THE DOWDS LIVE in a jigsaw puzzle of a house on the northeast side of town. It used to be a thousand-square-foot Cape Cod with two bedrooms and a single bathroom. Then Kimberly’s parents added three separate additions, none of which quite match the original paint job. They’re both writers for a couple of different magazines, and they like to keep to themselves. Charlie and Gabe and I have never had a bad experience at Kim’s house, but none of us has spoken more than a handful of sentences to either of her parents.
I have to stop myself when I get to the front of the house. It used to be so easy for me to waltz right up to the front door and let myself in, find Kimberly lounging on the couch reading some book, something by Thomas Hardy or Charlotte Brontë, something dense and complicated that would put me to sleep in a second. She likes to scribble poetry in the margins of the pages—her shelves are filled with books that are both classic novels and her own journals.
Knowing that she’s not in there waiting for one or all of us to come sweep her into some lame adventure …
The tears come before I know they’re building, and I drop my chin to my chest. The concrete at my feet develops dark splotches where the teardrops hit and quickly evaporate into nothing. If I stand here long enough, maybe the heat can bake my grief away, too.
“What the hell did we get ourselves into?” Gabe asks beside me.
When I look at him, I’m surprised to see tears in his eyes, too. He’s got the same fears weighing on his mind as I do, with Kimberly at the center. But he’ll never understand my fear, the basis for wanting to believe that Kim is alive out there. I have to keep reminding myself that he’s worried about our friend, same as I am, and that no matter what, he’s on my side. Gabe’s never been anything less than a friend to me. Maybe he’s wanted more, and maybe I’ve pulled away from him because of that, but I know he’d never let anything happen to me. He didn’t keep secrets because he didn’t trust me—he kept them because he wanted me to be safe, and I’m grateful for that.
“Let’s go,” I say. “We don’t know how much time we have.”
Walking up to Kimberly’s front porch feels like walking to the edge of a cliff. My feet are unreliable, my legs shaky and hollow. I’m a ceramic doll, a piece of porcelain that could tip and shatter with just a breath of wind.
There isn’t any wind now, not even a breeze. Just the June sun, a perfect yellow circle driving beams of thick heat down on Windale. My forearms are sweating, my shirt clinging to my back. The old boards creak as we step across them to the front door. There’s little escape from the heat under the shade of the awning, but I feel a chill anyway. I lift my fist to knock but hesitate.
“You do it,” I whisper to Gabe. “Please?”
He swallows, nodding, then lifts his own fist. I can see it shaking. Then there’s the sharp crack of Gabe’s knuckles on the door, which cuts through me in an unpleasant way. I shut my eyes and see the slo-mo world of the Windale I explored in my dream (nightmare?) and the front door that was supposed to look like my own but definitely wasn’t. I hear the knock. When the door opens this time, though, the man in the gas mask is waiting on the stoop, dressed from head to toe in black, the big lenses of the mask tinted a smoky shade of gray, hiding the eyes that watch me from behind them.
My eyes snap open, and I suck in a harsh breath, almost a gasp.
Gabe leans over. “You all right?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I lie. “Yeah. Just nervous.”
“Me too.”
I feel his hand slip into mine, his skin just as clammy as mine. My first instinct is to snatch my hand away, put it in my pocket, protect him from getting the wrong idea. But I get the feeling he’s looking for comfort as much as he’s trying to give some to me. And if I’m being really honest, it’s good to have someone to hold on to, someone who’s been there through practically every knee scrape and heartbreak of my childhood.
A few years ago, when our dog, Presto, died, Gabe held my hand just like this while Dad buried him in the soft ground near the canal. Charlie and Kim were there, too. Kimberly was holding my other hand, and Charlie was holding hers. We all cried together that day, and then we went to the diner and Harry brought us milkshakes and we took turns telling our favorite Presto stories. By the end of the night, those three had me laughing so hard that my tears were less grief and more joy.
Now, I squeeze Gabe’s hand. For that memory and so many others like it.
When nobody answers the door, Gabe knocks again. This time we can hear footsteps moving through the house. We see the top of Mrs. Dowd’s head poke up into the little window at the top of the front door. Then the locks click—the dead bolt and the doorknob—and the door swings open.
Mrs. Dowd stands in the dim foyer, dressed in wrinkled sweatpants and a sweatshirt that’s too small for her. I recognize it as Kimberly’s Flyers sweatshirt. It’s old and faded, the elastic in the cuffs worn out so that the sleeves droop open like sagging jowls. I can smell Kim’s perfume on it even from here, wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Dowd had sprayed a little extra on the sweatshirt before squeezing herself into it. Her eyes are wide and puffy, the color drained from her cheeks.
“Hi, kids,” she says, trying a tiny half-hearted smile.
“Hi, Mrs. Dowd,” Gabe says. He has his empty hand buried in the pocket of his jeans, and his head is pulled down between his shoulders like a turtle trying to hide in its shell.
Mrs. Dowd lets out a single cluck of laughter. “Gabe, in all these years, no matter how many times I’ve told you, you still refuse to call me Sheila.”
Gabe waggles his head back and forth, grinning a little himself. “Sorry. Force of habit, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Mrs. Dowd says, her expression souring. “I get that.” She doesn’t elaborate, but she tugs at the bottom of Kimberly’s sweatshirt, rubbing the fabric between her fingers almost tenderly.
“Mrs. Dowd,” I say, my voice croaking. “How are you doing? How’s Mr. Dowd?”
“Bradley?” she says. “I have no idea how he’s doing. I have no idea if he even … if he even knows…” She pauses, pulling in a shaky breath. “Bradley got caught outside the army barricade. He was driving back from Doylestown Friday afternoon when … he never made it back, and I haven’t been able to get ahold of him.”
“Wait,” I say. “So you’ve been here by yourself?”
Mrs. Dowd nods, not looking directly at me or Gabe. But she seems to snap back into herself, her eyes clearing up a bit. “Why don’t you kids come in out of the heat? We can talk. Tell me how you’re doing.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, that sounds nice.”
She pulls the door open all the way, and before we step in, Gabe and I both steal glances over our shoulders. We parked the Chevelle in an alley a block or so away, as out of sight as we could get it, but the MPs could already be patrolling the streets looking for us. If they find the car, they’ll most likely find us here.
It’s delightfully cold inside the house. No wonder Mrs. Dowd is dressed in sweats—the AC is on full blast, and it must be sixty degrees in here at most. I shiver when the cool air falls across my damp, sticky skin.
Mrs. Dowd ushers us into the living room, which is cluttered with stacks of books and notepads, newspapers and magazines. There’s a small TV set in the corner, but the remote is resting on top and both are covered in a carpet of dust. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the TV switched on in this house.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Mrs. Dowd asks. She drops mechanically into one of the overstuffed chairs while Gabe and I sit down on the couch. “I think I have some Turkey Hill iced tea in the fridge?”
“I’m okay,” Gabe says.
“Me too,” I say. “We won’t bother you for too long, Mrs. Dowd. We just wanted to ask you some things about Kimberly and—”
“You’re not a bother,” she says, cutting me off. “It’s good to see you two. Where’s Charlie?” Her eyes widen again as she realizes what kind of horrible responses we could have to a question like that.
“He’s … uh, at the medical center,” I say quickly. “He was … he was hurt pretty badly, but he’s okay.”
“We’re trying to get some answers,” Gabe says, glancing in my direction, looking for reassurance that I’m not equipped to provide. “I think … Mrs. Dowd, I think we might be in a lot of trouble here. And we could really use your help.”
As Gabe talks, the Dowds’ two cats—a snowy-white Ragdoll named Marshmallow and a striped mackerel tabby named Meatloaf—saunter into the living room. Meatloaf, a little thick around the edges, makes a lumbering leap up onto the armrest of Mrs. Dowd’s chair. She scratches under his chin absently, as if she barely heard what Gabe said. Meanwhile, Marshmallow stretches her legs and scratches at the carpet inside a rectangle of sunlight. Her sky-blue eyes dart around anxiously. Both cats seem really on edge.
“I’m guessing you both have had experience with the colonel?” Mrs. Dowd asks, letting Meatloaf nudge his face into her fingers. “Lovely woman that she is.”
“Higgins?” Gabe says. He squirms in his seat a bit. “Yeah. Unfortunately.”
“She … uh … She put her boot in my door.” All at once, there are tears in the eyes of my best friend’s mom. I can’t watch her cry, have to look away. My eyes fall on the cottony fluff of Marshmallow pacing in the sun. Except for the paws and the nose and quietly swishing tail, she could be a wad of pillow stuffing that someone forgot on the floor. I can’t escape Mrs. Dowd’s voice, though, thick with emotion. “She practically forced her way inside my house. Wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“Did she ask you any questions?” Gabe asks.
“Yes,” Mrs. Dowd replies. “But none that seemed to have anything to do with … with finding Kimberly. They were so personal. So … invasive. She wanted to know when Kimberly’s last period was. Can you believe that?”
Gabe makes an uncomfortable noise next to me and sits back.
“That’s … obnoxious,” I say, shooting Gabe a sideways glare. “Did it seem like she was getting at something?”
“I guess she was just trying to … I don’t know … figure Kimberly out?” She sniffles. “She was trying to find out if Kimberly would have wanted to disappear. You kids didn’t notice anything, did you?”
Her eyes, drowning in hope and grief, all but break my heart.
“We came here to ask you the same thing, Mrs. Dowd,” I say softly. “Kimberly was … off on Friday.” I look to Gabe now for confirmation—part of me still believes I could have made up her strange behavior, imagined it somehow.
But Gabe is nodding emphatically.
“Yeah,” he says. “She’s always been kind of…” He trails off, cringing, afraid to say the thing that I’m also thinking in my head.
Mrs. Dowd surprises me by saying it for us. “Rough around the edges?”
Gabe and I smile sheepishly. So does Kimberly’s mom. It’s strange to feel so guilty and relieved at the same time. I’ve never had this kind of conversation with one of my friends’ parents. It’s always hollow niceties and cheery clichés. Stupid, half-sarcastic jokes about school or the weather. I wonder, suddenly, if Gabe and Kimberly and Charlie and I have ever had to deal with anything truly serious. Our regular, everyday high school drama feels a lot less important than it always has. If it was ever important at all.
“It’s okay,” Mrs. Dowd goes on. “I’m her mother, remember? I know how she gets.” For some reason, she glances at me with a look that’s full of an emotion I can’t place. “But maybe you kids know her better than I do.” She inhales sharply. Something catches at the back of her throat. “Kimberly has these moments. These rare, spontaneous days of joy. Her laugh comes so easy, and it’s like she’s a little girl again. She’s so … untroubled in those moments. You know what I mean.”
Mrs. Dowd is looking at me when she says that, and I don’t hear a question. I nod, because I do know what she means. Kimberly is so bright and full and vibrant on those days her mom is talking about. Her smile is this perfect, fragile thing. It makes you feel like you have to be delicate with her, otherwise it might shatter and she’ll fold back into herself.
But those days aren’t the reason we’re all friends with Kimberly. And they’re certainly not the reason I fell in love with her. If we were always holding out for Kimberly’s good days—simply tolerating her through the bad ones—our friendship would never have lasted. Kim is our friend because of those days when she drags like an anchor at the bottom of the ocean, not despite them. She’s the most brutally honest of us all, the most fearless. She stares into you, not at you or through you. Sometimes, when she’s quiet and reserved and thoughtful, she just watches me, or Gabe, or Charlie, and she knows what we’re thinking even before we say it. At school, she’s an Almost Nobody because, according to bullshit high school stereotypes, she looks and sounds like she should be this bubbly, rich-kid, cheerleader type. But half the time you can find her in one of the rigid, uncomfortable chairs in the library, rolled into a ball with a book in one hand, the pages held open by her thumb. The other hand is busy fiddling with her hair, twirling and untwirling it—threads of soft gold wound around the slender spools of her fingers.
“Yeah,” I say to Mrs. Dowd now. “I know what you mean. But Friday was different. We know what she’s like when she’s being herself, when she’s … I don’t know … tuned in to another station, one that only plays her own thoughts.”
Mrs. Dowd grins at that, nodding thoughtfully. “I’ve never thought of it like that, but yes, that’s a good way of putting it,” she says.
I go on, leaning forward in my seat. “This wasn’t her being herself. She was different. Bothered by something. Mrs. Dowd, do you have any idea what that might be?”
She puts a fist to her mouth and bites the knuckle of her index finger. Meatloaf is pressing his face against her wrist, looking for more love.
“I honestly don’t know,” she says finally, dropping her hands into her lap and looking ashamed. “I was busy with an article for the Saturday Evening Post. She was in the kitchen briefly. Maybe she said goodbye? I … I just don’t remember. God, it was only two days ago, but I just wasn’t paying enough attention.”
She looks at Gabe and me with eyes that are round, wet saucers. She looks ready to cry again, but there might not be any tears left in her. This whole thing may have hollowed her out. I know it’s done that to me.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Dowd,” Gabe says next to me. “Don’t beat yourself up. We weren’t paying attention, either. At least, not enough to really ask her about what might have been going on. You know how Charlie and I are. We were talking about stupid movie shi—stuff. Sonya was the only one who really…” He trails off, and I remember going to Kimberly while we were eating lunch on Friday, right before the storm came in, and the plane with it. Maybe we can talk later? she said. “Did she say anything to you, Sone?”
“No,” I say, unable to look either of them in the eyes. “She didn’t say anything. I asked her what was up, but she … she just said we’d talk later.”
“Sounds about right,” Mrs. Dowd says with a sigh. But she’s still staring at me and Gabe, the gears turning behind her squinting eyes. “Why are you guys really here?” she asks. “Colonel Higgins is running the investigation. We all told her everything we could.” Her eyes are flicking from me to Gabe and back. “Didn’t we?”
“There are some … additional details,” Gabe says cautiously. “Things that happened on Friday…”
“And since,” I add.
“… that we don’t feel comfortable sharing with the colonel,” Gabe finishes. “To be honest, we, uh … we don’t think we can trust her.”
Mrs. Dowd’s stare falls on me again, her eyes suddenly alert and piercing. “And what about your father, Sonya?” she asks. “Does he trust the colonel?”
The implications behind what she’s asking are clear. I can’t do anything but shift uncomfortably on the couch cushion. “It’s complicated, Mrs. Dowd,” I say. It’s the only thing I can say, the only thing that even comes close to the truth.
“Except it’s not,” she replies. There’s a sharper edge to her voice now. “It’s not complicated in the slightest. My daughter is missing. Vanished because an airplane, an army airplane, fell out of the sky.” She leans forward now, uncoiling like a snake protecting its eggs. Meatloaf hops down, startled, and scares Marshmallow, and they both skitter into the kitchen. Mrs. Dowd’s stare is focused into laser precision, aimed right at me. Behind the glare, I can see her putting together the obvious pieces of the puzzle. “If your father knows anything about why that plane crashed,” she says to me, then looks at Gabe. “Or if your father knows anything about why that plane crashed, you two need to tell me. Right now.”
Her tone has taken on that parental quality, full of empty menace. She’s trying to play the Mom card on us, which might have worked when we were ten and we were jumping too high on Kimberly’s bed, but not now. Now, it just dings off the hard shell I’ve grown, my defense against all the things that can hurt me here in Windale, all the things I fully intended to leave behind when I went off to college.
Gabe speaks first, slowly and carefully. “We don’t know anything for sure right now, Mrs. Dowd.” There’s a gentleness in his voice that I’ve never heard before. “All we know is that something very strange is happening here. Something that might turn out to be really scary. Not just for us, but for everyone in Windale. And we need your help to get as much information as we can.”
My thoughts turn to the Banshee Palace, to Kimberly huddled in the dark throat of the hotel room, to the black shape of the man in the gas mask bounding out of the bathroom, falling over me like a heavy velvet curtain. Fresh goose bumps spring up across my arms, and I shiver.
Kimberly’s mom sees this, and the anger that was prickling toward her surface dwindles. She slumps back into the plump cushions of the chair with fresh tears in her eyes.
“I just want my daughter back,” she whispers, tugging at the hem of her too-tight sweatshirt.
I get up and cross the room, squat down in front of her, take her hand. It’s freezing. “Us too,” I say. “The important thing is that we find Kimberly. After that, we can worry about everything else.”
There’s a pause while Mrs. Dowd sniffles, her chin on her chest. When she breathes in, her nose sounds remarkably similar to the gurgling of the canal.
After a moment, she looks up, over my shoulder at Gabe. “And this … scary thing. Whatever it is that you say might be happening. Finding Kimberly might help you figure out what it is?”
“Or the other way around,” Gabe replies. “If we can figure out what’s going on, it might help us find Kim.”
Mrs. Dowd looks down at me, thinking. Then she squeezes my hand. A single, light pulse is all it is, but it comforts me in a way I can’t describe.
“Okay,” she tells us. “Like I said, I don’t know much. But the one thing Colonel Higgins asked me to do that I refused was look around in Kimberly’s bedroom. She said she’d come back with a warrant if she had to. I told her good luck getting Judge Hanlon out of bed on a Saturday.” I smile at that. Something tells me that Higgins doesn’t really need a warrant from our local, usually inebriated judge to get what she wants, but I’m proud of Mrs. Dowd for standing up for herself, and for Kimberly.
“You kids were closer to my daughter than I ever was,” she continues. “If there’s anything up in her room that seems odd or out of place, you’ll know what it is. Go ahead and take a look.”
I nod, standing. Gabe rises with me. We thank her again and head up the steps to Kimberly’s bedroom. On the way, I try to shake the fact that Mrs. Dowd used the past tense just then. But I can’t do it.