Prologue
Ingrid Halstead was alone.
She knelt in the dirt, retying her laces for the third time since the start of the team run. It felt like only a few seconds, but when she lifted her head, the sounds of a dozen other pairs of sneakers pounding the dirt path were long gone. She’d fallen to the back of the pack, breaking the single rule the coach set: no one runs alone.
The rule came from superstition. Blackridge fed off it. But even if she didn’t buy into the ghost stories, she understood that the woods were a dangerous place. One wrong turn, and you’d wind yourself farther and farther into an unforgiving landscape.
She rose, ignoring the other untied sneaker, and scanned the trees. Cross-country practice took place before sunrise in August, before the sweltering summer sun pressed against the sky. She hated morning practice, but she hated the heat more.
The trees rustled. She half expected a rabbit to dart out from the brush, leaping past her feet and back into the safety of the dark woods.
Instead, a shadow passed between two trees.
Ingrid had heard the stories. But she’d never believed them. The Shadow Man was a cautionary tale to keep kids from wandering into the woods and getting lost.
She wasn’t afraid. It was silly to be afraid. But still, her heart raced and her fingers trembled as she bent and struggled to tie off her laces.
The knot slipped through her fingers, unraveling. She cursed under her breath and lifted her head, her gaze flicking to the place she’d seen the shadow. The trees were trees. The forest a forest.
She reached for the charm bracelet clipped around her wrist, a gift from her parents when she was ten, with a new charm added each birthday. She unclasped the bracelet. Let it fall to the ground. Nudged dirt over top of it with the toe of her shoe.
Maybe she was paranoid. Maybe all she’d accomplish was dirtying a nice bracelet.
But maybe if she left a piece of herself behind, someone would find her.
The snapping of a twig. A footstep crunching leaves. Both sounds too close.
Ingrid tied off her shoe and pushed to her feet. The hairs spiked on the back of her neck.
A presence at her back. An exhale, not her own. And then a sharp prick to her right arm. The cool flush of liquid spilling into her veins.
In an instant, the world turned to mush. Darkness spread at the edges of her vision. Her limbs buckled.
Everything went dark. And Ingrid knew, knew it down to her very cells, that she wouldn’t see the light again.
One
I should be standing infront of the largest ball of twine.
Harper and I planned a trip for the summer before graduation years ago, vowing to see a little bit of the world together before it inevitably pulled us apart.
We spent most of middle school making the itinerary, alternating stops. Harper chose the twine for Kansas. I went for the cowboy museum in Oklahoma. According to the itinerary, today was twine. Tomorrow, cowboys.
Instead, I am on a stiff chair behind the counter of my aunt’s bookstore. After six hours and only a handful of customers, I’d give anything for that ridiculous collection of twine.
The bookstore, affectionately named the Stacks, sits smack in the middle of Blackridge’s main street, sandwiched between a boutique so expensive I don’t even glance through its windows and a literal sandwich shop. Clad with thick red carpeting and dark brown wooden shelves, full of a few too many sets of bookcases,the store has a vaguely claustrophobic feel that is only acceptable in a bookstore. Really, it isn’t the worst summer job I could end up with.
It just wasn’t the plan. The plan was Harper and my car and a bunch of weird tourist attractions.
But my crappy car is a pile of metal in a junkyard, Harper is buried in a cemetery three hundred miles away, and I’m here, making an airplane out of a sheet of paper with last week’s inventory on it.
With a sigh, I send the badly folded airplane across the store. It soars past a middle-aged couple pondering cookbooks and a woman with her young son in the children’s section, then lands beneath the community board across from the door. I ease off the stool behind the counter and wind through the stacks to the board, pulling the paper plane off the dark carpet.
When I stand up and lift my head, I am staring into a pair of light eyes.
The board, alongside its collection of job offers and events—dog walking, babysitting, a pet-themed Beatles cover band called the Beagles—is covered in missing person posters. And they’re all kids.
A boy looks back at me from a faded one. His photo has been edited to account for aging, and some of the lines of his face are blurred, but his eyes are a blue so light it’s almost clear. An announcement for the town’s high school band covers the bottom half of his poster, but I know his name. Finn.
