The Dead and the Dark(23)

That was where she was now: nowhere.

Ashley yanked the truck across the two-lane highway without warning, veering onto a road that followed the lakeshore. The Ford thumped from pavement to gravel, momentarily upheaving the clothes and textbooks from the back seat. Logan gripped the dashboard and closed her eyes to keep from puking, but Ashley was unfazed. She commanded the truck as though she were a cowboy breaking an unruly steed, one hand firmly on the reins, leaning into each bump and skip with ease.

“So, the spot is a ways past the turnout,” Ashley said. She flipped her visor down and plucked a pair of pink sunglasses from its grasp. “I hope you have walking shoes.”

Logan inspected her strappy leather sandals under the glove box. “I’ll be fine. Anything’s a walking shoe if you believe in yourself.”

“Ha,” Ashley huffed, humorless.

The truck skipped over a pothole and Logan’s sunglasses toppled to the floor of the truck. Ashley smiled at her smugly, as if she thought handling bumps in the road was something only girls from Snakebite could do. The Ashley Barton who drove the Ford was different from the one Logan had met at the police station. She was unbothered, casually slouched in her seat, T-shirt shifted carelessly above her belly button. The sun-kissed skin of her stomach was dappled with light brown freckles.

Logan stared for a moment too long.

She sat back up and focused on the road ahead. She was gay, but not thirst-after-straight-horse-girl gay.

After half an hour, the gravel road spilled into a makeshift turnout at the edge of the woods. Lake water pulsed at the shore to their left. Darkness gathered in the junipers ahead of them where the trees huddled too close to see between. Something about the quiet made Logan feel ill.

“This is where you guys go for fun?” Logan asked.

“Not here,” Ashley said, hopping out of the truck. “Follow me.”

Logan did. The nausea she’d felt in the truck only deepened as they crossed the tree line. It wasn’t fear so much as unease. The woods were quieter than they should have been. But maybe this was how woods always were—she wasn’t a frequenter of the great outdoors. A gentle clawing dread rummaged in her gut, warning her that something waited here.

Ashley strode along, touching each trunk as though the bark held secrets. Her lemon-blond ponytail, tucked through the gap in her baseball cap, bobbed between her shoulder blades with each step. Logan couldn’t help imagining her in a granola bar commercial.

When Logan and her fathers lived on the road, they’d spent nights between towns parked on highway shoulders along woods like this. Bugs and passing cars were bad, but the isolation was worse. In the woods, there was no exit. People who died weren’t found for months, if at all. She’d imagined the branches like misshapen fingers beckoning her into the dark, waiting to snatch her away. Maybe it was the woods that had snatched Tristan Granger.

“Here,” Ashley said suddenly. “This is where we were.”

Logan walked down to the water where the dirt dissolved into dust and rock. The shore formed an alcove just large enough to swim in without being seen from the lake proper. A few feet away, half submerged in water, a black bikini top was snagged on a rock. It swayed along the incoming waves like a solemn flag.

“Cute,” Logan said. She hooked her toe under a strap and picked it up. “Yours?”

Ashley flushed. She snatched the bikini top away and flicked the water out before tying it to her purse strap. “It’s not mine, it’s my friend’s.”

“Your friend had a good night,” Logan said. “Better than you, I guess.”

Ashley turned to face the lake. She stepped up to the water line and closed her eyes, one hand on her hip, the other clasping the bikini top as if she were channeling it for clues. Logan was tempted to stand in the same pose and see if any visions of missing boyfriends came to her, but she wasn’t feeling quite that mean. Not today, at least.

“What are we looking for?” Logan asked.

Ashley marched up the bank, back toward the trees. “I was by the fire when I saw him. He went into the trees.”

“You followed him?”

Ashley didn’t answer. She kept walking, disappearing into the trees. Logan half jogged to catch up. The woods were quieter the deeper they went. They reached a clearing where the trees fell away and the lake was only a distant line of blue beyond the branches. A battered cabin stood a few feet ahead of them. There was a sound under the silence. Logan closed her eyes to hear it better.

The woods weren’t quiet. Not completely.

Music drifted between the trees. It was a piano song trickling through the quiet somewhere nearby. The sun filtered through the bare branches, dousing the world in lonely magic. The piano played a ghost song, haunting and strained; unbearably sad, but beautiful.

“You guys have a lot of pianos in the woods?” she asked. Her laugh was breathy, uneasy, because joking about the ghost song was easier than trying to wrap her head around it. It was the kind of thing her dads would investigate on TV. But Brandon and Alejo weren’t here now. Whatever this was, it was real.

“I know where it’s coming from,” Ashley said. She moved toward the cabin. She was too casual about all of it, like it was normal to dive headfirst into the paranormal. Because that was what the piano in the woods had to be—paranormal. As far as Logan could tell, no one lived out here. Aside from the crumbling cabin, the woods were empty.