At the door, I fumble for the button on my flashlight, illuminating the steel long enough to locate a thick chain through the door handles, held in place with a lock.
“Last chance to back out,” Nora says.
“I’m good. You?”
She huffs. Pulls out the bolt cutters again and slices through the lock in one clean snap. The lock tumbles to the ground.
I give the door a shove, but it doesn’t budge.
“Probably rusted shut?” Nora asks.
“Help me,” I say. She tosses the bolt cutters aside and together we shove against the door. Once. Twice. The third time, we throw our shoulders into it, hard, and the door clicks, swinging open.
I catch it before it tries to shut again, standing against it and meeting Nora’s eyes. She rubs absently at her shoulder with a grimace.
There’s no more putting it off.
“Hold that door in case it swings shut on us,” I instruct, and Nora doesn’t argue, stepping in front of the heavy door and propping it with her hip. I take a few tentative steps inside.
And my stomach sinks.
Nothing. There’s nothing. It’s a long, empty hallway, littered with debris, pieces of ceiling hanging down. Apart from a few smashed bottles and some low-hanging long-dead wires, the place is empty. Dark, musty, and empty.
“See anything?” Nora asks. Her voice is low, though there clearly isn’t anyone to hide from.
“No,” I say. The word sounds as hopeless as I feel.
But what did I really expect? To walk through this door andfind all the answers, wrapped up in a pretty bow? If it were truly that simple, all of this would have ended years ago.
The building is large, and there are certainly a dozen rooms I could check, but the answers are right in front of me. In the stale, musty air. In the undistributed sheen of dust coasting the floor. In the shattered windows along the hall.
No one has been here in a long, long time.
“Jo?”
“Give me a second,” I call back. The reality is here, staring me in the face, a big heaping bowl of nothing-soup, but the second I acknowledge it, the last fragments of hope turn to nothing, too.
It’s like losing Jasper a second time. Like I never really had him. Like this whole time, I’ve been clinging to something that didn’t exist in the first place.
A sob racks my chest, and my hand flies to my throat, like I can wrangle this horrible, huge feeling out of me.
I step farther into the dark hall, sweeping my flashlight around. The beam skims across something that glints in the light, and I jerk it back, zeroing in on the object.
A teddy bear. Missing an arm and half its stuffing. Faded and crusted with dust. Its black plastic eyes glint in the flashlight beam.
I tiptoe across the floor, leaving footprints in the dust, and kneel in front of the bear. Across its chest, a piece of blue masking tape has a name on it.
Jerome McCaffrey.
That name. I know that name.
I know Sloane, Aisha, and Finn because I shared a house with them. And Ingrid’s poster is still in the pile of junk mail on my kitchen counter. But on my many sleepless nights, poring over message boards and old articles, I came across the names of all thekids who went missing in the woods. I even met Jerome’s parents after the parade.
Jerome McCaffrey. Seven years old. He wandered off during a hike near the creek with his family and was never seen again. Disappeared eight or nine years ago. The theory was that he fell into the creek and drowned. The current carried his body far away.
But if he never made it across the creek, the teddy bear he’s holding in all the poster photos wouldn’t have either.
The bear is here, though. Sitting in the middle of the hall like it’s waiting for him to return for it.
