“Not ever,” Sharon was saying. “You got me?”
I watched her like bad TV. I could hear her, but I couldn’t make her words connect into anything with meaning.
“You don’t even know my last name,” she went on. “Let’s keep it that way. You saw nothing, you know nothing. They’ll make their way to you, once her parents report it. If you send them to me I’ll make sure you regret it.”
Them. “Who?” I asked.
“The police, you doorknob.”
A breeze blew over us, lake-water cool. The scent of it flushed something crucial out of the great blank in my head.
“Eighteen,” I said dully. “It’s Marion’s birthday today. She’s … she was…” I blinked my sandy eyes. “She’s eighteen.”
Sharon brightened right up. “Seriously? Holy shit, that’s lucky. We might actually get out of this. They won’t even put her down as a runaway.”
“You’re horrible,” Fee said. Her arms were jacketed tightly over her ribs. “Horrible. I hope you … I wish you…” She pressed her lips together tight before anything dangerous could escape. “I do not wish you well,” she finished.
“How nice to be sixteen and blameless,” Sharon said. “What a luxury to think regret can wipe your slate clean. That girl built her own casket, honey. And the blood on your hands is as red as the blood on mine.” She shook her head. “My hand to god, I wouldn’t be sixteen again for the world.”
* * *
In the days that followed, pieces of what Sharon said came back to me, like bits of tape I hadn’t known I was recording. It all played out like she’d told us it would.
First came days of nothing. No supernatural visitations and no police, either. A peace so false and sinister it almost broke me.
Then, right when I thought it would never happen, a cop. A full two weeks had passed when a man with hound-dog eyes and an ill-fitting suit showed up at the fish shop to talk to Uncle Nestor. Fee was working that day and he talked to her, too.
Maybe my uncle knew more than he let on. He’d seen the maze of deep cuts on my left hand, already settling into scars, and the changes in Fee, invisible but impossible to miss. But he never asked us. He underplayed our friendship with Marion, and the man’s interrogations were perfunctory at best. Sharon was right again: Marion was eighteen. It wasn’t their job to care what happened to her.
We looked on from a distance as they drew a silhouette of a girl and colored it in: Delinquent. Depressed. Disappeared. A girl who left home the day she was legal to do it, and dropped out of sight.
That’s how Marion vanished twice. The first time it happened because of me. The second time, it was the world that buried her.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The suburbs
Right now
I followed Marion over moon-drenched pavement, toward an open front door that felt less like an invitation than a warning. Like a house from a fairy tale, drawing you in with food and rest before you realize you’re a prisoner.
She led me past the tinted windows of an SUV, a basketball hoop in freshly poured concrete, an Ariel doll lying facedown in grass. Then through the front door.
The house was open-plan, with a high timbered ceiling and great flanks of shining windows. In the daytime it must’ve been a hotbox of light. From the entryway I could see a sunken living space and a staircase curving to the upper floor, and a short hallway that led to an unlit kitchen. The house smelled like new appliances and floor wax and something else, a drowsy scent that nibbled at my brain and made me catch myself on the wall, fingers fumbling against the hook where a glittery unicorn backpack hung.
“Oh, right,” Marion said, and spoke close to my ear. Three syllables that set off a bracing burst behind my eyes and burned my confusion away.
“What was that?” I caught her wrist. “What did you just do?”
She shook me off with a hiss, strange eyes flaring. Just as quickly they cooled. “Be careful,” she said, conciliatory. “Don’t surprise me. Don’t just touch me like that.”
I put my hands behind my back and followed her through the house’s first floor.
The furniture was showroom plump, the painted walls had an impersonal shine. I didn’t think the house had been lived in long. A mirror hung in the hall that led to the kitchen; I could see the glint of its beveled edge. But when I walked past, it didn’t reflect me.
I stopped. Moved a hand in front of my face. Nothing. The hall was dark and so was the scene through the mirror, so it took some squinting to make out that they didn’t match. Inside the mirror, to my left, was a half-open door, and straight ahead a familiar striped shower curtain.