CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sheriff Moser is waiting for us up front at the station. The desks behind him are eerily empty, save for a woman in a bulky sweater clacking away at her computer’s keyboard. The heat is cranking; underneath my jacket, my sweater sticks to my spine. My nose has stopped bleeding, my pocket full of tissues from the Hammonds’ bathroom, just in case.

Moser shakes Ashley’s hand. “I appreciate you coming down here. Busy lady, managing three kids and the café.”

Ashley gives Moser a tight smile. Wiggles her hand out of his paw. “I—should I be in the room with Kacey?”

“Well.” Moser’s mustache lifts. “I think the detective would prefer to chat with her alone. More honest answers.”

A breathy chuckle. Ashley’s face is grim. I swallow and touch her hand with my pinky. “It’s okay. I’ll be okay.”

“All right,” she says. “I guess I’ll wait out here.”

“It might be a few minutes,” Moser says. “The detective is just finishing up another interview.”

Ashley looks down at me.

“It’s fine,” I say. “Go home. I’ll call you when they’re done.”

When Ashley’s gone, I sit in one of the empty waiting room chairs. Moser brings me a tepid cup of water. Mercifully, the phone rings, and he scuttles off to get it.

A door opening. Muttering. Ellie Knepper steps out of the room next to the coffeemaker. After her, a hulking guy steps out, shoulders slumped forward.

Cliff Grosso.

Ellie spots me. Nods. “We’ll be right with you, Kacey.”

Cliff looks up when Ellie says my name. His gaze skims over me. I pull my jacket tight around my body. I feel the rage bubbling up inside me; why are they letting him just walk out of here? He was the last one seen talking to Bailey before she disappeared.

Are they cutting him a break because the sheriff’s great-niece is dating him?

I call out to Cliff: “Hey. That’s a nice doe you shot.”

He pivots. I see the gears in his head turning. Cliff’s stupid, but not that stupid. Good. I want him to know I was in his backyard; I want him to feel violated. He should, for all the shit he talked about Bailey behind her back after the accident. She was dying to fuck at my house. I couldn’t talk her out of it.

Cliff raises his hands. Gives me two middle fingers.

He opens the door, sending a gust of cold my way. Stands there for a beat, like he’s doing it on purpose, then lets the door slam behind him. The sound echoes in my head until someone inside the room calls my name—but this time, it’s not Ellie Knepper. It’s the man from yesterday.

“I never formally introduced myself. My name is Detective Steven Burke,” he tells me. “Why don’t you come inside?”

We’re in a room that feels much too small for three people; there’s a counter with a sink and microwave in the corner. Detective Burke sits across from me at the table. Knepper stands in the corner, arms folded. Supervising. Which one of us, exactly, I don’t know.

“Before we start, I want to make it clear you’re not in trouble,” Burke says. “Technically, you were trespassing yesterday, but we’re willing to overlook that in exchange for your cooperation. You seem like a good kid.”

Burke gives me a grim smile. I lower my eyes to the cup of water Moser gave me. I’m not stupid; I know Burke is trying to get on my side. Make me trust him enough to tell him why I was really at the barn.

“Does this have anything to do with you guys finding Bailey’s car?” I ask.

Burke glances at Ellie. “We’ll get to that.”

Panic corners me. “I already told Ellie everything I know.”

Burke rests his forearms on the table. The sleeves of his dress shirt are rolled up. “See, I have trouble buying that. I have daughters. I know how girls are with their best friends—always covering for each other, not wanting to sell each other out.”

“I’m not covering for anyone.”

“I believe that, Kacey, I do. I’m just trying to get the whole picture. Find out how a girl with no enemies goes missing in a town as small as this one.”

“Bailey had enemies.” The words spill out of me, a knee-jerk reaction. I want to kick myself.

Burke cocks his head. Even Ellie Knepper shifts in the corner. Heat comes into my face. “I mean, you know that Cliff Grosso hated Bailey. You just talked to him.”

Burke nods. “We’ve spoken at length with Mr. Grosso, and other witnesses at the party. They don’t think the disagreement by Bailey’s car was physical.”

“But he left the party not long after Bailey did. What if he followed her?”

I pick up the cup of water and hold it to my lips, because I don’t like how Burke is studying my mouth. Like everything that comes out of it is a lie.

“I’m going to ask you something,” Burke says. “You seem like a really smart girl. So I want to know, in your honest opinion, what you think happened to Bailey Saturday night.”

I blink, startled. “You want, like, my theory?”

Burke sits back. Crosses his arms across his dress shirt. The top two buttons are undone. “Let’s take Cliff out of the equation for a minute. Say he had nothing to do with this. Where would Bailey go if she was upset?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She would normally go to Jade’s, but she obviously didn’t want Jade with her wherever she was going.”

“So you think she was headed somewhere with a specific place in mind.”

“I didn’t say that. Maybe she just drove around, to clear her head or something.”

Burke nods for me to continue. “You’re doing real good, Kacey. Go on.”

It’s a thousand degrees in here. I unzip my jacket, shrug out of it. “Maybe while she was driving around, something happened. She could have had a beer or two at the party—if she got into an accident, she may have panicked. I mean, she would never call her parents in a million years. She’d sooner wait by the road for help, I guess. And maybe she ran into the wrong person?”

Burke holds up one hand, twirls his pen through the fingers on the other.

Burke is watching me. “I know this is hard. Would you say that Bailey was the type to trust a stranger who pulled over to give her help?”

“Not really. I mean, it’s a small town. There aren’t a lot of strangers.” I realize I’m making Bailey sound naïve. “She—she knows there’s bad people out there. She’s just the type of person who thinks that nothing bad is ever going to happen to her.”

The corner of Burke’s mouth tugs upward. “You remind me of my daughter a bit, Kacey. You notice a lot about people. That’s something special.”

A swell of pride. I tamp it down, but not before a smile quivers on my own lips. That’s when I see something flash in Burke’s eyes. It’s the look of a hunter with a rifle cocked and aimed. The satisfied tug in his expression when he knows he’s got a perfect shot at his prey.

He is playing me. He wants me to feel important. I grip the edge of the table. He thinks everything I just said is bullshit. “Is there, like, a point to this?” I ask.

Burke’s smile flickers. “I’m just comparing theories. Most folks I talked to figured if Bailey was upset, she would have sought out you or Jade Becker.”

“Are you asking if she was on her way to see me when she went missing?” I ask. “Because she definitely wasn’t.”

In the corner, Ellie’s spine straightens. I’ve said the wrong thing; I imagine her piecing everything together. My not being at the party. How I was so quick to say that Bailey and I never fought.

“Okay, refresh my memory,” Burke says. “The last time you saw Bailey was Saturday, at your stepmom’s café?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you talk about?”

I swallow. “Nothing, really. She got breakfast and left.”

“And what did you do Saturday night, again? From what I hear, you spent most of your Saturday nights with Bailey and Jade. Why was this weekend different?”

“I already told her”—I nod to Ellie—“that I had dinner with my family and went to bed around ten.”

Burke takes a sip from his coffee. “Your statement to Deputy Knepper over here says that the next morning, after you paid a visit to Mr. Sullivan’s house, you and Jade decided together to drive by the Grossos’.”

Had I said that? “I said maybe we should check and see if she was at Cliff’s, and Jade agreed. I can’t really remember whose idea it was.”

“So you suggested looking for Bailey at Cliff’s. Why?”

“Because I thought she might be there.” My tongue feels dry. It’s stifling in here. I want to gulp down the water in front of me but don’t want to give Burke a reason to think I’m nervous. “He was the last person to talk to her at the party. It made sense. At the time.”

I hate the look in Burke’s eyes; it’s like he’s trying to see past me, figure out what he’s missing. Like he suspects I’m nothing but a carefully constructed act: the compliant, quiet one. The reasonable friend. It’s who I’ve built myself up to be over the past year, because if the Markhams knew how I used to be, my happy new life would crumble around me.

“Okay, and instead of finding Bailey at Cliff’s, you found her phone. How’d y’all find it again?”

“Jade called it and it started to ring. We followed the noise to the woods.”

“Here’s what I can’t wrap my head around. If Bailey’s phone was lying out in the cold, how was the battery not dead?” Burke glances at Knepper. “I don’t know about you, but if I leave my phone in the car for even an hour in this weather, it’s done.”

Ellie gives a noncommittal nod.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe it wasn’t out there that long.”

“Okay. So you found Bailey’s phone while you were looking for her at Cliff Grosso’s. Makes sense.” Burke leans on his elbows, toward me. “Now, showing up at that barn and finding the blood? That makes less sense.”

Of course, that’s why I’m here. Does he think that I’m the one who left that blood smear in the barn?

Just tell the truth and nothing bad will happen. My mom said that to me when I was a kid, after I’d gotten into a scuffle with a girl during a kickball game in elementary school. She’d said I kicked the ball into her face on purpose because she and her friends wouldn’t let me sit at their lunch table. I remember sitting in the principal’s office waiting room, my mom’s hand in mine.

Just tell the truth and nothing bad will happen.

It’s such a load of bullshit. If I start from the beginning, tell Detective Burke everything, Ashley and my dad will definitely blame me for what’s happening with Lauren.

There’s only so much people are willing to forgive. That’s the truth that trumps everything else.

“I already told you why I was at the barn,” I say.

Burke leans forward. “You want to know what I think, Kacey? I think you’re not telling me why you really went to Sparrow Hill yesterday morning.”

I look over at Knepper. She’s watching me, two fingers touching her chin, like I’m a painting she’s trying to decipher. Burke taps the table. Look at me.

“We’ve got three locations”—Burke starts to tick them off on his fingers—“Bailey’s vehicle, the barn, and the property where you found her phone. And we’ve got you, at two of those locations.”

A flutter of panic. “Am I a suspect or something?”

“You’re not a suspect. In fact, I think you’re a witness. I think you know something you’re not sharing with me, something you maybe don’t think is important.”

“I went to the barn because I heard something. A rumor.”

“A rumor.”

“This girl who lives on my street—this kid—she said she saw someone covered in blood running down Sparrow Hill the night Bailey disappeared.”

I’ve caught Burke off guard; he pauses with his coffee at his lips. Sets it back down instead of taking a sip. “That’s quite a story. One that might have been helpful for us to know about.”

“You’d have to know this girl, Chloe,” I say. “She lies all the time for attention. Tells the other kids stories about the Red Woman. I didn’t want to waste your time—I honestly thought I wouldn’t find anything up there.”

“The Red Woman?” Burke looks at Ellie, who clears her throat.

“It’s, ah, a local legend.”

“So like a ghost story?” Burke almost looks amused.

Ellie clears her throat. “The property where Kacey found the blood,” she explains. “There was a house there in the thirties. A family was killed—the story is that the wife walks up and down Sparrow Road at night. Covered in blood.”

Burke’s forehead creases. “So this girl—Chloe—she says she saw a bloody ghost?”

I pull my sleeves down over my hands. “Like I said, she’s always making stuff up.”

“But you still wanted to check things out for yourself,” Burke says. “It’s why you went up to the barn yesterday, right? Curiosity.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Burke is staring at my hands, at the way my thermal shirtsleeves are stretched over them. I let go and set my hands on the table. “Bailey is my friend. I’m worried sick about her. I heard something weird, so I got curious.”

“Okay, fair enough. Were you at the vigil last night?”

I hesitate. “No. I couldn’t go.”

“Really.” Burke blinks, taken aback.

“I had a panic attack or something. I couldn’t get dressed.”

“A panic attack?”

“After I got home—from seeing the blood in the barn, everyone was badgering me, asking me stuff, and I just freaked out, I guess.”

Ellie gives a sympathetic nod.

Burke scratches his temple with his pen. “So you were too nervous to attend the vigil?”

“What?” I look from Burke to Ellie. “No. I just—I helped look for Bailey in the storm on Monday. I was actually out there doing something. Sorry if I didn’t think standing around holding a candle would make a difference in finding her.”

I can feel it: the red splotches coming to my face. The tightness in my throat from trying not to cry. A tear slips out anyway. Ellie produces a box of tissues and clears her throat again. “Detective—I think maybe here’s a good place to break for the day.”

Burke’s eyes are on me. “That seems like a good idea.”

I’m wiping my face with one of the tissues when Ellie rests a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll go call your stepmom, ’kay? Let’s take a walk outta here. Get some air.”

I let her put her arm around me, herd me back to the waiting area. I feel Burke watching me the whole time, and that’s when I remember the pendulum from the séance, still in the pocket of my jacket.