GARRETT MURRAY doesn’t talk to Hadley in school, at least not that I see now that I’m watching. Sometimes he passes us in the hall; he’s always in a hurry, turning his bone-skinny body to sidle between the bumping shoulders of the kids walking ahead of us, looking like he’s stepping between the bars of a jail cell. He never even glances at us. Or Hadley at him, either. It isn’t even that studied sort of not looking, where you can sense that the person is purposely keeping his eyes averted. It’s like Hadley and Garrett are strangers to each other, or ghosts, and I’m left to gawp at the phenomenon of the two of them.
Hadley doesn’t talk about Garrett again, and though I’m always thinking of ways to bring him up, I never have the nerve to actually do it. The day I found them in the field, I went to my locker and crossed out his name on our list of suspects. The scribble looked bad somehow, like uncertainty, so I rewrote the entire list, leaving him off it and stowing it back on the shelf in my locker. The next day, I saw that Hadley had added his name again in her bold block letters.
After that day in the field, Hadley stopped eating lunch with me altogether. She spends her lunches in the smokers’ field now, feeding herself with cigarettes and the sticky red peppermints that she pops to cover the smell. Sometimes I sneak out of the cafeteria early and stand at the door by the bus circle, staring across at the nodding tufts of winter wheat. I lean into the door and press the bar, making it click and unclick, looking out over the field for the places in the wheat that shake. Hadley will find me after lunch, but we won’t talk about where she’s been or what she’s been doing.
Hadley’s mouth and chin are raw pink these days; her lips are rubbed down to a shine; buttons have gone missing from her shirts, their threads still hanging—tiny nooses; she sports fingertip-shaped bruises on her arms and wrists like a gray pox. I don’t know if this is passion or injury. I blame Garrett, want to hurt him back for her, until one morning I see him in the hall with an angry pink scratch curling around the side of his neck, pricked with blood. I fight the urge to grab Hadley’s hand and look under the fingernails for peelings of his skin.
Hadley doesn’t seem any happier or sadder now that she’s with Garrett. She’s determined to keep our investigation going. She spends hours after school completing detailed profiles of each person on our list, which has grown to include sixty-three suspects. She dictates the information, and I take it down: age, occupation, physical description, known associates, episodes of violence, connection to the deceased, etc. She got the categories out of a chapter in one of her mother’s crime novels, which stand in mildewed towers, bricking up one wall of the downstairs bathroom. Our notes have expanded way beyond the capacity of my science notebook, though our main list of suspects still lives in its back pages. We keep the rest of our investigation in file folders that Hadley steals from a stack of boxes in the dining room. Her dad’s old work stuff, she explains, though not why the contents of his office are packed into boxes. She crosses out the words written on the tabs of the folders—“MediaBlitz,” “Travel ’88,” and “Lonigan, Sheryl”—replacing them with her own labels: “Suspects, Chip. High,” “Suspects, College,” “Newspaper Articles,” and “McCabe, Elizabeth.”
I’ve yet to meet either of Hadley’s parents, though I saw her father’s silhouette once as he drove away from the house. His profile was fatherly, the face of a man who might chew on a pipe. Veronica told my mother once that both of Hadley’s parents are having affairs, that each knows that the other is and doesn’t care. Does that mean they love each other more than other parents or less? Hadley does nothing to explain or defend them. “They didn’t want kids,” she said once with a dark grin, “so they had four.”
The other three, her little brothers, remain at their station in front of their video games. The detritus of the house—crumbles of food, clouds of laundry, webs of dust—sometimes recedes, only to creep forward again, like the banks of dirty snow as winter ends.
In Hadley’s room—that tidy, girly island—we pile our case files around us like children building a fort. We alphabetize, sort, and label. We keep the finished files in the bottom of her sweater drawer, hidden under the scented drawer liner, until the stack grows too thick, thicker than two folded sweaters, and Hadley buys an actual file box from a store in the mall and slides it to the back of her closet. We annotate and cross-check and tend to our folders, and I promise Hadley that if we’re patient, a pattern will emerge.
I tell her this not because I believe it, but to keep her from following through on one of her crazy plans. Her latest idea is to type a letter composed of only one sentence—I know you killed her—and send it to our top ten suspects, which include the shop teacher at school, a couple of men who loiter in a back booth at the diner, and Garrett Murphy. Hadley keeps trying to get me to walk through the woods at night dressed like Zabet.
“You could almost look like her if you put on some of her clothes,” she says, studying me. “Your hair’s kind of the same, and you’re about the same height.”
“She was prettier than me,” I say, hoping just a little bit that Hadley will disagree.
“Well, yeah, but in the dark, from behind,” she says and absently presses a tiny bruise on her elbow, causing it to fade and then flush back like a word written in disappearing ink.
She’s still obsessed with seeing the place where Jonah found Zabet’s body. And I’ve promised, reluctantly and falsely, that I’ll try to talk to him again. The entire week, we practice what I’ll say.
“Touch his hand like this,” Hadley instructs, resting her fingers on the back of my hand. When I look down, her hand flits away like a moth and lands on her neck just under her jaw, the same place where Garrett’s scratch was. “Now you try it on me,” she says.
On Sunday, Jonah’s not even in Hokepe Woods. Pervy Mr. Jefferson is there instead, plunked in the cab of his truck like an old beanbag, eating generic Cheerios straight out of the box. When he sees me, he raps on the window and then rolls it down to call out, “You wanna trade jobs, darlin’?” I’m tempted to grab the sled out of the back of his truck and set off for the trees just to see what he’ll do.
“Where’s Jonah?” I ask.
“Home sick, missing you,” he says and rocks with laughter.
I don’t call Hadley after my paper route, and she doesn’t call me either, so I tell myself that, unlikely though it seems, maybe she forgot about Jonah and the woods today. That afternoon, Mom is out at the store and I’m sitting on my bed, looking at the trap I’d stolen from Jonah’s truck. I think I’ve figured out how to load it. I don’t dare do it, though, because even touching the trap at its base with only the tip of my pinky finger calls up the feel of the metal jaws snapping shut on my wrist, biting through my skin, teeth wedging themselves in my bones.
Then I hear it from my bedroom, a sound I’ve listened for before, those times I’ve woken in the middle of the night, my dreams laid out around me, my fears there with them. It’s the sound of the front door’s knob turning back and forth. I consider barricading my bedroom or wriggling out the window, but in the end, like the stupid girl, the inevitable victim, I walk out to meet it. My breath is a balloon in my throat, my heart a pump. I tell myself that I’ve made the sound up, confused it with some other sly, metal scritching—a neighbor raking out flowerbeds, a mouse in the walls. But then I’m there in the front room, and I see it for myself, the doorknob twisting one way then the other in a frantic little shimmy. I back up toward the kitchen, toward the drawer with the knives. Before I get there, the rattling stops and someone starts knocking—rapid knocks that land not just in one place but all over the door. “Open up!” I hear Hadley call. “Open up!”
At the sound of her voice, all the fear rushes out of me in a whoosh of breath, and I run to the door and unlock it. Hadley bursts in and slams it behind her, locking it and leaning back against it. She looks silly leaning against the door like that, like she’s keeping out the zombies and vampires and maniacs with chainsaws. When she’s sure that the door is secure, she runs to the front window. She sweeps her gaze over the street.
“What are you doing?”
She ignores me and heads down the hall to my bedroom, peering out the window there. Then she turns and sighs with relief, tipping her head back so that it rests against the pane. I think of the blot of hair grease that she’ll leave behind and how Mom will go at it with a cloud of spray and a paper towel. At Hadley’s house it’d remain unnoticed for weeks, forever.
“He’s gone now,” Hadley says.
“Who’s gone?”
“That guy. The one from the parking lot.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The guy I hit with my car.”
“You didn’t hit him.”
“Fine. The one I almost hit. He’s following me.”
I picture him, the guy in the parking lot, how I stood over him, how he had a look on his face like I might kick him, like he was afraid of me.
“Come on. He’s not following you.”
“I knew you’d say that, but he was outside my house today.”
“What—just, like, standing in your front lawn?”
“No,” she says as if I’m purposely being dense. “In a car, but I can tell it’s him anyway.”
“What car?”
“It’s a rusty red thing, dark red—what do you call it? Burgundy. Maroon. A junker.”
“And you think it’s him?”
“I know it’s him.”
“In a maroon junker.”
“I could see him through the window. It’s him.” “You could get the license plate number,” I suggest.
“Sure, why don’t I do that, Evie? Why don’t I lie down under his back wheels? Why don’t I knock on the window and ask if I can sit in his lap?”
I’m grinning now, but Hadley’s unperturbed. She scratches her elbow, certain, so certain.
“He’s not following you,” I say.
Hadley looks at me, her mouth screwed to one side as if I’ve confirmed something disappointing about myself, something that she hoped she’d be wrong about. She gives all her attention to her elbow again, scratches it.
“He could’ve followed Zabet just the same,” she murmurs.
She rotates her arm and studies the palms of her hands as if she expects to see something there—mud? Blood? She closes it into a fist.
“Had?” I say. “Hadley?”
She looks suddenly sad, deflated of her certainty and self-righteousness. I crouch down in front of her and put a cautious hand on her arm. She mumbles something, but it’s too soft, and I have to ask her to repeat it.
“Do you think I’m next?” she says.
“Next?”
“After Zabet. The next one.”
“No. Oh, no.” I feel a burst of sympathy and also relief. I’m shaking my head rapidly, though I don’t tell her that this is the same thought that I’ve had a hundred times, only about myself, that I’m next, the next one, the next victim. I know that the Whisperers fear it, too. I don’t go outside at night anymore, not even into my backyard, one says in the tenor of a confession, and the others nod yes, yes. So maybe we’re all thinking it: I’m next. Maybe that’s part now, of being . . . what? Young? A girl?
“Yeah, no,” Hadley says with a phlegmy little laugh. She uncurls her fists, gives me a push, and says, “Not me.”
She stares off over my shoulder. I’ve completely forgotten about the trap right out there on my bed in plain sight, and so for a second I don’t know what’s made Hadley’s eyes light up the way they do. By the time I turn, she’s already rushed past me and is sitting on my bed next to the trap, running her fingers along its jawline.
“What’s this?” she says with a hint of glee.
“Nothing.”
“You could trap a moose with this thing.”
“I think it’s for deer, or maybe a bear.” I stand over her, an adult supervising a child. I want more than anything for her to leave it alone.
“Like this,” she says. In one quick motion, Hadley yanks the jaws of the trap open, fastening the catch to hold them in place. I take a step back, as if the trap might jump up and fasten itself to my shoulder or my cheek.
“You just set it,” I say in disbelief.
She shrugs.
“It could snap closed now.”
“Well, yeah. It’s a trap.”
“How am I going to get it closed again?”
She shrugs, like no big deal, and reaches for it.
I start to say Stop! but figure that would just make her all the more determined. So instead I say, “Hey!”
She looks up at me, her hands still on the trap. And now she’s not even looking at what she’s doing! She disarms it anyhow by unfastening a catch on the base and folding the slack teeth closed. As soon as the trap is safe again, I reach forward and pluck her hands off of it.
“Come on.” I pull her up from the bed. “I have something to show you.”
“Jonah, right?” she says, her eyes bright. “He showed you the spot. He did, right?”
I lift the trap carefully, stowing it back under my bed.
“Yes,” I say, nodding. “Yes, that’s right.”