thirty-two

Dad and I came up with a plan.

I’d go to Grant’s, tell him everything about Dad, and ask him to help me find Ella. Dad would tell Mom that I’d gone back to New York in the middle of the night, and that Grant had decided to go with me. He’d say that I realized I’d never be able to stay in Amble again, not with my history. Then he’d spread this message like a stain all over town.

The walk to Grant’s house was quick and painless. The sky was stained with pink, the snowfall had slowed, and I took it all as a good sign. But when I stepped onto the Buchanans’ sagging front porch, all of that hope drained out of me.

Angry black words crawled across the porch, the windows, the front door. Words that had been written in the hours nestled between dark and dawn. The hours when wolves came out to hunt, according to Rae, and when their howls broke apart high school bonfires.

I touched the word “psycho” on the front door. Black smudged my fingertips. Still wet.

I followed the trail of paint that had run down the door and pooled at the welcome mat.

A box of matches lay scattered across the porch like forgotten strings of seedlings, plucked from the ground and left to die. I picked up a match and examined its tip: blackened, but not charred. An almost-spark that never caught fire.

My hand shook as I reached for the doorbell. Grant’s living room was thick with shadows, so much so that it was like they’d put up a curtain of fog in front of the bay window.

The door creaked open and a puffy eye peeked out at me from the other side of the doorframe.

“Oh. Claire.” Grant’s mom opened the door and stared back at me, the skin under her eyes purple and blotchy.

“Hi, Mrs. Buchanan. Um, is Grant here?” I asked softly, because it felt like if I spoke too loudly she would shatter in half.

That must have been the wrong question, because her head drooped as she pressed her fingers over her eyes. “He’s not here.” She pulled in a breath between her teeth. “I can’t find him anywhere.”

“Didn’t he come home last night? When did you see him last?” I asked. But the words sounded stale and foreign, like they weren’t coming from my mouth. Like they were disconnected from me, like they came from the wind and the trees and the cornfield that was swallowing everything and everyone up around me.

Laura Buchanan looked out past me and into the rolling gray underbellies of the clouds. “Yesterday. Before he went to your house.” She bent down and picked up a single matchstick, rolling it between her fingertips. “And then I woke up to this. At least I shooed them away before they lit the matches.”

I couldn’t find words, not a single one. They were clotted together in the back of my throat. I blinked for an extra second to temporarily erase the site of Grant’s mom surrounded by words I wish Amble had never found. They were the same words they’d used to torture my family, and now they were punishing Grant for being with me.

Remember, Grant, Amble doesn’t like crazy.

Laura sighed and flicked the match to the porch. “I guess I better call the police.”

“No.” It was the first word that snapped into my mind. “I mean, I think I know where Grant is. He said he’d meet me for breakfast this morning, at that diner downtown.”

Dad couldn’t come here. He couldn’t see the graffiti that bit at the sides of the house, at the almost-fire littered across the porch. I didn’t want him to see the disaster I’d created. The same disaster he’d tried to keep hidden under a layer of paint and handful of lies.

I could find Grant.

Laura’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure, Claire?”

I smiled my best no-teeth smile. “Positive. I know where he is.” I turned and stepped over the rotting part of the staircase and headed back toward my house, and I felt Laura’s eyes burning through the back of my head. It was almost like I could hear snippets of her thoughts. They whispered, “What did you do with my son?”

I stepped off the porch and clutched my chest. I couldn’t freak out, not now. I couldn’t give Laura a reason to think I wouldn’t find him.

I called his cell phone. The ringer hummed in my ear, and after six, seven times, Grant’s voice clicked on: “Hey, this is Grant. Leave a message after the beep.”

Beep.

I hung up the phone.

“Okay, Claire, think.” I paced the patch of dirt road in front of Grant’s house. Images from Lacey’s party flicked through my head. Grant and Cole wrestling in the snow. Knocking over the card table. Spilling the cherry vodka.

All over themselves.

And then the wolves came.

“Oh God,” I whispered. They couldn’t have taken him. They wouldn’t have.

They might have.

I stopped pacing and tried to breathe, to clear my head. Okay, what had Grant said about investigation before, when I saw him at the diner my first day back in Amble? Something about always starting at the beginning.

I thought about going back to Lacey’s house. That would make the most logical sense, I mean, that was where the wolves first struck tonight. But the wolves weren’t logical creatures.

For me, there was only ever one beginning with Grant. It was the beginning I’d longed for, for years. The one I thought of when Grant scratched the back of his head with his pencil in Algebra. When he showed up at my house after Thanksgiving dinner, cheeks rosy and eyes glowing, stealing Mom’s pecan pie right out of the tin. It was the beginning that almost began in the cornfield two years ago, when he slipped me that note and told me to come to my birthday party alone. It’s where Ella’s beginning happened, the turning point where the whole course of who she thought she was going to be changed. It was Dad’s beginning, too—that’s where he found the wolves hunting Sarah Dunnard and his life tipped on its axis. That clearing nestled between Lark Lake and Route 24 was a constellation of beginnings and endings, of life and almost death.

It was exactly the kind of place to go looking for wolves.