“It’s been over forty years, Lizzy,” he reminded me. “She could be dead for all we know.”
“She’s not dead,” I said, knowing it was true. I’d feel it if my sister was dead. I would. “She’s out there. And she’s the one taking the girls.”
“Even if you’re right,” he went on, clearly exasperated, “it has nothing to do with you.”
How could this be the same boy who’d once known everything there was to know about monsters?
“It has everything to do with me,” I told him, my voice edgier than I intended. “Don’t you see? I’ve got to go to Vermont.”
“And what exactly are you hoping to do there?”
My breath caught in my throat.
What was I hoping to do?
Save the girl, of course. Get there in time to save this girl and make sure that no more girls disappeared.
“I’m going to stop her.”
As I spoke, I realized: I meant it this time. I’d thought it before, but this, this felt different. The fact that I was going back to Vermont seemed significant. Symbolic.
Do you ever get tired of it? The cat and mouse game we play?
I wanted to say all of this to Eric, thought that maybe he, of all people, might understand. But once again, I was thinking of him as Eric from our childhood, not the grown man known as Charlie.
Charlie feigned amnesia. Often, when we tried to talk about our past, when I asked him a question about a specific memory, he’d shake his head, say, “I don’t know, Lizzy. That was a long time ago.”
“How?” he asked now. “How are you going to stop her?” His voice was icy cold, dripping with fear.
It was wrong of me to have called him. It was selfish. Foolish, even.
“You know how.” The words came out snappish, scolding. “You know what I have to do. You helped write the book—you know how to stop a monster.”
He was quiet. I heard the flick of a lighter. He’d quit smoking, but sometimes I could hear him sneaking a cigarette when we talked.
“Lizzy, this isn’t healthy,” he said.
I said nothing.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t go to Vermont. Come here instead. Come stay with us for a while. We’d love to have you. Cricket was just asking when you’d come again, and both girls are here now until after Labor Day when Ali goes back to college.”
I doubted very seriously that Cricket had been longing to see me. I knew I made poor Cricket as uncomfortable as Cricket made me. Cricket with her highlighted hair, her Crock-Pot cookbooks, her pretty but practical outfits from JCPenney. And the girls looked at me like I was something they’d scraped off the bottom of their shoe. Their weirdo monster-hunting aunt who came for a visit twice a year and insisted on sleeping in her van in their driveway instead of the guest room with the rose stencils on the wall and the matching rose air freshener that was supposed to make you think you were really in a garden.
“Yeah, that’d be nice,” I said at last.
“Good.” He sighed a relieved breath.
“I’ll drive out just as soon as I’m done in Vermont.”
“Lizzy—”
“I’ve gotta go, Eric,” I said, hanging up before he had a chance to curtly remind me, as he often did, that his name was Charlie.
Vi
May 9, 1978
THE HOUSE CAME with the job, Gran always says,” Vi explained as she gave Iris a tour, starting in the kitchen. Here was the special drawer where the cookies were kept, and the freezer with gallons of ice cream, boxes of ice pops in plastic tubes.