UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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I retreat to a quiet moment, back before this night. Just a regular night weeks before, when nothing is happening. I sit at the window of Maggie’s room.
A spider makes a web in the white glow of the floodlights. I watch her work; the moths flutter in her web. Some of them are too big for her to eat or are not to her taste. They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But not me. There’s nothing accidental about me being in this place, and this time. I’ve sifted through these hours—I’ve hovered above Water Street and below it in dark spaces—because of what I’ve done and what I need to atone for.
I’m afraid I know what it is, and I don’t want to know.
The moonlight on this night, weeks before, is beautiful. The people I love are still living. There’s so much peace here. I want to stay forever. But time pulls me forward.
A key is buried in the dirt under the front stairs of the house on Water Street. The word Subaru is etched across its face in faded letters.
If I still breathed air, I’d take a breath.
Pauline walks along the snowy road in her black winter boots, trudging in the direction of the Wittes’ and gazing up at the cardinal that seems to be following her from tree to tree. It’s been snowing for about an hour, but only lightly, and every few moments pieces of the sunset shine through the clouds and filter down through the trees.
She walks up to the house and knocks and waits. She peers across the empty field and sees the dim outline of Liam’s tracks, strangely crisscrossed and jumbled. She knocks again.
Pauline stamps her feet together and rubs her mittens against each other, then turns and walks back to the edge of Water Street. She must be thinking that he’s gone on a walk or that he’s gone to her house, straight through the woods, and they’ve passed each other. She peers into the trees in the hopes of seeing Abe.
She sighs. She starts off again in the direction of home.
As she walks back down Water Street, she glances at the field beyond the fence, staring again at the crisscrossed tracks. She listens to the silence and glances at the silo in the distance. Then keeps walking. She’s almost at the edge of the fence when she stops and backtracks a few steps, staring at something. Under the shelter of an evergreen that overhangs the fence, where there’s only a light dusting of snow because of the full branches, there are drops of dark red. Blood.
At first she thinks it must be an animal. Pauline looks to either side of her and then sees the tracks. Whatever it is has set a definite course. The trail—the deep furrow in the snow—leads toward the silo.
She walks through a scattering of evergreens, and now the path opens up into the wider clearing, and from here, the trail leads right to the silo door, which has been left open.
Pauline’s eyes water with fear; she wipes them with her mittens. Not an animal.
She walks forward slowly now, tense. She pauses at the threshold and peers into the shadowy darkness inside the silo.
She only has to push the door a little farther—letting the last of the evening light in—to see the figure. It’s curled on top of a pile of grain.
It stirs and rattles. Its breath is labored.
The figure has a voice. It calls her by her name.
Maggie stood in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom, trying on her blue-flowered dress. It fell to just above her knees, and she liked the way it clung to her hips and accentuated her curves. But there was no denying it was still an ugly dress.
She thought of her dad walking into the store to buy it and kept trying to look at it from a different angle, hoping to magically change her mind.
She wondered if her mom had realized, as soon as she’d seen the dress, that it was all wrong. She was just starting to unzip it when a choked, metallic groan pulled her attention to the window. She could see Pauline’s silhouette in the front seat of the old Subaru across the yard, trying to get it started. Maggie wondered absently where she was trying to go in the crazy weather. The car had snow tires, but that didn’t mean it could plow its way through a foot of snow. She turned to her dresser and rezipped her dress. Maybe if she sat with it a while longer, it would grow on her.
A few moments later, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Pauline’s dark shape crossing the snowy field between their houses at a faltering run, like she was tripping through the snow. Maggie leaned her face up against the window in curiosity as Pauline raced up onto the porch.
She heard the doorbell ring below and then the pounding on the door, the loud staccato of Pauline’s fist.
Maggie turned toward the hall, then hesitated. There was something Pauline urgently wanted to tell her. Or something she wanted to do immediately and couldn’t wait for. Whatever it was, it was another thing that would end up revolving around Pauline. Maggie’s heart pounded in her chest with envy and anger. If she’d had boiling oil right then, like they’d had on the walls of castles in the Middle Ages, she might have poured it out her window.
She turned back toward her mirror. She smoothed out the skirt of the dress with her hands. She decided that, no matter how hard Pauline knocked, she wouldn’t answer the door.