This can, I think, as I disappear into the trees, getting swallowed up by them. Outside, the night air is cooler than I thought. I shiver from the cold, trying to forget about things like being cold and about being scared to death of the dark, though the darkness is so close I can feel it, like some concrete thing. It’s not just an absence of light. It’s not something intangible like love or hope or dreams. It’s real. I feel it against my skin as I walk, touching me. I try not to think about how scared I am. I try to think of Daniel instead, of him at the beach, waiting for me on the pier, like he said. I picture his face. I imagine him alone, searching the dark horizon with his eyes. I fantasize about the moment I step out of the darkness and we see each other again. In my illusion, I say something witty and brilliant. He laughs, coming to me.
For a while, thinking about him makes me forget about being scared. But then I hear a sound from behind—the snap of a tree branch and the soft crunch of leaves like from beneathsomeone’s feet—and I freeze, momentarily paralyzed, thinking this is how I die. Out here, alone, late at night.
No one knows where I am.
No one would even know I was missing until the morning, when Emily and Nolan woke up and found my bed empty. By then, I’d definitely be dead.
I picture that: Emily finding my bed empty and being mad first, before she finds out I’m dead.
Everyone was asleep when I left. I waited for Emily to go upstairs last as if she was putting off going to bed with Nolan, who went out of his way all night to ignore her. Even when he did say something, it was mean. He went to bed first, closing the bedroom door. I wasn’t sure she was ever going to go. I waited a long time, and then, after she did, I waited even longer for her to fall asleep. I carried my shoes out so no one would hear me go, wrapping my hand around the doorknob, turning it a little at a time so as not to make a sound. When it was open, I grabbed the knob by the other side so that the latch stayed put, not letting go until the door was closed and even when I did, it was slow as fuck, the latch crawling back into place. From downstairs, I could hear Nolan, snoring like he does, which is why Emily wears earplugs when she sleeps. Nolan sleeps like the dead, so much so that he’s always sleeping through his alarm.
I left the front door unlocked because I don’t have a key, which means that anyone can get in while I’m gone, if they wanted to.
Now I wheel around at the noise. I narrow my eyes, searching the woods, my heart pounding in my chest. I try to see through the darkness, imagining someone coming out of the trees and killing me horror movie style, with a chain saw or an ice pick. I can almost hear the music playing in the background, something super minimalist but creepy as fuck. In horror movies, it’s always the dumb, slutty cheerleader who dies first, and Iwonder if that’s me, if I’m that trope: the stupid blonde, sneaking out late at night to walk through the woods alone to meet up with a complete stranger.
If something were to happen to me, would people say it was my fault? That I had it coming to me? That I deserved to die?
“Hello,” I whisper out into the darkness, my voice soft, shrinking. I feel cold and I’m shaky all over. My legs are weak and there’s a steady pulse in my neck, athump thump, thump thump. “Is someone there?” I ask.
Thump thump.
No one says. But then the sound comes again, even closer this time, and I retreat slowly from it, too afraid to turn my back to whatever it is, to turn around and run. The face of the man from the pool—theHey. Can you bring me something to eat too?—flashes into my mind, as does the face of the man at the lodge the other day, the one who checked out Mae, his eyes moving from her overalls, down her bony little legs to her shoes.
I should run to our own cottage, where it’s safe. I start to, backing further away. But before I can go, a dark shape steps in front of me and I gasp. It’s too late for me now. There’s no time to run before he smashes a damp, sweaty hand down over my mouth, and my heart goes wild. I try to pull away, to jerk free from under his grip.
“There’s no point fighting,” he says as the moonlight shines down on him and lights up his face so that, for the first time, I see who it is. I go still. Stiff. My breaths become shallow, my whole body overcome with panic and fear.
He comes even closer. I yank back, slamming into a tree, trapped. His face is straight, his stare piercing and cold as he looks down on me and says, “You should’ve known better than to trust a guy like me. Did you really not think I might try to hurt you?”
Courtney
I take the car, leaving Elliott and the kids carless, not that it matters because they won’t go anywhere. The resort is nearly empty now. All day yesterday, I watched out the window as other families packed their bags and left, driving away from this awful place, so that Elliott and the kids have it all—the pool, the beach—to themselves now, not that that matters either, because they won’t leave the cottage. It’s not like anyone is in the mood for a swim, but even if they were, they couldn’t, because it’s not safe for them to be outside.
I leave the resort. I pull from the parking lot and onto the main road, which is a two-lane highway through town, though the termhighwayis misleading, because it gives the impression of a main artery, when this is nothing more than a small vein, not much different than any of the other roads around here. I drive through the small village with a population of something like four or five hundred people, though I don’t know where they live because houses around here are so infrequent. It feels like it’s stepped back in time. There is a Laundromat in a tired storefront with a rusted sign. There is a psychic and a seedy-looking liquor store—with crooked signs that hypebeer, ammo, bait—and gas stations with convenience marts in place of grocery stores. There are restaurants, but nothing high-end, everything local and modest like the dive lodge at our own resort.
I drive the couple miles it takes to get to the location Snap Map pulled from Reese’s phone. The further I go, the more the road narrows. Trees draw nearer the street; their branches overhang it, the sun coming through in mottled swathes that move on the asphalt with the wind.
As I drive, I can’t stop thinking about Reese on these same roads two nights ago. There’s an image that plays over and over again in my mind like a song on repeat until I can’t get the lyrics out of my head: Reese with a blindfold over her eyes, a sock in her mouth gagging her scream, and zip ties on her ankles and wrists. In my vision, she lies on her side in the hard bed of a pickup truck with her hands bound behind her with her knees pulled into her chest, struggling in vain to get free.
It’s been about thirty-six hours since she’s been gone.
She could be in California by now. Or she could be here, just like the Snap Map said.
I try not to give in to paranoia and fear. I try not to think that for the last thirty-six hours, someone—whoever took Reese—has been keeping watch on the cottage, that they watched me leave and that they’re following me.
No one is following me, I tell myself, as I steal a glance in the rearview mirror to see that the street behind me, which narrows until it’s almost only one lane, is empty. I’m completely alone, which is the one thing Elliott told me not to do:Don’t ever let yourself be alone.
If something were to happen to me right now, no one would know. No one would see.
My fear lightens when I see cars parked up ahead. They’re pulled to the side of the road, just off a wooded trail not far from a waste disposal site, which is the kind of place where people bring their own recycling and trash. I pull onto the shoulder. I turn the engine off, and then I sit in the front seat of the car, taking in the wide expanse of trees that surrounds me.
People gather at the edge of the trees, including Detective Evans. As I get out of the car, hearing the low growl of an ATV in the distance, he starts to make his way toward me, and we meet in the middle, where the dewy grass reaches my knees, the moisture coming in through the mesh of my gym shoes and making my feet wet.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” he says.
“Why wouldn’t I come?”
“I thought you’d want to stay home and be with your family.”
