Chapter 19
NINETEEN
Emma
I once read about women who could find water with a willow stick and never believed it.
If you’d asked me whether some people have a built-in radar for trouble, I’d have said yes, but the stick thing was out of my realm.
Following Daniel through that part of the woods made me reconsider.
He led with his chin, broad shoulders hunched like he expected a punch in the face from the scenery itself, and yet he kept going, deeper, faster, off-trail.
My thighs ached by the second mile, and I had begun to suspect that Beth was either too winded to complain or too scared to speak.
The air had gone soft and heavy, each breath a little harder to catch.
Trees grew closer together, thick pines and poplar with lichen as big as palms. Daniel’s boots thudded in rhythm with my pulse.
Beth’s huffing kept time behind me, while Alice, whose little legs should’ve lagged, practically jogged at Daniel’s side.
“This is weird. Isn’t this weird?” Beth finally croaked.
“It is,” Daniel answered without turning. “But the trail’s clear.”
Beth was not reassured. She yanked a bramble out of her hair and teased, “Alice, are you sure your grandmother even came this way? Maybe she’s sitting in a Denny’s, eating pancakes and laughing at us.”
Alice didn’t slow. She kept her gaze locked on Daniel’s back, her face pulled taut. “She’s not at Denny’s,” Alice said, almost growling. “She’s here. I can tell.”
Daniel raised a fist and stopped short. I nearly barreled into him, my hand pressed to his lower back, and the warmth surprised me. He held still, head cocked.
“No birds,” he murmured.
He was right. Not a single trill. No woodpecker. Not even the endless, irritating twit of a chickadee. It was a silence that had density. The wind itself bent around the trees and left us in a pocket of stillness, as if we’d been placed in a bell jar.
Alice shivered. “Maybe we should turn on a flashlight,” she said, her teeth chattering even though it wasn’t all that cold.
“It’s eight in the morning,” I said, then realized I wasn’t sure about that anymore. I checked my phone. No service, but at least I could tell the time. 7:57 a.m., but the sky above looked like someone had thrown a heavy coat over the sun.
“This place is so weird. I can see why you got confused about how many days you were out here,” I told Alice.
Alice nodded, but she looked spooked. “With you guys, at least, it’s easier to stay focused. To remember who I’m looking for and why I’m in the woods. Something about this place made me feel crazy.”
“Don’t worry. We’re not going anywhere,” Henry told her softly.
Daniel plucked his battered flashlight from his belt, snapped it on, and gave it to Alice. “Lead the way, kid. You know what you’re looking for.”
“Maybe she’ll see something we don’t,” I said. She moved with uncanny certainty, her flashlight beam as steady as a surgeon’s hand. It traced the ground, the bark, the burned-out holes punched through the trunks of older trees.
I reached to touch one, the edges charred and smooth like the inside of a church bell. “What could’ve done this?” I asked.
Beth peered down at it. “Lightning, right?”
Daniel shook his head. “No scorch marks up the trunks. No recent storms, either. It’s not natural.”
“‘Not natural.’ Great,” Beth repeated. “What is it then, like, a death ray?”
He shrugged, but his jaw was tight, and I recognized the look. Someone steeling himself for something he’d seen before and never wanted to see again.
The holes kept getting bigger and more frequent.
Soon, entire trunks were hollowed out, as if something hungry had bitten through decades of tree in one gulp.
Alice led us through these, her breathing so shallow I thought she might faint.
She stopped at a patch of soft dirt where the ground was peppered with holes the size of gopher burrows, all radiating from a single spot.
She squatted. “Grandma was here,” she whispered. “Her perfume is—” Her nostrils flared. “It’s under everything. Like she was fighting something.”
I squatted next to her. “You think she got hurt?”
Alice didn’t answer. Daniel crouched low and sniffed the air. “Smells like chemicals. And copper.” He scraped the soil, exposing a shred of pinkish wool.
I showed it to Alice. “Is this hers?”
Alice nodded, tears filling her eyes.
Beth crossed her arms and studied the trees with open suspicion. “You know what’s wrong? The shadows.” She pointed. “They’re wrong. Look, those should all point the same way, right?”
She was right. The light, what little made it through the canopy, threw the shadows in spirals, some east, some west, some straight up into the arms of other trees.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Daniel stood, grunted, and took the flashlight from Alice. He aimed it at the ground, then swept the beam in a wide arc. “There’s tracks,” he said. “But not human.”
He was wrong. There were human tracks. Several, pressed deep into the mud. But the stride was off, long and dragging, the heels never lifting. I imagined a person walking with their shoes full of stones. Or maybe a sleepwalker, dead on their feet.
Beth started counting the tracks aloud, her voice a whisper. “One, two, three... But there’s only us and grandma, right?”
Alice said, “And the thing that took her.”
“You think something took her?” Daniel asked.
She nodded. “Something supernatural.”
I hated that I believed her, but I did. The air had a charge, like a power line about to snap. Daniel tried to shield Alice, but she ducked under his arm and pushed on ahead, deeper into the gloom. She was the smallest of us, but nothing was going to stop her.
Beth and I shared a look.
The trail narrowed. Tree limbs reached for us, sometimes catching in our hair or scratching at our cheeks.
I lost all sense of distance and time, my calves burning, knees screaming, but Daniel never let us stop.
The only thing that made me keep going was Alice’s straight back and relentless shuffle.
The fog rolled in without warning. I’d grown up in Maine and knew what coastal fog could do, but this was thicker than soup, and cold. My fingers went numb in seconds. I could see my own breath, even though I wore a thermal under my hoodie and a thick scarf.
Daniel stopped again, his silhouette suddenly huge and inhuman in the white. “Don’t move,” he said. The words thudded out of him, heavy as anvils.
The fog pressed close. It bent the world into nothing but the ground at my feet and the back of Daniel’s head. Then a shape loomed. Man-shaped, but not quite. It hovered, just above the leaves, pale and blurry.
“Turn back,” the shape whispered.
Alice was not impressed. “Where’s my grandma?” she demanded. “What did you do to her?”
The shape’s head jerked, as if yanked by a string. It didn’t answer at first. It pulsed, shuddered, then seemed to grow clearer, the jawline sharpening into a face. The lips moved, but the sound came from everywhere at once.
“Turn back before it’s too late. This is not your place.”
“We can’t leave,” I said, forcing my words out slowly, “unless you give us a reason.”
The ghost stared at me, eyes black as creosote. “You want your grandmother. But I want something, too.”
“What?” Alice snapped.
“I want to know.”
“To know what?”
The ghost grimaced, as if it were chewing glass. “I don’t remember. But something happened here, and I can’t leave until I know.”
Beth’s hands shook. “You’re dead,” she said. “You’re a ghost.”
“Died somewhere close, if your ghost is stuck here,” Daniel said, glancing around the trees.
The ghost shimmered, almost as if it were nodding. “My name is Cody, that’s about all I remember, and that I’m buried in the ground. But I never got to rest.”
Alice wiped her nose and said, “Did you take my grandma?”
The ghost’s mouth worked open and closed. “She saw me. I took her. I need her help.”
“Why her?” I asked, stepping forward.
“She can see me. She remembers things. She can help me remember.”
Daniel eyed the ghost, then turned to Alice. “Is this how your grandma’s gifts work?”
Alice nodded, her face set. “She talks to ghosts sometimes. Helps them move on.”
“Will you let her go if we help?” I asked, looking at the shadow thing in the eyes.
The ghost’s hands twisted. “If you solve my death. If you remember for me who ended my life.”
Beth raised her hand, like a student in a class she hated. “What if we can’t?”
“Then she’ll stay here. With me. Forever.”
Silence. Even Alice hesitated.
I cleared my throat, my neck burning with old anger and new fear. “Then you’ll show us the body. And everything you remember.”
The ghost stilled, then spread its arms. “Follow.”
It slid away through the fog, and Daniel fell in behind it, his hand never leaving Alice’s shoulder. Beth caught my sleeve and whispered, “Do you believe this?”
I nodded. “I do.”
Beth squeezed my hand, a little too hard. “Okay,” she said, “let’s go remember a murder.”
The path underfoot was soft, almost spongey, and the fog seemed to swallow all the light. Only the ghost’s dim outline pulled us forward. I didn’t look back, not even when I heard something shuffle in the shadows.