twenty-five

It wasn’t hard to convince Grant to take me back to the station to search through the database. Even though I knew he was worried about getting caught again by Seth, he was more worried about me. At this point, there was no place safe for me in Amble.

There were still no case files in the database, just like before. There were articles, though, and they were mostly about Ella. But every once in a while one would mention me. After almost an hour, the words began to melt away until all I could see were the facts beneath the surface of the story.

I was Ella’s older sister.

I was fifteen years old.

I was wanted for attempted murder.

Despite the evidence, there was some kind of conclusion the police had come to that kept me from rotting in jail for the rest of my life. But without any official police records, it was impossible to tell why.

Why?

I rubbed the skin between my eyes and stared at what seemed like the hundredth article on the screen. Grant sighed, his back turned toward me as he stared out the window at the dying sunlight.

I clicked off the screen. “I’m done looking.”

He turned around and plopped into the chair next to me. “Good.”

I sighed, burying my face in my hands. “All of this doesn’t even matter anyway, not without records or a file.”

Grant looked at me for a long second. I could almost see the gears churning behind his eyes. “But the thing is, you did have a file. At least, you did a couple years ago, when I first started my training.”

I blinked. “I did?”

Grant tapped his lip. “Yeah. I remember an actual, physical file labeled with your name. Like, one on paper. I remember seeing it in a pile on your dad’s desk when he was entering stuff in the database. See, we used to keep physical files, but then when Seth took over he wanted to put everything in the same place so it couldn’t get lost. So he had your dad input records digitally. I think we still have some of the old files, though, the important ones that Seth wanted to keep copies of.” He shook his head. “I didn’t even think of that file. There’s a chance we still have it.”

My heartbeat quickened. “Did you ever look in it? In my file?”

His face changed then, like the light dimmed in his eyes and the creases above his cheeks gave away that he remembered something he’d long since pushed away. He cocked his head to the side, observing me like he wasn’t quite sure if I would bite his hand off it he got too close. It was the first time he’d ever looked at me like that. It made my heart drop into my stomach.

Then he reached out and placed his hand on my knee. “I’ll be honest. I tried to look in it, but I couldn’t get ahold of it for long enough. I only saw a couple of pages.” He cleared his throat. “Can you remember anything else about those few days after the incident?”

Could I? There were only flashes of that week, starting with the night of the party, like someone had taken a fat eraser and rubbed away all the parts I wouldn’t be able to stand. I remembered the way the Robbie and his friends smelled like sweat and cigarettes. I remembered the icy feeling in my chest when Rae said that Grant wasn’t coming. And I remember the way the stalks smelled like Cherry Blast body spray, and that was how I found her. And bloody orange mittens. And snow.

The next week was even foggier. There was the wet smell of the police station. The therapist making scratching noises with the pencil when she wrote. There was the smudged glass outside Ella’s ICU room. And there was a cameraman for Channel 6 standing on the front steps of the hospital with snowflakes in his dyed hair. There were Dad and Mom’s hurried whispers wafting in from the kitchen before they thought I was awake. And pills. I remember pills. Little pink pills that Mom and Dad and the therapist said were for anxiety. Pills I stopped taking when I met Danny because you’re not supposed to mix those with vodka.

I turned to Grant. “I don’t remember a lot. I drank a lot that night. But I loved my sister, Grant, and I would never try to kill her.”

Grant nodded slowly. “I know you wouldn’t. And that’s what you said in your statement.”

“Oh yeah? What else did I say, since you seem to know me better than I do, Grant ?” My voice was sharp and the words were bitter on my tongue, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why I was panicking over the fact that Grant had seen the inside of my real file. The inside of the real me.

Grant scrunched his nose and the Big Dipper folded in on itself. “I do know you better than you know yourself.” He took a tentative step toward me. “I always have.”

When I didn’t answer, he kept going without even stopping to clear his throat. “I thought it was strange, too, how you never got charged, even with all that evidence piling up. But that thing about the knife in your possession … they didn’t find it in the field near Ella.”

My heart fluttered with hope. No knife next to Ella meant that my memory was faulty, webbed with cracks caused by trauma. It was a lot better than being a suspected murderer.

“Your mom found it,” Grant said. “In your jeans pocket, the next day.”

Every ounce of hope I’d built up rushed out of me, a flood of heartbreak, as he continued. “She gave it to your dad, and the department sent it in for a DNA scan,” he said. “It was Ella’s blood on the tip.” He started to pick at a hangnail, but thought better of it and kept going. “But your Dad testified for you, said that Ella had cut her finger with it earlier in the day cutting an orange.”

“And did she?” I asked, my cheeks growing hot. It was a strange thing, hearing about myself from someone else.

Grant shook his head. “I don’t know. But that wasn’t the only thing that saved you.” He took a deep breath. “Ella saved you, too. She told the police she didn’t even remember you being there, in the field, until the very end when she heard you singing.”

I closed my eyes, and for a second I saw Ella, her face in stitches and her eyelids purple, her hair in matted ringlets around her head in the hospital bed. “She probably didn’t remember anything after leaving the party. She didn’t remember a lot after the surgery, I know that.”

“Maybe,” Grant said, pushing in the chair.

Panic swelled in me again and I inched toward him. “Maybe? You don’t believe me, do you? You know, for someone who knows so much about everything, you could have told me.”

Grant stepped back, watching me like I was a wolf, snarling and snapping, but I couldn’t stop. “You already made up your mind about me a long time ago, didn’t you? You’ve thought I was crazy this whole time, and you didn’t even have the guts to tell me.”

“I swear, I—”

“So what do you believe, Grant?” I took another step toward him. I was close enough to him now that I could bump his chin with the tip of my nose. “You read my file while I was in New York, and they all said I’m a murderer. I’m crazy. But then I come back here and you help me try to find Ella.” I clenched my hands to keep them from shaking. “You’ve been helping me try to find the wolves, even though you didn’t tell me what was in my own file. Even though you don’t know if they exist. What is that?”

Grant rubbed the skin on the bridge of his nose and shook his head. I held my breath, and everything in the moldy little office waited with me. I swore even the clock stopped ticking. Whatever Grant said right now, in this stretched-out second, mattered more than anything he’d said in the past week. The past seventeen years, really.

He let out of a puff of air. “I don’t know.”

My heart deflated and sank into my stomach. I couldn’t look at him, so I stared at the watery brown stain on the carpet instead. “How do you not know?” I whispered.

“Claire, listen.” He lifted the tip of my chin. “What I mean is, I don’t know what really happened out there that night. But I only needed to read a few pages of your file to know that I believed you. I’ve never thought you were guilty. Not for a second. Whatever else that file says, it doesn’t even matter.”

“What about the wolves?” I whispered.

Grant sighed. “I don’t know. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but there are some things I can’t explain.”

I pulled my chin away from his fingers. Same as Grant, some things with the wolves I couldn’t explain. But that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. It was just so hard to grab hold of the truth through the secrets and lies. If I could just find the truth—the whole truth—about one thing, maybe I could figure out the rest by deduction.

“We have to find my file. The real one,” I said.

“Claire, I’m not even sure—”

“I have to look,” I said, more forcefully this time. “Please. I need to know everything.”

Grant hooked his hand into mine. “Come on, I’ve got the keys to the file cabinets. Let’s see if your old file is still in there.” And without another word, he led me down the hallway and into a small alcove outfitted with three steel cabinets and a shoddy-looking desk. I winced when I saw the nameplate: Mike Graham.

He shoved a key into the center cabinet, the tallest one, and pulled the top drawer free.

I held my breath as his fingers darted over the files, one after another, until he reached the end of the row. “Weird,” he said finally.

“What is it?”

“Your file’s not in here, either.” He glanced up at me. “Look. Even though some of these files are empty now,
at least the names are still on the labels. But there’s nothing at all in here with Graham on it.”

That settled over my brain like a layer of dust. “But why wouldn’t it be there, with all the other old files?”

Grant just shook his head, and reached down to pull open another drawer, even though it was labeled “LAST NAMES H-M.”

I poked around the makeshift office, but all I found was a stack of blank manila folders and a string of empty coffee mugs in desperate need of a wash.

Finally, I came to Seth’s office door. I twisted the knob, but the lock clicked in place.

I chewed my lip, thinking. There was no logical reason why my file would in Seth’s office.

Was there?

His bulging eyes and puffy belly popped into my mind. You look just like your father when he’s trying to lie. All twitchy.

Seth’s reaction to my presence at the station had seemed extreme, especially since Dad didn’t pose much of a threat to his position as chief anymore. Was it possible he’d been reading my file, too?

“I think we should check in here.” I tapped a knuckle against the door.

Grant’s face clouded over. “I don’t think it’d be in there. What would Seth need with your old paperwork?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s the only place we haven’t looked.” I glanced back at him. He was fiddling with his keys, running his finger over the teeth of a particularly thick one. I moved toward him and wrapped my hand around his wrist. “Don’t worry. I’ll be in and out. There can’t be that many places to look, right?”

Grant nodded slowly. “Okay, but you have to move quick. I don’t know when Seth’s coming in today.” He slipped the key into the lock and pulled open the door.

The chief’s office was even smaller than the alcove and the database room in back. My stomach hitched when I saw a dusty gray square staining the wall next to the desk. I traced my finger along the perimeter. Which picture had been in this frame again? I think it was one of me and Ella at the Christmas concert, Ella still decked in her outrageous angel wings. I pulled my hand away.

There was only one beat-up file cabinet in the corner, and it wasn’t even locked. I pulled the first drawer open and pawed through the folders: procedural manuals, payroll, and a bunch of other yellowing documents that didn’t look important.

Nothing with my name.

I opened the second drawer. This one was mostly empty, except for an old radio with a hole in the speaker and two hanging files. I looked at the first one.

Bingo.

Graham, Claire.

I opened it.

The first few pages were official reports on the incident, how they found me at the scene rocking and unresponsive to questioning, how Mom turned in the paring knife for DNA testing. These must have been the same reports Grant had read.

I flipped the page and a name I didn’t recognize stared up at me.

Fourteen-year-old Patrick Gillet made the 911 call when he discovered the victim and suspect in the cornfield at 8:56 a.m.

Patrick Gillet.

His name bumped against something in my brain, forcing me to remember. I did remember; I knew he went to school me. He must have been in a grade between me and Ella.

A pair of eyes the color of a cloudy morning popped into my mind.

I gasped. Patrick Gillet was the same boy Ella wrote about in her diary, the same boy who’d found us in the cornfield.

My mind raced. Patrick had been at the scene that morning too—he’d seen the gory aftermath of Ella’s attack. The last page in Ella’s diary flickered in my head.

He’s going to kill me.

“Claire, hurry,” Grant called from the other side of the door. “You’ve been in there forever.”

I blinked until the words melted away and I suddenly felt sick. I flipped through the rest of the pages, searching for anything else I could find about Patrick. But there was nothing.

I was about to close the file and tell Grant to lock up the office when the edge of a crisp, stationery-thick sheet of paper caught my eye. It was the last page in my file. I slipped it free and stared at a seal of some sort, an image of a twisted oak tree with budding leaves.

Havenwood Mental Institution: Private Records

I stared at the paper in my hands, unable to comprehend. What was this doing in my file? I scanned the page, and when I saw my name, my fingers started to tingle and the breath clotted in my throat and everything got very, very stuffy.

Fifteen-year-old Claire E. Graham has been referred for an evaluation for residence in our inpatient treatment facility. Diagnostic tests reveal that there are no physical ailments contributing to mental health; however, there is a family history of psychosis. Because Ms. Graham is currently a minor, and, subsequently, her legal case has been temporarily cleared, our team, including Ms. Graham’s parents, has decided a weekly outpatient treatment program with our satellite psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel M. Barges, in Manhattan is the best course of treatment at this time. It is recommended that the patient be treated for mental illness instead of facing prosecution.

I sank onto the wobbly desk chair and tried to breathe, breathe, breathe.

My parents hadn’t shipped me off to New York because I was scared, because I was in so much pain from watching Ella suffer. They sent me away because they had to.

It was either that or send me directly to Havenwood, which was the kind of place they sent deranged women who murdered their babies for spilling grape juice on the carpet.

It wasn’t the lack of evidence, or Ella’s inability to remember, that got me off without any charges. It was because they thought I was legitimately crazy. Certifiable, even.

Had Grant seen this letter?

I pressed my palms to my face and tried to snuff out the images, the thoughts, flashing behind my eyelids.

“Claire!” Grant barked, and I jumped. “Seth’s car just pulled up—you’re got to get out of there now.” He poked his head into the doorway, his face polluted with panic. He glanced at me and then the file. “Hurry, hurry, hurry. Put it back and get out. Let’s go!”

Something in me snapped back to life and I spun around to cram my file back into the hanging folder. I started to shut the door when I noticed two hasty letters, scribbled in pencil, on the second file tab.

M.G.

“Let’s go, he’s walking toward the door!” Grant yelled behind me.

I bit my lip. There was a chance this was nothing, that this file didn’t have anything to do with Dad. But there was an even bigger chance that it did.

Quickly, I grabbed it out of the hanging folder and shoved it under my jacket. Then I slammed the cabinet shut and raced out the door.

Grant’s fingers shook as he tried to jam the key into the lock. Just behind him, the knob to the front door began to rattle. I wrapped my hand around Grant’s and squeezed until it stopped shaking. The key slid into the lock with a click.

I didn’t let go of his hand as we ran down the hallway, our footsteps muffled by the faded carpet. I heard the hinges of the front door yawn open just as I pulled the back door shut behind us.