CHAPTER NINE

Sheriff Moser insists on driving me home, even though navigating the blockade the police have set up takes as long as it would have taken me to walk.

My father answers the door. He’s in his scrubs; he lives, breathes, and sleeps in them. I’m the one with the last name Young, but my father looks like a well-preserved blond frat boy. A college student playing doctor in those scrubs.

He looks like he must have when he met my mom, a waitress at a hole-in-the-wall wings place in Buffalo, where he was getting his degree in pharmacology.

My father’s eyes move from me to Sheriff Moser, and his jaw goes slack. “Kacey. Are you okay?”

My teeth are chattering and my feet are numb. “I n-need to warm up.”

My father’s hand goes to his chin. Runs a thumb along his jaw nervously as he turns to Moser. “What on earth happened?”

I can’t stand around and hear how the sheriff fumbles to relay my lousy version of why I was in the barn. Why I was at a crime scene. I rush past him, not even bothering to take off my jacket.

I’m so cold I feel like I’m drunk. I stumble into the bathroom and strip. Turn on the faucet and wait until the water starts to steam. I sit in the bathtub and pull my knees to my naked body as the tub fills with hot water. It shoots up my nose, making me choke and sputter. I rotate the handle all the way to the right until the water scalds my skin, until it’s almost unbearable. But maybe if I stay like this for long enough, I’ll disappear into steam too.

When I burn all the cold from my body, I get out of the tub. Lock my bedroom door behind me and crawl between my comforter and sheets, naked. The house is silent, Moser’s cruiser gone from our driveway.

The worst moments of my life have always managed to creep up on me when everything is quiet. I’ll be watching TV or trying to read and then bam, my brain is all Hahaha bitch, here’s that painful memory you’d sell your soul to forget. Most involve my mother.

I know that the way the detective and Sheriff Moser looked at me is going to be one of those moments. I was an animal that needed to be tranquilized. I wasn’t me: I was the beast inside me that breaks free when I’m cornered. The thing that makes me freak out.

Black out.

I was twelve the first time I threw something at my mother with the intent to hit her. I don’t even know if I succeeded; the second the glass left my hand, her boyfriend had me pinned down on the floor.

One of his arms was as big as my entire body. It hardly seemed fair, how easily he kept me down, like I was a rag doll. The more I fought to get away, the worse he pushed.

I remember the feel of the scratchy carpet on my chin. How I’d howled like a wild animal.

“You need to calm down,” he’d said, in his deep baritone. “Y’all can’t fight like this anymore.”

The following week, he moved out.

My phone buzzes from the pocket of my jacket, where I left it before getting into the shower. Texts have filled up the screen—some from numbers I don’t recognize.

Unknown: hey it’s sully true they found bay’s body??

Andrew: what is going on?? There’s a cop car outside.

Jade: fucking call me back.

I grip my phone. Feel myself coil up. Leave me alone, get off me—

When it vibrates again, I hurl it at the wall.

“Shit.” I leap out of bed, run over to where the phone has clattered to the floor. Thunderous footsteps down the hall.

“Kacey?” My father. “What was that banging? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I fell.” I run a finger along the spidery crack at the corner of my phone’s screen. It’ll be hard to hide that, but thankfully, the phone still works.

My doorknob jangles. “Why is the door locked?”

I sit back on my heels, fully aware of my own nakedness, and there’s a hole in the drywall where my phone hit it. I’m going to have to find something to cover that up.

“I’m fine. Please leave me alone.”

More jangling. I curl onto my side, paralyzed by shame at what I’ve done to the wall and the screen of my phone. Damaging something just because I was angry—it’s not who I am.

It’s exactly who I can’t be, now that everyone seems to be watching me.

I am still under my covers, wrapped in the towel from the shower, when I hear Ashley’s SUV rumble into the driveway. The pillow is wet beneath me from my soaked hair. I can’t bring myself to get dressed, or to do anything else, really.

A knock at the door. Ashley jangles the knob; the clicking sound of a key inserting into the lock. She has a master key for all of our bedrooms, in case of major tantrums. Or in my case, a complete meltdown.

Ashley silently comes to my side holding a mug of tea. Unfolds her other hand and reveals a half moon of a white pill. “It’ll help you sleep,” she says.

I swallow it with a sip of the chamomile tea she hands me.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, stroking a lock of hair from my forehead.

I shake my head. I just want the nothingness that the pill will bring me. By the time I’m falling into a cloudy sleep, I finally remember that the vigil is tonight.

When I wake up, it’s almost seven and I realize that no one woke me up to get dressed. At some point, they must have decided to leave me at home, to go to the vigil without me. They haven’t left yet—I hear Lauren’s footsteps overhead, thunderous when Ashley calls for her to put her coat on.

I can’t go. Jade will never forgive me, but the thought barely registers as a blip on my conscience. I can’t look all of those people in the eyes—people with their candles and purple ribbons pinned to their coats and their prayers of hope.

Because I think I get it now: what that psychic in Pleasant Plains meant when she said that deep down, I know what happened to Bailey.

She’s dead. What other answer is there?

That deputy said they found bloody clothes. I saw the blood in the barn for myself.

When I shut my eyes, I’m there all over again. The image triggers dread in my gut, but I try to think about the blood logically.

There was a smear of it on the wall, but nowhere else in the barn, except for a few droplets on the hay. I’ve lost more blood from a bloody nose than what was on the wall. Which means—I swallow the thought like a pill—that no one was killed in the barn.

Pictures of Bailey emerge in my mind. Bailey, bloodied and injured, running in the woods from her attacker. Bailey, hiding out in the barn. Leaning against the wall for support, and leaving that blood smear herself.

Bailey, running into the night, too hurt to press on. Bailey, curling up on the ground, the snow covering her body by the next day.

I feel sick. I don’t even know that the blood in the barn was Bailey’s, or that it was real at all. Someone who knows about the Leeds crime scene photos could have made the blood smear as a cruel prank.

But who would do something like that—especially with a girl missing?

Unless someone saw us in the barn.

Impossible. Jade and I went outside and looked for human footprints—there weren’t any.

Thinking about that night in the barn makes me feel the cold in my bones. I’m suddenly uneasy with the fact that my family has left me here alone. No doubt Ashley called Mrs. Lao, who never leaves her house, and told her to keep an eye on things. But still. I feel the emptiness of the house in every corner of my body.

I see the blood in the barn whenever I close my eyes.

I wish we had a fucking dog.

My phone buzzes on my nightstand, startling me. There’s a text from Jade: you here yet? can’t find you.

Moments later, another: I see your family.

Hand to my stomach, I force a breath in, and out. A full five minutes go by before Jade texts again: what the actual FUCK, kacey??

There’s pressure behind my eyes. Jade’s going to find out, if she hasn’t already, that I was there with all the cop cars and flashing lights on Sparrow Hill today. She won’t forgive me for not telling her what I saw; missing the vigil is just something else to add to my list of crimes.

I climb out of bed and slip into my flannel pajamas, some of the fog from my brain lifting. It’s past seven-thirty now; the vigil will be starting any minute. The local news will probably be streaming it live; I force myself off my bed and head for the living room.

I pause in the hallway. Music—the delicate strumming of a guitar. It sends gooseflesh rippling down my arms.

I am hearing things now. The sedative made me trippy and I’m hearing things.

I stand still, one finger pressed against my pulse beating in my neck. The music comes to a crescendo. It’s above me.

I follow the sound upstairs, my knees unsteady.

The music is coming from Lauren’s room.

Her door is open a crack. I nudge it open more with my toe and slip inside the empty room.

Lauren’s furniture is littered with things: ninety-nine-cent bottles of nail polish from Friendly Drugs, a brand I never saw until I moved here, on the nightstand. Jelly pens, a half-empty Nalgene, earrings shaped like sushi on the dresser. Dance shoes and dirty tights on her desk chair. She and Ashley fight over the state of this room weekly, especially the laundry strewn across her bed and carpet.

Some kids don’t even have warm clothes and you treat yours like they’re trash.

Her laptop is open on her desk, a video playing.

It’s Bailey. Bailey looking even rounder-faced and bright-eyed, like a baby. Bailey in a flowery peasant top, alone onstage with a microphone. Singing.

I move Lauren’s ballet shoes aside so I can sit in her desk chair. The video ends and begins looping. I click around—the video is embedded in an article. Missing Wisconsin Girl Planned to Attend University of Indiana at Bloomington.

Bailey has made national news.

The caption explains that the video is from Bailey’s eighth-grade talent show, where she sang “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” I let it play from the beginning again. Bailey has a sweet voice, a scrapy alto you might hear in a coffee shop. Her hands hug the microphone so tightly you’d have to peer closely to see that she’s shaking.

I had no idea she could sing.

I can’t bring myself to watch the video again. I feel like a gawker, watching some news story about a girl halfway across the country. The Bailey I knew didn’t sing, didn’t wear peasant tops. I pick up the jewelry holder on Lauren’s desk. It’s the macaron I sculpted and painted pastel green in Mr. White’s class last year.

I thought beginner drawing and painting would be a nightmare. But art at Broken Falls wasn’t like the art class I’d taken as a kid in New York, in stuffy rooms with crayon stubs and paintbrushes slimy from sitting in water overnight.

I’m not great at drawing and sketching—I have a long way to go—but this macaron, my first assignment in his class, convinced Mr. White I was ready to take AP art.

When I brought it home, Lauren locked eyes on it like a ferret on a shiny necklace. “That is so cool.”

I let her have it without question. She was hesitant, didn’t know what she’d owe me in return. I insisted she take it; I knew I’d win her trust eventually.

And here I am, at her computer, alone.

I switch tabs and open Lauren’s browser history. The first site on the list immediately catches my eye. HAUNTED WISCONSIN—THE RED WOMAN SIGHTINGS

No wonder she won’t sleep alone. Bailey showed me this site when she was trying to explain the Red Woman to me. Some of the stuff on it will keep you up at night no matter where you live.

I click through to the forum topic, where Lauren is logged in as mookie. I swallow to clear my throat. Mookie is on her bed; the nearly decapitated chimpanzee was Lauren’s first stuffed animal. She was too little to say monkey, so she branded him Mookie.

I scroll past the posts: Stories about the Red Woman jumping out in front of motorists. Stories about her slapping a bloody palm on the windshields of stalled cars, leaving behind a ghoulish handprint. Stories about brave souls going up to the barn and reporting hearing sobbing and children crying.

Nausea wells up in me. That streak of blood in the barn—it could have been a handprint.

I click on the navigation bar until I find Lauren’s profile. Apparently, she registered on Haunted Wisconsin on Monday—almost two days after Bailey disappeared.

Lauren’s only made one post, in a subforum called THE RED WOMAN—GENERAL DISCUSSION.

It’s time-stamped at 10:31 this morning.

A chill settles over me. I dig my socked toes into the carpet and scroll through the responses.

The latest response came three hours ago:

I scroll down, but Lauren never responded to anthropomorphist’s question. I toggle back to her search history, the pit in my gut growing when I see everything Lauren has looked up in the past few days.

the red woman

Josephine leeds murder

séances

how do you make the dead mad

And:

can ghosts kill people?

I click out of the window and leave Lauren’s desk and computer exactly as I found it.

When I get back to my room, I lock the door behind me.

I’m in bed, counting the minutes until everyone gets home from the vigil. When I hear the crunching of tires on snow in the driveway, I turn off my light.

Moments after the front door creaks open, there’s a soft knock on my door. I pretend to be asleep. I don’t want to know how the vigil went. It’s just a reminder that I should have been there. Should have gotten my shit together and shown up, like a real friend would.

But I can’t handle the inevitable questions from everyone. What did you see in the barn? I can’t answer them, and not because Sheriff Moser told me not to when he drove me home.

I can’t parse out what’s real and what’s not anymore. Lauren isn’t stupid—she might be a little naïve—but she’s one of the smartest kids in her class. She watches Dateline with Ashley on Friday nights. She knows that girls disappear all the time: not at the hands of murderous spirits but at the hands of humans.

So why that post on the message boards about the Red Woman? Could she really believe that Bailey’s disappearance has something to do with Josephine Leeds?

I can’t turn off her scream, looping in my head.

On my nightstand, my phone starts buzzing frantically. Jade’s picture fills the screen; her judging stare has never seemed more appropriate. A tear rolls down my neck as I let the phone ring and ring.

When it’s done, I reach for my phone. A text message from Jade pops up on the screen.

Look at the goddamn news.

I scoot from my bed to my desk. Shake my laptop out of hibernation. The default news site on my computer shows all the usual misery—bombings halfway around the world, a fire at a Brooklyn apartment complex, and historic snowstorms headed for the East Coast. I let my fingers fly across the keyboard, typing Bailey Hammond into the search bar.

I’ve bitten my thumbnail nearly clean off by the time the top hit loads.

BREAKING: Police discover missing teenager’s car

Wisconsin State Police confirm that a vehicle found in an abandoned garage in Broken Falls belongs to Bailey Hammond, 17, who has been missing since late Saturday night. Police have not commented on what they found inside the vehicle but have said that a full forensic examination is under way. A source close to law enforcement says that the discovery of Miss Hammond’s car comes off a suspicious discovery earlier today, and that police are ramping up their search for the missing teen.

I lean over the wastebasket under my desk, but all I manage is a dry heave. I spit on top of a discarded draft of an English paper.

Abandoned garage. I think of the bank-owned old farmhouse behind us, the one my father says will never sell because no one is looking to buy ten acres of property in this market. I’ve seen the enormous double garage out back, its doors rusted from years of weather and neglect. It has to be that house.

Because that house—that garage—is less than half a mile from Sparrow Hill. Of course the police would look there after finding that blood in the Leeds Barn. After I found the blood in the Leeds Barn.

There’s a ringing in my ears, nearly drowning out the thoughts forming: I hand-delivered Bailey’s phone to the police. I led them straight to the blood.

And I can only imagine what that detective is thinking now: What is Kacey Young going to find next?