There was something strange about Noelle’s postcard, she thought, taking a seat on the lowest set of risers, with her elbows resting on her knees. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
What had her aunt said?
A twig snapped and Nadine jumped, her hands going to the metal seat.No one’s there, she told herself, looking around warily. But her sense of peace had been ruined.
Hands in her pockets, one of them fisting her keys, she turned around to head back to the condo. An eerie, unsettling feeling had draped itself over her like a spiderweb and could not be shaken off, no matter how hard she tried to focus on the warble of frogs or the friendly chitter of crickets. Without being aware of it, her free hand crept to her necklace, twisting the chain.
“How was the walk?” Nikki asked from the couch. To Nadine’s relief, she was playing a video game. She didn’t recognize which one, but she didn’t care, because when her aunt was feeling good enough to game, it usually meant she wouldn’t drink.
“It was fine. I saw an owl.”
“Ooh. What kind?”
“Not sure. Barn, I think?”
She kicked off her shoes and headed down to the room that until last year, she had shared with Noelle. She had taken some of her things with her but what remained was a shrine to teen girl adolescence: a parade of sun-faded Breyer horses, knotted friendship bracelets, dog-earred posters of Matt Dillon and Orlando Bloom, and whole collages of Polaroids and concert tickets.
So weird that none of them were invited to the wedding.
Nadine looked at a photo of her, Nikki, and Noelle that had been taken at Disneyland, wearing those stupid mouse ears. On the white space below the photo, Noelle had written in bubbly letters:As long as we’re together, nothing bad will happen.
There it was again, that twinge of wrongness. Nadine lifted the lid off her tin and picked up the Argentum postcard, studying it closely. The oddly precious wording and misspelling of her aunt’s name felt . . . almost deliberate, somehow. Even Nikki had noticed something was off about the letter, although she had blamed the pen.
Nadine looked at the ink blotch. The pen had been pressed so hard to the paper that there was actually a dent in the postcard itself.
Please give my love to Aunt Nikkie now that we’re no longer together.
Was that a callback to their family’s sad little motto? Was Noelle trying to say that something bad was going to happen as a result of her leaving? That, maybe, something already had?
She traced the P with a frown, noting several similar divots from some of the other letters.
And then she gasped and dropped the card. “Oh my God,” she said shakily.
The first letter of each sentence spelled outHELP.
C H A P T E R
T W O
? his will runs deep ?
HELP.
Nadine fiddled with her phone in the taxi as the driver navigated the roads, passing groves of fruit trees and long spans of rolling hills dusted with lupine and yellow mustard flowers. As they went up in altitude, the fruit trees became less frequent, and the hills began to yield to craggy bedrock, some of it marred with the dried-blood color of iron oxide. On the other side of the glass, the sky was a mocking blue that seemed at odds with the dark reality existing inside her head.
The reality in which Noelle might be alone and frightened and in desperate need of help.
Maybe they did something to her, she thought.The Cullravens. Maybe that’s why she never called me back.
She hadn’t voiced her suspicions to Nikki, knowing her aunt would try to talk her down. “You know how you are,” she’d say, in that calm and reasonable tone that was so utterly infuriating, because why would she choose to be an adultnowwhen it felt as if her world were being blown to smithereens. “You know how you worry.”
Yes, she did worry, because sometimes things needed to be worried about. In fact, they often did. But she didn’t want to upset her aunt and if this ended up blowing over to nothing, Nikki might tell Noelle what had happened and then Noelle would hate her for trying to ruin her marriage.
But at least she’d still be alive to hate you, that traitorous part of her mind whispered.An angry Noelle is better than a dead one.
So she had booked an AirBnB in Argentum and gotten enough cash together to get herself there. And then she had told her aunt that Noelle needed her and that she would be in touch as soon as possible, reception permitting.
“I thought you said she didn’t write or call and you were worried,” her aunt said suspiciously.
