Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
No one speaks all the way back to Nora’s house.
She offers to drop Margot and me off at home, but neither of us is all that excited to walk back into that den of hopelessness, certainly not hauling our own disappointment back with us.
Going home early would mean attention and questions I don’t have the energy for.
So we make our defeated return and end up spread out across the couches in Nora’s living room, drowning our sorrows in store-bought cookies and movies from when we were kids.
But even with cartoon animals singing on the screen and our fingers covered in sugary icing, there’s no mistaking this for what it is. A full-blown pity party.
Margot passes out first, curled up under a throw blanket on the armchair, and Nora is close behind her, but as hard as I chase sleep, it skitters out of my reach.
The clock on the wall reads four in the morning when I finally give in to my restlessness. I peel myself off the couch and out from under my blanket cavern, heading down the hall in search of a bathroom to splash water on my face.
I enter the first room on my right but make the same mistake I did last time I was here, entering not a bathroom but a bedroom. I flick the lights on and find a modest guest room. A bed, a dresser, and an empty nightstand.
The only other things in the room are the boxes sitting on the made bed. Three of them, the cardboard straining against its seams, two taped shut, one open. Scrawled across each box in Nora’s handwriting is a name.
Finn.
Nausea creeps through my gut. I’m on autopilot as I approach the bed, tentatively opening the untaped box.
Inside are folded clothes. Dark jeans, dark T-shirts. A faded gray-and-black-tie-dyed hoodie. A pair of beat-up Converse.
Nora told me they never got rid of his stuff. Before they moved, after their mom got remarried, Finn’s old bedroom was left untouched, like it was waiting for his return. And even after they moved out, Nora and her mom couldn’t bear to throw out his things.
And so here they are, still waiting for him to come back. His whole life stuffed into three cardboard boxes. The only physical remnants of Finn Shipman.
I drop onto the edge of the bed, squashed between the boxes. Unthinking, I pull out the tie-dye hoodie, bring it up to my nose, and inhale.
The fabric smells a little musty, probably from living in this box for so long, but behind it, there’s laundry detergent and sandalwood. This is Finn. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to him. The most tangible part of him I’ve found.
It’s such a silly thing. What someone smells like. But for all the time I’ve spent with Finn, I knew I’d never know what kind of aftershave he used, never feel the calluses on his fingers from years of playing guitar. Never know if his hair was as soft as it looked. Never see his shadow.
I pull the hoodie over my head. It’s big, would have been oversized on him. I can’t imagine what this scene would look like for Nora to walk in on, but I can’t bring myself to take it off. Instead, I press the sleeves to my nose and close my eyes again.
I will never have more of him than this. I wonder whether Jasper will end up the same way. No more than a box of things he never came back to. Scent and fabric in place of the person they once belonged to.
I’m not sure how long I sit there, bobbing in a sea of a dead boy’s things, when a cold shiver runs down my arms. I hear her voice.
Find me.
I jump to my feet, scanning the room, though I know I won’t see anything. I’ve never heard it outside my own house.
Find me.
Anger surges like a wave in my chest. For months, Ingrid’s voice and presence have hung from my shoulders. The words that lead nowhere, the voice that nearly drowned my sister in the creek. All I have to show for her haunting is a bracelet covered in dirt.
“Leave me alone,” I say aloud.
Find me, find me, find me. The words batter against my ears, loud and demanding.
“I’ve tried, but there’s nothing there. Just give up. Give up.” My voice cracks on the last sentence. “It’s over.”
But those two words keep coming.
Find me find me find me FIND ME.
Something in me snaps, and I head for the doorway.
I should wake up Margot or Nora or ignore the voice altogether. Maybe it’s the exhaustion twisting my logic, but I think maybe if I follow it, it’ll finally stop. She will stop.
I slip out the front door and into the warm, dark night.
The first hints of dawn bleed on the horizon, but the street is silent, empty.
My bare feet tickle against the dewy grass, and a fleeting thought reminds me that shoes are always a good choice, but I hear Ingrid’s voice, and I don’t think—I follow.
My mom and Paige would have a conniption if they knew I was out here on my own before the sun has come up, with no shoes to boot. Margot would have my head for leaving her behind. But all of that is far away. Irrelevant. I feel far away, too, following a ghost through the predawn streets.
After a few minutes, the voice has me turning onto my own street. I slow slightly, the familiar surroundings stirring at the logic I’ve put to bed.
Then I see her. Standing in the middle of the street between my house and the Holdens’ at the end of the block, the vast woods behind her. Ingrid. She looks older than she does in the posters her parents still hand out but younger than she’d be if she’d lived.
I walk down the center of the street, but when I reach the place Ingrid stands, she’s gone. Only her voice echoes as her simmering rage points me not toward my house, but the house across the street. To the old run-down barn behind the Holden house.
The barn door is unlocked and whines as I pry it open.
I still, craning my head around, but this early the town is still too deep in sleep to notice what may or may not be breaking and entering on my part.
The soft hay tickles the bottoms of my feet and the air smells musty, like grass and animal feed.
It’s pitch-black inside, save for the soft dawn light streaming through windows near the ceiling, cutting swaths through the darkness.
Here. The voice is right behind me, like someone slipped up to my back to whisper in my ears. I stumble and fall into loose hay, and my knees crack onto something hard.
HERE. The whisper is a yell now. A command.
I sweep the hay away with my fingers and find the outline of a hatch. It’s made of hard metal, painted to match the brown floor, the paint flecks peeling at the edges and around the tiny handle.
I tug up on the handle, not anticipating it to open, surprised when it does.
It isn’t like a storm shelter or crawl space like I expected. It’s another dark space, large enough for a few people to squeeze into. A metal ladder runs down to a cement floor, but across from the rungs, there is a door.
A steel door with a keypad set to the right.
This shouldn’t be here. Neither should I.
Not because it’s probably illegal and because there are plenty of things I could bump into and cut myself on—horror movies with pitchforks come to mind—but because this hatch in the floor, and the door at the base of the ladder, doesn’t belong.
And it’s niggling at the puzzle I’ve been straining to fit together in my head.
Like I’m staring at the piece that gives the image a meaning.
I let the hatch door fall and spread the hay back over it, straightening. With the pounding of my heart and my frantic movements, I don’t notice the heavy footfalls behind me until they’re directly at my back.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” a deep voice says, and it’s familiar, their name on the tip of my tongue. But before I can turn around, something hits me in the back of the head, hard, and I’m unconscious before my knees hit the ground.