17 & Gone(46)

— 36 — THE girl who had been counselor to Abby Sinclair’s counselor-in-training was in the coffee shop between classes as she said she would be—she just didn’t know how long I’d driven to get to her university’s campus, and that I wasn’t actually “in the neighborhood”

that week as I’d said. In fact, I’d never been down to that part of New Jersey before in my life.

Cassidy Delrio—Cass, as she seemed to want me to call her—was a college sophomore and a sorority girl. She had Greek letters emblazoned on every item of clothing, even her socks. When Abby’s name came up, her face darkened.

At first, I thought, because she must have felt it—the spiraling of Abby’s fate down that road through the pines and what it must mean for everything that came after. Maybe she could see Abby when I couldn’t anymore, and hadn’t since that glance of her in the doorway at school. Maybe I wasn’t the only person alive who knew that something was taking these girls and that Abby, out of all of them, could be grabbed back before she was made to stay there forever.

But no. Cass’s face had darkened for two reasons: The barista hadn’t made her mocha with soy, as she’d asked specifically. And because Abby had made her look bad. No other counselor in the history of Lady-of-the-Pines Summer Camp for Girls had one of her trainees flee in the night like that. And Cass knew this because she was a legacy. Three generations of Delrios had traveled up to that patch of wilderness and rowed those canoes. Not to mention, she herself had been going to Lady-of-the-Pines since she was nine. No way would she get hired back next summer because of what Abby did to her.

“Listen,” Cass said, “the thing about Abby is really pretty simple.” She leaned in, and I felt my breath catch. I noticed how perfectly straight and smooth her hair was and how vacant her eyes were and I wondered what she’d been holding in for all these months.

“Abby wanted to go home, so she went home,” Cass said. “She hated camp, so she left.”

She waited for me to respond to this.

“That’s what you think?” I asked.

(Though I believed she was right about one part: Abby did despise the place— the way it made her itch, no matter what she sat on; the way it smelled, eternally damp like a flood had just washed through; and the way it was so far away from anything interesting. That is, until she met Luke.)

“What the hell was I supposed to do?”

Cass said. “Run after her, beg her to stay? Say pretty please?”

“But you know she didn’t go home . . .” I said. “Don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I know that now. But I didn’t know that then.”

She was sipping on her mocha even though it had cow’s milk in it; I watched as the brown-tinged foam gathered at the corners of her painted lips and I almost motioned for her to get a napkin and dab it off—then I didn’t. I had plain coffee with plain sugar and plain milk, and I took a chug of that.

“What? I’m wrong?” she said.

“I don’t think she ran away,” I said.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“So she really hasn’t called you or e-mailed or texted or anything? Not any of her friends?”

I shook my head—I’d counted myself among Abby’s friends, and Cass hadn’t yet questioned it.

“I guess that is weird,” she conceded.

“Abby was always going on and on about all her friends.”

I wanted to ask their names—so I could track them down, too—but then she started shaking her head, and I felt the shift coming. I felt the turn before she even went there herself.

“But?” I said, helping her along.

“But yeah,” she said. “I mean, she didn’t take her bags.”

“See? She left all her stuff, right?

Wouldn’t she have taken her things if she ran away?”

She nodded, then shrugged. “Not if she got the chance to go, like, out of the blue or something. A ride. That’s what we figured. I mean, it’s not like she didn’t have anything with her. She had her wallet—this hideous plastic purple thing she kept stuffed with pictures and random crap. That thing was so big, she needed, like, a whole purse to carry it.

So if she had her wallet, she probably had her purse, too. Why come back and get the rest of her junk if she had all that?”

“I don’t know . . .” I said.

It was here that her eyes began to glow with something sick and warm coming up to the surface. She’d kept it down all this time and now I guess my questions about Abby worked to put it into words in a way she wasn’t able to before.

“Do you think he killed her?” she said suddenly, and it was so much worse than I thought.

She was nineteen or twenty by now; she’d stick around. Right then I hated her for that, and more still for what she said.

For not caring. For not noticing. For not doing a thing.

No wonder Abby had reached out to me.

“He, who?” I said from between my teeth.

“He, whoever. Whatever freak of nature found her in the woods and murdered her.”

“Wait, what do you mean? Did you see anyone in the woods?”

“No. Of course not. I’m just assuming.”

It wasn’t something I was going to assume. Some of the girls I’d seen lately in the house had met terrible fates before they walked up to the front door—it could be told through their eyes and in the way, sometimes, parts of their bodies would go all pins and needles like they hadn’t gotten used to having legs again.