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  For my mother, Jane

  1

  The roar of the bonfire is hard to distinguish from the sound of the trailer-park boys and the schoolgirls who holler and dance in the shadow of the Tall Bones. It is a small-town sort of night—the last that Whistling Ridge will see for many years to come, although nobody knows this yet—in the kind of town where coyotes chew on stray cigarette butts and packs of boys go howling at the moon.

  Abigail Blake turns at the edge of the trees and smiles at Emma. This will be the memory of Abigail that stays with Emma long after the rest has been drunk away: long and pale as a moonbeam, flyaway red hairs curling gently in the damp air, hands buried deep in her sleeves, standing on the balls of her feet, like she might take off running at any moment.

  “I’ll be fine,” she says. Her eyes give her away, darting ahead into the forest. They are not long into September, but fall comes quicker in the mountains, and already the early night has stolen over the pines, their opaque shadows broken only by the beam of a single flashlight.

  “But how are you going to get home?” There’s a little dent in her brow, Emma thinks, just the right shape and size for the pad of her thumb.

  “Em.” It’s as if she has to remember to smile again. “I’ll just call a cab or something. I’ll figure it out. Really, it’s fine.” She looks at the light hovering among the trees and, behind it, the vague shape of a boy. Emma follows her gaze, but it’s too dark to make him out properly.

  “I don’t think you should go.”

  Abigail’s grin looks so tight it must hurt. “It’s just fun, Em. Don’t worry about it.”

  Emma does worry about it. She isn’t tall like Abigail, doesn’t have the same gap between her thighs like all teenage girls want; the only thing her father ever gave her was his Latino complexion, and it has dogged her all the way through school; she isn’t the kind of girl boys ask to go into the woods with them, so what would she know? But still she shakes her head as she peers into the darkness. “I’ll wait here for you.”

  “No.” Abigail takes a deep breath and smiles firmly again. She smells of her strawberry ChapStick. “Come on, Em, let me live a little, huh? I’ll be fine. Promise.”

  Abigail Blake is seventeen and, like all girls her age, she believes she’s going to live forever. Deep down, Emma believes it, too, and that is why she leaves her friend there, where the stomped-down grass of the field meets the trees, and slouches back out past the Tall Bones to her car. The fire is still crackling away, its light snaking off the surface of those towering pale rocks. The partygoers cheer as they smash beer cans together and hurl them onto the fire, cooing with delight as the flames whoosh higher into the dark.

  Emma doesn’t look back. If she had, she might have seen Abigail hesitate, hand outstretched as if perhaps, in the end, she hadn’t really expected Emma to leave.

  There is another young man watching her from the other side of the bonfire. He has a wicked sort of gaze, which makes Emma feel as if she’s shivering even though she isn’t. She has seen him around, lingering on the edge of town since springtime, but she knows him only by sight. A profile sharp enough to cut cocaine, dark hair brushing the collar of his worn-out leather jacket: there is something in the motion of his hips, the way he juts out his chin, that feels like he might have been a highwayman in a previous life. Evening rain has stripped back the heat of the day, and now his cigarette breath hovers in the cool air the way storm clouds do around mountain peaks. When she looks again, he is gone.

  * * *

  “Where have you been?” Dolly Blake stubs out her cigarette as her eldest son tries to close the front door quietly behind him.

  “Nowhere.”

  Noah emerges from the gloom of the hallway, and for a moment Dolly tenses, seeing in his lean, lanky shape that of her husband. From a distance they are often confused for one another—the same down-and-out plaid shirts, that same flash of red hair, same high-set shoulders, as if they’re worried someone might peek over and see something they shouldn’t. But although at twenty-two he is a man now, Noah’s face retains the gentle edges of youth, which his father, Samuel Blake, exchanged a long time ago for a wiry beard and weathered skin from long hours spent hauling timber. Dolly breathes a sigh of relief.

  “You’re lucky your dad went to bed early,” she says. “What did you do to your jeans? They’re filthy.”

  “None of your business.”

  Above him on the wall hangs the large gemstone cross that Dolly’s mother-in-law gave her as a wedding present nearly a quarter of a century ago. Behind it, Dolly knows, there is a hole where Samuel once punched through the plaster.

  “Don’t give me that attitude, young man,” she says, but she isn’t looking at her son, she’s looking at the cross. “I don’t care how old you are, when you live under this roof, you get yourself home on time, and you talk to your mother with more respect.”

  “You never give Abi the third degree like this.” He steps around her with his long muddy legs, and beats a hard, familiar tattoo up the stairs to his room.

  Dolly sighs and digs her nails into her scalp. She wishes he weren’t the only one she can stand to lose her temper around, but she knows she has to lose it sometimes. Otherwise one day she might just burst.

  * * *

  Emma turns the car radio on, some late-night psychic—who says nothing of the events to come—so she drives away from Abigail without a second thought. Puddles on the county road flash yellow in her headlights, and the smell of wet tarmac coming through the air vents reminds her of wax crayons. She knows the route well, even at night. On either side steep banks are covered with conifers, leading up to dusty mountain peaks where the trees grow stumpy and fade out altogether as they approach the timberline.

  After a mile, the tree line following the curve of the road breaks away. Pine bark beetles have infected the evergreens here, and huge patches of the woodland are gray and brittle. In the daylight, through their thin dead branches, she can glimpse the blackened remains of the old Winslow house, hollowed out by fire over a century ago. Usually she can look right through the empty windows all the way to the other side, and even though she knows she won’t be able to see a thing in the dark, Emma glances at it as she drives by, just out of habit.

  There is a light.

  Something glimmers behind an old window frame. Emma slows the car, but the light swings suddenly, sharply, and is snuffed out.

  She will tell the police this when they question her, eventually, plundering all the last precious details she has of Abigail.

  * * *

  The bonfire has been tamped down and now the blackened circle of its remains looks like somewhere a UFO might have come to land. The Tall Bones are silent silhouettes against a night sky silvered with moonlight. The partygoers have scattered back down the road toward Jerry Maddox’s trailer park, or crammed into their friends’ cars and driven home through the woods, so there is no one around to hear the gun when it goes off.

  Tomorrow is Sunday, and the Blakes cannot yet imagine that they will sit in their usual lonely row of fold-up plastic chairs at church without Abigail beside them. Tomorrow is Sunday, and Emma is supposed to bleach Abigail’s hair for her, because Abigail is tired of being ginger, even though she knows her parents will
say she looks cheap. Tomorrow is Sunday, and Emma lies awake listening to the coyotes wail and wishes she were one of them. In the morning she will check her phone, void of any reassurance from Abigail that she made it safely home. Her eyes will return to that box of bleach, sitting unopened on the dresser, and somehow, she will know.

  By the end of the week, Abigail’s face will grin emptily from a hundred flyers tacked to telephone poles and church billboards, flapping in the Rocky Mountain breeze. Samuel Blake will go out into the forest with the police department, crying his daughter’s name into the trees. Noah will scrub the stains on his jeans until his fingers are raw, and Emma will hide the box of bleach under her bed. Dolly, sucking on her cigarettes, will knead the flaky flesh of her scalp, and stare at the big cross hiding the hole in the wall, afraid that, now, all the wrong things will come out.

  2

  Hold still, Jude.” Dolly catches her youngest son by the chin and keeps him in place while she dabs concealer over the bruise around his eye. He winces, but she only shakes her head and grips him tighter, forefinger and thumb pinching deep into the skin. “Got no one to blame but yourself. You know what your dad’s like if you wake him early.”

  Samuel won’t like the makeup. No boy of mine wears makeup, he’ll say. At sixty-two he is old enough to be her father, and often that line seems blurred enough that Dolly will do what he says without question. But today will be different. He won’t like the makeup, but he’ll like it better than everyone at church staring and whispering behind their Bibles. No wonder the daughter’s gone, they’ll say, in a house like that. No wonder the daughter’s dead.

  Dead. She heard the word in Safeway the other day, muttered in the frozen-food aisle. Mr. Wen from the liquor store and Carla Patterson, who taught Abigail in her sophomore year, said it softly under the hum of strip lighting and refrigerators, hoping perhaps that they wouldn’t be heard. At least they had the good grace to look guilty when they saw Dolly round the corner with her empty shopping cart. She didn’t say anything, as she so often doesn’t, perhaps because she wasn’t really sure how it made her feel.

  Dead. It sounded like a stop at the end of a sentence. She imagined sending a telegram and replacing all the stops with “dead”: Abigail will be just fine dead Abigail will come back dead. By then it had been only a week since her daughter’s vanishing, but time felt strange and long to Dolly, as if it were being stretched out like taffy on one of those old machines you sometimes saw in candy-store windows.

  Two weeks exactly now, and Dolly has gone to the grocery store almost every day, just so she can rest her weight on the handle of a shopping cart and let it drag her along. Meandering through the aisles gives her something to do. She refuses to be like those women in movies who go stir crazy sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. Time keeps on going, and so, she thinks, it can’t be the end of the sentence yet.

  In the bathroom, Jude sticks out his bottom lip, an action he has learned from his older brother, although in all other ways he and Noah are chalk and cheese. Ten years apart, Jude is slight where Noah is all broad shoulders, dark-haired and unopinionated, and with a tendency toward neatness, where his brother has the dirt of this town embedded in the whorls of his fingerprints. And then, of course, there’s Jude’s leg. A shattered bone, struck too hard like white-hot metal on a blacksmith’s anvil, all beat out of shape. No boy should have to walk with a stick at twelve.

  Dolly applies another layer of concealer to her son’s swollen eye socket but does not meet his gaze. Poor unplanned Jude. Jude, whom she tried to escape by sitting in scorching baths until the water turned cold and dirty, drinking two-thirds of a bottle of gin from her husband’s liquor cabinet before she threw up. A cruel trick of the Lord’s, she’d thought back then, to bring another child into this house. She still wonders if she wasn’t right.

  “There,” Dolly says, taking a step back to assess her handiwork. The swelling will take a day or two to go down, but at least she’s managed to neutralize the insolent red left by her husband’s hand.

  “Do I have to go?” Jude leans in closer to the gray-edged mirror, his fingers hovering around his eye, as though he wants desperately to touch the bruise and make sure it’s still him underneath. “I don’t feel like church. Everyone will look at us.”

  Of course they’ll look at us, Dolly thinks. The remaining Blakes have spent the last two Sundays knocking back can after can of Lone Star, or wandering grocery-store aisles, or lying on the bed in the middle of the day listening to the rhythmic click of the ceiling fan. (Dolly doesn’t know what Noah’s been doing, but she’s noticed him looking over his shoulder more than usual.) Yesterday, however, Pastor Lewis caught her pretending to read the ingredients on a bag of sliced bread. He announced that the First Baptist Church of Whistling Ridge would be holding a special service this Sunday so that the congregation could dedicate their prayers to Abigail and the Blake family, and everyone sure would love to see them there. Dolly was taken aback by how easily he could stand there and lie to her face like that, when they both knew exactly what the congregation thinks of her family. But it was not a request, however many times he smiled and patted her on the arm.

  We can pray or be prayed for, she thinks, and perhaps it is this sense of having to choose between active and passive that makes her so determined to go. She tries to explain this to Jude, but he just chews on his lip and looks sulkily at the floor.

  “Maybe Abi ran away because she didn’t want to go to church anymore,” he says, his voice so thick with scorn that Dolly feels like she could smack him too. Instead, she turns away and fumbles for a cigarette in her pocket. Her hands itch with a want to break something—so break yourself, not Jude. After all, if anyone’s to blame here…

  “Abigail didn’t run away,” she tells him, and he has to believe her because she is his mother. Abigail would never have just up and left her like this, no matter what the police seem to think. But Dolly’s fingers shake as she puts the cigarette to her lips, plugging her mouth from saying any more. If Abigail didn’t run away, then what happened to her? She hears it again in the monosyllabic click of the lighter. Dead.

  * * *

  It’s all her fault. That’s what they’re saying at school. The corridors smell like glue and cleaning products, and Emma presses herself deep into the corner of the girls’ bathroom, trying to drown out the echo of their voices, knocking back the travel-sized whiskey bottles her mother keeps for trips they never take.

  “Can you believe Emma Alvarez just left her there?”

  “OhmyGod, do you think that’s why she got taken?”

  “She didn’t get taken. She ran away with that gypsy boy.”

  “She did not. I saw him at the diner last week.”

  “Yeah, well, I heard she got eaten by coyotes.”

  “I’d never leave my friend to get eaten by coyotes.”

  Her mascara turns her tears black, and she rams her knuckles into her mouth so that nobody can hear her sobbing.

  A week after the party at the Tall Bones, Principal Handel holds a special assembly in the gym, where she asks the students of the high school and middle school to keep Abigail in their thoughts and prayers, and to extend their support to her family and friends. Little Jude Blake chews on his lip and sinks into his shirt collar like he hopes nobody will notice him. Emma watches it all through heavy-lidded tipsy eyes and thinks, That’s it. All two of us here. Abigail’s family and friend. There’s no one else who remembers the sight of grass stains on Abi’s socks, sitting out on the old couch at the bottom of the Blakes’ backyard through countless summers; or copying each other’s homework and eating candy that turned their tongues blue. No one else who heard her say, when she was thirteen: “I’m going to be an artist.” Emma had snorted and said, “What, in Whistling Ridge?” and Abi had told her no way, she was going to catch a bus to Denver and never look back. This had seemed very impressive at the time. Abi was like something from a movie. She’d looked wide-eyed at Emma then
, and added, “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

  Now Emma downs another tiny bottle in the bathroom, and pukes when she gets home.

  * * *

  That night Emma dreams of a coyote pack screaming among the trees. She plows through them with her car and their blood gums up her tires. Then she’s bleaching Abigail’s hair, and while their nostrils sting with the reek of ammonia, they sip on Samuel Blake’s bourbon. It burns, it burns, Abigail keeps saying, or she’s mouthing it, or the words just appear in Emma’s head. Abi kisses her, spilling blood onto Emma’s lips, down the front of her body, her chest, her arms, her hands…

  When Emma wakes it is barely dawn. The mountains are dark and steaming with fresh September rain, and she can smell dried vomit in her nostrils from when she threw up earlier. Wrapping herself in her blanket, she sneaks to the bathroom and washes her hands, over and over, until they’re so cold from the water she can hardly feel them. Melissa must hear the faucet because, wordless, she comes and puts her arms around her. When Emma finally stops shivering, they shuffle into Melissa’s bed, and she strokes Emma’s hair until they fall asleep—mother and daughter curved like some strange rune against the sheets. The next morning, Melissa pours away any remaining alcohol she can find, but they say nothing about it. Emma’s grandmother liked to say that people in glass houses should not throw stones, and Melissa has been aged prematurely by the guilt of marrying a man who could not love her enough to stay, or so she says.

  Before Abi’s disappearance, before the drink, Emma never realized how many decisions she had to make just to get through the day. Am I going to bother having breakfast? Should I drive to school or get the bus? Who should I sit next to at lunch? Who is least likely to look at me like I’m gum on the underside of their desk? But starting the day with a drink means there is only one decision to make: Do I keep drinking? Everything else just sort of falls into place after that. She knows her mother means well, but good intentions won’t stop Emma crying in the girls’ bathroom. Christmas break is still months away, and she’s not sure she can make all the decisions that stretch between now and then.