“I don’t even know why that thing is in there,” I said. I should have gotten rid of it a long time ago. I crammed the binder and the cards and the quilt back in the box. The things in that box were the very last possessions I’d taken with me when I left Chester. “Maybe I should throw it all out. Move on.”
“You know, I don’t think I’ve told you how fucking amazing you are,” Mitch said. “You were eleven years old and you put a serial killer away. They had jack shit on Stahl without your testimony. You were a pint-sized badass, and I think holding on to things that celebrate that isn’t a bad thing at all.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t been brave, just obedient—and terrified. Not of Stahl, but of failing. The police and the prosecutors and everyone else told me over and over again that I had to do it, that it was all on me.
We’d all identified Stahl, but there were questions about witness contamination with Liv and Cass. They’d given general descriptions right away, but they’d seen Stahl on the news before the official ID. I’d been unconscious during the televised arrest, untainted. So while all three of us testified, my words counted the most. I had to do it. Otherwise none of his victims would have justice, and he was an evil, evil man, and did I want him going free?
“I’m going to go home for a while,” I said. I hadn’t been certain until I spoke the words out loud.
“Home? You mean Chester? Why?”
“You know. See my dad. See Liv and Cassidy.”
“That makes sense,” he said, nodding. “Go back to the beginning. Full circle and all of that. Get some closure.”
What does that even mean, you found her?
I’ll tell you, but only in person.
I’m not going back.
We owe it to her.
“Closure. Yeah. Something like that.”
We met on the first day of kindergarten. This was, of course, completely inevitable; Chester Elementary only had one class per grade. I was well aware when I sat down in the front row between Olivia Barnes and Cassidy Green that I was the moat between two opposing armies.
Cassidy’s dad, Big Jim, was the mayor of Chester and owned the last operating mill in town. One of the last in the whole county, in fact. Chester was a town that still sported signs reading THIS HOME SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS, but increasingly those signs were a lie. The blame for this fell, fairly or not, on people like Marcus Barnes and his wife, Kimiko.
Kimiko was a biologist, Marcus an environmental lawyer, and between the two of them they represented everything Chester hated. After they moved to town, they woke up one morning to find a spotted owl, neck broken, dumped on their doorstep. They’d had their tires slashed while they were eating at the family restaurant in town, and Kimiko had fielded more than one racist and obscene call.
The truth was that by the time they arrived the era of plenty was over for the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest. The Olympic National Forest belonged to the owls, whether Chester liked it or not, and it wasn’t Marcus and Kimiko Barnes who’d made that happen. But the grief and fear of a dying town didn’t care about logic. Liv started that first day already an outcast.
Nobody hated me or my family the way they hated hers, but I was almost as much of an outsider as she was. I was the girl with divorced parents. The girl with holes in her clothes and a stale smell. Mom was a floozy who’d walked out and Dad was a lazy drunk who could barely hold down a part-time job at the bar, and no one expected me to turn out any better.
Of all the kids in Chester, Liv and I were the least likely to be friends with the mayor’s daughter. But for some reason, Cassidy Green took one look at us and, much to her parents’ consternation, decided that we were going to be best friends. Come recess she declared that we would play with her, and we were too stunned to protest. The adults tried to intervene, refusing transportation to playdates and lecturing Cassidy on her responsibilities as the mayor’s daughter to keep good company, but they were too late—Cass had claimed us.
Soon enough our friendship turned downright feral. Forbid us to see each other and we’d spit and claw and sneak out into the woods until our parents relented. Eventually, they gave up trying to keep us apart. Cassidy was like that. She got an idea into her head and it took her over. Once Cassidy Green was fixed on a thing, there wasn’t a force in the world that could dissuade her.
I might have been the one who discovered Persephone, but Cassidy was the one who made her ours.
* * *
I’d agreed to meet Liv and Cass at ten a.m., which meant stealing out of the apartment before Mitch woke up—an added bonus, given how things had gone last night. It had started with his suggestion that he come with me to “document” my return to Chester, and quickly turned into the fight I’d been trying to avoid. I’d said some vicious things—some I’d meant and some I’d said just to wound him. He’d laid out every one of my transgressions in return.
And now I’d left. I hadn’t actually said the words—said that I was leaving him. But I knew I wouldn’t be going back. I rolled into town feeling untethered. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. Mitch and I hadn’t been right for each other, but I’d never been good at being alone.
In the years since I’d left, Chester had been transformed, but you wouldn’t know it driving through town—at least, not until you looked closely. The shops were the same—except that the grocery store displayed antiques in the front window, hoping to scrape together a few extra bucks each month, and the café was themed after a briefly popular but now-forgotten movie that had filmed nearby. The general store advertised rain ponchos for the hikers and campers who hadn’t taken “rainforest” literally enough while they were packing, and there were national park passes in the windows of most of the cars parked on Main Street.
When we were growing up, Cass would have laughed at you if you suggested that she would end up living in Chester as an adult. Turned out the joke was on her, but as far as I could tell, she was happy. She opened the door in a flour-smudged apron with earbuds dangling from one ear. When she spotted me her face broke into a flat-out grin, and before I could even tense up she’d crushed me in a hug.
“Naomi! You’re early,” she declared, popping back and letting me catch my breath. “You look amazing.”
I looked like a herked-up hairball. She looked like something out of a home and garden magazine, with her platinum hair swept up and her makeup immaculate. The apron was protecting a satiny maroon blouse and slacks. I wondered if she had a business meeting or if she always looked like this now.
“I made better time than I was expecting. I hope it’s not a problem,” I said.
She flapped a hand. “Don’t worry about it. Here, follow me in, I’ve got cookies about to come out. Oh, take your shoes off at the door.”
I obeyed, leaving them next to a neat line of pumps and walking shoes and cute little flats sized for a child. How old would Amanda be now? Eight, nine? Cass had gotten pregnant her senior year of college—she and I turned out to have similar coping strategies, but I was luckier with birth control.
Senior year of college—crap, Amanda was almost twelve. Where had the years gone?