Chapter Two
When Logan gets back in the car, he hands me a can of sparkling water, but I can only stare at what he’s holding in his other
hand.
I knew he would go for gross, but . . . “You’re not going to eat that.”
He lifts the piece of pizza to his mouth and takes a big bite. “Delicious.”
It’s positioned on a little tray of flimsy cardboard like it’s just been sitting out. Likely under one of those heat lamps that look like ninth grade biology experiments. “You are going to die of food poisoning.
Gas station pizza?” I point at the grimy building in front of us. “That gas station’s pizza?”
Logan looks smug, likely because this sounds like actual concern from me, which means he’s winning the points. “I told you
I was hungry. It’s surprisingly good. Want a bite?”
“No, I do not want a bite. I want to live to see our next birthday.”
“Suit yourself.” He takes a few more bites, making quick work of the pizza slice, before wiping his hands on a napkin he brought with him. He hands both to me, as if I am his personal trash can.
But I know if I do not take it from him, he will simply drop the grease-splattered items in the middle console. And I will
be stuck smelling reheated soggy bread and broiled cheese for the remainder of the drive. I take one of his unused napkins
and use it as a barrier between my fingers and his trash before touching it.
He pulls our rental car around to the free side of the gas pump where there is a maw of a trash can buzzing with flies, though
it does not look big enough to conceal a whole gross man with a strange tongue and no teeth from view—but I can’t think about
that. Holding my breath, I get out and dispose of the cardboard and grease while Logan gets out to . . . pump gas, apparently.
I have never known him to dirty his hands with such a task, claiming he can just drive out to New Jersey where there are only
full-service gas stations as far as the eye can see. But this is Logan, and there is something innately knowledgeable about my brother. Things come easily to him.
I’d be more bitter about it if that didn’t so often come in handy for me.
He tops off the gas tank, then we’re back to driving. The gas station attendant gave Logan the necessary directions that his
phone wouldn’t, along with some unsolicited advice on the newly opened bow-hunting season.
I am dubious about this interaction. “He looked at you, the only person in a three-hundred-mile radius—I’m just guessing—in
Armani and thought, I know. This man looks like he can shoot some arrows?”
Logan grins. “I can’t help it if people see what they want to see when they look at me, Lexi.”
My stomach is starting to growl, and I know he can hear it, but I refuse to be regretful about rejecting gas station pizza.
“Almost there,” Logan tells me after another eternity slips by.
The world around us is dark now. Where there were farms there is now only the press of night, punctuated by solitary lights
here and there. A farmhouse on a small rise. The suggestion of a road that might lead to something, somewhere. Clusters of
ominous trees, like they’re hiding something.
At least I can see the lights of a town gleaming in the distance ahead of us. It’s a relief. I was starting to picture our
so-called knitting store and supposed house in a collapsed pile of farm things, no doubt in a heap in the middle of an abandoned field.
I was beginning to wonder if the “tornado alley” thing was more literal than I’d imagined, flattening the entire state and leaving these hints of wreckage in its wake. So
enough of a town to require more than a single, solitary light seems promising.
But before we reach the lights, the road changes.
Out of nowhere, in all this flatness, we are suddenly going down a hill, and it takes my stomach with it, so we sink together.
Halfway down, on this increasingly narrow road, there’s a giant, thick wall festooned with bright lights that’s so out of
place with the cluster of houses and the steep street on the other side that I don’t even know what to make of it.
Especially when, as we drive past it, it looks more like a kind of gate made for giants. Towering up above us, made of thick,
heavy, immovable-looking stone. But there are also hinges, so it’s clear it can shut, on the off chance anyone wants to lock down a random little town in Nowhere, Iowa, I guess?
I shake that off, along with a faint sense of unease, and focus on the tall, skinny brick buildings crowded on either side
of the single street. Most of them are dark. A few have lights on in their second stories, but the streetlights are sporadic
and dim—just enough illumination that you could jump from one pool of brightness to the next. If you had to.
Otherwise, everything seems to blend together into a dark, shrouded mystery.
A creepy mystery, but I don’t say that out loud, in case Logan agrees.
Maybe it’s the crush of the darkness that lulls me to sleep. I must be asleep, I must have dozed off, because suddenly I’m in one of my nightmares.
It has to be one of my nightmares, even though I’m in this airless rental car, wearing the same clothes I left New York in, headed
toward who even knows what. Even though everything feels the same as it did a second ago and I don’t remember falling asleep.
Because the road ahead of us might be narrow and steep, but it is leading us toward a tall, sturdy obelisk that seems to glow.
Spotlights, I realize, are beaming up at it from the ground. And at the top, a black-and-gold watch face stares down at us.
It fills me with a creeping sensation, like an army of beetles has taken up residence in my bloodstream.
I look over at Logan and he’s muttering about cell service. Even as the dread is slithering around my neck, like prickling
fingers. I can’t seem to catch a full breath, my lungs constricting like they do when I can’t quite wake up.
It’s a dream. It has to be a dream. I squeeze my eyes shut and mentally shake myself in a bid to wake up. Because I don’t recognize this place. I can’t have
feelings about a clock tower in a weird small town I’ve never been to before.
When I open my eyes, everything is the same. Logan is still complaining bitterly about his cellular signal dropping off the
minute we crossed into town, but I can’t take my eyes off that clock tower.
It feels like it’s staring at me. Like the gold numbers are eyes. Or worse.
You’re being ridiculous, I tell myself. You fell asleep without the usual routine. You almost had a weird dream. Now you’re awake and in control.
Just because it’s crazy inside doesn’t mean I have to act crazy on the outside.
“What the hell am I supposed to do if I can’t make calls?” Logan continues to grouse, because he really does think the world
turns entirely because he is chained to his cell phone like the dog I saw in a yard halfway up this hill, staring out at us
as we went by like there was no point in offering a warning. After a moment, my brother ducks his head a little and lets out
a low whistle. “What’s a small town need with a giant clock tower like that?”
Nothing good, something in my untrustworthy mind whispers.
But I know better than to say it out loud.
When Logan pulls into one of the many unclaimed parking spots along the main drag, with that clock tower still looming in
front of us, he has a faint frown on his face.
“That’s the knitting shop, I guess,” he says, pointing to a small building that looks like all the other small buildings around
here to me. “But where the hell is the house?”
He picks up his phone and the frown goes deeper. I have to study the contours of his frown or I will stare at that clock tower
and start screaming. Like this is a nightmare I’m somehow stuck in while awake.
Maybe a building can’t actually hurt me, but I haven’t survived as a woman in this world without listening to a gut instinct
or two. And my gut instinct says this place is not safe.
Except a clock tower is not a forked-tongued creep who loomed up out of nowhere, so I set my teeth and look at the world around us.
It’s all shadows and dark windows. There are streetlights, but they don’t feel like enough.
Where are the signs that people live here and aren’t just rotting corpses in these phantom houses lurking all around?
The bright face of the clock tower reflects in a window across the street from us, distorted in the glass. For a flash of
a second, I swear I see an actual face in that window, lit up by the tower’s light. A man’s face. Chiseled and intense and—
Then it disappears. A scream rises in my throat. Someone’s watching us. In the window. Someone is—
Or you’re losing it again, Lexi. Because there is clearly nothing going on in that darkened storefront or anywhere else along this street. And since I have,
on more than one occasion, lost it and drawn a little too much attention in the process, I remember my therapist’s guidance to breathe through my panic.
And to keep the crazy inside, where it belongs.
Midas, Iowa, at night isn’t giving much of a hint that there are any people living here, but I imagine blood-curdling screams
might draw someone’s attention. And it might have taken me a long time, something like twenty-eight years, but I have learned how to avoid that
kind of attention.
Unless blood-curdling screams at night are par for the course in this place.
I shiver at the thought. Count it away. One-two-three, everything is fine. One-two-three, your imagination can’t hurt you.
“I still can’t get any service,” Logan mutters, poking at his phone irritably. He squints up and into the dark. “Sit tight.”
Then he makes a move to get out of the car.
Normally, Logan telling me to do anything would have me doing the exact opposite, but no way am I getting out of this mildewy
car to come face-to-face with that clock tower or a face in a window, or any of these horrors that I know exist only in my mind.
So I sit tight while he rummages around in the trunk. He returns with a manila envelope. I recognize it because it’s what our grandmother’s lawyer sent with all the important legal documents Logan looked over, and also keys to the house. And the shop, presumably.
Logan pulls out some papers and reads through them, sitting there so casually with the door open and the interior lights on,
like he wants to pinpoint our location for any potential assailants lurking about. Like, say, in that looming clock tower.
“Behind the knitting shop,” he says after a moment or two, as if it’s the answer to all our prayers. He makes a move like he’s going
to get out of the car again.
“Where are you going?” I screech at him.
“To walk behind the knitting shop and find our accommodations.”
“And why can’t we stay at a hotel?” I demand, even though I know the reasons. “Like normal people?”
The only place to stay even remotely close to the center of Midas—that wasn’t already booked up, for inexplicable reasons
I suspect I will never comprehend, especially now that I’ve seen the place—was a highway rent-by-the-hour motel.
I have never been in a motel. And this is no time to break that streak of good luck and good taste.
Logan knows better than to answer rhetorical questions. “Come on. Let’s go. The lawyer assured me the house was in good shape.”
“Yes, because lawyers never lie.”
He glares at me, which helps a little. But I shake my head. I am not leaving this car.
More accurately, I’m not sure I can. My body feels welded into place. Panic is sticky.
“Lexi,” he says, with enough gentleness I feel almost honor bound to get my shit together and deal with this. “I’m going to walk around the back. I’m going to check out the house. You can either come with me, or you can stay here.”
I cross my arms over my chest and look forward, but in front of me is that clock tower and . . . While I’d rather die most days than do what Logan says, just on principle, the minute he closes his door and leaves me alone I’m immediately scrambling
out of the car.
He’s getting our luggage out of the trunk. I jump a foot at the sound of the trunk door slamming into the near silence of
the night. Even though I know it’s coming, I jump again when the car beeps because Logan has locked it.
Without even an I thought so, he rolls my suitcase to me. Then he starts walking.
Into the shadows.
Into the dark.