No One Can Know(34)

She angled toward the familiar path on instinct. She couldn’t see the kids anymore—if they were kids—but she didn’t slow. She passed under the tree house, which sagged, probably rotten through. Footsteps crashed up ahead. Still she ran after them, not sure what she was doing, not sure why, her pulse thudding through her and her breath coming hissed between her teeth.

Then she slowed. She looked around. The path had petered out. There wasn’t much undergrowth here, and it was easy to navigate, but she couldn’t tell where they might have gone.

A voice broke through the low chatter of forest sounds. It was high and excited, and followed by a lower voice that burbled with laughter. Off between the trees, Emma could make out the graying side of a building. The old Saracen house. Hadley had said kids still hung out there.

She crept forward slowly. As she drew closer, the house became visible. It was low and narrow, the roof gaping on one side and sagging on the other. Nothing about it looked structurally sound, but voices were coming from inside.

“Oh come on. You were scared. Admit it,” the higher-pitched voice was saying.

“I wasn’t scared! You’re the one who took off running.”

“Yeah, because I didn’t want to get caught.” Both voices were male and young. Through one grimed-over window, an upper pane knocked out entirely, she could see two boys sitting on the leaf-strewn floor, posed like they’d collapsed in exhaustion.

She kept moving, around to the front door, which was hanging off its hinges. She stepped right over the two rotten steps, not trusting them with her weight, and onto the spongy floor inside. The walls inside might have once been white but had faded to a grotesque yellow, covered liberally in scrawled graffiti. The frames around the doors were carved with more scratching, names and words and symbols—pentagrams and anarchy symbols and others she didn’t recognize but that looked vaguely occult. A moldering couch slumped in one corner, pale blue with the cushions chewed through. Another door led out the back, past a narrow galley kitchen, but given the way it was swollen in its frame, she doubted it was functional.

She walked toward the sound of voices, still congratulating themselves on their own daring. When she stepped into the doorway, one of the boys, the one with the mop of blond hair, yelped and jumped up to his feet. The other one was a second behind but quicker to realize there was nowhere to go, unless they wanted to try busting through the window.

“Hey, lady, we, uh, we weren’t,” the second boy said nervously, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He was Black, heavyset, wearing a red T-shirt with a dragon curled around a twenty-sided die. The other boy was white, and about the color of a sheet of printer paper at the moment, his hands opening and closing at his sides with nervous energy.

She imagined how she must look to him. Hair wild, shoes unlaced, wearing cotton shorts and a T-shirt that had clearly been slept in. The murderer, chasing them through the woods. “What were you doing at my house?” she asked. Her voice came out rough.

They glanced at each other. “We were just messing around,” the first boy said. “We didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Was it you? Last night?” she asked.

They looked at each other again, eyes wide. “No?” the second boy said. “I was at home last night. Swear to God. Whatever happened, we didn’t do it.”

“He’s telling the truth,” the other boy said desperately, and she laughed. Both of them looked startled. She combed her hair back from her face.

“Criminal masterminds,” she said. The Black boy smiled nervously. “So, what? You wanted to scare the evil murderess? Then what?”

“I dunno. It just seemed … fun?” the white kid suggested.

“What are your names?” she asked them.

“Travis,” the blond boy said immediately, and his friend gave him a dirty look. Travis didn’t notice. “And this is Abraham.”

“Travis. Abraham. Don’t throw any more rocks at my fucking house, okay?” she said calmly.

“No, ma’am,” Abraham said immediately. “Look, we didn’t really think…”

“Yeah, I gathered,” she said. She crossed her arms, looked around. “This where the cool kids hang out?”

“Well, we’re here. So … no?” Abraham said.

“We’re cool,” Travis said, a touch sulkily.

Emma raised an eyebrow. He scuffed the floor with his toe. What had she expected? Kids with mohawks and nose rings, bullies out of a high school movie? “You hang out here a lot?” she asked. They both wanted to bolt out of there, she could tell, but she was still blocking the door.

“Sometimes,” Travis acknowledged with a bob of his head.

“There are parties here, that sort of thing?”

Abraham shook his head. “Used to be, I think? But with the roof caved in and everything, I don’t think so. When we found it, it was pretty fucked-up.” They were still nervous, but starting to settle down. Convinced Emma wouldn’t unhinge her jaw and devour them whole, maybe. She turned back to look at the living room. Feet shuffled behind her. One of them cleared his throat, but neither spoke.

“Kids used to come here,” she said. “When I was your age, they were out here all the time.”

“Yeah, we heard about that,” Travis said, almost eagerly. “We heard there were, like, Satanic rituals and shit.”