Thora had disappeared seven months ago, and they’d never found the body.
No one had any answers other than the usual litany: you kids shouldn’t run around on the cliffs, they’re too dangerous, haven’t we told you that a million times?
Zoey had had just about enough of pretending she was okay with this.
She didn’t think, generally speaking, people were allowed to wander in off the street and go snooping around the police station like they owned the place. But Police Chief Harlow was in charge of things, so Zoey Harlow could do what she wanted to do.
It was the one paltry joy of living on Sawkill Rock alongside its army of gleaming people, with their smooth, untroubled faces and their sweat-stained riding jodhpurs and their cars that cost more than Zoey’s house.
Rosalind, sitting at the front desk, offered Zoey an oatmeal-raisin cookie and nodded at Zoey’s notebook. “What’re you writing today?”
“Haven’t decided yet!” Zoey replied. Which was true. She hadn’t decided yet since Thora died. Her half-filled notebook remained half-filled. The only thing to come out of Zoey’s pen over the past few months besides schoolwork were doodles of farting unicorns.
She rounded the corner, parked herself in the staff lounge, showed an old scrap of a poem to her father’s nosy deputy, and doodled flatulent mythological creatures for a half hour. When the place had emptied out for lunch, Zoey retrieved her dad’s office key in her pocket, crept through the quiet hallways, unlocked his door, and slipped inside.
Her heart raced. She’d been in this office hundreds of times since moving to Sawkill two years ago. But she had never entered it without her father’s permission—and definitely never with the intent to snoop.
Zoey crept around the desk, opened the six desk drawers, leafed through papers. The office was immaculate—no surprise there—but that meant she had to go slowly, make sure she put everything back exactly where she’d found it. Ed Harlow was the kind of guy who’d flip out—mostly good-naturedly—if someone misplaced a single book.
He’d told her once, The world is a crazy place, Zo. I like to keep my part of it as neat as I can.
Which was all well and good, albeit painfully dorky. Still, this wasn’t the first time Zoey had wished her dad was a slob.
Nothing in the desk. Nothing on the desk.
Zoey turned around, eyed the row of file cabinets lining the back wall—eight altogether—and blew out a sharp breath.
“Wow, Dad,” she muttered. “Got enough file cabinets?”
She opened the first one, thumbed through the hanging files. A bunch of administrative crap. Forms and forms and more forms. Useless.
Next: Three-ring binders packed with training manuals.
Next: Employee files. Performance reviews. A handwritten letter of complaint from Sergeant George Montgomery III about the hazardous levels of perfume Rosalind insisted upon wearing. Really, Chief, Sergeant Montgomery had written, I fear for my health.
Smirking, Zoey closed the third file cabinet, stretched her arms over her head, yawned.
Then she saw it. A new addition to her father’s office: a small, square picture in a silver frame, sitting in a lineup of other framed photographs on a narrow corner table. Zoey’s own brown face—skin a bit lighter than her dad’s rich brown, dusted with a few of her mother’s freckles—smiled up at herself. Her chin-length black curls framed her face like a cloud, and she had her arms thrown wide, as if to declare that the person grinning beside her was a revelation to be flaunted.
Zoey touched Thora’s image—white skin, mousy brown hair, cheeky grin, shining eyes. Zoey’s tears came so quickly that their arrival made her choke a little.
Thora.
Presumed dead at seventeen, and no one knew why, or when, or how.
Zoey closed her eyes, turned away from the frame and Thora’s giddy image. She remembered the day from the photo: Zoey’s seventeenth birthday party. Thora and Grayson were the only attendees, and the only ones Zoey had wanted to see (and the only ones who would have come to a party of Zoey’s, but whatever). A movie marathon—Alien, Aliens, then, at Thora’s request, The Breakfast Club, then, at Grayson’s request, sleep, for the love of God. It was 4:30 a.m. Thora’s voice, giggling: Grayson, you are such an old man. All of them piled on the couch in Thora’s basement. Thora snoring against Zoey’s shoulder. Grayson’s hand touching Zoey’s.
They hadn’t yet had sex, her and Grayson. And she hadn’t yet broken up with him.
And Thora hadn’t yet been murdered.
Well, and that was the thing, wasn’t it? No one thought Thora had been murdered. Not officially, anyway. There had been no evidence of murder; everyone’s alibis had checked out.
“There are wild animals on our island,” Zoey’s father had said in an interview with the mainland paper, “not to mention very dangerous areas on the cliffs where the ground can give way without warning. Please, to all our young people, and to any visitors: do not go wandering in the woods after dark.”
Wild animals. Collapsing cliffs.
Sure. Zoey guessed so.
But those were the same bullshit reasons people had been giving for Sawkill’s disappearing girls for years. Decades, even. Zoey had never bought it.
And now, with Thora gone?
Thora, who’d always understood when Zoey wanted to stay in instead of go out. Thora, who’d obsessed over fandoms even more obscure than Zoey’s. Thora, who’d always whispered the old island monster tales before bed when Zoey and Grayson slept over, even when scaredy-cat Grayson had begged her not to:
Beware of the woods and the dark, dank deep.
He’ll follow you home and won’t let you sleep.
Zoey slammed open the door of her father’s fourth file cabinet, blinking back her tears.
With Thora gone, Zoey was no longer satisfied with the non-answers of the local law enforcement. Not even when their boss was her dad.
But just as she started flipping through a new drawer of hanging files, a scream cut through the silence—a horse scream. The most terrible sound in the world.
Zoey felt like she’d stepped through a veil into winter. She kicked the cabinet door shut, then hurried to the window and squinted into the sunlight, just in time to see Nightingale, her father’s horse, rear up in the parking lot of the market next door, his front legs clawing the air. Her father fell back, hit the ground hard, but Zoey wasn’t worried. Ed Harlow was made of granite.
The reins went flying. Someone was on Nightingale’s back.
Zoey didn’t recognize her—some white girl with long dark hair.
“Marion!” Another white girl, wearing a faded red parka, rushed across the parking lot, grocery bags swinging from her hands.
But it was too late.
Nightingale surged through the rows of parked cars. His coat glistened with sweat.
The girl on his back held on for dear life, hair streaming behind her. It was painfully obvious that she wasn’t a Sawkill girl.
One, her clothes looked secondhand, like Zoey’s—except they lacked what Zoey liked to refer to as her middle-finger flair. Artful rips, plain fabric dyed in shocking colors, wild fringe where there had previously only been a plain, uninteresting hem.
And two, the girl couldn’t ride for shit.
Zoey sympathized. Her first and only riding experience had ended with a full-blown panic attack on the back of a sedate whiskered police horse with woebegone eyes.
“Jesus,” Zoey spat.
She sprinted down the hall and outside, grabbed her mud-splattered mountain bike from where she’d left it hidden behind the hedge, and took off pedaling.
Nightingale was taking the Runaround Road, pebbled and dusty white. It circled the outskirts of town, along the Black Cliffs that capped the hilly shoreline of the island’s western face, and eventually sloped down into the Spinney.
It was a road meant for pleasant seaside strolls, not for panicked horses on a tear. Nightingale would fall, break his leg, throw the girl. If she was lucky, she’d hit a bush beside the trail.
If she wasn’t lucky, she’d land on the black sea rocks below the cliffs.
Zoey pumped her legs as hard as she could. From behind her came the wail of her father’s patrol car, the pounding of feet as people ran after them down the road.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered, glaring through the wind at Nightingale’s racing dark form. “Calm down, you stupid horse.”
At Runaround Road’s highest point, Nightingale let out another one of those awful, bloodcurdling screams and disappeared over the other side.
Shit, shit, shit.
Zoey’s muscles burned as she pedaled up the slope, and then she was cresting the hill and flying down the other side. Runaround Road ended in a tiny tree-ringed overlook that Val Mortimer had long ago claimed as her favorite hookup spot.
There, in the center of what Zoey had coined the Viper’s Den, the girl lay unmoving in the dirt.
Nightingale tore off into the trees, reins trailing.
“Damn it,” Zoey muttered, braking hard. She sprinted to where the girl lay with her eyes closed, checked for blood.
No blood.
Breathing?
She checked her pulse.
Yes, breathing.
Zoey smoothed back the damp hair clinging to the girl’s forehead.
“Hey,” she murmured, cupping the girl’s right cheek with her right hand. “Can you hear me?”
Over the years, Zoey had remade herself from the kind of girl who cried when she saw roadkill to the kind of girl who shoved down her tears so deeply it sometimes felt she’d forgotten how to cry at all. Things were easier that way.
But now, kneeling in the chalky white dirt beside this girl, Zoey felt her eyes well up for the second time in ten minutes.
“Look, you’ve got to open your eyes,” she said, “because I could use another secondhand girl around here. You know what I’m saying?”
“Zoey? She all right?” Her father was running down the hill, shouting into his phone. “Yeah, we’re at the White Rock Overlook. No, I can’t tell yet.”
“Marion?” More footsteps racing down the hill, lighter ones. “Marion! I’m coming!”
“Is that your name?” Zoey leaned closer. “Hey. Marion? I’m Zoey. You’re gonna be okay.”
The girl from the parking lot, wearing the red parka, knelt beside Marion with tears in her eyes.
Zoey, afraid to move Marion, kept the girl’s face in her hands. If she woke up, she’d feel the comfort of warm skin on her face and know she wasn’t dead.
“Hush now,” came another voice, light and feminine. “I’ve got you.”
Zoey froze at the sound of that voice. She knew it well, and she was sorry she did.
At the edge of Zoey’s vision stretched a pale hand with shining manicured nails, trimmed short.
Parka Girl took the hand and rose.
“She’s not moving,” said Parka Girl, voice thick with tears.
“She’ll be all right,” answered Val Mortimer, in that voice that wasn’t fooling anyone, and yet it did in fact seem to fool everyone. It had even fooled Thora.
It did not fool Zoey.
Zoey concentrated on Marion’s unconscious face so she didn’t have to listen too closely to Val and Parka Girl talking. But she did catch some things: The girl’s name was Charlotte. She was Marion’s sister.
Their father had recently died.
“Don’t worry,” Val reassured Charlotte. “Chief Harlow always knows just what to do.”
Zoey couldn’t help it. She glared back at Val. Bitch bitch bitch.
Val had her arms around Marion’s sister. Her smile was made of diamonds and beestings, and she flashed it at Zoey as if to say, Go ahead. I dare you.
And to think that after Thora died, Zoey had actually considered reaching out to Val:
She was my friend, too.
At least, she used to be.
It was at that moment that Marion’s bloodshot eyes snapped open.
And she began screaming.