The pinstripe shade of the patio umbrella was doing very little to deter the sun. The crowd at the hot dog stand didn’t seem to mind the heat. The line outside the truck continued to build, curving around the back of the food truck and stretching across the sweltering blacktop in a staggered serpentine.
Thomas sat on the edge of a picnic bench and poked a limp fry, the back of his neck steadily burning. The pale white starburst of a migraine clung to his periphery. His sunglasses slid infuriatingly down the swollen bridge of his nose. A thin line of drool pooled atop his knee as, beneath the table, Judd begged for a fry. Next to him perched Molly, watching the bustle with her ears pinned flat.
No one in the crowd took any notice of Thomas at all, and that felt wrong. Not one person was leering, or pointing, or whispering behind their hands. Surely, they could see that he was a cosmic event waiting to happen. Surely, they could tell that his heart was actively collapsing in the galaxy of his chest. His mood felt dark enough to swallow everything in his vicinity.
Vivienne had been missing for thirteen hours. Thirteen hours, with no one looking for her.
He didn’t want to sit here in the heat, his head pounding.
He wanted to do something. He wanted to go after her.
But he didn’t know where to begin. And that was the problem.
“Explain to me again how you knew about Vivienne,” he said.
Across from him sat Priory president Colton Price, examining his smoothie as though he had reason to believe it might contain arsenic. He wore a ball cap pulled low over a crush of curls so that the brim cast a shadow over his features. It did little to conceal the raised pink scar that extended from the left corner of his mouth nearly to his ear. He set the smoothie down without taking a sip, nudging it out of arm’s reach.
“It’s not me,” he said. “It’s Delaney.”
Next to Colton sat a white-haired girl dressed all in black. Thomas knew her, but only just—she’d been a fellow freshman during his brief tenure as a college student. Though they’d never personally interacted, the program was small, and he’d known her by sight. In any case, everyone had heard the story of how Delaney Meyers-Petrov was there the day the Priory’s Sanctum went up in flames.
“She sees dead people,” said Eric Hayes, directly to Thomas’s right. The Priory’s former treasurer reached for a fry and added, “Real M. Night Shyamalan stuff.”
“But Vivienne’s alive,” said Thomas. Or at least, she’d still been alive thirteen hours ago. He’d seen enough true crime to know the first seventy-two hours were critical. He’d been focusing on that. He hadn’t considered the window might already be shut.
That Vivienne might already be dead.
Delaney looked as though she knew exactly what he was thinking. “It’s not her,” she rushed to say. “Who I’ve been seeing, I mean. It’s Mikhail Popov.”
“Sorry,” said Thomas. “You mentioned that name before, but I don’t know who that is.”
“A ghost,” said Colton. “A persistent one. He’s been hanging around the house for months.”
“He’s connected to Vivienne,” explained Delaney. “I’m still not sure exactly how. He doesn’t say a whole lot. It’s kind of like a radio connection—unless I’m near a source of energy, the spirits don’t come through very clearly. But one day, the television was on, and there was a story in the news about a CEO’s son who’d died on a fishing expedition.”
“Bryce Donahue,” said Thomas.
“Yeah. That’s the one. The newscaster mentioned who else had been on the boat. I heard Vivienne’s name, and the lights started to flicker.”
“I thought we’d blown a fuse,” said Colton. “The electricity went nuts.”
“See what I mean?” said Eric, speaking around a fry. “Shyamalan.”
Thomas hand-fed Judd a bit of his uneaten hot dog. “How’d you figure out I was connected?”
“I looked online,” said Delaney with a shrug. “You were in the background of one of her photos. Colton was the one who recognized you.”
Unhappy with the rising heat and the growing crowd and the fact that no one had slipped her any hot dog, Molly began to howl in earnest. Startled, Judd joined in. It took Thomas several tries to wrangle them back into silence. He’d discovered—mainly through trial and error—that they responded to signs over verbal cues.
Finished, he signed, crossing his wrists.Sit.
Judd dropped to his haunches, tongue lolling. Reluctantly, Molly followed.
“Did you have to bring the dogs?” asked Colton, who was trying in vain to nudge Judd’s hindquarters off his shoe.
“You don’t like dogs?”
“I like dogs fine,” said Colton. “Those are the hounds of the Baskervilles.”
