Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
1
The roar of the bonfire is hard to distinguish from the sound of the trailer-park boys and the schoolgirls who holler and dance in the shadow of the Tall Bones. It is a small-town sort of night—the last that Whistling Ridge will see for many years to come, although nobody knows this yet—in the kind of town where coyotes chew on stray cigarette butts and packs of boys go howling at the moon.
Abigail Blake turns at the edge of the trees and smiles at Emma. This will be the memory of Abigail that stays with Emma long after the rest has been drunk away: long and pale as a moonbeam, flyaway red hairs curling gently in the damp air, hands buried deep in her sleeves, standing on the balls of her feet, like she might take off running at any moment.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. Her eyes give her away, darting ahead into the forest. They are not long into September, but fall comes quicker in the mountains, and already the early night has stolen over the pines, their opaque shadows broken only by the beam of a single flashlight.
“But how are you going to get home?” There’s a little dent in her brow, Emma thinks, just the right shape and size for the pad of her thumb.
“Em.” It’s as if she has to remember to smile again. “I’ll just call a cab or something. I’ll figure it out. Really, it’s fine.” She looks at the light hovering among the trees and, behind it, the vague shape of a boy. Emma follows her gaze, but it’s too dark to make him out properly.
“I don’t think you should go.”
Abigail’s grin looks so tight it must hurt. “It’s just fun, Em. Don’t worry about it.”
Emma does worry about it. She isn’t tall like Abigail, doesn’t have the same gap between her thighs like all teenage girls want; the only thing her father ever gave her was his Latino complexion, and it has dogged her all the way through school; she isn’t the kind of girl boys ask to go into the woods with them, so what would she know? But still she shakes her head as she peers into the darkness. “I’ll wait here for you.”
“No.” Abigail takes a deep breath and smiles firmly again. She smells of her strawberry ChapStick. “Come on, Em, let me live a little, huh? I’ll be fine. Promise.”
Abigail Blake is seventeen and, like all girls her age, she believes she’s going to live forever. Deep down, Emma believes it, too, and that is why she leaves her friend there, where the stomped-down grass of the field meets the trees, and slouches back out past the Tall Bones to her car. The fire is still crackling away, its light snaking off the surface of those towering pale rocks. The partygoers cheer as they smash beer cans together and hurl them onto the fire, cooing with delight as the flames whoosh higher into the dark.
Emma doesn’t look back. If she had, she might have seen Abigail hesitate, hand outstretched as if perhaps, in the end, she hadn’t really expected Emma to leave.
There is another young man watching her from the other side of the bonfire. He has a wicked sort of gaze, which makes Emma feel as if she’s shivering even though she isn’t. She has seen him around, lingering on the edge of town since springtime, but she knows him only by sight. A profile sharp enough to cut cocaine, dark hair brushing the collar of his worn-out leather jacket: there is something in the motion of his hips, the way he juts out his chin, that feels like he might have been a highwayman in a previous life. Evening rain has stripped back the heat of the day, and now his cigarette breath hovers in the cool air the way storm clouds do around mountain peaks. When she looks again, he is gone.
“Where have you been?” Dolly Blake stubs out her cigarette as her eldest son tries to close the front door quietly behind him.
“Nowhere.”
Noah emerges from the gloom of the hallway, and for a moment Dolly tenses, seeing in his lean, lanky shape that of her husband. From a distance they are often confused for one another—the same down-and-out plaid shirts, that same flash of red hair, same high-set shoulders, as if they’re worried someone might peek over and see something they shouldn’t. But although at twenty-two he is a man now, Noah’s face retains the gentle edges of youth, which his father, Samuel Blake, exchanged a long time ago for a wiry beard and weathered skin from long hours spent hauling timber. Dolly breathes a sigh of relief.
“You’re lucky your dad went to bed early,” she says. “What did you do to your jeans? They’re filthy.”
“None of your business.”
Above him on the wall hangs the large gemstone cross that Dolly’s mother-in-law gave her as a wedding present nearly a quarter of a century ago. Behind it, Dolly knows, there is a hole where Samuel once punched through the plaster.
“Don’t give me that attitude, young man,” she says, but she isn’t looking at her son, she’s looking at the cross. “I don’t care how old you are, when you live under this roof, you get yourself home on time, and you talk to your mother with more respect.”
“You never give Abi the third degree like this.” He steps around her with his long muddy legs, and beats a hard, familiar tattoo up the stairs to his room.
Dolly sighs and digs her nails into her scalp. She wishes he weren’t the only one she can stand to lose her temper around, but she knows she has to lose it sometimes. Otherwise one day she might just burst.
Emma turns the car radio on, some late-night psychic—who says nothing of the events to come—so she drives away from Abigail without a second thought. Puddles on the county road flash yellow in her headlights, and the smell of wet tarmac coming through the air vents reminds her of wax crayons. She knows the route well, even at night. On either side steep banks are covered with conifers, leading up to dusty mountain peaks where the trees grow stumpy and fade out altogether as they approach the timberline.
After a mile, the tree line following the curve of the road breaks away. Pine bark beetles have infected the evergreens here, and huge patches of the woodland are gray and brittle. In the daylight, through their thin dead branches, she can glimpse the blackened remains of the old Winslow house, hollowed out by fire over a century ago. Usually she can look right through the empty windows all the way to the other side, and even though she knows she won’t be able to see a thing in the dark, Emma glances at it as she drives by, just out of habit.
There is a light.
Something glimmers behind an old window frame. Emma slows the car, but the light swings suddenly, sharply, and is snuffed out.
She will tell the police this when they question her, eventually, plundering all the last precious details she has of Abigail.
The bonfire has been tamped down and now the blackened circle of its remains looks like somewhere a UFO might have come to land. The Tall Bones are silent silhouettes against a night sky silvered with moonlight. The partygoers have scattered back down the road toward Jerry Maddox’s trailer park, or crammed into their friends’ cars and driven home through the woods, so there is no one around to hear the gun when it goes off.
Tomorrow is Sunday, and the Blakes cannot yet imagine that they will sit in their usual lonely row of fold-up plastic chairs at church without Abigail beside them. Tomorrow is Sunday, and Emma is supposed to bleach Abigail’s hair for her, because Abigail is tired of being ginger, even though she knows her parents will say she looks cheap. Tomorrow is Sunday, and Emma lies awake listening to the coyotes wail and wishes she were one of them. In the morning she will check her phone, void of any reassurance from Abigail that she made it safely home. Her eyes will return to that box of bleach, sitting unopened on the dresser, and somehow, she will know.
By the end of the week, Abigail’s face will grin emptily from a hundred flyers tacked to telephone poles and church billboards, flapping in the Rocky Mountain breeze. Samuel Blake will go out into the forest with the police department, crying his daughter’s name into the trees. Noah will scrub the stains on his jeans until his fingers are raw, and Emma will hide the box of bleach under her bed. Dolly, sucking on her cigarettes, will knead the flaky flesh of her scalp, and stare at the big cross hiding the hole in the wall, afraid that, now, all the wrong things will come out.
