According to the laws of nature, the sun rises, the sun sets—the intervals in-between mark off seasons, months, years, decades, a lifetime. We are selected at random by the lottery of life and we mark off our years until we are selected at random by death. Or so it seems. I believe there is divine intervention behind each and every living soul. A purpose for us all, even if we never make it to the finish line. A meticulous network of preprogramed events that are meant to lead us from start to finish. My father once said that the Bible stipulated nothing was random. Then my mother took the book and knocked him over the head with it. But my father’s words stuck with me. I’ve always been prone to believe him over her. The friendly counselor over the wicked warden. Up until the day Reagan dissolved into thin air, I believed we had an ordained blessing upon us. Nothing could go wrong—with the exception of James fucking things up, but that was to be expected. He was and is a man.

I glower out the window as the steam rises from my coffee on this lonely morning. Yesterday was Halloween. I’ve never been a fan of the spooktacular night, but with Reagan, the day, the entire week leading up to it felt like a glorious festival. In a way, Reagan was giving me back my childhood. All of the delicate beautiful pieces I was missing, she hand-fed me by way of her laughter, that charming demeanor that made you love her without even trying. She cast her spell on me the first moment I held her in my arms. I saw Len in her dark eyes. That dark head of hair everyone swore belonged to James? It was Len’s, too.

A timid knock erupts over the door, and I bolt to it in hopes it’s Reagan herself.

But it’s not Reagan. It’s not any sane person I would crave to see at ten in the morning. It’s Heather Crazy Train Evans wagging her phone at me, pointing at it with a feral looking grin on her face.

“Are you insane showing up here?” I hiss as I jump onto the porch and close the door behind me. “If James finds out you’re stalking me, he’ll have you arrested and booked.”

“Maybe he’s the one who should be arrested and booked?” Her eyes bug out. She has her hair slicked back into a ponytail, showing off too much forehead. Her lips are puckered and pasty, crusting around the ridges as if the icy weather doesn’t agree with her. “I’ve got evidence that he’s not so innocent!”

“What?” I lead her down the steps and around to the side of the house, out of earshot and out of sight. “What are you talking about?” My chest starts to pound erratically because a part of me already knows.

“He’s a cheater, Al. He’s got a girl on the side. And I caught ’em. Me—your very best friend.” Her eyes seal over mine like a threat, that desperate wanting of approval knifing out of every pore in her body.

My stomach bottoms out for so many reasons, but more unnerving that the thought of her catching James with some woman—which I’m not sure I believe—is hearing her decry our friendship. It’s like nails on a chalkboard, a sound I’d much rather live with than have Heather wrapped around my neck like a noose.

“Show me.” I glare at the phone she’s cradling like an infant. Speaking of infants, I can’t stomach the fact she’d rather stay holed up with me than with her own family. It makes me uneasy, as if she’s bringing her obsession with me to a whole new level.

“I got ’em coming and going.” Her thumbs dance frantically over the phone until a picture pops up.

“It’s dark.” I shake my head, trying to make out the image. “What is that?”

“Some house he went to for some late night trick-or-treating, and he was looking for a treat if you know what I mean.” She enlarges the picture and a grainy version of his parents’ home comes into view. It looks monolithic, towering into the dull gray sky like a long forgotten relic.

“That’s his father’s house. He must have asked him to stop by. He probably needed a few things.” The way I’ve been sleeping the days away, James could have built a house and I wouldn’t have noticed.

“Uh-huh.” She flips through a few more pictures, and in each one another window is lit up with the peachy glow of secrets. “How about this?”

She zooms in on an unfamiliar sedan parked snug behind the truck. The next picture shows a shadowy figure making its way up the porch. The next shot is tight. The frame of a woman comes in clean—heels, her hand raised to pour down its wrath on that door.

A breath hitches in my throat. “He had a visitor. Probably a neighbor.” Dear God, let it be a neighbor.

“Just you wait, Ally Girl.” Her breathing grows erratic as she steps in close. The next picture shows the girl entering the house with the top of my husband’s head in full view.

She flips past a few more darkened shots of the home, the woman suspiciously missing from the front. The next shot is the two of them making their way down the porch. The picture is clearer, closer. Heather must have changed positions. Then the heartstopper. Her hand on his face. The next one with her arms wrapped around his waist.

“Whoever she is, he’s not into this.” I can tell by his body language. But still it looks rather incriminating.

She lets out an ear-piercing tsk. “That’s because she tuckered him out. They were in there for over an hour. I timed it.” Her eyes grow hauntingly larger as she suffocates me with her acidic leftover coffee breath. “If you don’t believe me, we can probably get the data off the pictures.”

“I believe you.” I gently push her away until she’s at a solid arm’s length. “Let me see those again.” I pull her phone forward and scroll through the next few. “She looks familiar.”

“Her name is Monica Percale. I followed her home, then looked up the tax records to see who owned the house.” She snaps the phone back with a prideful grin.

That bitch Monica. Should have known.

“You’re quite the little detective.” I frown at the neglected petunias bordering the house. “I do know her. She was the girl doing his makeup. His ex. I met her at the press conference. She has a thing for him.” My head ticks without meaning to. “But he can’t stand her. Besides, she’s not his type.” Hailey Oden and her thin, tan frame, flawless skin, shock of white teeth flash through my mind. “I know his type, and that’s not it.”

“You’re his type.” Her voice hikes with a righteous indignation. “He damn well better get that through his thick pretty little head.”

A burp of laughter rattles around my chest and I clap my hand over my mouth at the grievous sin I’ve just committed.

“It’s okay, A. You go on and laugh. You’re allowed.” Heather grabs ahold of me and rocks me like an infant, and as much as I’m repulsed by her touch, by the sweaty scent of her skin, I begin to weep like a baby. I had laughed. I wasn’t allowed to feel one ounce of joy. Reagan is somewhere out there with the freaks who lured her to the side of the road like an animal. Then, in a moment of clarity, I realize I’m on the side of the house, out in the open where anyone can see. Heather Evans has crawled back into my life from the grave, an impossibility, something I had sworn would never happen. There are some people you will go to lengths to avoid, and for me Heather was one of them.

“Look”—I wipe down my face with my sleeve and extract myself from her strangulating embrace, but her hot hand remains flat and clammy over my back—“you are a very good friend.” The thick knot in the pit of my stomach gets a little tighter. “And you have proven yourself an excellent detective.” Oddly true. “I need you to do something very important for me.”

“Anything.” Her hands flail as if she might rocket right off the planet with excitement. “Anything for you, Alley Cat. You just name it. I’d give you the moon if I could.”

I try not to cringe at the performance she’s putting on, genuine as it might be.

“I need you to find my baby.” My voice breaks. “I need you to find the bastards that did this to her and bring them to me so I can kill them with my bare hands.” She swallows hard, her eyes shutter like an old-fashioned doll with a haunting expression to match. “I’m going to dig my fingers into their eye sockets and take extreme pleasure in plucking them out. I’m going to stomp on them with my heel, and then I’m going to make them eat it.”

“You’re going to kill them.” Her expression grows somber, and her cheeks fill with crimson. “And then we’re going to stomp their eyes out!” Her voice ratchets up to a curdling roar. Heather jumps in place over and over. “Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!”

I pull Heather over and turn her body toward her minivan parked in front of the house.

“Now go find my baby.” I give her a firm shove toward the van and head back into the house. That ought to keep her out of my hair for a while.

Wouldn’t it be something if it were Heather Crazy Train Evans who brought my baby home?

Now that would be something.

---

They say suspicion grows like a fungus, and if James and I were anything, we were suspicious. The white-hot spotlight had landed on us, and no sooner did the early days of November blow in than a trickling of hatred dressed in human skin arrived down the street. First, there was the egg splattered window. Charles said it was because we didn’t open up our home to trick-or-treaters. But then a bucket of paint was hurled at the driveway, spattering the back of the car. The walkway to our home is now temporarily dipped in red.

“Where is she?” they chant as James and I hole up in our bedroom.

I pull the curtains shut at the seam. “What the hell do they think we’ve done with her?”

“I’ve read it all. That we’ve sold her into some perverted underground network. We sold her for cash. We offered her as a sacrifice in some satanic sick ritual, and now we’re covering and profiting from it.” He slumps over himself at the foot of the bed, looking every bit as tired and dejected as I do.

“I read where someone has a theory she was abducted by aliens. That Concordia is full of them.”

His chest thumps with a dull laugh. “I’ve heard that one, too. That Ota was an alien.”

“A demon.”

“A disgruntled little girl who wanted a sister.”

“A ghost.”

“A liar,” he counters. “Only that is the truth.”

“I don’t like liars.” I take a seat next to him and take up his hand.

James pulls me in and I look up at him, the closest I’ve been to my husband in weeks. We sleep on opposite sides of the bed with an ocean of blankets between us. I can’t remember the last time his lips touched mine.

I bump my finger over his nose, his mouth, and chin. “Why were you at your dad’s house with that woman?”

His head ticks back as if I slapped him. His eyes remain wide a moment too long. He’s been caught, and he knows it.

James frowns in that seductive way only he knows how to do and makes me feel as if this is all somehow my fault.

“My dad asked me to pick up a few things.” He winces just the way he always does when he lies. “I was looking for my mother.” His voice drops to a hoarse whisper, and his gaze falls to the floor. And there it is. The truth. “About halfway through my treasure hunt, Monica showed up.” His face contorts in a grimace. It looks natural. I can tell he’s as repulsed by her as I am with Heather. “My father—he stripped that place clean of all our shit. Not one trace of my mother, my siblings—just me.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “It’s as if they never existed. As if with them gone he could finally breathe. All of the photo albums my mother spent decades painfully assembling, the storage boxes of memories—all of it up and disappeared.”

“It’s because he needed to heal,” I offer, unsure if it were true at all. “Charles is stoic, stubborn, locked in his ways. I could see him loading up the trunk of the car and transporting it somewhere off the grounds. Maybe he put it all in a storage unit. Didn’t your parents keep one?”

“That’s right.” A swell of relief fills his features. “My mother had one filled with the things she used for the holiday fundraisers. A fifty foot Christmas tree, boxes and boxes filled with party supplies for every single occasion.” He tips his head back as if offering a silent thank you to the sky. “I bet that’s where it is.”

“So nothing happened between you and this Monica woman?” A part of me doesn’t want to quantify her as human.

“No.” He winces. “She was just there doing who knows what. She tried, but I’m not going there. I said goodnight and took off.”

“She tried. Was that the hug? It must have been.” She was pawing all over him.

“How did you know?” He cocks his head, those serious blue eyes filled with curiosity.

“Charles.” I swallow down the lie before I can finish the sentence.

He grunts. “Figures. He probably saw a hair out of place. Better yet, Monica filled him in. She’s been a longtime member of the Charles Price Fan Club.”

My hand glides over his, soft and reassuring. “I would have gone with you. I know that must have been hard.”

He stares at the curtains as if looking right through them and back into that night. “It was harder than you know.” He shakes his head a moment. “The memories in that house. They were brutal—painful.”

“I can imagine.” The parade of death never seemed to end.

His phone buzzes in his pocket and he fishes it out, flashing the screen my way. It’s a text from McCafferty.

Can I come over?

James texts right back.

Please.

He gives my thigh a light tap along with a reassuring idea of a smile. “Nothing happened with that woman.”

James didn’t cheat on me with that woman.

Not that one at least.

---

McCafferty looks older, thinner, frailer than she did when we started out this journey. Her hair sits on top of her head in the requisite bun, and it makes me wonder if she were a ballerina somewhere along the line before she picked up a magnifying glass. That’s the visual I get when someone says the word detective. And I wish she were scrutinizing every detail of my missing daughter’s existence—putting the whole world under a microscope.

An image of Reagan’s lifeless body floating in a stream bounces through my mind. Her shirt caught in a branch, the only thing keeping her from being swept away. As soon as I gouge the eyes out of whoever did this, I’m going to track down Dolla Chetney and do the very same thing to her. I bet her psychic ass will never see it coming.

“Shall we sit?” McCafferty nods toward the dining room table, a room once filled with laughter and joy—albeit short and sweet—now sits collecting dust and mail. A partially used stem candle is knocked over in the center of the melee.

James pulls out a seat at the head of the table for the guest of honor and we sit on either side like somber bookends, our expressions pulled down like melted wax.

She plunks down a thick manila envelope I hadn’t even noticed she had with her and this startles me. How many obvious things do I let go unnoticed? How many times have I passed by my daughter, not knowing it was her? Passed by her captors, missing the opportunity to sink my fingernails into their flesh, disfigure them for disfiguring my family.

“I thought we should touch base. Discuss my recent findings regarding the case—the two of you.” She cuts a quick glance to James and he flinches.

My heart lurches at the sight. James and I don’t have a single thing to fear.

“Don’t worry.” She sheds the hint of a viper-like grin. “I will leave no stone unturned.” She pulls a file from the envelope with Price scrawled across the front. “I’ve taken the liberty to dig as deep and wide into your past as I felt needed.” Her eyes hook to mine, dark citrine, with a rim of crimson. Blood and urine that’s all I see.

My body takes on a heartbeat of its own. My hands start to shake so I slip them underneath my thighs. This can’t be Len. Nobody knows about him but Heather and me. Heather is practically my disciple. There is no way in hell she would rat me out.

A brief vision of me wrapping my fingers around Heather’s neck, the skin pressing white around them in a pasty looking halo as I squeeze the living life out of her brings me a rise of satisfaction.

McCafferty frowns as if she had the ability to see my thoughts displayed in a cartoon bubble over my head. Now her I would believe. McCafferty is far more credible on her worst day than Dolla is on her best.

“Let’s talk about the accident.” She folds her arms, and for the life of me I can’t register what this might be about. “You were sixteen. It was January.”

“Oh, that.” I close my eyes as a deep swell of regret washes over me. “Yes.” I roll my eyes toward James as if it didn’t matter. I know we glossed over this once when we were dating. I painted it as insignificant. “I went to a party with two of my girlfriends.” It was right after Heather gave birth. I knew that I needed to seize the opportunity to reintegrate myself into society. Heather had been a toxin injected straight into my bloodstream, and with her off the grid for a short time I needed to seize the day. “Karen Parker and Briana Humera.” I shudder as their names stumble from my lips. As far back as I can remember, I hadn’t uttered their names since before the accident. “They were seniors. I was a junior. But I grew up with them. I knew their families.”

McCafferty narrows her gaze my way as if disbelieving on some level. “What happened next?”

“I had cramps.” I shake my head remembering how pissed I was at the time. “We were supposed to party hop that night. I had a big social debacle I was recovering from, and that was supposed to be the night I shed my coat as the social pariah.”

James offers a quick tap to the table as his dimples depress, no smile. It’s his way of saying I’m sorry, I pity you, wish I could fix this all rolled into one.

“When we got in the car, I asked Karen to take me home. I didn’t think I could do another round of beers and boys. The only thing I wanted was my robe, thick socks, and a hot water bottle slung over my stomach.” I take a ragged breath as the argument that ensued comes back to me.

“I’m not taking you home.” Karen scoffed while slicking on another coat of lip gloss. “That’s clear across town, and Jonny Guzman said he has a surprise for me once we get to Vinny’s house.” She and Briana cackle at the idea of hickeys and herpes being doled out freely for the rest of the night. But I was sick. A nine at least on the pain scale.

“I started to vomit.” I give the slight tick of the head toward McCafferty. “Karen rolled down the windows and proceeded to get me home as quick as she could.”

“You stupid, stupid, bitch! Don’t you fucking yak in the back of my brand-new car!” A new Honda Civic gifted to her on her sixteenth birthday.

Briana glanced back, daggers in her eyes for ruining their night. “She’s probably knocked up like that freak she hangs out with.”

I wasn’t about to correct them, let them in on the fact that Heather had the baby and named her after me.

“And then they dropped me off at home.” I try to shrug it off as if it were no big deal, but my entire body ricochets with the terror of their shared fate that night.

McCafferty leans in, her entire demeanor reminds me of an angry old spinster school teacher who openly hates children. “What did you do after you went home?”

My faces pinches with heat. My eyes settle over her a moment too long until it becomes unbearable.

Karen stopped in front of my driveway with a jolt so hard I almost snapped my neck. I wasn’t fully convinced she was going to wait for me to take the time to get out, so I quickly took off my seat belt and swung open the door. A hand reached back. Karen dug her nails into my forearm, her entire face locked with a silent rage. “Rumor has it, you have a crush on David McMillan. Is that right, Pig Face?”

I hated that nickname. Nobody had called me that since junior high, but ever since Heather glommed onto me like a fifth appendage it had resurfaced. Heather hated it as much as I did.

“She does.” Briana snorted into the mirror on the sun visor where she watched the show unfold. “She’s blushing. She probably fucks him in her sleep. That’s the only way she’d ever get a piece of him.”

“Good.” Karen winked—something so seemingly innocent, but I saw the devil in her eye right then and there. “I’m going to take a giant shit in front of his locker early Monday morning and let him know it was from you.”

I ran straight into my bedroom, tears streaming down my face. Karen was mean enough to do it. Her father was the football coach, and she had already bragged about breaking into the school on several occasions to steal things from the biology lab, fetuses, an entire crate of dead frogs, the carcass of a cat. Rumor had it, she was a witch on the side and needed these things for her rituals. Not that I believed them. But what I did believe was that she was about to make my life all around shitty.

But that wasn’t the only unnerving event of that night. I ran straight into my room and found more trouble waiting for me. Sitting high up on my bed, with a ruddy looking newborn on her lap was Heather Holy Shit Evans.

She saw how upset I was so I told her what had happened. Then the baby started to cry unstoppably and they left. It was the first time I felt a smidge grateful to have her there to vent to. Heather was just as hurt as I was, her face doused in tears as she ran into the night.

“And then the misfortune.” McCafferty turns over the first picture, a glossy eight by ten of the Honda Civic charred, the windows blown out, the front end pushed in like an accordion and I swiftly turn my head away.

“What the hell?” James takes the picture and pulls it toward him.

“They died.” McCafferty fills him in. Okay, so maybe I didn’t gloss over this with him. “The girls left. They took off for a party in the next town over. It was dark, a fog bank came in quick, and they flew off the side of an embankment—rolling all the way down. The car spontaneously combusted, blew out the windows. Both girls were found burned to a crisp still buckled in their seat belts.”

They always did follow the rules—right up until they broke them.

I pull the picture over and force myself to look at it. “That could have been me,” I whisper.

“It couldn’t have been you.” McCafferty’s eyebrow hooks its way into her forehead. “Not according to Katrina Parker.”

“Karen’s older sister.” Older, certainly not wiser. Certainly not above paying off a group of seniors to threaten to kick my ass for the rest of the school year. I’ve never been so happy to see so many people graduate. Good riddance.

“She seems to think you caused the accident.”

“I heard the theory.” I shake my head at James as if to dismiss it before it ever comes from my mouth. “If they never brought me home, they wouldn’t have ever gone that route. They would never have crashed, never had rolled to the bottom of the cliff.”

“You don’t think it’s true?” McCafferty seems amused by my delivery.

“I learned at a young age not to entertain what-ifs.” What if I had another mother? What if my mother had died in that horrific crash that night instead? It was useless. I was her charge, and until the government issued me a reprieve after eighteen long years, I was hers to use and abuse as she wished and she did.

“Katrina Parker doesn’t buy that theory either.” McCafferty mimics my casual shrug and I blink to attention.

“You spoke with her?”

“I didn’t have to.” She bleeds that wicked smile my way. “She has a website dedicated to her sister.”

“What does it say?” James has that intent look on his face as if he might give weight to whatever it is she’s spouted off. Katrina Parker was an angry bitch. Just as mean and heartless as her sister.

McCafferty takes the picture back and turns it upside down. I can feel all of the negative energy in the room start to evaporate.

“Katrina believes someone bumped them off the side of the road.”

I shake my head as if it were lunacy. “She’s a finger pointer. She doesn’t want to believe it was an accident.”

“She found a body mechanic to back her up.” Her eyes light up as if this news tantalized her.

“Oh? So a fender bender or something? There were a lot of drunk teenagers out on the road that night.” My heart drums wild in my chest.

“True, but not on that end of town. There were no eyewitnesses. The mechanic says there was a very sharp indentation in the right rear passenger’s side. It had a distinctive quality of a sedan.”

“They tumbled over boulders,” I point out. “Their car looked like a wrinkled piece of paper. Not to mention the fire.”

“I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Allison. No reason to get worked up. Both the Parkers and the Humeras were resentful of the fact you lived and their daughters didn’t.”

“I know.” It was hell, and I hated every moment of it. There were times I actually wished I had stayed in the damn car.

James taps his fingers over the table. “Wait a minute. You don’t think some twisted fuck from one of their families is responsible for what happened to Reagan, do you?”

“I’m not implying that.” She turns over the next photo, and my entire body recoils as if she had uncovered a snake. “Who’s this?”

There we are. High school. Senior year. I had finally conceded to the fact I would never have another friend outside of the one who stalked me so proficiently. A staffer from the yearbook snapped that picture of Heather and me running track.

“Some girl I had P.E. with.” My heart gives a hearty wallop with the lie.

McCafferty flips the next photo. Heather and I locked in an embrace on the front lawn yesterday morning. Shit.

“And this is the same girl?”

“Yes.” My voice grows small with shame. My fingers twitch to flip over that entire damn stack of incriminating photos, cutting to the demonic chase. I’m not a fan of these wicked games.

“Who is this?” James leans in to get a better look at her.

“A friend from high school.” The one I forced into admitting she ran Briana and Karen off the road that night. Heather said she would have taken it to the grave, but I couldn’t sleep not knowing if it were true. Of course, I didn’t sleep afterwards either. I promised Heather I wouldn’t breathe a word, and that’s when she said she knew we were soul sisters. I hated to break it to her, but I was no soul sister—simply an accessory to a very gruesome crime. The only reason I didn’t turn her in was because I was too afraid the case would go sideways and it would be me serving time. Maybe that would have been best, Heather and me serving out our sentences in the very same cell forever. Her heaven. My hell.

I clear my throat. “She was in the area and stopped by to give her support. The one that started the GoFundMe.” I roll my eyes as if the entire thing were ridiculous.

“Heather Evans—Porter.” McCafferty flips over another shot of her crouching in the crowd down at the Boys and Girls Club. Did I know she was in town then? I try to filter through my memory, but the damn thing is stuck on stupid.

“She’s married. Has a family.” I try to whitewash her strange behavior with a patina of normalcy.

“Was,” McCafferty corrects. “Had a family. She and her daughter moved out to Torrance California a while back.”

My mouth falls open. That’s an outlying city close to where we lived. And here I thought Heather Evans was safely tucked in Nevada. “Local school records show the child attended Alta Vista Elementary School for the remainder of the last school year. Never did reenroll.”

“No, that’s not right. Her daughter has to be older than that by now, at least in junior high.”

“That’s the older one.” She grimaces at the picture of Heather. That’s right. Heather has more than one. Honestly, I can’t keep track of my own child—in the most literal sense—let alone Heather’s brood. And poor, poor Heather can’t even evoke sympathy from someone like McCafferty. “They both have curious names.” Here it is. “Allison.”

“Both?” James and I say in unison.

I clear my throat. My skin begins to crawl in that familiar way it has every time Heather is around with those little Heather-shaped maggots of hers burrowing into my flesh.

“How old would you say the youngest of the two is?” Tears blur my vision because I think I already know where this is going.

“A little older than Reagan.”

I pull Ota from the dark recesses of my mind and dust her off, slap her face with Heather’s juxtaposed over it. She doesn’t look anything like her, but then she doesn’t have to.

“Do you think this woman took my child?”

McCafferty leans back in her seat. That intense glare of hers spears right through me as if to say I should know.

“I’m saying anything is possible and we have an entire list of suspects to consider.” She tweaks the corner of the photos with her thumb as if they were playing cards. Her gaunt frame turns toward my husband.

“James.” She blinks a dry smile. “Let’s move on to you.”