I call Reese first. I don’t expect her to answer and she doesn’t. Her voicemail has not been set up, so the voice that greets me isn’t Reese herself; it’s something automated, soulless.The number you are trying to reach...I click end and try again.The number you are trying to reach...
I pull up Instagram instead. I search for Reese’s profile to see if she posted anything since she’s been gone, like a cry for help, a hint of her whereabouts, something, anything. She hasn’t. Instead, her posts have been completely wiped clean. There are none. In their place are the words:No posts yet, though I know for certain Reesehasposted to Instagram before. I can picture her posts, most of them of her and that one good friend of hers, posing, taking selfies, and the comments from her friends that always made Elliott and me laugh, nonsense things likeYou ate, which, as far as we could tell, had nothing to do with food.
Reese has deleted every single one of them from her page.
When I call, Emily’s mother sobs, gasping, choking sobs so that she can’t speak, but my own parents are silent for a long time at first. When they finally do speak, they say that they want to come, to be with me and to look for Reese, but I say no, that they can’t. My father is on dialysis for end-stage kidney disease. He goes three days a week and my mother drives him; she sits with him, holding his hand until it’s through. Not going to dialysis isn’t an option, because without it he could die.
“No,” I say decisively. “I will let you know when we find her.”
After I end the call, I clutch my stomach, folding an arm around it and bending at the waist. I press a hand against a tree,leaning into it. I cry, a moaning, no-holds-barred cry, because I’m alone; no one can hear me from here. But it only lasts for a moment before the sound of slow and deliberate footsteps coming from the woods startles me, and I stand sharply up, gasping, holding my breath.
I stare out at the landscape, more acutely aware of my own mortality than I’ve ever been.
A police officer appears in the depths of the trees. He’s tucked back, his head sloped, watching me from a distance. “Everything okay, miss?” he calls out, and I nod. “You shouldn’t be outside. You should go inside, where it’s safe.”
Safe.Is anywhere safe?
Did Emily and Nolan think they were safe inside their cottage?
I nod again, hurrying down the hill and back to the cottage, and then I go inside, close the door and lock the dead bolt.
“Did you get a hold of them?” Elliott asks, and I say yes. I walk past him for the bedroom, feeling his warm hand graze my arm as I do.
We’re better off during the day, but as darkness falls, the five of us grow more alert, jumping out of our skin with every noise, from the sound of the wind whispering through the trees, to footsteps passing by the cottage or a police car pulling slowly down the gravel drive, the crunch of it like walking on snow. I stand at the window, staring outside, searching for Reese, thinking of her out there somewhere, alone in the darkness.
The police car comes to a stop just outside our cottage. I wait for the officer to get out, but he doesn’t. Instead, he lowers the window, kills the engine and turns the headlights off. He rests his elbow in the open window and I realize that he’ll be there all night, that he’s been sent to keep us safe, as Detective Evans said.
All of a sudden, the officer turns. He sees me staring and hestares back, his eyes beady black pools. I wonder why I should feel any safer with a complete stranger just outside, watching over us. The police continue their work at Emily and Nolan’s, even after dark. They will be there most of the night, Detective Evans said, and I should feel safer knowing that too, but I don’t.
Elliott makes dinner, a box of macaroni and cheese that the five of us sit around the small table and share, still not finishing it. I sit there watching Wyatt, across from me, line the tines of his fork with the elbow noodles, never eating them. “You need to try to eat, Wyatt,” I say gently, watching as he gazes slowly up from his plate, his cold, hard stare holding mine so long that eventually I look away and start gathering dirty dishes for the sink.
We get ready for bed early in the hopes of a break from reality and to surrender ourselves to sleep. Wyatt and Mae don’t have any pajamas of their own and so they borrow from Elliott and Cass, but still they don’t fit. It seems strange seeing Wyatt in Elliott’s shorts, which he has to tug on the elastic waistband of, tying it so they don’t slip off. I start to turn away as he takes his own shirt off, until a big black bruise on his chest catches my eye and I look back.
“Do you mind?” he asks, glaring.
“Sorry,” I say, turning fully away, not asking where it came from because I’m embarrassed I got caught staring at his chest.
Cass and Mae ask to sleep in the bedroom with me, and I say yes, of course. Neither of them is doing well. Cass’s sadness seems to come and go in waves—one minute, she’s seemingly fine as if she’s forgotten, and in the next, the memory of what happened slams into her like a wall and she starts to cry—while Mae is lost in a mental fog, tired, barely speaking, her body heavy as she shambles into bed.
Wyatt sleeps on the sofa bed, which Elliott pulls out as Isearch the cottage for extra sheets and a blanket, finding a threadbare set in a musty dresser drawer. Elliott takes the loft, which isn’t made for a man his size, but he manages to shinny himself up there and fit.
“I miss my mom,” Mae confesses, which are maybe the first words she’s spoken since Detective Evans left hours ago, so that they take me by surprise. I can’t see her face in the darkness, but I imagine, from the quivering of her hushed voice, the way her chin and lower lip tremble as she fights tears.
“I know, honey,” I say, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and pulling her into me. “I miss your mom too.” My throat is tight. I take a breath and ask, my voice lowered, “Do you girls understand what’s happening?”
I should have had this conversation before. I shouldn’t have let the whole day go by without speaking to them. Cass knows a thing or two about death. She had a classmate die last year from acute myeloid leukemia, but this seems different—worse—because Emily and Nolan didn’t die of a disease. They were murdered.
Mae’s voice breaks as she says, “Someone hurt them.”
“Yeah,” I say, struggling to keep my own voice under control, “someone did. Someone really bad. And Detective Evans is going to find out who.” I hesitate, steeling myself before I ask, “You know that they’re not just hurt though, right, honey? You know that they’re dead?” Mae lets out a soft moan. I feel her nod against my arm, Cass, on the other side, crying. “You understand what that means? That they’re not coming back?”
Mae’s tears, when they come, are overflowing, choking her. “I want my mom,” she sobs again, coughing, gasping for breath this time, her body convulsing.
“I know, honey. I know you do.”
She cries herself to sleep, keening and then whimpering forhours for Emily, until her body succumbs to exhaustion. Even when she sleeps, she moves restlessly in bed and I wonder what her dreams are about.
All night, I lie awake. I don’t sleep. I don’t dream. I stare at the dark, cavernous opening that is the bedroom doorway, waiting for someone to come through it and kill the girls and me.
