Courtney
Wyatt’s words bring me to a sudden stop in the living room, which is dark save for the glow from his phone screen, the blue
light brightening his face but, at the same time, casting shadows on it that make it impossible to read.
I know where Reese is.
“Where?” I ask, breathless. I step closer to him, wanting to see what he’s looking at on his phone. I reach the sofa bed and
lower myself to it as Wyatt turns his phone slowly around and shows me. On his screen is a map with a cute little avatar of
Reese in a tiny pink tee and cutoff denim shorts that looks almost exactly like her.
“What is this, Wyatt?” I ask, reaching for the phone, bringing it closer so that I can see it better. He has cell reception,
one piddling bar that might disappear at any time, though reception tends to be better at night, when fewer people are awake
and fighting for it.
“Snapchat,” he says, his face dark now that the phone’s light isn’t shining directly on him.
I don’t use Snapchat. I’m not familiar with how it works. “What is this map?” I ask, fixating on the bright smile on the likeness
of Reese’s face, on the tiny details that are just right, down to the double piercings in her ears and the shape and spacing
of her eyes.
“Snap Map.”
“How does it work?” I ask, and he explains. It’s a location sharing feature. It allows friends to see where friends are in
real time, by putting these avatars of them on a map.
My stomach tightens. “You mean, anyone can see where you are all the time?” I ask. The idea of it makes me feel sick. I think
of all the ways that could go wrong, how the wrong people could find you, like old boyfriends, people you don’t get along
with, friends you’re in an argument with or boys who like you but you don’t like back.
He shrugs. “Yeah. If you want them to.”
“What does that mean, Wyatt?” I ask, looking at him.
“You can put it in ghost mode.”
“What’s ghost mode?”
“Where no one knows where you are.”
I nod, understanding. You don’t have to let your avatar be on this map. You don’t have to let people know where you are. You
can opt out of it if you want, but kids don’t think like that. They aren’t cautious like adults. They don’t consider all the
bad things that can happen, only how they can find friends at parties and show up at places where their crush is, things like
that.
I zoom in on this Snap Map, bringing Reese closer so that not only can I see her exact location, but I can see how long it
would take me to get to her.
Five minutes.
Reese is only five minutes away.
I push myself from the sofa bed, taking Wyatt’s phone into the bedroom with me, my heart racing as I feel the bedside table
for my own phone, relieved to see that I, too, have a single bar before searching for the number I stored in my contacts earlier
today.
Detective Evans’s voice is woolly when he answers.
“Detective Evans,” I say, trying to keep my voice low for the girls, who still sleep. “It’s Courtney Gray.”
“Is everything okay?” he asks, shaking off the morning voice, and I imagine him sitting up in bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. There’s a noise in the background, and I picture a woman beside him, a girlfriend maybe, rolling away, drawing a sheet over her head to lessen the sound of his voice.
On the other side of the curtains, the night is black. It’s sometime after two, maybe three, in the morning. The sun won’t
rise for hours.
“We know where Reese is.”
“Where?” he asks, his voice suddenly more alert. I tell him, texting him a screenshot of the Snap Map from Wyatt’s phone.
On the other end of the line, Detective Evans is quiet at first; he doesn’t have the same reaction as me.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” I ask, because of his silence.
“How much do you know about Snapchat, Mrs. Gray?”
“Not much. Almost nothing.”
“These maps are not always reliable. They’re only as good as the last time a person logged in to the site. That means Reese
might have been there last night, but it doesn’t mean she’s still here now. And we have no way of knowing if Reese logged
in to the account herself or if someone else logged in to it.”
“You’re not going to look for her?” I ask, exasperated, hearing him sigh through the phone, and though my heart sinks, it
doesn’t matter because I’ve already decided that even if he isn’t, I still am.
But he is. He says that he is going to look for her, and I imagine him sweeping the covers from his body, swinging his feet
over the side of the bed, standing up.
“I’ll meet you there,” I tell him, already reaching for a pair of jeans that lie folded on the top of my closed suitcase.
But he says, “No, Mrs. Gray,” his voice firm, resolute. “You can’t do that. I need you to stay there, at the cottage. It’s
dark outside. You don’t know the area like we do.”
“But—” I try to object. He stops me before the words can get out.
“You need to take care of the other kids,” he says, as Mae whimpers, crying out for Emily in her sleep.
I know Detective Evans is right. Still, I hate the idea of sitting idly by while the police search for Reese. But this part
of Wisconsin that we’re in is made up of vast forests with millions of acres of trees and thousands of lakes and swamps. It’s
the type of place where people can get easily lost or disappear in.
“I can’t have anything bad happening to you too,” he says, promising to call with news.
I come to early in the morning, woken by a sound. I don’t know where I am at first. I only know that this isn’t my bed and
this isn’t my room. Before I ever open my eyes, I can tell that something is off. It feels all wrong to me. There are fewer
pillows on the bed than I’m used to, and my downy duvet has been reduced to a quilt that lies like deadweight, leveling me
in bed.
And then reality crushes and drives over me and I remember: the little lakeside cottage in the woods.
Emily and Nolan dead.
I inhale a sharp drag of air, the memory of it settling in my stomach like rocks. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening.
For one split second, I can almost tell myself it was a dream, a nightmare, but then, a second later it solidifies, becoming
concrete, and I know.
It is real. It happened.
They’re dead.
I blink open my eyes, which are all but swollen shut. With effort, I sit up in bed, my phone sliding off my chest because
I must have somehow drifted off to sleep, waiting for Detective Evans to call, exhaustion pulling me under against my will.
The sound, I realize, is my phone.
Desperately I grab for it, turning it to face me, Detective Evans’s name splayed on the screen.
“What happened?” I ask. “Was she there, Detective? Did you find Reese?”
After a failed attempt to find her themselves overnight, the police arrange a ground search for Reese, asking the community
for volunteers to help look in the location where she was last seen on Snapchat. I decide to go while Elliott stays behind
with the kids. He wants to go too, but we can’t take the kids with us and we can’t leave them alone. It’s not safe for them.
Before I leave, Elliott follows me to the window, standing behind me. I peel the curtain back to gaze out, beyond the police
officer who’s still parked in his car on the driveway. Outside, it’s bright and calm, a glitch in the matrix. The weather
should be stormy, the lake raging, the wind wild and rushing through the trees. Instead, there are more boaters and fishermen
on the lake than I’m used to. They sit along our shoreline, enjoying the peaceful view.
“Why don’t you just let the police and volunteers look? Why do you need to go?” Elliott asks.
At the same time, I say, “Busy day for fishing,” taking in the surplus of boats on the lake, though finding it impossible
to believe the world still exists, that life still goes on, that people are able to do ordinary things like go boating and
fish.
Elliott steps closer, looking past me and out the window. “They’re not fishing, Court.”
I look again and this time see it for myself.
The boats aren’t out there slowing to troll for fish as I first imagined.
Instead, they’re trying to get a glimpse of Emily and Nolan’s cottage from the lake, searching through binoculars or taking pictures of it on their phones and on cameras with telephoto lenses to share online with horrible little hashtags like #crimescene or #murderhouse, reducing our family’s nightmare to a social media post.
Rage builds inside of me. “What do you think they can even see from the lake?” I ask, trying to keep my voice calm, level,
but as I do I remember how Emily used to relish her undisrupted view of the lake from the cottage’s deck. While the rest of
her family slept, she spent her mornings there, drinking coffee and taking it in: the reflection of the sky and the shadows
of the trees on the still blue-green water.
“I don’t know. Probably not much,” Elliott says to indulge me. But I know he’s wrong. They can see practically everything.
“Why don’t the police make them leave?”
“I don’t think they can. It’s public property and it’s not like they can rope off a lake.” Elliott turns me around and again
he asks, “Why don’t you stay here today? Let the police look for Reese. If she’s there, they’ll find her. They’ll bring her
home.”
I shake my head. “I have to go, Elliott. She’s my niece. Emily would do this for me.” He nods, pensive, and I can tell he
wants to say more. “What?” I ask, feeling frustration build that I even have to explain to him why I would want to go.
“It’s just . . .” His eyes stray. He won’t look at me as he says, “I keep thinking about what she said to Emily the other
night. She was just so angry. I’ve never seen her like that before.”
I hate you. I wish you’d die.
I take a breath. “What are you saying? That she killed them and ran off?” The words are hard to get out.
They’re harder to imagine. Elliott is quiet; he can’t bring himself to say yes, that that’s exactly what he thinks.
“She didn’t do this,” I say. “You know her. You know she would never do this.” But even as I say it, I wonder: Did either of us know Reese that well?
Once upon a time, when she was young, we did.
Reese was exuberant then. She had the best smile, the best laugh, and she was always very liberal with her hugs.
Before Cass came along, Elliott and I adored being the fun aunt and uncle, without all the duties of parenting.
We’d have Reese over to our house from time to time and spend the day watching movies and playing games, sending her home before the drudgery of bedtime.
When she was young, Elliott taught her how to play hide-n-seek.
Reese was a quick learner. I remember finding her at the back of my closet and not just standing there, but fully dressed in a shirt and skirt of mine and in my shoes.
At least twice I looked right past without ever noticing she was there.
Hidden in plain sight. Elliott was impressed; he said she was like some child prodigy of hide-n-seek, which she thought was hilarious, though she had no idea what prodigy meant.
But this new Reese, this defiant seventeen-year-old Reese, is almost a stranger to me. That girl that we knew as a child isn’t
her. It’s someone else. “She was just mad. She said things she didn’t mean. We’ve all done that.”
“No, you’re right,” he says. “Of course she didn’t. Like you said, she was just mad.” The change of heart is too quick; I
can see in his eyes that he doesn’t believe it.
My head throbs. When I looked at my face in the mirror before, it was swollen from crying and there were tiny marks, like
broken blood vessels, on my cheeks and around my eyes from vomiting. The kids, all three of them, sit on the unmade sofa bed
in their makeshift pajamas like deer in headlights, their eyes glazed over and stunned. Mae’s face is puffy from crying half
the night. As I watch, she sniffles and then wipes her nose with a sleeve. Beside her, Cass stares down at her own hands before
getting up and moving to the loft to be alone.
“You’ll take care of the kids?” I ask, worrying about them, feeling conflicted by the need to find Reese but also my desire
to stay here and be with Cass and Mae, to comfort them.
“Of course I will.” I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. “Are you sure you can do this?” Elliott asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” he says, reaching out for me and pulling me close, “if you’re sure. Just be careful. Stay alert. Stay with people
and don’t ever let yourself be alone.”
“I won’t.”
The police officer steps out of his car when I go outside. Up close, he’s maybe fifty years old, tall, lanky and balding.
“Everything alright, ma’am?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, moving down the steps, veering away from him and in the direction of my own car.
“Going somewhere?”
I stop and turn back, feeling my breath quicken, that flight-or-fight reaction kicking in. “Am I not allowed to leave?” I
ask, defensive.
He waits too long to answer. When he does, he asks, “How can I keep you safe when I don’t know where you are?”
I tell him, “I’m going to help the search party look for my niece.” I don’t ask if that’s allowed, or if I’m just supposed
to stay in the cottage all day like a prisoner.
As I jog the rest of the way to the car, my neck stiffens with that sense of being watched.
I open the door and get in. I slam the door closed and lock it.
From the front seat of the car, I search the woods, wondering if that sense of being watched is just my imagination or if
it isn’t my subconscious, picking up on something my eyes cannot see.