Teddy’s knuckle trailed along the row of books, tapping absently at spine after spine as he wandered up and down the stacks. I swiped a tired hand across my eyes, wishing I could will away the persistent thudding in my temples. We’d been at the library all afternoon, and a veil of exhaustion hung over my head, a dull contrast to the frenetic hammering of Ben’s fingers on the computer keyboard, which had no trouble reaching me from across the main room.
Our agreement hadn’t taken long to wear thin, not on my part nor on Teddy’s. He’d walked me home after the movie that day and promptly pulled me behind the garden shed, kissed me until my legs were weak and my lungs were empty. Every one of our encounters in the few days since had been sketched in the same secretive ink—I’d promised him I’d go along, and I had. But every furtive glance made it harder to see beyond that summer. How were we supposed to really move forward if each accidental touch ended with us ducking behind trees and buildings and goddamn utility poles, jumping apart at any hint of a noise?
I’d woken that morning to the Mustang’s horn, followed by the whirlwind of my cousin barging into my room before my brain shook off the fog of sleep. I’d shoved him back into the hallway and into Grandma’s clutches; by the time I joined them in the kitchen, she was stuffing him with guilt and pancakes, scolding him for waking me while simultaneously praising his growing-boy appetite and up-and-at-’em energy.
Unfortunately for said energy, Ben, in his enthusiasm, had neglected to confirm Teddy’s availability. He’d spent the next three hours pacing my room, peering impatiently out the window to monitor the progress of the riding mower, and bitching about the rate of summer-season grass growth. I ignored him as best I could, a preferred state of existence made even easier by my rekindled artistic focus. By the time the mower’s engine growled to a stop, I’d completed fifty-four thumbnails in my sketchbook, more than enough to meet my mother’s expectations, each stroke of my pencils lifting its own tiny, leaden weight from my heart.
Now, six eons later, I was hunched over a table in River Run Public Library’s tiny periodicals section, muscles aching, fingertips stained with newsprint ink. I’d been delegated the task of thumbing through the nine million years’ worth of old newspapers that hadn’t been logged in the online system, searching for any mention of missing or dead children, and jotting names and dates in one of Ben’s notebooks. I’d found a surprisingly large number, especially for a rural area, but there was nothing hinting at a connection to the Franklin family or the boxes we’d found. It didn’t help that I’d barely glanced at most of the articles in the attic; aside from the red-haired girl, whose face now lived eternally in my mind, I couldn’t remember any other details. Still, I thumbed through every brittle page, spurred by a gnawing hope that the names I found would yield more information when typed into a search engine.
Teddy, who’d finished his own far less intensive task ages ago, circled behind me like a shark, slow and silent and restless. His fingertip traced a shiver across the back of my neck as he slid into the seat next to mine.
“Hey, Ames,” he murmured, a shade too wistful. His hand drifted toward mine, thoughtlessly and naturally. He caught himself and stopped short, eyes flitting past me to scan the room. His hand wavered awkwardly between us before forming into a high five—an actual high five, palm in the air, waiting for the return like I was goddamn Ben. “Um. Up high?”
“Excuse me?” I tossed my head, dragged snowmelt eyes from his face to the hand and back again, a mocking emulation of his initial, pre-high-fucking-five gaze. “Up high?”
The hand disappeared beneath the tabletop. He met my glare with sagging shoulders and a tiny, nervous, smile—a sad, sorry shadow of the one I knew. It broke my heart all over again, watching him balk every time he got too close, avoiding my eyes in front of everyone who mattered, and everyone who didn’t.
I glanced at the back of Ben’s head, then rose from the table and ducked into the stacks, motioning for Teddy to follow. When we reached the wall at the far end of the shelves, I turned to face him, glancing around to check for eavesdroppers before I spoke.
“Teddy, I’m trying, okay? But really? Mixed signals are not my thing, especially when it comes to you.”
“I know. I know, okay? I’m just trying to act natural.”
“Since when have you ever come at me with a high five, even before all this? Grabbing my ass would be more natural.”
“I mean, I can always go there, if you want,” he joked, grin stalling into a grimace at my glare, then reforming into a wicked version of itself. He peeked around the stacks at Ben, who still sat at the computer, back to us. Stepped closer until my shoulder blades brushed the wall. “Say the word, Ames.”
“You say the word; this was all your idea. Not that it matters—aside from Ben, who do we even know in here who would see us?”
“I know just about everyone, actually, at least by sight. Small town, remember? Most of them know my mom—and yours.” His mouth pulled into a smirk at my skeptical glare. “What, you think River Run forgot Eleanor Langston? She’s like, the biggest success story to ever come out of this place. They know her, all right—and they sure as hell know Ben Hansen’s East Coast cousin. If little Amy Larsen starts slumming around with the kid from her grandma’s trailer? Bet that ass of yours it’d get back to all our parents in under a day.”
“So it’s not just about Ben or June. We have to hide from everyone because of a bunch of nosy, backwoods—” I bit off the end of the thought, swallowed it down before it pierced the wrong target. “I told you—I’m in if you are. But if this is one of your fuckboy games, you need to tell me now.”
“Believe me. We”—he leaned in close again, words shifting to a whisper against my ear—“are anything but a game.”
“Well, you’re the one playing hide-and-seek with the whole damn town,” I whispered back, making no attempt to move away. “And you’re the one about to get us caught—standing there giving me that look, probably still thinking about my ass.”
“I so am. But you’re right. I’m sorry.” Teddy sighed. “This is just way harder than I thought. Acting like everything’s cool, when all I want is to disappear, find someplace where it doesn’t matter.” His cheekbone grazed mine, sent a slow, warm flame twisting through my middle. “Away from everything and everyone but you.”
“Hey, Teddy. TEDDY. GET OVER HERE.” Ben’s shout rang through the stacks, pulling us apart. A half-dozen voices shushed him, overlapping one another before he’d finished speaking. “Okay, okay, sorry. Christ. Ames,” he stage-whispered, voice no less grating for its lowered volume. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here, Ben. God.” I ducked out from under Teddy’s outstretched arm and hurried down an aisle, following the sound of my cousin’s voice. He’d commandeered my table and upturned his messenger bag on the surface. I reached him in time to catch a Sharpie right before it rolled off the edge. “Did you find something?”
“Fuckin’-A right I did. It was Noah Franklin. I’m like, eighty percent positive.”
“Dude, for real?” Teddy said, appearing at Ben’s shoulder, avoiding my exasperated side-eye. He’d circled the stacks, approached from the opposite direction, making it look like he’d been browsing on his own. For someone who’d been so conflicted moments before, he sure as hell had doubled down on keeping up appearances. “What’ve you got?”
“This is some wild shit, you guys. Check it out.” Ben slammed a stack of printed pages onto the table and snatched the Sharpie from my hand, jabbed the top page with the cap. His cheeks were pink, his hair a tousled mess, like he’d dragged his hands through it over and over. “The house itself was built in 1870 by Amos Allen Franklin. He would have been Noah’s great-grandfather, I think. Maybe great-great, but it doesn’t matter. It’s been passed down through the oldest sons every generation. The dates on the articles we found go from about 1997 all the way back to 1986. Noah’s mom died in 1984, so he and Old Gerald were the only ones living there at that point. He would have been a kid then—right around Nat’s age, actually. Right around the same ages as all the other the kids who went missing.”
“Hold up, Benny,” Teddy interrupted. “All the other kids? 1986? How the hell do you know all that?”
“I checked my copies of the articles?” He raised an eyebrow at our puzzled faces. “What, you think I memorized all that shit? I took pictures with my phone while we waited on the cops.”
“That’s what you were doing in there that day?” I said, forgetting to whisper. I’d practically broken my legs getting out of that house, and Teddy had been right at my heels. Ben had emerged several moments after us, but we’d hardly thought to question the delay at the time. “What were you thinking?”
“Really? We’re in the middle of a murder investigation. I was thinking I’d better get them while I could, before Darrow showed up and started slapping evidence labels on everything. He’s been a dick about sharing.”
“I just spent how many hours looking all this up by hand, and you’ve had copies this whole time?”
“Well, you never know. I might have missed one.”
“Oh, great thinking. Thanks a lot.” I dropped my volume back to a whisper right before it rose beyond library polite. “If Darrow finds out what you did—”
“Whatever, that was our discovery. If the cops want to get technical, Dad bought the house as is, and all the contents therein, murder trophies included. Taking pictures of my own property isn’t illegal. And if it is, well, can you guess how many fucks I give?”
“Goddamn, Ben,” Teddy groaned. “Love to see you tell that one to a judge.”
“All those articles would’ve gone straight into the landfill if not for me, so as far as I’m concerned, they should all be kissing my ass, hypothetical judges included. Anyway.” Ben tapped a finger on the folder, getting back to business. “Noah Franklin left River Run in May 1993, right after Amy’s mom took off. They were in the same class, I think—is that right, Ames?”
“Yes, ’93. Two years behind Aunt Mattie.”
“That’s right. Dad and Sam were ’91—and wasn’t June a couple years younger, Teddy? I know they were all in school together at some point.”
“Mom was class of ’94, I think,” Teddy said. “A freshman when Dad was a senior. So yeah. A year behind Amy’s mom.”
“And Noah Franklin,” Ben added. “He was young, but stranger things have happened. He must know something. And there’s nothing saying he didn’t play a part in the later disappearances.”
“So because he was in town back then, he must have been involved?” I said. “Ben, everyone we know was in town—on the same land, even. Our mothers lived right through the woods. Teddy’s place is practically the halfway point between the houses.”
“That land was nothing but trees and a footpath back then. When my parents got married and everyone caught the fucking hint that your mom was staying gone, Grandpa cleared the site. Dad hired Sam to oversee the stables, and they installed the trailer for him and June. This was all before we were born, but either way, they weren’t on the property when shit went down at the Franklin house.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions, dude,” Teddy said. “We don’t know for sure if anything went down at the Franklin house. Now you think Noah Franklin was a teenage serial killer who came back decades later and took my sister?”
“They’re called deductions, Teddy. Standard investigative technique for any detective.”
“Yeah, but detectives base their deductions on facts—actual, confirmed case knowledge, not guessing out of thin air. For all we know, Old Franklin was just one of those true-crime junkies who kept up with all the weird local shit.”
“And who also happened to keep boxes of human hair in his wall? Okay, sure, man. Keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, I’ll focus on what we know for certain. You’re welcome.”
“That’s the point—we don’t know for certain. We don’t know anything at all, and until they get results back on that stuff, it’s all coincidence. I don’t know who the fuck this guy even is. He might have been in school with my parents a million years ago, but I sure never met him, or even heard of him before all this started, and neither did Nat. You’re out there chasing down your theories when we should be focused on what happened to her.”
“Noah Franklin was in that house for the vast majority of those disappearances and was back in town when Nat herself disappeared. I can’t find anything current on him now—just an old Facebook with a dog as the profile pic, and it’s locked down. No Twitter, no blog, not even a LinkedIn. It’s like he’s gone into hiding—like he’s running from something and doesn’t want to be found. But coincidence. Right.”
“My God, Ben, lower your voice,” I hissed, cringing under the eye of the librarian, who’d poked her head around the corner and aimed a warning glare our way. “We shouldn’t be talking about this in here. Or anywhere in public.”
“You’re right, Ames,” Ben said, stowing his printouts in his binder and loading his stuff back into his bag. “Let’s head back to my place and really dig into this stuff. And grab a sandwich. You guys hungry? I’m dying for a sub. Maybe some hot wings.”
Ben slung his bag strap across his body and stalked toward the exit, motioning with his chin for us to follow. We fell into step behind him as he shoved both double doors open at once, bursting defiantly into a wall of summer heat. Teddy and I caught up to him on the sidewalk, flanking him as he surveyed the afternoon shuffle of pedestrians, pickup trucks, and scattered café tables that was downtown River Run. Frustration pulsed in his jaw, knotting the muscles of his shoulders. He’d gone for the hard sell on the Noah Franklin theory, but Teddy was right—it was still nothing but a theory. Realistically, we were no closer to an answer than we’d been that morning.
I could practically hear the suspicions spooling through my cousin’s mind—it could be anyone. The man sipping from a Styrofoam coffee cup as he waited for the crosswalk signal. The woman taking the last drag off a cigarette as she strolled past, then tossing the butt in the gutter. A farmer or a banker, or a teacher at the school; a quarry worker on his father’s own payroll. Anyone.
A group of boys our age ambled by us, whooped a greeting as they passed. Ben acknowledged them with a sharp nod, then turned and headed for the parking lot, not bothering to look back. I reached for Teddy’s hand without thinking, my fingers drawn to his automatically. My heart sinking wearily into my gut when he shied away. His eyes darted to mine, heavy with sorrow and apologies. I looked past him, holding my chin high, emptying my veins of any semblance of hurt or rage or longing. Gathered it all and buried it deep beneath our lie, until it felt like nothing but indifference.