17 & Gone(51)

“I tried,” I said.

She kept staring.

I sat on the end of my bed and watched her in the vanity mirror. It was easier than looking directly at her.

Talking to her reflection came easier, too.

“I told them,” I said. “I told them you didn’t run away. That’s what you wanted me to say, right? But, Abby, I don’t know if they believed me. And that Cassidy girl from the summer? Don’t even ask me what she said. I went down there and I told them . . . I don’t know what else to do.”

I tried to keep my voice down, so my mom wouldn’t hear, but why wouldn’t Abby say something? Anything? Why wouldn’t she blink or nod or give me a sign?

If she told me what to do next—where to go, what to look for—all of this could be over by morning. Any one of the girls could give me a little push like that if she wanted. I mean, if that’s why they contacted me, why wouldn’t they do the simplest, quickest thing? It made me question them, and myself, and all of this. It made me wonder about the dreams and the house that contained them. Either I was meant to stay outside and help, or I was meant to join them inside and never get out. This dark thread of tightrope between the two options couldn’t keep me upright for long.

Abby, though. Abby was different.

She would be the one to give me her secret and let me unravel the answers.

Why else stare at me like that?

I took in all her details in the mirror: the mud spatter and the pieces of road and nature melded to her skin. The center hole in her throat had a faint glow, like she’d taken my pendant and swallowed it. Her lips were a thin, grim line, closed to air and words.

“It would help if you told me,” I said.

“What happened when you were walking back from Luke’s house?”

I watched as she turned slowly, in small, jerky increments, until the back of her body was what faced the mirror and the front of her faced away from me.

I hadn’t done what she wanted. I’d visited her grandparents—I’d done that —but maybe I should have said more.

Maybe I’d been a coward. Maybe I knew how her grandmother would have responded

if

I’d

told

her

the

disconnected

spirit

of

her

lost

granddaughter

was

communicating

through me, a complete stranger, from some open gateway between this world and the next. And that I didn’t know what this meant about where she was now, and I didn’t know what that meant for where she could be found in the future. I barely knew how to explain it myself.

Really, that would have gone over well.

I was going to say this when Abby suggested writing the letter. She’d turned her body deliberately, and I saw what she was facing now: the open notebook on my desk, the pen pointed to the page.

When I sat down at the desk, she came closer, and when I picked up the pen she was at my elbow, smoke-gray breath singeing my skin.

I couldn’t mimic her handwriting, and this wasn’t a session of automatic writing in which I sealed my eyes, cleared my mind, and let the barest touch of her ghostly hand guide my own. I simply wrote down what she wanted to say for her, because she couldn’t hold the pen and write it herself.

For the return address, I used the one on Dorsett Road. I borrowed an envelope and a stamp from my mom’s desk in the kitchen downstairs, and then I carried the letter up to my room to mail from a public post office box in the morning.

But as I was pulling the covers to my chin and curling up to go to sleep, I felt her still there in the room, as if I could do more even than that, as if I should be trolling the back roads in my van, calling out her name, pasting her poster on every telephone pole, visiting the police station every day until they reclassified her case as possible foul play. I thought of Fiona Burke, who I felt sure was observing from a perch somewhere in the shadows, and I thought of how I’d never wondered what happened to her, before this winter, and how I should have. How heartless it was for a girl to be forgotten and buried before there was even anything of her to put in the ground.

I wouldn’t let that happen now, again.

Not to Abby Sinclair.

— 41 — FRIDAY was Deena’s eighteenth birthday party at her boyfriend’s house.

It was also the night I lost any control I had over this. If I’d ever been in control.

First the noise. Not all in my head this time—also in the room around me. It was a raucous party as Deena had been hoping. All the activity didn’t drown out the insistent whispering in my head but drew it out, made it frantic. So much seemed to be happening, and there I was in the midst of it, sitting on a sagging plaid couch with a spiked jug of cranberry juice. I was a part of things in the way any piece of furniture would be.

I’d forgotten anyone could see me and flinched when two girls from school came up asking if I was still into Jamie.

“Wait, is Jamie here?” I said. “Have you seen him?”

They said he was around somewhere, or I thought that’s what they said, but before I could ask why, they’d moved away and somehow taken my jug, the one between my knees that I’d been lifting up, again and again, to my mouth.

It was here that the party turned from me. I became completely detached from it as if a scissor had poked through the page and removed me from the scene.