CHAPTER FOUR

Something is wrong. I hold two fingers to the throbbing vein at my temple. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. Bailey never made it home from Sully’s party last night.”

“Wait, she went home?” Bailey always stays at Jade’s house after parties; she has a strict eleven-thirty curfew, and her mom is oblivious—she really thinks Bailey has kept her promise to be good after the Cliff Grosso incident. She really thinks Bailey spends most of her weekends at Jade’s making cupcakes and watching crappy reality television. Not sneaking out to the Culver’s in Pleasant Plains or to the occasional party.

“At like ten she said she was busted and had to go home,” Jade says. There’s a silent but lingering there.

“What?” I ask.

“Cathy called me this morning. She said Bay isn’t answering her phone and asked me when she was coming home from my house.”

“Bay lied to you?”

Jade is quiet. I realize how I must have sounded. Accusatory. Because Bailey’d lied to me yesterday too, hadn’t she? She said she would text me before she and Jade left for the party.

“I told you,” Jade says. “Something’s seriously wrong. I’ve been blowing up Sully’s phone, but he’s not answering. I’m thinking of driving over there so Cathy can keep calling people.”

I can tell she wants me to come with her to Sully’s. But Jade never asks for anything. “I can be ready in like ten minutes.”

“Okay.” Jade’s sigh of relief fills the line. “I’ll be there in five.”

Jade lives on the other side of Sparrow Hill, all the way on the opposite end of town, which means she was already on her way to me when she called.

The thought fills the hole in my stomach a bit. Whatever is going on with Bailey, we’ll figure it out together. I haven’t been frozen out completely—Jade still needs me.

Whatever my crime was, it’s forgiven. For now.

After Jade ends the call, I look at my screen. Bailey had grabbed my phone one night, taken a picture of herself making a grotesque “derp face,” and saved it as my wallpaper. I never bothered to change it, because it made me laugh every time I looked at it.

I text her: Where are you?? This isn’t funny.

I slip out of the house before Andrew can corner me and ask what’s wrong. The answer feels too complicated.

I pause as I pick my way around the spot where Andrew’s Mazda is parked. There are fresh tire marks behind the car, the grooves filling up with snow. I didn’t hear him go anywhere last night or this morning. I entertain the idea that he went to the party for a half a second and laugh.

Andrew can’t drink on his medication, and when I asked him why he doesn’t go to the parties anyway, he said he’d rather get his legs waxed than be the only sober person at a party.

Jade’s already here. She’s idling at the curb in her father’s truck. Warren works nights for the power company. When he’s sleeping, Jade can take the truck as long as she refills his gas tank. I don’t know anything about Jade’s mom except what Bailey told me: she killed herself when Jade was five—Jade walked in on her in the bathtub—and I should never, ever bring it up.

“Babe,” Jade says as I climb into the truck, “I’m freaking out.”

Jade’s eyeliner is smudged and her bun lopsided. I reach over and give her mittened hand a squeeze. The picture of her and Bailey from last night pops into my mind—the one I should have been in—and I pull my hand back.

If Jade notices, she doesn’t say anything. “When we get to Sully’s, I’m going to beat him for not answering his phone. Then I’m going to make him call every single person in his contacts until we find her.”

There are plows out already, trying to stay ahead of the storm. When we pass Milk & Sugar, I sink down in my seat. Ashley sometimes wipes down the windows in the afternoon when it gets slow, and I don’t want her catching me out gallivanting with Jade in this weather.

Jade doesn’t say anything about last night, doesn’t ask what I did, and I wonder if they talked about it. If they came to a joint decision to leave me behind.

The first time I snuck out with Bailey and Jade, we went to the Taco Bell in Pleasant Plains. We laughed at the drunken twentysomethings fumbling their orders into the drive-through speaker and imagined having that kind of freedom, someday. In the summer, we snuck down to the lake, waded in up to our midthighs, and laughed under the moon. Bailey never wanted to go home.

Eventually I realized I preferred my evenings by the fire in the den, playing games of Risk with Andrew and Lauren that stretched to midnight. I’d finally found a version of myself I could live with—found a place where I didn’t feel like I had to escape.

So I lied to Jade and Bailey and told them Ashley caught me sneaking back in one night. Said I had to cut back, couldn’t go out with them every weekend. It didn’t stop them from trying to pull me out into the night.

But the night doesn’t like to give up its secrets. And if Bailey disappeared into it, there might be no telling what happened to her.

Kevin “Sully” Sullivan lives in a McMansion on Prairie Circle. His mom is always traveling for business, and his brother goes to college in Canada, so Sully is generally left to do as he pleases, which equals instant popularity.

Personally, I think Sully’s a creep. He’s a squat guy, constantly trying to make up for his size with his easy access to booze. He’s always hovering around the girls at his parties like a gnat, snapping pictures for some weird personal collection.

My toes clench in my boots as we pull into the Sullivans’ driveway next to a sad-looking beer keg turned on its side.

The Prairie Circle McMansions all have two-car garages. Both of the doors are open and Sully’s Ford Escape is on display. Jade parks behind it and we climb out and ascend the long cobblestone walkway.

When we reach the front door, Jade cups her eyes and peers through the glass. She rings the bell. One, two, three times, and then she tries the handle. The door creaks open. No one locks their doors in Broken Falls—something that’s always creeped me out.

Sully’s house is trashed: there are red Solo cups at our feet and a trash can overflowing with empty liquor bottles by the door, as if whoever was bringing it outside lost the will at the last moment. The contents of what looks like an entire bag of Doritos are crushed into the rug in the living room adjacent to the entryway. We stand in the foyer, listening for signs of life. Then: the rustling of cans, coming from the basement.

“I knew he was home.” Jade starts down the stairway leading off the foyer. I pause to shake the snow from my boots before I follow—there’s no reason not to be polite.

Sully is bent over the wreckage of what looks like it was once a table for mixing drinks, a Santa’s sack of a trash bag in his hands. He looks up and sees Jade and me. “What are you guys doing here?”

“Someone wasn’t answering his phone,” Jade snaps.

Sully pats his back pocket. “Oh. I have no idea where that is.”

Jade’s jaw twitches. “So you haven’t heard from Bay this morning?”

“No. Why?”

“She never made it home last night,” I say.

Sully’s eyes flick to me, like he’s just noticing I’m here. “Shit. Well, I don’t know where she is.” Sully nods to Jade. “You didn’t leave with her?”

“She said she couldn’t because she had to go straight home. Remember, Tyrell gave me a ride when the party was over?”

Sully blinks. There are freckles on his eyelids.

“You said bye to us!” Jade makes a sound of disgust.

“To be honest, I was blitzed out of my mind,” Sully says. “I don’t even remember Bay leaving.”

“Well, someone must have been outside when she left,” I say. “Maybe they talked to her.”

Jade pulls out her phone and dials. Moments later, a beer pong cup starts rattling against the table. Sully hurries over to it and fishes his phone out. “How’d that get in there?”

“Are you not understanding what’s going on here?” Jade snaps. “Bay is missing, and she was last seen here.”

Sully’s eyes go wide, swiveling to take in the remains of last night’s debauchery. “No one called the cops, right?”

I think of the beer keg still out in the driveway. I snatch the phone from Sully’s hand. I open up his picture folder. He may have been too drunk to remember Bailey leaving, but there’s a chance he caught it on camera if he was outside around the keg.

I flip through, looking for exterior shots of the house. There’s a photo of some junior girl, illuminated by the flash of the camera, being held up in a keg stand on the driveway. I zoom in, noticing a spot of blue at the edge of the screen.

Bailey’s Honda Civic. Bailey, one hand on the driver’s-side door handle.

She’s not alone. Someone the size of a linebacker is grabbing her shoulder. He’s got a shaved head.

“Jade,” I say.

Jade yanks the phone from my hand and zooms in on the picture. The color drains from her face as she turns to Sully.

“Call Cliff Grosso right now.”

Sully balks. “I don’t have his number.”

“Then what was he doing at your party?”

“He came with Bridget. I didn’t invite him.”

Jade’s ears go red. “Then call Bridget!”

I cross the basement as Sully fumbles with his phone, Jade towering over him like an angry mother. I run a finger over the surface of the beer pong table—the same one Jade and Bailey were smiling over just last night. Bailey wasn’t looking at the camera. She even looked distracted, maybe.

But Bailey wouldn’t leave a party just because she saw Cliff. It wouldn’t be the first time she ran into him; Broken Falls is a small town, and after losing his scholarship, Cliff stuck around to work at his uncle’s hunting shop. Bailey had to have known Cliff would show up to Sully’s party; she’s always calling Cliff the loser former quarterback who has nothing better to do than hang around high school parties with his high school girlfriend.

“No answer.” Sully shrugs. “Everyone is probably still sleeping.”

Jade runs her hands down her face. “God, you are so useless. Try Val.”

Val Diamond, Bridget’s right-hand woman. I come up next to Jade as Sully dutifully makes the call. “Do you think that’s why she left? She saw Cliff?”

“She would have told me,” Jade says. “I would have left with her.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to kill your vibe or whatever.”

Jade rolls her eyes. “If you’d been here, you’d know there was no vibe to kill. The party sucked.”

The words hang in the air between us: if you’d been here. So casual, like it’s the most natural thing in the world that I wasn’t there. That they left me out. I swallow to clear away the lump in my throat. “Well, if you guys hadn’t ditched me, I would have been here.”

“Ditch you?” Jade’s eyes flash. “Bay texted you asking what time we should pick you up and you never responded.”

My head turns to a fishbowl. No, Bailey definitely hadn’t texted me. I slide my phone out of my pocket and show Jade my conversation with Bailey.

Jade gnaws the inside of her cheek and looks up at me. “That’s just what she told me. I mean, maybe her text to you didn’t go through.”

I doubt it. I don’t say it, even though I know Jade is already thinking it. Neither of us wants to say out loud what’s becoming painfully obvious.

Bailey lied to both of us last night.

We leave Sully’s house with Cliff Grosso’s phone number, extracted from a reluctant Val Diamond. I’ve never had a problem with Val, but there’s all sorts of shit between her and Bailey that I never got the full story on. All I know is they used to be best friends, and Val dropped Bailey in eighth grade when Val made dance team and girls like Bridget Gibson started paying attention to her.

When we’re shut back in Jade’s father’s truck, I lick my thumb and wipe away a salty patch on my boot. Jade is on her third attempt to call Cliff Grosso.

“Either his phone’s dead or he’s hitting the eff you button,” she says. “Kace, I’m so goddamned scared right now.”

“Let’s just stick to the facts,” I say. “We don’t know that something bad happened to her.”

Jade eyeballs me, as if to say, Really? Because the facts are this: Bailey lied about why she was leaving the party. Cliff Grosso followed her to her car. She somehow never made it home.

An idea springs into my head: “Why don’t we just go to Cliff’s?”

“Like his house?” Jade blinks. Her eyeliner has gone grimy, and there are gold curls falling from the bun atop her head. “Do you want to get shot?”

Cliff Grosso lives alone with his father, Jim, and even I know what happened five years ago when a bunch of high school kids tried to cross through the woods behind Jim Grosso’s house. He took his hunting rifle off the mantel and shot one of the boys in the ass. I guess it was a miracle the kid could walk again, but nothing happened to Jim over the whole thing because apparently in Wisconsin you’re allowed to defend your property.

“We can just drive by,” I say. “To see if her car is there.”

Jade picks at a remnant of plum lipstick flaking on her mouth. “Okay. But we’re just driving by.”

And then she makes a right, toward Pleasant Plains, up Cypress Hill, where Cliff Grosso lives.

We don’t talk on the drive up the hill. Jade has to focus on the bad conditions outside, and I am trying to come up with an alternative to Bailey being dead in a ditch somewhere.

There is the smallest chance she went home with Cliff Grosso. She almost hooked up with him once, and it’s been nearly a year. Cliff might not blame her anymore for the accident. What if Cliff got into a fight with Bridget last night and decided to hook up with Bailey as payback?

Bailey might just have gone along with it—either because she wanted to relish the chance to piss off Bridget or because she was bored.

The thing about growing up in a town like this is that some people catch boredom like a virus. Bailey has it bad—bad enough to get into that car with Cliff Grosso last spring after he’d been drinking. Bad enough to sneak out every weekend in search of something—what it is, I don’t even think she knows.

I think of her idea to hold the séance in the barn, and a shiver runs through me. I roll up my window.

When we reach the top of Cypress Hill, Jade parks at the bottom of the Grossos’ driveway. It’s too risky to drive up it in this weather, even with four-wheel drive. I climb out of the car and shade my eyes; atop the hill, a row of cypress trees blocks my view of the house.

“We’re trespassing,” Jade says.

“We’re already here,” I say. “He’s not going to shoot us for ringing his doorbell.”

We’re panting by the time we get to the top. The head of the driveway loops around the cabin. There are no cars in sight, but smoke puffs out of the cabin’s chimney, white as gauze against the orange-pink sky.

Jade climbs up the shoveled path and I pull out my phone and follow her. I feel dramatic, but I type 911 into my keypad, just in case. A tawny cat, almost as pale as the snow, darts past us and around the back of the cabin. The sound makes my heart lurch.

Jade shields her eyes and peers through the garage window. “Cliff’s Jeep is here.”

In the woods off the side of the house, there’s a low-pitched shriek. Snow owl, maybe. I shiver in place. Jade climbs up the porch and rings the doorbell.

No footsteps. Just silence. Jade rings the bell again, then jangles the knob. Locked.

The wind carries toward me, bringing a sour, metallic smell with it. I pull the front crook of my scarf over my mouth. Jade steps around to the side of the cabin. I follow. A high window—bathroom, probably—is cracked open. Jade calls “Hello” into it.

The ensuing silence ripples through me like a current.

Jade gets out her phone, peeling away her mitten to scroll down the screen.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Calling Bailey. If she’s passed out inside, we’ll at least hear her stupid-ass ringtone.”

“But her car’s not—”

Jade shushes me. It’s so quiet on the hill I can hear the first ring leaking from Jade’s phone clearly. But there’s another noise, farther away.

“I hear something,” I whisper.

Jade points to the house, brow furrowed. I shake my head. It’s a tinkling sound, like a bell, coming from the woods adjacent to the Grossos’ cabin.

I take off after the sound. It’s not Bailey’s ringtone. Still, it’s a phone, and it’s ringing, at the same moment Jade is calling Bailey’s phone. The thought makes my toes curl.

I pick my way around the trees. Step over brown, soggy leaves weighed down with melting snow.

“Call it again,” I say, just loud enough for Jade to hear me. She frowns, starts to come toward me.

The tinkling starts up again. Wind chimes. I turn—the sound is behind me—coming face to face with a barren balsam tree. A phone in a case with a peeling photo of the northern lights is on the ground, resting on dead pine needles.

We were with her when she bought it—Bailey is obsessed with the northern lights, and when she saw the phone case at the Pleasant Plains flea market last summer she freaked out, even though Jade told her it looked like shit quality.

Blood pounding in my ears. I reach for Bailey’s phone. I’m prompted for a passcode. I type in Bailey’s birthday—0427. Access granted. The phone is clinging to life with a five percent charge.

I peel off a mitten and open Bailey’s call log. She has dozens of missed calls and texts. All from numbers with the Broken Falls area code, except mine. I open my text.

Where are you?? This isn’t funny.

My number is displayed above the text, but not my name. My heart lurches. Why would she delete me from her contacts? I flip through to her phone book.

All of Bailey’s contacts are gone. Deleted. My pulse picks up.

I thumb through to the next screen. Pull up the camera. No pictures. I know for a fact that Bailey had a minimum of four hundred pictures on here. Selfies. The three of us, making stupid faces. Something delicious she’d eaten.

I look up at Jade, who’s staring down at the needles covering the forest floor, her face white. “Someone erased everything.”

“Kacey. Do you see this?”

I follow her eyes to the ground, several feet away from us. The pine needles, shielded from the storm by tree cover, are stained red, and the snow around them has been flattened.

Something was dragged here.

Jade looks paralyzed. I follow the tunnel in the snow the body made—it had to have been a body—avoiding stepping too close to the streaks of blood. Don’t touch anything. Crime scene.

“Kacey, stop.”

I ignore Jade and leave her in the woods. That smell wafts my way again. The metallic smell. I cover my face, following the blood around the side of the house.

The snow in the Grossos’ backyard comes up to my calves. I hold on to the side of the house for support. On the deck, the snow is stained with a spot of red. Even though my face is covered, I gag when I take a breath.

I climb the deck. On the far end of it, pushed against the side of the house, there’s something boxy and covered with snow. I keep one hand pressing my scarf to my mouth, afraid I’ll spray vomit everywhere if I smell any more of the blood.

A freezer. The top has been wiped clean of snow. Someone’s been in it recently.

I squeeze my eyes shut, snow seeping through my mittens as I lift the top.

I force myself to look and let out the breath I’ve been holding. Inside is the body of a doe, a puncture wound at her neck. Her eyes are wide open in shock. Like she never saw the arrow from the crossbow coming.

“Kacey!”

I drop the lid of the freezer as Jade emerges from the side of the house. She looks from me to the blood and comes to a full stop.

“A deer,” I say. “It’s just a deer.”

“I called her mom.” Jade pulls her coat around her tight. “She says get the hell out of here. Bring it straight to the sheriff’s station.”

It. Bailey’s phone, she means. Which I am still holding in my unmittened hand. “My fingerprints are all over it.”

Jade’s mouth hangs open. “What does that matter?” She plucks the phone from my hand, staring at me with a strange look on her face.

I feel frozen in place. Sick from the smell of the dead deer. I force myself forward, knowing full well Jade will leave me behind if she has to. I trudge through the snow, my heart hammering so fast now I’m afraid it’ll shatter.