Come Find Me(65)

“Maps and a flashlight,” she says. “Nolan, I think I like you.” She nudges my shoulder.

“If I knew this was all it would take,” I say, and she smiles. We’re procrastinating. We’re frayed nerves. Misplaced energy. Getting ready to leave a car in the rain in the middle of the night at an empty factory, walking around back to some alleged building, a location given to us by a girl neither of us knows, other than the fact that she caught us trespassing.

This is stupid.

At least it’s not raining as hard, but let’s be honest, rain is rain, once you’re out in it for more than a few minutes. I feel it in my socks, between my toes. My sneakers are a lost cause.

Kennedy walks forward, and I follow her, shining the light in her path. The rain hits the puddles in the dirt on a poorly marked path, overgrown with weeds, as we circle the main building.

Behind it, the trees stretch out in the distance. Until the dark building comes into focus. It seems like just another abandoned building out here, with the windows boarded up, the wooden steps half broken off. It looks like it was once part of the factory but has since been left to disrepair, same as the others. We duck under one of the large oak trees, which shelters us from most of the falling rain.

“Do you see that?” Kennedy says, and it takes me a second to notice what she’s pointing out.

    The soft glow of a light, from the corner of one of the plywood boards covering the window. A corner forgotten. A sign that not everything is dark and abandoned out here. At least, as Hunter Long’s sister implied, not at night.

We sneak around toward the back, where there’s a door, boarded up. I’m not sure how they get inside, but there’s something happening here. Kennedy stands on a rotted bench under a window, where there’s another sliver of light peeking through.

She peers inside, then quickly backs away. She points at the gap and whispers, “There are people inside.”

I step up beside her, but it’s hard to share the tiny gap in the window boards. We have to take turns, and even then, we can only see random streaks of fabric moving in the distance.

I pry my fingers into the gap—one of the boards is just barely hanging on; one nail in the corner, balanced on the piece of wood below. I pull it out and let it swing quietly down, and then we’re staring into the open expanse of what looks like an abandoned shipment center.

There are crates in the corners, broken down and emptied. And in the center of the space, three guys sit in a circle of metal chairs around a lantern. Other than those crates and the wrappers and trash littering the floor, the room is barren. There are sleeping bags behind the guys, making it seem like they’re planning to stay here for the night.

Kennedy presses her face up against mine at the window. The kid facing us has white-blond hair, and he laughs at something another one says. Her hand comes down on my wrist. “That’s him.”

    She pulls back from the window, looking at me. “We should talk to him,” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say. I get this feeling, this premonition, standing in the rain, peering into the abandoned factory. He’s here because he doesn’t want to be found. What happens, then, if we find him?

Kennedy takes a step to the side and stumbles off the bench. She reaches a hand out and grabs a piece of the wood from the window as she falls. The sound echoes through the night.

The guys inside go silent. I crouch down lower, still peering through the window. The three guys all stare back, but I don’t think they can see me. And then on instinct, Hunter dives for his bag. I brace myself, thinking he’s going to grab a weapon, but he doesn’t. He grabs his bag, and he runs in the other direction, for the door.

Before I can reach for Kennedy’s arm, she takes off around the building.

Everything clarifies: the night, the rain, this moment. I take off after her, on instinct. She’s a blur in the night that I’m following through the trees. My God, she’s fast. “Kennedy, wait!” I shout, but she doesn’t listen.

I hear her shout in the distance. “Please. I’m Elliot’s sister!”

And then I almost collide with her back. She’s standing still between the trees, and across from her, Hunter stares back.

He looks her over closely. “I remember you,” he says.

She nods. “Kennedy. I saw you once, at the house.”

He frowns at me. “Who the hell are you?”

    “My friend,” she answers for me. “We’ve been looking for you.”

His hair drips with rainwater, and he shakes it out. His T-shirt clings to his skinny frame, and his worn jeans and tan boots are also rain-and mud-covered. “I don’t know what happened,” he says.

She steps closer. “But you do know. You know something happened. You know Elliot’s in trouble.”

He looks over our heads, as if he’s expecting someone else to appear from the trees. “I couldn’t stay,” he says. “Not for that. Not for the police.”

Then he brushes by both of us, and I guess that’s a sign that it’s okay to follow him back to the old building. He leans his hip into a side door where the lock has worn through the rotted wood.

It’s cold and impersonal inside, but at least it’s dry, and there’s still that lantern set up in the middle of the room. The other two kids who were here are gone—apparently spooked by our presence. Why would anyone want to stay here, I think, unless they don’t want to be found?