Meredith
Present Day
The call came the following evening, during the one hour Meredith spent outside the lighthouse. She made herself go back to the house to eat something other than granola and to charge her phone, which was seconds from dying. She’d just plugged it in when it rang, the display showing the detective’s number.
Her trembling fingers slipped so many times on the touch screen she almost missed the call.
“Hello?”
“Miss Strand, it’s Detective Catano.”
“Do you have her?”
A pregnant pause. “No.”
“But you know where she is.”
“No.”
Rage boiled behind her navel. “Then why the fuck are you calling me? She’s not—”
“We’re still looking. Are you at home? I’d like to come by and have you look at something.”
She took a breath. It could be anything. It didn’t have to mean something terrible.
“Yes, I’m home. What is it?”
“I’ll be there in ten. Sit tight.”
***
She stank. She knew because she could smell herself—sweat and salt and terrible breath. She didn’t care. As the detective sat next to her on the couch, a pair of gas station coffees on the table in front of them, he withdrew a plastic bag with a scrap of fabric inside. She recognized the pink-and-green pattern immediately: Alice’s pajamas.
Her heart plummeted.
“We shouldn’t think the worst yet,” the detective said. “But this is Alice’s, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Where did you find it?”
“On the beach, near the water.”
The words in Grace’s journal came rushing back. She shook her head.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. I… Nothing.”
“If you have any ideas, anything at all, you should tell me.”
She didn’t have anything. Nothing he would believe. With the detective still staring at her, his face all scrutinizing concern, she rationalized the piece of Alice’s pajamas away. She’d ripped it on something and the wind carried it. That was all.
“Nothing,” Meredith said.
He paused a beat, then returned the bag to his pocket. She thought about taking it. She wanted to bury her nose in it to see if there was still some part of Alice woven between the fibers. There were a hundred reasons her pajamas could have torn, but Meredith couldn’t think of a single one that didn’t end with Alice being hurt or worse. A kaleidoscope of images flew through her mind—Alice hunched cold behind a dune, Alice twisting out of the grip of some faceless stranger as the fabric tore, Alice floating facedown in a tide pool, pajamas shredded by a bit of coral.
“This is good, though, right?” she asked, her voice strained and just this side of manic. “It’s a clue.”
He offered a weak smile like a tiny ember of hope. “Of course it’s good. Every scrap of information is good.”
She thought of Grace’s journals again. Every scrap.
***
After the detective left, Meredith changed her clothes and washed the crust from her eyes. Information was the key to getting Alice back, and she was determined to find it. She’d start at the flower shop where Alice had seen the girl with the red hair.
The sky was overcast, but Meredith wore sunglasses, partly to conceal the red rings around her eyes and partly to avoid making eye contact with anyone with half-hearted condolences to offer. No one approached her on the walk to the shop, but she caught several startled looks out of the corners of her eyes. She walked faster, her shoes slapping the sidewalk, wishing she could be invisible.
A small bell announced her presence when she opened the flower shop door. Sitting behind the counter, an older woman with shock-white hair and beaded glasses perched on her nose lowered her book, frowned, then shook her head and clicked her tongue. Her name tag read “Kayla.”
Meredith didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean the woman didn’t know Meredith. Growing up on the cape had taught her that everyone’s business was everyone’s business and secrets didn’t exist. Before the woman could launch into her I’m sorrys and You’re so braves, Meredith made a beeline for the counter and lifted her sunglasses, giving the woman the full force of a mother on a mission.
“My daughter was in here last week,” Meredith said. “She saw a girl, a teenager, with bright red hair. Do you know her?”
But the woman had already started shaking her head before Meredith had finished talking. “I’ve been in the shop maybe twice in the last month. It’s rare I see anybody in here, let alone several somebodies. In case you hadn’t noticed, the economy is in the tank. No one wants overpriced flowers anymore.”
“You’re sure?” Meredith didn’t even try to hide the desperation in her voice. “Absolutely sure?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What about the other employees?”
The woman scoffed. “Those two? Unless you’re a dime bag, those two wouldn’t look twice. And they’re the best I could find. Doesn’t matter, I guess. I’m selling to the first person who makes me a decent offer.” She nodded at a sign in the window. Meredith hadn’t noticed it until now. Business For Sale. “Listen, the cops were already here. I told them same as you. If I see her, you’ll know.”
Meredith thanked her, making sure to mention the Thalias her shop had provided for her mother’s funeral. The ones she hadn’t bothered charging Meredith for. “My daughter loved them.”
Just as Meredith hoped it would, the mention of the Thalias softened the woman’s hard expression. “Did she keep any? From the funeral?”
It was an odd question, but Meredith was too frustrated by another dead end to think too deeply about it. “I think so.”
“Good. That’ll help.” Then, “My evenings are pretty open. We close the shop early most nights. A few walks on the beach won’t hurt me.”
Meredith thanked her, and before she left, Kayla pressed a few petals into her hand. Told her to keep them in her pocket. For luck.
It couldn’t hurt, she supposed.
Meredith left the shop feeling aimless, her one lead having dissolved before it even had the chance to fully take shape.
The next logical step was to find Vik. Though he’d lied about knowing the red-haired girl, Meredith felt sure about seeing them together, that she was the same girl who’d spoken with Alice. She already had a vague idea of where he lived. She thought about calling Art; if he spent a lot of time with Vik’s son, it was likely he’d know. But Art was also the kind of person who would have told her to let the police handle it. Instead, she called her mother’s bank. Through some creative manipulation of the woman on the phone, she was able to get copies of the last year’s worth of checks her mom had written to Vik emailed to her. The endorsement on the back of one of them, beneath his signature, had a street address.
Her GPS brought her to the other side of the cape, where most of the old properties had been bought, torn up, and turned into condos that still sat vacant. Attempts to renovate and revamp the cape as a hipster haven of breweries and midcentury modern architecture had lived and died in this square mile.
As she turned onto a road only half-paved, her GPS seemed to have a fit. The image on her screen got turned around, then twisted back again, unable to find her.
What if someone brought Alice here? she thought.
Her heart skipped as she pulled to the side of the road a few houses down from where Vik’s address should have been. She resisted the urge to yell Alice’s name as she walked along the broken street. If someone had her here, she didn’t want to alert them to her presence.
Except no one has her here, a voice whispered in the back of her head. It’s the curse that got her.
A squirrel skittered across a skeletal-looking branch above her, making her jump.
For all her mother’s warnings, she’d been maddeningly silent on what exactly the curse was. What the curse could do. Her mother might have thought she was trying to keep Meredith safe, but all her mother’s secrets only managed to bring them here: her mother dead and Alice missing and Meredith completely in the dark.
But hadn’t she tried to tell Meredith? And all Meredith had done was brush her off, dismiss her as paranoid. The longer Meredith was without her mother, the more she realized how much she needed her.
As she walked past abandoned house after abandoned house, something shifted inside her. This couldn’t be right. It was clear no one actually lived out here anymore. Still, she continued on, glancing into windows and around fences, just in case of a miracle.
She patted the petals in her pocket. For luck.
Finally, she reached what was supposed to have been Vik’s house. She checked the rusted numbers on the mailbox against the copy of the check twice, but she still couldn’t believe this was it. A chain-link fence surrounded the overgrown property, a sidewalk from the street to the dented front door mostly hidden beneath weeds and brambles. The house itself looked one good storm away from collapse. The shingles on the roof were sun bleached and the skirt surrounding the bottom of the porch was rotted.
She lifted the latch on the gate and let herself through. “Hello?”
This was a stupid idea. Even if she didn’t think Vik had had anything to do with Alice, she couldn’t shake the unease of her last interaction with him. She’d all but accused him of stealing from her mother, and the light-switch change on his face from concerned friend to something more sinister had disturbed her.
She walked the rest of the way up to the house and stepped carefully over a broken stair before going straight to the window. She couldn’t see much—the place was dark, and the sun shone too bright on the glass, making it impossible to see through the glare. Casting a quick look over her shoulder, she went to open the door but found it locked.
She tried the window again, but all she was able to make out were shapeless shadows and the light from probably another window on the other side of the house. She knocked, positioning herself just to the side of the peephole, and listened. No movement came from inside, so she knocked again. Still nothing.
Planting her foot sideways for leverage, she leaned experimentally against the door. It gave, but not much. The lock was flimsy, and she figured she could probably break it if she kicked hard enough.
Any hesitation was buried under the weight of Alice’s absence. She needed answers, whatever it took.
She stepped back and, bracing herself on the porch rail, reared back and kicked the door just under the lock. The old wood cracked easily. Two more well-placed kicks and the door swung open, sweeping up a cloud of dust.
Covering her mouth and nose with her shirt collar, she went inside.
If Vik was living here, he hadn’t been there in at least a day. A bare mattress sat tucked against the nearest wall, with a few flat pillows tossed aside. A pizza box lay open at the foot of the mattress, a single congealed slice remaining. There was a camp stove and lantern and a small box with clothes. If he was stealing from her mother—and the longer she looked around, the more convinced she was—this explained why.
It occurred to her he might have just given a random address to the bank when he’d cashed the checks, but a quick rifle through the clothes changed her mind. She recognized one of the shirts as the one he’d worn to her mother’s funeral.
She thought she heard movement in one of the other rooms, and her head snapped up, her heart in her throat. “Hello?”
No one answered, but the air had gotten heavy. With every passing second, she was less and less sure she was alone in the house. What sounded like footsteps on the porch sent a bolt of fear up her back. She ran into the hallway, into what had probably been a bedroom, as quietly as she could and carefully shut the door behind her. She pressed her ear to the wood, skin crawling with the feel of dust and cobwebs on her skin, and strained to hear movement or voices, but the only thing she could hear was the pounding of her own pulse. She held her breath. Willed her heart to slow.
Eventually she pulled away, thinking it was squirrels again, or the wind. She’d look out the bedroom window—it faced the front yard—and if the coast was clear, she’d get the hell out of there.
But the boxes in the corner grabbed her attention. No, it was the writing on the side that stopped her.
For Meredith, in big, bold black marker in her mother’s shaky handwriting.
Forgetting the window, she reached for the box closest to her and unfolded the flaps.
Photo albums. Some familiar—she recognized one of the oldest-looking ones as having been up on the shelf when she was a teenager—and a couple she hadn’t seen before. She flipped through one of the older albums to find pictures of her and her stepdad at the museum. In one picture, Meredith wore a cheap pink wig and a pair of bathing suit bottoms with a fin sewn on the butt. But the picture was blurry, and out of nowhere she remembered that was because her mom had been laughing too hard to take the photo properly. She hugged the album to her chest as she fished through the box for another, this one newer. Inside she found pictures of Meredith and Alice, ones she didn’t even know existed, probably taken during the few times she could get her mother to visit them in Arlington.
My girls, she’d written beneath one of Meredith holding a then two-year-old Alice.
Tears blurred the rest of the pictures, but Meredith couldn’t stop turning the pages. Finally, she set the albums carefully back in the box and went for the second, expecting to find more of the same, but this one was mostly empty. A few knickknacks, including a ceramic bird she didn’t recognize and a framed picture of two girls who couldn’t have been older than sixteen or so. It took a long time to realize one of them was her mother, impossibly young and bright looking. Her hair was long and wild, and she leaned against the other girl in the picture, who pretended to scowl, but her arm was wrapped just as tightly around Judith, a mischievous glint in her eye.
Why would Vik have these? He had to have taken them from her mother’s house, but when? Why?
She looked back at the side—For Meredith—and it dawned on her. He’d probably thought there was something valuable inside. Something he could sell or pawn. New waves of anger washed over her as she imagined him creeping into the house while she mourned.
Still clutching the framed photo, she went back to the albums. Ran her finger along the split spines. There had been good memories between Meredith and her mother, and she felt guilty for forgetting them. But how could a few laughs compete with a life embroiled in her mother’s fear and frustration? Her obsession with a curse Meredith only now thought, maybe, was real?
She looked back at the picture of her mother as a young woman. The girls stood in what looked like a house. Behind them was an image she hadn’t noticed on first glance. She squinted to make out the features of what looked like a drawing of a face. A girl, with Medusa-like hair, gaunt face, and hollow eyes.
Do you see her?
Her mother’s words came rushing back.
There was something about the drawing that made Meredith think of the red-haired girl, but the image was grainy, and the harder she focused, the less clear it seemed to become.
Meredith stood, bringing the photo to the window for more light, but it didn’t help. She carefully pried the back off the frame and slid the photo away from the glass. On the back corner in handwriting she didn’t recognize:
Judith, Cassie, and Lizzie.
Cassie? Lizzie? The names meant nothing to Meredith. Her mind was moving in circles, making her dizzy. The only thing she knew for certain was that there was a girl at the center of all of this, and right now her gut told her she needed to find the girl with the red hair.
Find the red-haired girl, she thought, like a mantra, and you’ll find Alice.