Days float by programed with icy grief. The numbness in my heart turns into an ocean big enough for the entire world to drown in—a sheet of frozen glass suppressing all of humanity from taking another breath. My mother says she’s making arrangements to fly out with my father, but I threatened her within an inch of her life, begging her for mercy to reconsider. I can’t have that right now. I cannot have my parents milling around, the unwanted guests—peering into my life with James, our shared hellish nightmare exposed and magnified before them. And they would insist on staying here at the house under the guise of compassion, but God knows they are too cheap to ever stay at a hotel. My mother doesn’t have a compassionate bone in her body. No. I cannot have that woman in my house. I might lose my mind and accidentally pay her back for all the misery she’s inflicted on me. She is the sole reason for so many of my indiscretions, so many of my seemly rational decisions, which in hindsight were all so very, very bad.

James seems to be sulking more than usual. The visceral hate the American public feels for us has hit an all-time high. At night, when sleep eludes me, I sit and peruse the comments’ sections of each exacerbated article that paints the two of us to be money-grubbing baby killers. The trolls have come out in force. Where is your daughter? Where are you hiding her? Have you killed her just like you killed your brother? That one in particular was geared toward James like so many of those hateful comments are. Who knew my handsome husband has equal power to charm as he does polarize an entire demographic of fang-bearing women. But he’s not the only Price they’ve decided to crucify. She looks like she’s got her nose stuck on a window! Oh, the comments about my pig nose—something I haven’t been insecure about since junior high. They wish they could rear the ugly monster of insecurity back to life. Sorry, but I’m too damn frightened at what might have become of my daughter to care about your cruelty toward my genetic makeup. My daughter shares what my father dubbed an adorable ski-jump. But they don’t give a damn about Reagan.

A knock bounces over the front door. James is upstairs and Charles is on one of his famous walks in which he herds the media around the block for hours like a faithful sheltie. It’s a sight to behold. Maybe he forgot his sunglasses.

I head over and find a plume of blonde parading in front of the window. A woman about my height, and I swing the door open without thinking twice. What could be the harm? The harm has already happened in my life. The shit has hit the fan and it is covering every square inch of me.

A cry strangles in my throat at the sight of her.

She bats those spider lashes at me. “Now is that any way to greet an old friend?”

Heather Evans stands taller than I remember with her feet strapped in three-inch heels. She’s put on a good forty pounds, but that obsessive gleam in her eye remains the same.

“What are you doing here?” Years ago, I wanted to take out a restraining order against her, but Jane said not to. My sister had other ways of taking care of my nuisance. Secretly, I hoped she would have someone point the working end of a pistol to her head but no such luck. Yes, I’m ashamed to say Heather Evans has always fostered a murderous side of me. Heather disappeared quietly—met a boy, had another baby, such a boring end to our unreasonable relationship—and here she is ready for round two.

“I’m here for you, missy.” Her finger stabs into my chest and a prickling jolt of electricity runs through me. “Is James here?” She cranes her neck past me. “I’ve got a bag in the car he can help me with. Drove all the way out with just two potty stops! My mother-in-law is watching the kids. I can’t wait to tell you all about that battleax. It’s been so long I can hardly wait to catch up.” Her rust-colored lips spread into that signature overgrown grimace I had grown to hate.

“You can’t be here, and you certainly can’t stay here. I’m sorry.” I try to slam the door on this new nightmare that’s entered my life, but her shoe wedges between us making it an impossible effort.

“Have you tried to call the baby’s father?”

The air around me stills. Can’t breathe. A small crowd of reporters camping at the foot of the lawn have halted their conversation to look this way. I don’t think they heard, but everything in me knows Heather will do her damn best to correct that.

Shit. I scratch at the sofa table, snatching up the keys before pulling her down to that beat-up minivan she rode in on.

“Follow me. I’m taking you to a hotel.” My heart pulsates a good three feet in front of my body. “You can’t stay here.”

If it’s one thing I’ve learned about Heather, after all these years, is that you cannot get rid of her. She is the cockroach in my nuclear detonated world. The sole survivor long after my beating heart has been ripped out of me. An incurable case of head lice. This is penance for what I had done. I lied to James—was still lying to James, and now I would have to pay the ironic price. Reagan is gone. It would have been a feasible explanation, a kidnapping by the disgruntled birth father. God knows Heather would have happily spilled the genetic beans from the beginning, but fate intervened and stopped her from doing so.

Heather follows me out to the distal end of town, a flea-infested Motel 7 where I make her a stale cup of coffee as we sit at the wobbly dinette built for two. In the past, the quickest way to get what I wanted from Hysterical Heather was to sacrifice a bit of my time. It’s her fuel. It’s true. My presence feeds her. Somewhere in that twisted mind of hers, I am the panacea to all of her troubles, a warped extension of her. I’m none of those things, but she’s too damaged to see it. Heather sees life through the broken mirror of her mind—her sanity shattered long before she ambled into my personal space. I felt sorry for her in the beginning, but by the time I realized what was happening it was too late.

“How is Allison?” It feels strange saying my own name, almost foreign.

“Fifteen and dangerous!” She lets out a whoop, exposing a brown-layered ridge over the tops of her teeth. It shouldn’t surprise me at all that her teeth are rotting right out of her skull. They match her rotting soul. “Damn brat got knocked up. Kid came last spring—boy. He’s dead now.” She glowers at the green carpet. “What’s new with you?” She toasts me with her mug, and for a minute I envision taking my scalding cup and tossing it in her face. I could blind her. Gouge her eyes out for even thinking this was a good idea.

“My child is missing.” The words string out like a morbid poem.

“I bet she’s okay.” She gives an odd wink, her fingers flicking through the air as if I had uttered something outlandish. “Things always have a way of working out for you. Golden child.” She pokes my arm with her finger. That was the nickname she gave me back in high school. She had half the school believing we were sisters and that I was the favorite of the family. I played along with it at first until the revisionist history turned dark like so many things are prone to do with Heather.

“I don’t know if she’s okay.” It takes everything in me to keep my voice even. “Do you know if she’s okay?”

Those dark eyes of hers flit to the corner of the room. “Hell, I don’t know. But what I do know is you are one lucky gal. Did you see that GoFundMe? Holy shee-it! You are one rich woman, Allison Greer.” She gives another quick wink as if it were a tick. “You’ll always be Allison Greer to me.” She sobers quickly as if the fact I had become Mrs. Price was a personal betrayal.

“Why are you here?” My voice trembles because, honest to God, with Heather, I have never had a clue what makes her twisted mind tick.

“To help out while we wait for Reagan to come home.” Her eyes grow wild. Heather’s eyes have always had a personality of their own as if they were afraid to be attached to the rest of her and were unsuccessfully trying to plot an escape. “Now tell me that you told the cops all about her real father—because keeping something like that a secret is going to hurt you a helluva lot more than it’s going to help.”

“He’s dead.” I take a punishing gulp of the scalding coffee and burn layers of nerve endings off my tongue. Finally, I can feel something. I might just scald myself tonight for the hell of it just to feel human again.

“Dead?” She inches back in her chair as if I had slapped her and I wish to God I would have. The option is still on the table. “What in the hell happened?” Her lips quiver in an exaggerated O. Heather has always made reality feel a bit cartoonish with her overdone theatrics. “That was one hot man. I couldn’t get him out of my head for years. Never seen a man so beautiful. Not even my own husband. Swear to God.” She swipes an X across her chest like a bull’s-eye I’d love to plunge a knife in. “With the exception of James, of course—but you deserve the best, Ally. I’ve always felt that way and you know it.” That last line comes out curt, demanding like a threat, and the room suddenly feels too hot, too unsafe to be in.

Yes, Heather has always testified to my husband’s hotness. She’s also testified to the comely good looks that Reagan’s biological father, Len, possessed as well. This is true. Never was there a bigger cheerleader in my life than Heather. Never a bigger menace, but never a bigger cheerleader. Len and Heather were worlds apart, but Heather happened to track me down at school the weekend Len and I decided to take off for Hidden Falls. It was a three-day getaway, and as usual Heather had interjected herself in the middle of it. I entered into an alcohol fueled rage and told her exactly how batshit I thought she was and told her to stay the hell out of my life. When I got back, I found my mattress knifed opened and the word cunt scrawled across my mirror in red lipstick. Her signature shade of autumn rust. The exact shade of human plasma she’s sporting now. That’s when I begged Jane to step in, and after that Heather was seemingly history—until she entered my present nightmare, and God knows it wouldn’t be a proper nightmare without Heather Fucking Evans in it.

“He died at a gas station.” My body heats as if begging to burst into flames. “Freak accident. He was waiting for his car to fill up and some drunk pulled in behind him, pinning him against the fuel tower. There was a fire.”

“Oh shit!” Her fingers tap over her lips as if mocking his Native American heritage.

“And that’s what happened.” I fold my hands together as if to exemplify the fact it’s the end of the story. How I wish it were just that—a story.

“It sounds like he was cursed.”

I avert my eyes a moment. He was a curiosity more than he was cursed. Every other thing that man did was blessed and beautiful. Len Lewis made the news that night, online and on television, as millions of Americans winced at his painful, unfortunate demise. I had just learned I was expecting, already dating James again. Len and I hadn’t spoken in weeks over some silly argument that I don’t even remember anymore.

“Well, I guess he’s off the suspect list, isn’t he?” Her eyes stay wide and round, her face freckled and pale as a grouper’s. Heather always did remind me a little of a fish. I asked my dad about it once, if he saw it too, and he simply said grouper. It’s not a coincidence I can’t stand fish.

“Yes, he is. And so that’s the end of it. Please do not mention him again. Not to me—not to the media for God’s sake. Let’s respect the dead.”

“What about his family?” She leans in hard with a child-like curiosity etched in her face as if this were a bedtime story I’m weaving in her honor. “I bet one of them found out and they’re just raving mad! I bet they took her to the reservation or something. They don’t think the rest of us are good enough to raise their kind.”

“No.” I’m quick to refute her runaway thoughts. “He had no family. Both of Len’s parents were dead. He never made mention of any siblings. I doubt anyone outside that circle would care enough to do this.” My mind tries to wrestle down the possibilities, but a part of me knows that delving into any of Heather’s theories is only an exercise in madness.

She leans in further, closing the distance between us with a ferocity. Her hard gaze penetrates me, unyielding and unwelcome.

“People are insane.” Her fingernails graze over the top of my hand and I retract it. “People want what they believe is theirs, and sometimes there’s not a person on the planet who has the power to stop them.” Her voice is hypnotically slow, those gray eyes of hers gloss over as if she were stoned.

“Are you threatening me?” I’m so damn tired of being in the passenger’s seat. If Heather Evans thinks I have an ounce left in me to put up with her brand of psychotic bullshit, she has another thing coming. As far as I know, I am in a waking nightmare that for the life of me I can’t rouse myself from, and last time I checked it’s not a homicide to slaughter someone within your dreams. That is exactly what I used to fantasize about back in high school. Some girls dreamed of their wedding day, a white picket fence, two point five children, and I dreamed of hacking Heather to bits with the rusty butcher knife my father kept in the shed. My sister beat me to it—wrong person, though.

“Take it how you want to, Ally.” Her eyes spear their deadness into mine. “I’m not leaving until we find your little girl. And the only way we’re going to find her is if you tell the truth—just like you had me tell the truth that day. Remember?” Her voice pitches, candy coated with insanity.

“Yes.” I swallow hard. “I remember.”

---

By Friday, I’m worn thin with text messages from my least favorite nuisance. I’ve relegated Heather to a hotel room and happily confined she’s been ever since. For now, the electronic communication and just breathing the same air, as she puts it, is enough to satisfy her. She claims to understand that my husband and I need some time to ourselves. But I know her too well. I have a ticking time bomb sitting at the edge of town just waiting to blow up in my face.

McCafferty shows up again, and like some over animated character in a silent movie, she asks us to follow her down to the woods at the end of the street as a coven of reporters lurk in the distance. It’s the first icy day we’ve had here and the fog rolls out in billows down the street like batting unfurling off the bolt. Tomorrow night is Halloween, a treasured and well-loved holiday to Reagan, and it sickens me that she’s not here to bask in the glory. It sickens me she’s not here to begin with.

“What are we doing?” I pant, trying to keep up with her brisk pace.

James picks up my hand and gives a warm squeeze. “Is there new evidence?”

New evidence is an oxymoron at the moment, considering there hasn’t been any evidence at all.

“Just something I thought the two of you might be interested in.”

We set foot into the woods as our feet crunch over the brittle pine needles that have shed to create a mattress over the soil.

“Before this land was a development, there used to be farmhouses here.” She gives a hard sniff as if pausing to take in the fresh pine scent. It smells like rot and death to me, and I pray to God that has nothing to do with Reagan.

James scoffs. “If you say the words Indian burial ground—”

My stomach lurches when he says the words Indian burial ground—more to the point, Indian.

“Not that.” She walks deeper into the woods before turning to face us. “There was once a house here.”

A chill runs up my spine because already I don’t like where this is going.

“Turn of the twentieth century these were all dairy farms.” She frowns at the development sitting behind us, a testament to modern day architecture, greedy contractors, and overbuilding. “But the main house of the Wilder farm stood right here.” Wilder farm? She knows something. Why else would she drag their corpses into our lives? “Rumor has it, the builder knew the history of these grounds and refused to build on it.”

James leans in. “What history?” His eyes grow large, bulging like twin blue eggs.

“The story goes the Wilders were feuding with local Indians.”

“Knew it.” His features set in, a staunch refusing to believe whatever else might stream from her mouth. “There’s always an Indian in the story.”

A dull laugh rattles and dies in my chest. Little does he know there has been an Indian in our story for six short years.

“What happened?” I take a timid step forward, suddenly the ground feels sacred. I’m half-afraid if I comb back the kindling beneath my feet I’ll find the past right there staring back at me in some mirrored world—Reagan locked on the other side, irretrievable.

McCafferty’s nostrils flare. “Tempers heated over who the land belonged to. One night there was a fire in the Wilder home. Both parents were burned alive, but when relatives came, they couldn’t find any of their five young children.”

My heart ratchets up slowly at first, then with the speed and finality of a roller coaster shooting straight to hell.

“What became of them?” I whisper as if they were here lurking somewhere, and I didn’t want to wake them. God knows I don’t want to wake a single ghost from anyone’s past, let alone my own.

She shakes her head, that ultra-tight bun has pulled her eyes back, made her look ten years younger than she is, I’m sure. “Not one of them was ever seen again. The farm became this thing, this folklore, about a dozen urban legends spawned from the very soil you’re standing on. Nobody dared build over it. Some claimed the ground was cursed by those Indians.”

“They took the kids.” James shrugs it off. “Why is that so hard for anybody to believe? It’s the only logical explanation. Or hell, they could have banded together and headed out West. Everyone was doing it. There were no phones, no Google search, no dim-witted police department to help them out. If you wanted to disappear, it was the perfect time to do it.”

McCafferty sheds that signature mocking smile. “That might have been true, but two of the five were blind, one was lame, and the other two were infants.”

“But the Indians still could have taken them, right?” My heart gives a steady knock over my chest and I rub my neck as if pleading with my body to keep from malfunctioning.

“The Indian tribe was raided by the government. They searched high and low for those kids. They swore they didn’t have them. The dim-witted police even went as far as digging up the reservation, looking for bones. Sent in hounds—the whole nine yards.” She steps between James and me while inspecting the ground as if she might come across a skull, a hand spiking up from the soil in need of assistance. “Want to know what the Indians said happened?”

James and I exchange a brief glance, each too weary to admit we don’t.

“They said the ground swallowed them up as a punishment for the sins of their parents. To the tribe, at the time, it was a mercy killing on behalf of the earth. By swallowing the children, they were now one with the soil. They were a part of this deity, this rock they worshipped. It had all somehow come full circle.”

“Sounds like bullshit.” James wipes the sleep from his eyes. That look on his face doesn’t even crest disgust. He’s simply dismissed everything she’s just said to us.

McCafferty gives a shrug of the shoulders. “Just thought I’d let you know before some reporter started to spout things off. Your father was the one who mentioned the gap in the woods. I told him I’d look into it.”

His eyes round out a moment before he goes right back to dismissing all thoughts of earth swallowing anyone whole. It figures that his father would have landed us on this morbid topic to begin with. Morbidity in and of itself has plagued the Price family for years. James and I are going through hell, but his parents beat us to it.

McCafferty starts heading back toward the street. Her footsteps carefully lift the ground fog making her feet disappear and the very sight of her has an ethereal flair. “The Indians believe in just punishments, that whole circle of life thing. You take our land; you will become our land. I guess you can say they take their curses pretty seriously.” We watch as the mist swallows her, but it’s not good enough. A part of me wishes the ground had yawned open its greedy mouth and ate McCafferty for breakfast. How dare she align her thoughts with Heather Evans of all people. Dear God, what the hell is happening? “For what it’s worth, my sister is a realtor. You know what she always says? The people don’t pick the neighborhood, the neighborhood picks the people.” Her lips pull tight. Idiot. “If I get any new leads, I’ll get in touch.”

Her words resonate in my mind long after she’s no longer visible. They take their curses pretty seriously.

Heather thought Len was cursed and I all but laughed. It’s not true. There is no bullshit curse. This is just another mind game the universe is trying to take me down with.

Len wasn’t cursed and neither is Reagan. But that doesn’t stop me from dropping to my knees and clawing at the soft piles of dry brush. A fresh bite of soil hits my nostrils as my fingers feverishly comb through years of debris. James tries to pick me up again, but I scratch and claw at the earth as if I were rabid. She’s here. Something’s here. It’s that smell. It’s making me mad.

Where in the hell is my baby?

I hit soil and grind a fistful in my hand before pitching it to the sky.

The soil rains all of its fury right back over the two of us as if to say there is nobody to blame but you.

“Come here,” James says tenderly as he lands his arms around me. His phone jumps out of his pocket and lands face up before me like an offering.

A text is there to greet us. Hannigan again. It has a ring to it.

Coming out to visit soon. Time to show you my stomach.

My heart thumps all the way into my skull. Why do I get the feeling Hannigan isn’t some fifty-year-old beer-bellied man from the city?