The Gallagher Place

Prologue

Marlowe hissed as the tip of her pencil snapped.

She cast it aside and shoved at her sketch, lifting her head to look out at the cloudless night.

From her room, she had a view of the wide front yard and the red barn across the street.

She bit down hard on her lip as she stared at the solid structure darkened by shadows.

Her bedroom door was open, and she could hear voices downstairs.

Her father’s somber murmur, her mother’s quick response.

She was supposed to be sleeping. As if that were possible.

She had been up all night. Her whole family had been up, crisscrossing their acres of land, searching.

A heavy exhaustion had settled over her, but she felt like she would never sleep again.

Marlowe grabbed a new pencil from the expensive drawing set she’d been given for her sixteenth birthday and flipped to a new page in her sketchbook.

The charcoal tip flew over the thick, creamy stock.

She had sketched the single birch tree in her front yard a hundred times, gradually layering light and dark strokes for the texture of the bark—more black than you would think—with sharp flicks to angle the serrated curve of a leaf.

It was a simple one-point perspective that she’d mastered.

But she’d yet to produce a sketch of the woods that captured what it felt like to stand among the dizzying trees.

Her heavy pencil strokes filled the page.

She drew tree after tree in rapid succession, the woods becoming an impenetrable wall of black.

The forest surrounding her family’s country home often gave her a feeling she couldn’t place, like there was something just out of frame, like a taunt that dared her to look closer.

She felt it every time she heard a twig snap or the faint sound of footsteps in the layers upon layers of fallen leaves.

Even the thought of it made the back of her neck prickle.

“It’s just your imagination,” her older brother, Nate, always explained. “We’re the only ones out here,” he would say. He didn’t understand her frustration.

She ripped the drawing out of her sketchbook and threw it onto the pile in her trash can. It was no use; she would never be able to capture the feeling correctly. Not now.

Instead, she forced her trembling fingers into a firm grip and etched out the first few lines of the old barn, its doors wide open.

It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see the details at this time of night; she knew from memory exactly what it looked like—its walls becoming a little more warped with every snowfall, every windy autumn, and every summer’s round of hay loaded into the loft.

She slanted her pencil to shade in the yawning darkness within the barn, and farther back, near the ladder, she tried for a shape.

Broad but sloping shoulders, legs and boots shrouded in shadow.

A nameless figure tucked away in the corner of the barn.

She imagined him stalking through the open doors, over the hayfield, and into the thickest part of the woods.

Marlowe felt a sob rattle in her chest as she took a breath, and fresh tears fell onto the page, watering down the pencil marks, making everything blurry and gray.

It didn’t matter. She couldn’t even attempt to sketch the stranger’s face, because she had never seen him.

But he wasn’t in her head. He was out there. He had to be.