Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
I lie back in the overgrown grass of the backyard. Finn’s nineties rock filters through the open kitchen window. Somewhere in the house, my mom and Margot are bickering loud enough to make out their tones but too low to make sense of any words.
“Sloane?” I call.
For a few seconds nothing happens, and I’m grateful no one is around to witness me making a fool of myself.
Then Sloane appears in the grass at my side, perplexed. “What did—”
“It worked,” I say.
“What worked?”
“I summoned you. I wasn’t sure it was going to work, but it did on Finn, and…” I wave a hand. “Here you are.”
“I didn’t know that was a thing. Awesome.” Sloane nods, then looks around. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s nice.” After a beat, I add, “Wanna join me?”
One side of Sloane’s mouth turns up. She fiddles with the grass near her sneaker.
She starts picking out blades, concentrating on each one as she plucks it and starts a pile.
“I used to hate the summer,” she says eventually.
“The whole no-school thing was great, but, god, the heat. Our apartment had the worst AC.”
“Used to?”
“Perk of the job,” Sloane says. “Can’t feel the heat. Or the cold. Or anything, obviously. Makes it easier to appreciate it.”
I can’t help but smile. I lean back, hands splayed on the grass. Sloane lies down, knees drawn up, hands resting on her belly.
There’s no easy way to broach this subject. “Sloane, I was wondering…”
Sloane stiffens almost imperceptibly. She’s quiet for a beat. Then, tentatively, “You want to know what happened to me. Or us.”
I wince, bringing my knees to my chest and looping my arms around them.
“I’m guessing Finn’s been less than forthcoming,” Sloane says.
“More like downright avoidant.”
“Yeah, that sounds like him,” she says. Her eyes flutter shut. “I don’t remember much, really.”
“What do you remember?”
Her eyes stay shut. The seconds crawl by, and I’ve stopped expecting an answer when she finally gives one.
“It was the last day of summer. I made one of my older brothers drag me with him to the creek with his friends.” The memory makes her smile, but it’s a strained expression.
Her eyes open. “I felt so cool hanging out with the older kids. So grown-up.” She pauses.
“It was so warm all day, but the second the sun started to set…I didn’t bring a jacket or anything.
It was freezing.” She shakes her head. “My brother Stephen went back to the car to get me a blanket. His friends didn’t notice me wandering off.
I don’t even know what I was doing. I think I heard a noise, maybe, down the creek. ”
My aunt’s house sits on a huge swath of property, most of it wooded, but there’s a massive creek that crosses through it. When we came for the summers as kids, Margot and I vowed to swim across the creek and explore the other side. We never did.
The cold feeling hardens to ice, and I am frozen in place.
Sloane’s lips pull thin, and a muscle ticks in her jaw. “I remember kneeling down at the creek’s edge. There were footsteps, and I thought it was my brother”—her voice shifts, wavers, like she’s holding back tears—“but before I could look, I felt a sting. And then…nothing.”
I get stuck on that word. Nothing. Every other word is weighed down heavy with emotion except for the last.
I open my mouth to speak, but the words get stuck, refusing to dislodge.
As if she can tell, Sloane goes on. “And Aisha, she isn’t even from town, you know.
Her family was vacationing. I guess they heard from some locals about this trail that goes through the woods, hugs the creek.
She says she went on ahead. She heard a deep voice and felt something sharp, and then… nothing.”
“Half the people in town swear it was some creature that took you,” I say, musing aloud.
Sloane laughs bitterly. “Let me guess, the Shadow Man?”
I frown.
Sloane nods. “Yeah, I remember those stories.”
“You don’t think it was a monster.”
Her brows draw together. We’re edging toward a cliff, and the closer we get the more she closes up. Like Finn. I can’t tell if it’s concealment or she really doesn’t remember.
“I don’t know what happened to us. I really wish I did.” She sits up. “But I don’t. All I know is that we all woke up here, and we’ve been stuck ever since.”
“My aunt’s house.”
“We can’t go any farther than the house across the street or past the creek. Like some kind of boundary line. The closer we get, the more we kind of…disappear.”
A moment passes. I have a million questions and no clue how to ask them or which are important enough to voice.
“Do you think you’re trapped here forever?” I ask eventually.
Despite the heavy nature of the question, Sloane doesn’t flinch. “Not forever. Nothing lives forever.” She pauses. A quick glance tells me she’s smiling—a wry smile, but a smile—as she adds, “Or dies forever, I guess.”
Something instinctual scratches at my insides, urging me away from this conversation. Like it knows something I don’t.
I ignore the warning, and ask, “How long?”
“We don’t really know. Ingrid made it the longest, we think—” Sloane stops abruptly, straightening like she’s been yanked. It makes me jerk up, heart beating a mile a minute.
“Ingrid?”
Sloane’s cheeks go red. She chews on her lip, clears her throat, then says, “Yeah.” She squirms where she sits and won’t meet my eyes.
I shake my head, gearing up to push harder on that topic, but before I can, Sloane continues.
“They’re all gone. Except Ingrid. But she’s not…she’s not like us anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes I think I can feel her. Or hear her. But she’s not like Finn and Aisha and me. She’s like…” Sloane goes sheet white. Her shoulders are tight and her hands tremble ever so slightly. “Not like a ghost. Like a poltergeist from those old horror movies. All wrong.”
“But—”
“Look, Finn and Aisha don’t like to talk about Ingrid. Especially Finn. He knew her, before she…changed or whatever.”
“I don’t—”
“I would leave it alone, Jo. Nothing good’s going to come out of it.”
“Is she dangerous?”
“I don’t know what she is,” Sloane says. “What’s more dangerous than that?”
“But if she—”
But Sloane is gone, vanished, leaving me alone with the overgrown yard and all of my unanswered questions.
The most pressing sits at the forefront of my mind, six letters banging against the walls of my skull.
Ingrid.
I head for the back door and into the kitchen. I’m not sure what I’m looking for until I’m standing at the counter, sifting through a pile of junk mail. Halfway through are a few of the flyers that those parents handed out after the parade. Like the flyers up at the Stacks.
Ingrid Halstead. Missing four years. Last seen during a cross-country practice, somewhere on the path near the creek.
It all comes back to the woods, the creek. Whatever happened to her, it happened here.
My gaze drifts out the kitchen window, through the woods. If there are answers, maybe they’re out there. Hiding in the rushing creek. Finn, Sloane, and Aisha may not be willing to give them. So I’ll find them myself.