Joey stands outside River’s door, hesitating. It’s just past midday, which means he’s most likely out on backcountry patrol or clearing more local trails for summer hiking.
Either way, he’s not here.
Doubt roots her to the front step. Does she really want to do this?Yes, she concludes. She’s just checking a box. She knows the book is not here. She’s been here enough times to know that. She would have seen it. But she needs to bring back this conclusive information to Elena and Sophie. And for some inexplicable reason, she needs to check. Just to know for certain.
To the right of the front door is a woodpile. She wiggles a small paving stone next to it and is rewarded with a glinting spare key. She hesitates again but snatches it up before she overthinks it. She jams the key into the lock harder than she intends to. It gives with a click, and she’s inside. Walter immediately bounds toward her, his tail sweeping the floor in excitement. She bends down to greet him and makes her way to the kitchen.
She holds out a piece of jerky, and he takes it with careful teeth.“Don’t tell on me,” she says before he trots to the other room. She stands and examines the empty kitchen. There’s an old coffee cup on the counter with black sludge at the bottom, but otherwise, it’s tidy. Mountainscape hand towels hang neatly on the oven, and a few pictures hang by magnets on the fridge door. School photos of his niece and nephew, who live in Montana. Walter leaping off a rickety dock into a lake. Then she sees her own face looking back at her. She’s smiling in the picture, her hands pulling at the straps on her hiking pack, Rocky Mountain juniper trees behind her.
There’s only one more picture on the fridge, and she’s in that one too. It’s a group shot from when they were in high school. Quinn is there and so are Elena, Sophie, Marissa, Tanner, and a handful of others. They’re at a party at Tanner’s house and look caught in the act. River wears a wry smile. Joey stands next to him, looking so young. He told her once that she’s the reason he loves this one, but she doesn’t like looking at it. It was right before everything fell apart.
When she makes her way to the living room, she’s surprised she’s never noticed that his smell is everywhere. She checks all the nooks around the fireplace where other books live. She checks the hall closet, rummages through the junk drawer, and briefly glances in the dining room where a Scandinavian-style wooden table sits bare beneath an industrial light fixture. Eventually, she makes her way upstairs.
In his room, the bed is made, and there is a bookmarked Muhammad Ali biography on the bedside table. There are other little touches too—an Edison-bulb industrial lamp, a stack of national parks coffee table books, vintage whiskey bottles lined up by year. Hiking boots. The comforter has his smell. Shampoo. Campfire. She searches his closet, his underwear drawer, and under the bed.
She only saw the inside of his childhood bedroom once as a teenager, and she has done everything she can to keep that memory under lock and key. Now, she lets it in just for a second—the all-black walls,the snowboarding posters, his vinyl collection, the window overlooking the backyard, and the trees beyond. The records are still here, but that seems to be all that remains of his youth. The room is home to a Peloton and some weights. No books. She flips the house key over and over in her hand.
In the office, there is a metal desk with a dark wood top and a leather swivel chair in the center. The desk is backed by bookshelves, which are mostly empty, except for a few trinkets. A fancy pen still in the box, Pokémon cards for his nephew, a pocket-sized multitool, and loose change. She’s starting to relax, grateful that she hasn’t found the book here. She doesn’t want River to have it. She doesn’t want Quinn to have given it to him.
She’s about to leave the room when she sees something to her right. A small door next to the bookcase stands two feet tall. A storage space or something. She’s never registered it before. The tiny door sticks as she tries to open it, like it’s been covered in a fresh coat of paint. Inside is a hollow, dark crawl space. She scans the inside with her phone’s flashlight. Dust, dog hair, a spider web. No book.
But there is something. She holds the light still.
In the back corner is a full-grown buck antler. Sixteen, seventeen inches maybe, with five curved tines. It looks like a hand with bony webbed fingers cupping the air and glows ghostly white in the beam of her flashlight. She’s not an expert, but there seems to be dark, dried blood on it. Her eye is drawn to a flash of neon toward the base of the antler.
A pink sticky note.
She leans in to read it and drops the phone in shock. With unsteady hands, she pulls it into the daylight, letting it rest on her lap.
The words on the note are written in bold black marker.
Ask Joey about bloodspell.
Her head is pounding. She can’t track her thoughts, even as sherecognizes the word,bloodspell. It was carved into the wood under Quinn’s deck two days ago.
“Joey?”
She whips around at the sound, a fork of tines jabbing her in the middle.
River stands at the door to the office with one hand frozen on the brim of his hat.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” she says. She sounds cool, but she’s boiling inside.
He sets his hat on the desk and walks toward her, peering down at her from the other side of the desk. “Decorating?”
She lets a nervous laugh escape and then realizes she’s clutching the antler like a weapon. Her knuckles are growing white. He reaches out a hand, and she doesn’t know if he’s reaching to help her up or take it away from her. “What is that?” he asks.
“Not sure,” she says, standing on her own.
He examines it. “Is it real? Looks real.”
She shrugs. She has no idea why this has been stuffed into his crawl space with her name stuck to it or why there seems to be old blood on it.
He examines it without revealing any signs of recognition. What is she hoping to see? Nothing tells her he knows what this is or what it means. She pulls the note free, sticks it to her palm, and holds it out.
It takes him a second to process what he’s seeing. “Ask Joey about bloodspell,” he reads. Then he frowns. “What am I looking at?”
She closes her fist around the note, then shoves it into her pocket. “I found it in there.” She points to the gaping crawl space door.
