Keeper(4)

Breathe! my brain urged, but my body was less than cooperative. My arms and legs were so heavy I could barely lift them.

It wasn’t real, the voice whispered to me. Calm down. It was just a figment of your imagination. It wasn’t real.

“It—wasn’t—real,” I wheezed. Breathe. Just breathe.

In my mind, that soothing voice of reason repeated those words over and over again. In through the nose and out through the mouth. Just breathe.

After several agonizing minutes, the tightness in my chest lessened. Relief flooded through me, though my entire body was still trembling.

“It wasn’t real,” I whispered. “It wasn’t real.” But the words sounded strange. My lie was hardly convincing.

When I finally got my breathing down to a normal pace, I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand and blinked away the remaining tears.

“Okay, Lainey, calm down and figure this out.” I gulped down a breath of air and began methodically going over the details in my head, trying to objectively look for something that might explain what had happened. There has to be a logical explanation for this.

“Step one, look at the evidence.” I shivered as I pictured the woman, the feel of her icy skin against mine. “Step two, form a hypothesis.”

The scientific method had never failed me before, and already my nerves seemed a bit calmer. “Probably just a bad combination of stress and exhaustion,” I continued. “People see weird stuff like this all the time, right?”

My hands still gripped the steering wheel, but at least they weren’t shaking anymore. My breathing had evened out. The more I talked myself through it, the more I could—

almost—start to believe it was all just some joke, just a dream or a hallucination my overworked brain had conjured up in the heat of the moment.

Most of the remaining pain in my body had started fading away, dulling into a more manageable ache. My left arm, though, was throbbing.

I glanced down—and yelped. Right above my elbow, in the very spot the woman’s fingers had wrapped around my skin, was an angry, red handprint. The mark, raised and puffy, was the exact silhouette of five slender fingers, not much bigger than my own. I prodded the skin gently with one fingertip and hissed through my teeth; the spot was tender to the touch. It looked and felt like a bad burn, but the pain radiated much deeper.

A fresh layer of goose bumps covered my skin. All former thoughts of reason and logic evaporated. The voice inside my head began its calming mantra once more—It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real—but this time it lacked the confidence and conviction it had before.

There was only one thing I knew to do.

Tearing my eyes away from the handprint, I pulled out my cell phone and tapped the first picture on my list of favorites.

“Hey Styles! What’s up? Did you make it home okay?” Maggie’s cheerful voice on the other end of the line was so comforting, I nearly burst into tears again.

“Maggie,” I breathed into the phone. “I’m so sorry, but I really need you. I’m freaking out. Can you come meet me?”

“What happened? Are you okay?”

I bit my lip, unable to hold back the tears any longer. “No,” I whispered into the phone. “I’m not.”



The playground was deserted. Even with silver patches of moonlight filtering through the trees, the place was dark and a little eerie without a bunch of noisy kids running around.

I hadn’t wanted to stay at the comic book shop, and I couldn’t go home, considering the state I was in, so Maggie had suggested the old playground near my house. It was familiar and soothing in a way. Yet every time a squirrel moved in the trees overhead or the swings squeaked in the wind, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I sat shivering on the edge of the sandbox and gripped the worn plywood edges.

“God, Maggie. Where are you?” I grumbled, checking the time on my phone. The playground was only a few miles from the coffeehouse Maggie had gone to with Heath.

“Lainey!”

Maggie’s curls swayed side to side as she hurried toward me, her brow furrowed. A lump formed in my throat. I swallowed hard, but it barely budged.

“What happened?” She plopped down beside me and reached for my hand.

It took everything I had not to start crying. “Just promise me you won’t say anything, okay? Not to anyone.”

Maggie nodded and drew an X across her heart with her finger. “It’s rule number one in the best friend handbook.”

I took a deep breath and scoured my vocabulary for the perfect words. Ironically, despite the hundreds of flashcards I had made, I was drawing a blank. “It doesn’t make any sense, not even to me.”

“Just tell me, Lainey. We’ll figure it out together.” She squeezed my hand.

“I think I might have witnessed some kind of crime.”

Maggie’s shoulders stiffened. “What?”

“I was walking to my car.” My voice cracked. “It was really dark and there was this woman. . .” My hands started to shake. “She was covered in blood. So much blood!”

Maggie was frozen beside me, her eyes wide.

“But when I tried to get help,” I continued, the words rushing from my lips, “There . . .” The words stuck in my throat. “There was no one there.” My voice came out as a whisper, but the words seemed to hang thick in the air as if I had shouted them.