her dad. No more road trips for Jenna’s gymnastics competitions with her mom. No more board games on rainy weekends. No more making dinners together or dumb jokes or the endless mundane things she took for granted and would give anything to get back. She squeezes her eyes tight and cries herself to sleep.
She awakens with a fright—someone touching her arm. Her heart’s banging and she can’t see who it is at first and is disoriented. Then the crushing reality hits her again. This isn’t a nightmare.
She’s at the group home. Her parents killed in a car accident. She has no one.
There’s a girl crouched at her bedside. In a whisper, she says, “We need to hide.”
Hide? Jenna doesn’t understand. But then from outside the room, there’s the sound of male voices. Laughing, heavy footsteps.
“Come out come out wherever you are.”
The tone isn’t playful like in hide-and-seek. It’s creepy. She thinks he’s imitating a line from a movie.
Jenna jolts up. She looks around, but there’s nowhere to go. The girl’s already gone. Jenna jumps to her feet, opens the chest at the foot of the bed. It’s small, but she’s limber. She balls herself up, closes the lid on top of her, the inside hot from her breath, loud from the banging of her heart.
But the lid juts open. The girl is back, shaking her head, silently telling Jenna that they’ll find her there.
The girl takes Jenna’s hand, then guides her out of the bedroom. In the upstairs hallway, Jenna hears more noise from downstairs. She’s not sure what time it is, but it’s dark and the place is otherwise still.
The girl—she has dark black hair and brown skin—puts a finger to her lips. Jenna is terrified now. What is happening? Why is this girl so afraid of them? Where is Mr. Brood?
They step gingerly down the hallway, fear seizing Jenna with every creak of the floorboards.
“Come out come out wherever you are.”
The voice floats up the stairs.
The girl stealthily moves into the other bedroom, Jenna following close behind. The room has three more beds in a line. Three trunks in front of them. The girl goes to a closet at the far end.
The voices grow louder.
The girl opens the closet door. It’s empty save for a few clothes hanging on a mismatch of hangers. The girl sweeps aside the clothes and reaches inside. Jenna notices a small gap in the drywall about four feet long. The girl puts her small fingers inside the crevasse and pulls.
A slice of drywall, a makeshift hidden door, comes off and Jenna is startled by two round eyes looking back at them. The girl who led her there says, “Shit.”
The girl in the hidden section of the closet says, “You can fit, Marta. Both of you.” She pushes herself back, as if willing herself to be smaller.
But Marta clearly knows better.
Marta wedges the section of drywall back to its place and fans the clothes in front of it.
She’s starting to panic, Jenna can see. The voices are getting closer.
Jenna needs to take control. Take action. Her gymnastics coach always says, If you want to be a leader, lead. She runs to the window and looks outside. There’s a small slice of roof covering the
porch. But the drop is far.
Jenna pries open the window. Marta is watching her. The voices grow louder. Like a pack of wolves going room to room, looking for food.
Jenna gestures for Marta to come to the open window. But the girl’s frozen. Jenna quietly races over, takes Marta’s arm, and steers her to the opening. Marta ducks through the window and stands on the small section of roof looking terrified.
“Come out come out…”
Jenna darts over to the bed, yanks a thin blanket from it, and climbs out the window, shutting it right as the bedroom light is slapped on.
They move away from the light to the edge. Marta is visibly trembling now.
Jenna hands her an end to the blanket. Gestures for her to grip it tightly. “I’ll lower you down,”
she whispers.
Marta shakes her head violently.
But Jenna gives her a look that says, It will be okay.
Voices are coming through the walls. Jenna peers over the ledge. The front lawn isn’t overgrown, but it isn’t well cared for either. Like someone whips through every few weeks with a mower without regard to what they’re plowing over. She confirms it’s too far down to jump.
Still holding the blanket, the girl lowers herself so she’s sitting on the ledge. She twists her body around so she’s facing the house, balancing on her forearms as she grips the blanket.
Jenna plants her feet and begins lowering Marta, the girl gripping the blanket for dear life.
Jenna’s foot slips, and she worries they’ll both go down, but she regains her footing as Marta inches closer to the ground. The blanket is long enough that with outstretched arms Marta will be able to drop without breaking a limb.
Jenna feels a rush of panic as the window makes a loud noise as someone jams it open. The weight on the blanket releases. Jenna makes sure Marta is safely on the ground and then tosses the blanket over the ledge.
A voice booms. “She’s outside.”
Jenna doesn’t look back at the window but instead runs across the roof and leaps to grab the gutter’s downspout above, which is old and rusted. She prays it will hold.
There’s more voices, but they trail off. They’re running downstairs. Trying to catch the girls in the yard. Jenna shimmies down, sliding too fast, the aluminum burning her hands.
Marta has waited for her. The two lace hands and run into the night.
“Are you Clark Stansbury?” The voice jars Jenna back to the present. The driver of a car with an Uber sticker on the side window is looking at her. She remembers she’s using the scooter guy’s phone, nods, and hurries into the vehicle.
While they drive to Willow’s school, Jenna finds herself returning to that first night at the group home, to the dark-haired girl thanking her for getting them out of the house.
“Those boys,” she tells Marta. “We need to tell Mr. Brood.”
Marta’s response takes the wind out of her: “It’s not the boys we need to be afraid of.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DONNIE
“Donnie, how’s it hangin’？”
It’s Mickey, the manager of Tracer’s Bullet. Donnie has the cord to the hospital room’s phone pulled tight. He needs to get a new cell phone. His is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He favors the old flip phones, which are harder to find these days. He has considered getting a smartphone, but he doesn’t use social media, doesn’t watch television, doesn’t surf the interwebs, and doesn’t want to start. He’s seen too many people addicted to their phones when there are so many better things to be addicted to.
After some small talk, halfhearted concern, Mickey says, “Look, I’ve got some good news.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you talked to Tom?”
“Not since he kicked me out of my band,” Donnie says. “I’ve had a buncha fans here, even the frickin’ FBI, but nothing from Tom or any of them.” Donnie thinks about the FBI agent, the curious image of the woman lingering outside the federal building where Benny worked. He’s starting to think she looks familiar, but that’s probably the power of suggestion. Still, something has him baffled: If she was on the cruise ship, how would she be outside Benny’s office three days ago? They were at sea when Benny died. The agent asked him a lot of questions about whether anyone arrived via helicopter and when they went to port. But there’s no way the same woman could be in Pennsylvania when Benny was murdered and on the cruise ship at the same time. Donnie asked the agent about that, but Rodriguez was tight-lipped.