It had been so long since I’d heard my mother’s voice that for a second it shifted in and out of focus, sounding both like her and not like her at all. She was what I heard inside my head. Older, maybe, and throatier, but my own voice. I closed my eyes so that she was all around me, and if I peeled away the Strouds’ house I could be back in our own home. Bent over my homework as my mother talked on the phone to a coworker, or talked to herself in the kitchen as she prepared a frozen meal.
My mother. How could I have ever thought we were done with each other when her voice was the one I heard in my own head? A thought darted through my brain. Maybe my mother had had her reasons to set the fire. Maybe if I just asked her, I’d understand why she’d done it. The thought was a betrayal at first. Traitorous to Bellanger. Discomfort twisted in my belly.
Then I breathed deep, let the thought stay. What if?
“Play the message again?” I asked Cate, opening my eyes and blinking the tears away. This time I listened more closely.
It’s—it’s difficult to explain over the phone. I would rather speak in person if you’d let me. I understand if that’s—well, if you don’t want to see me. But I have to try, Vera. We let Fiona down. We let Lily-Anne down. I—look, maybe I’ll talk to you soon. She recited our home number, the familiarity of it making my heart throb. All right. Goodbye.
“So we know for sure she was in contact with the Strouds,” I said into the silence.
Cate nodded. “It’d be great if we could ask the Strouds about it.”
From the other room, Isabelle called out a wordless exclamation. Cate and I exchanged quick glances before hurrying to her. We found Tom coming from the other end of the house, his face tight with worry. In the kitchen, Isabelle had pulled the dusty tartan curtains aside, letting the brilliant early evening sunlight into the kitchen. She crouched near the back door. “Look,” she said simply. I knelt beside her. A rusty smear stretched along the wall, and in the slanted light, it was hard to tell whether it was a deep brown or closer to red. The stain resolved into a familiar pattern. It was a dark brownish blotch, rounded and cleft, and then two longer, thinner stains extending from the top. An interrupted handprint, stamped in blood.
A spiky dread climbed up my spine. Cate’s face changed: it dropped into shock and then, just as quickly, hardened into determination.
Isabelle rose, brushing her hand against her skirt, and opened the back door. There was another small porch out there, a rickety set of stairs leading down into a threadbare backyard, the forest looming a few yards beyond the edge. Isabelle stepped outside, the sunlight catching bronze in her mousy hair. She turned in a slow circle.
“There’s more,” she called. “On the porch railing.”
I didn’t know how Isabelle could speak so calmly. My pulse was a hard rhythm now. “The stranger in the maroon car,” I breathed. He’d found the Strouds before we had. We’d come here too late to warn them, too late to do any good except to be the witnesses to what he’d left behind. This impossible ghost, always one step ahead of us.
It was dazzling with sunset outside, unfairly beautiful, steeped in peacefulness. Isabelle knelt in the grass, pressing her palm flat. She straightened and pointed, her pale arm highlighted by the sun, her outstretched finger aiming right into the heart of the forest. “It goes that way.”
* * *
The forest was weedy and dark, as if the shadows were generated from an unseen source, fleshing out the spaces between the thin and tangled branches. Even in the spring, dead leaves choked the ground. We’d entered another part of the world. “Should we be yelling for them?” Tom asked, hushed.
Now that we were in the woods, we’d all gone quiet, sticking close together. The underbrush was dense and wild, an untended pocket in the middle of Kithira’s carefully arranged domesticity. My arms had broken into thick goose bumps.
“Let’s keep a low profile,” Cate said.
I wondered how far from civilization we’d gone in just a few minutes. It was more and more silent, noise swallowed up in here. A few bursts of birdsong; the low hum of insects. But overall, the whole forest seemed to hold its breath.
“Up ahead,” Cate said, gesturing.
A break in the trees, a loosening in the closed ranks. I caught a flutter of movement. A flash of white. I was instantly, urgently optimistic, picking up my pace, hurrying through the underbrush and over the rocky terrain until I nearly lost my footing.
“Hold on,” said Tom, “Josie, wait—” He reached toward my elbow, but I wasn’t listening. I locked my eyes on that shimmer of white that moved between the trees, like a woman dancing, or fleeing from me. Without thinking, I began to run. I broke through the trees and stopped short, my brain not catching up with what I was seeing.