CHAPTER FIVE

I haven’t been inside a police precinct since an officer from the Syracuse Police Department recognized me as a runaway outside a 7-Eleven last January.

I’d run away a month before that, right before Christmas, but I was a dumbass about it and got caught by Dawn, my social worker. She saw my split and infected lower lip. I lied and said my mom’s latest boyfriend did it and got sent to New Beginnings Home for Girls while social services worked out the details of me going to live in Broken Falls, a town I’d never heard of, with Russ Markham, a man I’d never met.

My roommate at the group home, Missy, had been bounced around foster homes from the time she was two weeks old. I could tell why no one adopted her as soon as I met her and she snarled at me to stay out of her shit. In the weekly group therapy sessions, she bragged about going to juvie for the first time when she was twelve, for pulling a box cutter on a classmate.

My first and only night at New Beginnings, I woke up with Missy on top of me, her knees digging into my chest. Someone had most definitely been in her shit, and even though I insisted it wasn’t me, she said she could go to jail for felony possession and if I breathed a word to anyone she would cut my throat in my sleep.

I had been planning to make a run for it, before the thing with Missy. I thought hiding out with friends in New York and sleeping on their basement floors was better than being shipped off to Bumblefuck McCow-Town to live with strangers who would take one look at me and decide I was trouble.

But I knew I wasn’t smart enough or strong enough to make it on my own until I turned eighteen. I would wind up somewhere like New Beginnings again, some girl breathing in my ear that she would cut my throat while I slept.

My social worker took the flight to Madison, Wisconsin, with me. It was the first time I’d ever been on a plane. Dawn was silent throughout takeoff.

“Don’t you have your own family to deal with?” I asked. Dawn was flipping through one of those magazines selling things like patches of grass so your dog can pee in the house. I already knew from looking her up on Facebook that Dawn lived with her girlfriend, Renee, a woman who rescued retired greyhounds.

Dawn’s jaw set. I prayed to God I hadn’t accidentally said something horrible—like maybe she and her girlfriend wanted kids but couldn’t have them. “I’m not leaving you.”

It was all she said. My chest was tight as I went back to reading my book, one of the few possessions I’d managed not to lose over the years of constant shuffling back and forth between houses. A compilation of fairy tales that had belonged to my mom as a child, even though I don’t know why anyone would give this shit to a kid.

They weren’t the Disney type of fairy tales, where everyone gets a prince—they were the real stories, the ones that came first. The story where the sea witch cuts out the little mermaid’s tongue and she decides to throw herself over the side of a boat rather than stab the sleeping prince. The version of Cinderella where she commands her birds to peck out her evil stepsisters’ eyes.

I guess I got attached to the book because I knew all the other stories were bullshit, even as a kid. There was no prince waiting to rescue me—only a social worker with lipstick on her teeth and a crate full of files in the backseat of her car.

Girls are not princesses, and I know all the possible endings to the stories about the girls in peril. They’re rarely happy.

The door to the sheriff’s department is frozen. Jade punches down on the handle. The noise rattles my brain. How is this happening? How is this for real?

The woman behind the desk doesn’t look up from her stapling. Like most of Broken Falls, the sheriff’s office hasn’t gotten an upgrade since the 1970s. The walls are wood panels. Plastic trees in planters, the rocks inside covered with a visible layer of dust.

“Excuse me.” Jade taps on the counter. The woman keeps stapling. Her dark hair is pulled back so tightly it looks like it hurts. Overplucked eyebrows to match. She’s wearing too much foundation that she probably doesn’t need. She’s younger than I first thought. Early, maybe midtwenties. Her badge says Ellie Knepper.

Jade hisses in my ear: “Is she deaf or something?”

Ellie Knepper sets down her stapler. Looks up at Jade and smiles. “No, hon, I can hear just fine.”

I set Bailey’s phone on the counter, which is piss-yellow. It matches the tiled floor.

Ellie looks at the phone, then at me. “Whatcha got there?”

“It’s our friend’s,” I say. “Her mom called you guys to report her missing.”

Ellie looks at Bailey’s phone again and says, “Huh.”

I feel Jade’s pulse ticking beside me, like a bomb. Jade is one of the smartest people I know, but she was not blessed with a Midwesterner’s patience. Her face goes red, the snowflakes clinging to her curly bun dissolving. “Her name is Bailey Hammond.”

“Ah, sounds familiar. Yes—I talked to her mom this morning.”

“Then why aren’t you guys looking for her?” Jade asks.

Ellie Knepper folds her hands together and rests her chin on them. “If we sent someone out for every teenager who didn’t come home on time, we’d have no one for real emergencies. Ninety percent of the time, kids come home in twelve hours.”

“She obviously didn’t go off on her own, because she would have this with her.” I point to Bailey’s phone.

A curious look crosses Ellie Knepper’s face. “Where’d you say you found that again?”

“Cliff Grosso’s house,” Jade says.

“Oh,” Ellie says. “That’s the boy who rear-ended me.”

Jade and I share a look. Of course Ellie is the deputy that Cliff hit. You can count the number of law enforcement officers in this town on one hand.

Broken Falls doesn’t need much more than that. The only reason anyone here calls 911 is because they hit a deer. The last person who went missing here was probably Josephine Leeds.

The thought makes a chill skate up my spine.

“So you know who Bailey is,” Jade pleads. “She wouldn’t just run off on her own. You have to send someone up there to look for her.”

“Hon, I don’t have anyone to send up there,” Ellie says. “It’s a Sunday afternoon and we’ve got people keeling over from heart attacks left and right on their driveways. There’s already been a pileup on Main Street because of the storm. You need to get home before it gets worse.”

“Are you seriously not hearing us?” Jade looks at me for affirmation. “Our friend has been missing all day.”

Ellie sighs. “As soon as I have someone free, I’ll send them up to the Grosso house, okay? But you two need to get home.”

“What about her phone?” I say. “Someone deleted everything off it.”

Ellie Knepper gives me another curious look. My deep mistrust of cops kicks in.

“I’ll check it out,” she says. “You girls be careful, okay?”

Jade is rooted to her spot. I’ve never seen her cry, but the expression on her face scares the shit out of me. Says that tears are imminent—that what’s going on is very, very bad.

“Trust me,” Ellie says. “The only thing you can do for her right now is go home.”

The sheets of snow falling outside the sheriff’s station are picking up speed. I’ve seen storms like this before; within the hour, the roads will be in whiteout condition. The fear of getting trapped, freezing to death in this truck needles my brain.

“We really should go home,” I say. “If we get stuck in this—”

“I’m not going home.” Jade stares straight ahead. “I have to go back to Bay’s and talk to her mom. I’ll take you home if you want, but I’m not listening to that woman inside. She didn’t even take us seriously.”

I gnaw the inside of my cheek. “Maybe she was just overworked.”

“Call me crazy, but I think a missing person is more important than a couple dumbasses skidding off the road.”

Missing person. “Jade,” I say, trying to sound calm. “It’s only been a few hours. Maybe she’ll come home.”

Maybe saying it out loud will make it happen. Maybe she left her phone at the party and someone stole it, wiped everything off it with the plan to pawn it off. They could have changed their mind, panicked, and dumped it.

My stupid theory collapses like a Jenga tower when Jade speaks: “She never lets that phone out of her sight.” She’s right: Bailey’s phone is always within a few inches of her. Her pocket, the cup holder in her car. Under her pillow when she goes to sleep.

“What about her phone bill?” I ask. “Can’t her mom go online and see who she talked to last night?”

“That was the first idea I had when she called me. She tried that but doesn’t have the password to Bailey’s plan, and the phone company wouldn’t give it to her. Said they had to prove it was part of a police investigation, and obviously there is none.”

Bailey’s parents are old-fashioned; their cells are still bulky flip phones. After years of battling with them over the necessity of a phone with Internet access and unlimited texting, Bailey finally got permission to get her own plan once she could pay for it. And she did.

Jade’s hands are shaking as she coughs into them. “The phone thing is really freaking me out. How it was wiped or something.”

I hold my fingertips in front of the heating vents. The word pings in my head. Wiped.

Like someone was trying to erase every trace of Bailey.

Lauren must have heard Jade’s truck pull up to the house; she’s waiting for me in the foyer when I get home, her fleece blanket draped over her shoulders.

“Did you find Bailey?” Lauren asks.

I feel my brow furrowing. “How did you find out that’s where I was?”

“You just disappeared without saying anything.” Lauren frowns. “I heard you talking to Jade before you left. What’s going on?”

I strip off my hat and scarf; my neck and ears ache from the cold. “I don’t really know what’s going on.”

Lauren shrinks away, hurt by my dismissal.

“Just let me check something out first,” I say. “Then we’ll have hot chocolate.”

I kick my boots off and bypass Lauren, heading straight for my room and my laptop. I pull up the local news’s website, but there’s nothing about Bailey. Just a thick red banner at the top splaying STORM TRACKER!

Moments later, there’s a knock. Andrew opens my door and leans against the frame, frowning at me.

I swallow. “Did you hear what’s happening?”

Andrew nods. “Were you at the party?”

“No. They were supposed to pick me up and take me, but they never texted.” I don’t know why I’m telling him this part. I don’t know if it’s important.

“Were you at the party?” I ask.

Andrew’s eyebrows shoot up. “Me? Seriously?”

“I saw the tire tracks. You went somewhere.”

“Yeah. To pick up my prescription this morning.” He’s watching me now, his eyelids heavy. “Where did you guys go Friday night?”

I crack a knuckle. “How did you know I went somewhere?”

I wait for him to correct me, say that he knows Lauren went, too, but he doesn’t. “I heard a car door slam outside.”

“It was nothing,” I say. “We just drove around.”

I can’t tell if he believes me. But when he turns to leave my room, I think I see something like disappointment cross his face.

Ashley has already heard about Bailey by the time she gets home. Apparently it’s all anyone at the café could talk about; Paula Schulz, the stripy-haired gossip Ashley hired this summer, heard from her kids.

Paula’s oldest son, Axel, is Cliff Grosso’s best friend. Such a shame, Paula tutted to me when the Grosso family came up in her daily gossip. One mistake ruined that poor boy’s future.

I could hear it in her voice, what she was too cowardly to say: That Bailey Hammond ruined that poor boy’s future.

I stay in my room until it gets dark, looking out the window into the storm. I think of Jim Grosso, shooting that boy in the ass just for stepping onto his property.

I’ve known men like him—ones who get violent when they think someone has taken something that belongs to them. I remember the boyfriend who came home from a bar with a swollen eye. He’d punched out another man just for looking at my mom.

I’ve only seen Jim Grosso in passing—mostly I wait in the car whenever Ashley goes into the butcher’s after work to pick up a cut of meat for dinner. But Cliff’s face is vivid in my mind. His mouth, always twisted with rage.

I don’t want to think about what he’s capable of when that rage comes to the surface. What he’d be capable of after a night of drinking and running into the girl he thinks took everything from him.

The hours tick by, and I stay in my room, watching the empty screen of my phone. I don’t want to face the thousand questions from my family. I’m hiding again, like I did those first few weeks after I moved to Broken Falls.

For my first month or so in town, my strategy was to stay out of everyone’s way. As if maybe the Markhams would forget I existed. I’d sneak into the kitchen when I knew no one would be there, like some burglar who’d broken in just to drink their expensive almond milk and eat handfuls of farm-fresh cherries.

Ashley was too busy with running Milk & Sugar and my dad was too absorbed in work-sleep-repeat to breathe down my neck much. Lauren was like a cat, skittering out of the room when she sensed me nearby.

Andrew, on the other hand, wasn’t content to let things be. He’d decided that the right thing to do was be my friend, and he wouldn’t stop until I relented. I was washing my cereal bowl one Saturday morning when he bounded into the kitchen, skidding to a stop when he saw me. “Hey. What are you doing?”

I felt my face redden. “Cleaning up after myself?”

“Want to go for a run?”

“Like, on purpose?” I never ran unless someone was chasing me or if New York State required it for me to pass gym class.

“Yeah, why not?” Andrew zipped his fleece up to his chin. “It’s a beautiful day.”

It’s not like I had anything better to do. He’d scolded me when I came back into the kitchen wearing my Vans, telling me they were terrible for my feet. I had to borrow Ashley’s running shoes—we’re both a size eight.

I felt his eyes on the scribbles alongside my shoes. I was born with the devil in me. Heat went to my cheeks; it was a stupid lyric from some band I was obsessed with in ninth grade. I would loop the song on those nights where music was my only escape from my mom and the boyfriends and the awful things coming out of their mouths.

“So you like running?” I asked while I was lacing up Ashley’s tennis shoes, as Andrew called them. Desperate to change the subject from my ratty, creepy Vans.

“It’s okay. I feel like I have to do it.”

“Why?” If he was going to say to stay skinny, I was going to punch him in the nuts. I had about ten pounds on him despite being six inches shorter.

“I’m going out for cross-country in the fall,” he said. “I used to play soccer and I’m afraid colleges will think I’m getting lazy.”

“Why did you stop playing soccer?”

“I got kicked off the team for missing too much practice.”

I couldn’t fathom Andrew being kicked off anything; he was so type A, so hyper-focused on success. Before I could ask why he missed so much practice, he nodded to my feet. “Those fit okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

I followed Andrew as he made a right outside the house. I realized we were heading west and would pass Sparrow Kill.

I saved my breath to say something once we approached. The barn wasn’t visible from the road, but the hill was still covered in snow at the top.

“Do you believe the Red Woman stories?” I asked Andrew.

Andrew hadn’t even broken a sweat; I realized he was running under his usual pace for my benefit. “I mean, everyone knows the massacre was real. But I don’t think there’s anything, like, supernatural going on.”

“But the Red Woman,” I said. “For her just to disappear.”

“People disappear all the time.” Andrew shrugged. “Most of the time, they’re dead. Sad but true.”

For some reason, the thought put a deep sadness in my gut. A sense of loss I couldn’t describe.

“What if it’s not always true?” I said, the cold air cutting through my lungs.

Andrew turned to look at me. “What do you mean?”

“Hold up.” I stopped by a wooden rail guarding the Strausses’ property. I sucked in air, greedily, one hand over my heart. Andrew’s chest rose and fell evenly.

“I mean, maybe it’s crazy to think the Red Woman got away and lived happily ever after,” I said, when I got my breath back. “But all those other people who go missing…it’s not like the whole world looks for every person who disappears.”

I’d never felt stupider in my life. But I went on: “I don’t know, maybe the world sometimes just swallows people up. Maybe people just get away.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Andrew leaned against the guard posts. I pulled at a blade of grass near my sneaker.

“Can I go up there?” I asked.

“The barn? Why would you want to?”

“Curiosity.”

“It’s pretty disappointing during the day. It’s just a barn. No evil spirits lurking.” He wiggled his eyebrows and made his voice deep. “Those only come out at night.”

But I was already leaving him behind. The sun was coming up over the hill, bathing everything in gold. My calves ached until I reached the top and collapsed on a stump, chest heaving.

I thought of what had happened up here—the brutality of what Hugh Leeds had done to his family, and I felt sick. I thought of the things I had almost done to my own mother.

A chill passed through me as I imagined Josephine Leeds, trapped in the barn. Her screams as she heard the gunshots from inside the house. That was when I decided that all the ghost stories got it wrong: evil isn’t a spirit or a monster or a ghost. It lives inside regular people, and it doesn’t know the difference between night and day.