miserable, the same ones he couldn’t separate from even as an adult, insinuating himself into the school, the community.
The Missing Season Page 20