“What are your plans?” Wren asks.
“Oh. I’ll be working.”
“You should come by. I mean, when you’re done. We’ve got enough to feed an army and it’s just the four of us.”
Callie musters a smile. She knows Wren’s heart is in the right place but the offer makes her squirm. It’s just like when she was a kid. A pity case. “I appreciate it, but I don’t know if I’ll have time.”
“Mom said you were working on a cold case. The thing with the baby.”
“You know about that?” Callie had approached Della after she gave her Sabrina Riley’s name and asked her if she knew anything else, but Della only told her that was what the rumors were. Everyone at the high school had heard she was pregnant, that she was getting in a lot of trouble that year, and that she dropped out.
“We used to go drink out by the old factory near where she was found. Tell ghost stories. That was part of it… that story. I’m not proud of this but Mom told me about that case when I was a teenager and I used to try to scare the other kids with it. Used it as evidence there was like, a serial killer in the woods. I guess it’s no wonder I tell stories for a living now. Writers are always taking from someone, right? We’re thieves.”
Callie starts to feel uneasy. She feels a shift in Wren’s attention.Something grasping in it. Like she’s waiting for Callie to divulge details on the case that she can polish up, spin into one more tale. “What old factory?” Callie asks.
“I guess it’s technically private property, behind an abandoned old house. You can’t see it from the road but it must have been gorgeous, once upon a time.”
The Riley house.
“Mom said she knew the people who lived there, a long time ago.”
Callie’s attention snaps back to Wren. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah, she was like, friends with the mom. There were two girls. The ones who disappeared. We found a sweater out there once, this faded pink-knitted thing. Creepy as hell. And the shoe for a doll. Patent leather, covered in dirt.”
Callie doesn’t have to ask. She’s sure Wren and her friends made ghost stories out of them, too. Della hadn’t mentioned anything about knowing the Riley girls or their family. Why would she have lied to Callie? Why wouldn’t she have said anything? She excuses herself with a hasty “Merry Christmas” to Wren and rushes through checkout with half the things she meant to buy.
As Callie speeds away from the supermarket, her whole body is taut with anger. She lets out a scream, and then another. All these stories circulating, stories and rumors and whispers, none of them close to the truth. The frustration gathers in her gut, a hard knot. She wants to do all the things she’s never allowed herself, things she’s always associated with Jenna; smash something, to park at the nearest bar and drink herself stupid, wants to pick up a stranger who will be rough with her, leave her body aching and wrung out and used. She pulls the car over to the shoulder, gets out and paces in the cold, her hands on her head like a sprinter who is trying to get their first deep breath after an all-out effort. She’s got to get herself under control, hem herself in.
Take stock, she tells herself. Inventory the facts.
What does she know about the Riley sisters?
Annabelle had a scar on her arm. Annabelle was the one everyonelooked away from, who could get away with something because everyone else was busy watching Sabrina.
And this factory. The doll’s shoe that Wren’s friends uncovered. Would the girls play out there? She can picture it, the way she was always looking for places to call her own as a child, places where she could be in control, make the rules. She’ll go, because she needs something to do that doesn’t engage with this appetite for destruction, with this unruliness she’s spent her whole life tamping down. She wants to understand what it was like to be these girls, to know where they hid from the world, where they found refuge, where they felt safe.
She climbs back into the Jeep, and at the next intersection she takes the road that will cut through the woods to the Riley house.
It’s already dusk when she pulls up, 5:30 and the blackness seeming to seep up from the ground, joining with the shadows of the trees. She doesn’t have her Maglite on her, so the flashlight on her phone will have to do. Luckily there’s a three-quarter moon and no clouds, enough so she can make things out a few steps at a time. In the moonlight the heaps of trash in the yard throw strange-shaped shadows, and the house looms behind it all, looking bigger but shabbier than it did during the day.
She looks to her right for a break in the trees, a glimpse of a wall, but finds nothing. Then she tries to find a trail, some kind of marker. She paces the line where the yard meets the woods twice, three times, a fourth, before her toe connects with a boulder. She’s only got sneakers on so she swears at the pain of it, the smarting of her shin.
When she looks down again she sees it, another boulder in line with the one that tripped her, framing the path—or what used to be a path—like a gateway.
She aims her phone past the boulder and finds a line where the understory is less thick, not as tangled. She can only make out the ground a few feet ahead at a time but she starts to walk, high, plodding steps. The ground is level, at least—everything in the Pines is flat—but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to stop and backtrack, findher line through the trees to the place where she thinks she senses a gap.
A cloud passes over the moon and shifts away, and there it is: the line of the stone foundation, a gap where a door once hung. She steps through the doorway and there’s more of a drop to the ground on the other side than she realizes, lands hard on her right ankle, which starts to throb right away.
She limps to the center of the structure, not knowing what she’s looking for. The stone seems to hold the chill of the night close. She shivers, thinks of two girls climbing the walls and whooping as they jump, two girls pointing broken branches at one another like swords. Two girls laughing together and speaking in code as teenagers, hands quick in one another’s hair, tight French braids that look perfect and make their scalps ache, shins beaded with blood from trudging through the understory, though by then they hardly feel the sting. Their own world out here, the abandoned factory a place they could invent and explore, unlike their own home, with its bare cupboards and filthy windows.
“What happened?” she whispers, shrugging up at the place where the factory roof should be. What made everything go so wrong?
She paces the perimeter of the factory walls once, twice, a third time, learning now where she can place her feet, where the ground is uneven, ignoring the throb in her ankle. By the fourth lap her body knows how to keep her steady and she runs one hand along the cool stone of the wall, her phone in the other.
She thinks she is imagining it, her eyes playing tricks on her, when she catches the flash of white on the short northern wall of the ruins. A spot of it, just below the window. She steps closer, tripping once on the way, too eager to be careful.
In between one of the stones, a ziplock bag, damp and blooming with mold, with a piece of paper inside.
