Maybe if I had understood them, I could have read the collection of objects like a diary, and they could tell me what I needed to know.
Her laptop was out on her desk. Next to it was a stack of articles and environmental reports. Probably something to do with the work she did for her parents’ environmental compliance consulting firm. There was a sticky note on top of the stack with a bunch of numbers and letters jotted down on it—2248DFID, 3376DFWA, 1898DFWA—and a to-do list on a notepad that included “check map ID references” and “pharmacy pickup.”
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Some hint about where she would have gone, or why she would have called suddenly in the middle of the night. What had changed between yesterday morning and last night?
I tapped the touchpad, and a password login popped up. No dice. I tried the drawer. There were pencils, a sketchbook, rubber bands, paper clips, hair ties, three pill organizers—which seemed to indicate that she’d taken all of her pills including last night’s, though not this morning’s—and loose photographs, snapshots that had been printed at a drugstore.
Most of the photos were of her parents and the cats. Apparently there was a big fluffy gray one in addition to the marmalade gentleman I’d seen on the couch. But there were about a dozen random, poorly framed and badly lit photos of the woods, too.
The sketchbook was full of detailed studies of plants, insects, and birds. She was her parents’ daughter, that was for sure. She’d always had her father’s love of art, her mother’s attention to detail. For a while, she’d had to stop drawing—the antipsychotics she was on made her hands shake too much. That was when we’d almost lost her.
But now she had different meds, a lower dose, and beauty spilled from her again.
I turned the page and froze. This sketch was different. Looser, for one thing, drawn from memory rather than life—at least, I hoped so. It showed the top third or so of a human skeleton. Flowers had been placed in the eye sockets, and around it were arrayed seashells and stones and stranger objects—a set of four jacks, a playing card, a collection of coins.
“Persephone,” she had written at the bottom corner of the image, in her tiny, precise writing.
I turned the page. Another grinning skull greeted me. And another, and another, and another—page after page, growing less detailed, more gestural, with each one. Darkness seemed to radiate from the bones until on the last page they were roughly hewn patches of negative space in a field of scribbled pencil lines.
I thought the drawings must have gone back months, but the sketch before the first portrait of Persephone was dated only three days ago. Liv had done all of these since Stahl died. Since she decided to tell us what she’d found.
There was one more thing in the drawer. A small velvet jewelry box. I eased the lid open, praying to find a set of pearl earrings.
It was a bone. The tip of a finger. It might have belonged to any finger, might not have been human at all, except that I knew it was. It was from the right ring finger.
I knew because I’d watched Liv take it.
I looked again at the photographs. They weren’t random at all. They were landmarks. The reading rock, the crooked tree, the creek. It was a road map back to Persephone.
I slipped the earring box into my pocket before I left.
Liv’s missing,” I said when Cass opened the door.
She was wearing a cream silk shell and black slacks, her makeup subdued but precise, and at my greeting she raised her perfectly penciled eyebrows. “Missing? We saw her yesterday.”
“And now she’s gone. She left the house before dawn and she’s not answering her phone.”
“That’s not exactly unusual for Liv,” Cass pointed out. “Come inside, will you? I’ve been at the lodge since the crack of dawn and I haven’t even gotten any coffee yet.”
I followed her in. She paced into the kitchen, where she’d been in the middle of making herself a latte. She poured the steamed milk into the mug, her back to me, as she spoke. “Liv hares off sometimes. Especially when things get intense.”
“This is different,” I said.
“Why?” she asked. She turned, propping her hip against the counter. She blew gently on her coffee and watched me over the rim of the mug. “What makes it different?”
“She left me this message.” I held out my phone and played the message for her on speaker. “She said she lied. Not us. Just her,” I said when it was done.
“What could that mean?” Cass asked. “Did she lie to us yesterday?”
The promise was a private thing. Cass had always been the together one. We were her beloved disasters, but there were things she didn’t understand. “We have this thing,” I explained reluctantly. “I tell her that I’ll be here tomorrow, and she says she will, too. When we’re having a hard time. It’s a promise. To at least make it one more day.”
“I didn’t know that.” Cass set the mug down carefully, adjusting it by the handle so it sat just so. Her voice was brittle, almost wounded. I wished I knew how to explain that it wasn’t a secret we kept from her—not really. It was only that Cass was someone who needed to fix things—and sometimes Liv and I, we just needed to be broken together.
“We’ve got to find her, Cass. We have to go out there. To the Grotto,” I said. She flinched.
“Why? You don’t think Liv went back, do you? You don’t think—she wouldn’t have done something to herself there?” Her voice was frayed at the edges.
“She had a bunch of photos of the woods. Like landmarks, so she could find her way. I think she’s been out there more than once,” I said. “Have you been back?”
“I tried once,” Cassidy said cautiously. “After Amanda was born. I guess—I don’t know. I wanted to tell her about it, for some reason.”
“You wanted to tell Amanda?” I asked, confused.
Cass flushed. “I wanted to tell Persephone about Amanda,” she corrected. “I don’t know why, I just did. But I couldn’t find it. Her. Everything looked different.”
“Then we don’t even know if she’s still there,” I said.
“Of course she’s still there. Where the fuck else would she be?” Cassidy snapped.
“Okay,” I said, letting her anger slice into me. I could take it, and if I didn’t put up a fight it would spend itself sooner. And sure enough, her shoulders slumped, and she put her hands over her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all so fucked up.”
“We have to go make sure Liv isn’t there,” I said.
“I have a meeting,” Cass objected, but her voice was faltering, and she played with her necklace absently. That wasn’t a refusal, not from Cass. When she was saying no, you knew it. It was the yeses that were harder to suss out.
“Surely you have underlings by now,” I said, making a joking compliment of it. No demands for Cass. I was starting to remember how this worked.
“Percy,” she said, and there was that little nose-scrunch again. “He’s like an Energizer Bunny duct-taped to a wolverine. I’m pretty sure he’s planning to off me and run the lodge himself.” She laughed, but it was a little awkward, like she’d realized halfway through that this probably wasn’t the best time to be joking about murder. She cleared her throat. “I’ll have him take the meeting. With what I’ve got on the guy, he can’t say no to me.” She flashed her teeth, and I managed a smile in return.