ONCE IT WAS OVER, NOBODY TALKED ABOUT THE MISSING. IT WAS an unspoken pact carved into the town of Wolf Point, as if the thing that had taken so many of its residents could be awakened again by the mention of its name. It was strange how quickly Erin had gotten used to that as an adolescent, and how easily she had fallen into the habit of avoiding the subject with her father. She had returned fifteen years later to find that the spell hadn’t broken, that the people of this town had gone right on living that way, half awake and half asleep, their eyes cast downward instead of focusing on one another. It was a quiet town, she thought, not in the usual ways of small-town America but because of the implicit admonition that nothing dormant and evil should ever be disturbed.
Now that two of the bodies had been discovered on her father’s farm, however, the rest of the missing came bubbling to the surface of the town’s collective consciousness. CANDLELIGHT VIGIL, the flyer announced in large red letters across the top of the page. Under that it gave the date and time—tomorrow at 7:30 P.M.—and the simple words “In Memory of Those Who Were Lost.” There was no further explanation, and none was needed. This was Wolf Point’s wake-up call, a chance to acknowledge the dead as they were pulled from the earth.
Erin encountered the flyers everywhere that day. One had been pinned to her windshield beneath the blade of one of her wipers. The words were facing inward toward the cab of the truck. Someone had been thoughtful enough to add a handwritten note—“This is your invitation, bitch, so come to the party!”—that she read a few times before folding the paper and placing it into her back pocket.
She started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot with no particular place to go. She’d visited Matta and Diesel earlier that morning. The two of them were getting along well, and the interior of the house felt brighter and more full of life with each passing day. She’d gone to Robbie’s after that, but there was no answer when she knocked, and short of breaking and entering, she felt her chances of seeing him seemed to have dwindled to almost nothing.
She headed west now, beyond the outskirts of town, not knowing where she was going until she had pulled up to the curb in front of it, a small and sad little house sitting by itself at the end of the road. The weeds grew tall around it, as if the house itself was sinking into the earth. Erin was surprised that it was still standing. She’d imagined it bulldozed and replaced by something else. But here it was, lost to a state of neglect but still calling out to her, reminding her of the first time she had come here.
“It’s over,” she said, but it didn’t feel like it was over. It felt like the house had been waiting all these years for her to return to it.
Erin reached into her back pocket, pulled out the flyer, and unfolded it in front of her. “‘Candlelight vigil,’” she read, speaking the words aloud in the silence of the cab. “‘In memory of those who were lost.’”
She looked up at the house. The thirteen-year-old version of herself was in there somewhere, peering through a dirt-caked window at the yard beyond. “It doesn’t own you,” she said, but she’d returned to it anyway, and Erin wondered if she’d ever have the guts to go back inside.