“Someone’s feeling cocky because he won last week and the week before,” Sloane says, meeting my eyes over her shoulders.“Considering he created the game, it’s a little fishy.”
“You call it an unfair advantage; I call it skill.”
Sloane lifts the middle finger on her free hand.
“Keep that up, and I’m giving Aisha a head start.”
Sloane rolls her eyes.
Finn counts them down. As Sloane and Aisha make their way toward the tree line, slow and steady with their spoons, he sidles up to me. He leans over as if to bump my shoulder. “You think this is silly,” he says.
“I don’t,” I say, and it’s the truth. “I was actually thinking I haven’t seen either of them smile this much before.”
A sad smile lifts Finn’s lips, but it fades as fast as it came.“They should have more than this. But all I can do is…make things feel as normal as possible. Or distract them from how not-normal this all is.”
“You’ve been doing this a while?”
He nods.“When I first showed up here, it wasn’t Sloane and Aisha. Back then, it was this boy named Vincent and—He stops abruptly, and it takes everything in me to not push him. But pushing when he’s already opening up feels too much like pressing on a sore.“Every Friday, Vincent dragged us out here, and we’d tell stories. Things we remembered. A good day or a bad one. Something funny or scary or whatever. I thought it was ridiculous at first, but I get what he was doing.”
“So field day.”
“So field day,” he says.“I would have kept story time, but I’m not that sentimental. And I figure it’s good practice. Like strengthening a muscle. The more they play these silly games, the more they can, like, interact with the world.”
“And byinteract, you mean properly haunt my house.”
“Hauntsounds so…horror movie.”
“If the shoe fits.”
Finn smiles, but half his attention is on Sloane and Aisha.
“What happened to them?” I ask. “Vincent and whoever elsewas here? You weren’t the first to disappear, and neither was Vincent. But the rest aren’t here.”
His focus snaps back to me, but just as fast he looks away. Whatever spigot was pried open, it cinches back shut. Something about the ghosts who occupied the house before turns the ever-moving, always-talking Finn into a statue.
“They’re gone,” he says.
Fifteen
Only when my eyes aredry and stinging—and I’ve fallen deep into local-crime conspiracy blog posts about missing children—do I shove my laptop away. Three hours have slid past without me realizing.
As much as I hate to admit it, a good chunk of that time was spent on forums dedicated to the biggest ghost story in Blackridge: the creature without a face. Most people say it lives in the woods and has been around much longer than any of the human residents. Some swear it’s the angry spirit of a hiker who died violently back in the nineties.
I’m not even sure what I’m trying to find. I don’t expect to somehow solve a decades-old mystery with a few hours of Google and too many DrPeppers, but there has to be something. Something to explain why three missing kids are trapped on my aunt’s property. Where are the rest? Over a dozen have disappeared in the last twenty years. Once a year for the last seven.
If Harper were here, she’d know what to do. What to look up,which random tidbits to grab on to from the countless articles. Whether or not to buy into what may be simple coincidence and tragedy.
“If you feel like giving me any answers, Finn…” I say, rubbing my eyes.
There is a blur in my periphery, and then Finn is standing next to the bed, apparently as confused as I am. He looks like he always does, but after a week, it’s still weird to see him in the same clothes. Like animated characters on TV shows with their trademark T-shirts. It makes him less real.
He meets my eyes, his own widening, his hands rising in surrender.
“Okay, I swear, I am not peeping—”
“Finn.”
“I was minding my business downstairs, watchingThe Real Housewives of Atlantawith your mom—”
