“Seriously, Row, you’re lucky you don’t need stitches.”
Her mom’s parental voice echoes from the kitchen. It’s usually accompanied by a rhetorical question, such as when she asks Libby, Do you really need that much peanut butter? Or You scraped that off the side of the road, didn’t you? But Rowan is an adult and not her daughter, so maybe that is what makes the difference.
Their house is decorated in cool tones—dove-feather greys and whites, and blues the light shade of Araucana eggs. The color palette is calming and quiet. Except Libby doesn’t feel calm at all right now. Her heart hammers. She can hear it in her eardrums, her blood pulsing to its beat as though there’s a raging club inside her and she’s not even invited. Why is Rowan here? And why is her mom hovering over her, pressing a bag of frozen broccoli into her hand?
“What’s up?” Libby screws her fingertips into the corners of her eyes, scraping out the crusts of sleep. It’s early and there’s no school today. It was canceled for obvious reasons. So, why has her mother called her to come downstairs at—she looks at the clock on the microwave— 7:18 a.m.?
Whatever the reason, it can’t be good. Her chest tightens when she remembers sneaking into Chloe’s room yesterday. Perhaps Rowan knows.
She didn’t leave the window open again, did she?
No. She’s sure she didn’t. But there could have been a footprint—it was raining, after all—or a strand of long, black hair left on the bedspread. She needs to be more careful.
Rowan drags her gaze to her. Her eyes are wet and sunken into pools of purple. Libby furrows her brows as she looks at Rowan’s hand. “Is everything all right?”
As far as rhetorical questions go, this one takes the cake for dumbest ever. Of course nothing is all right.
“We need your phone,” says her mom.
Her stomach drops. “My phone?”
What if they see the texts between her and Chloe from Thursday night, and all the messages that date back to last year? She never erases them. In fact, sometimes she lies in bed and scrolls through old conversations to remind herself that she does have one friend in this world, despite what everyone believes.
She did, anyway.
“Your social media, Lib. Please.”
With a shaking hand, Libby lifts up her T-shirt and pulls her phone out of the waistband of her sleep shorts. She hands it over as though she’s just been caught with it in class, but her mom doesn’t take it. “Can you log on to your Facebook or whatever?”
“Supposedly, there’s a neighborhood watch group,” explains Rowan. “For Belgrave Circle.”
There’s something about the way Rowan is looking at her that makes Libby more uneasy than she was when she first came down. She doesn’t know if medical examiners use magnifying glasses or microscopes, but she feels like a germ being scrutinized beneath one right now.
“Okay.” Libby searches groups and types in Belgrave Circle Neighbo—
“There it is!” her mom exclaims, pointing at the screen.
It’s too early for loud noises. Flinching, Libby clicks on the group and brings up the page. “What are you looking for, specifically?” she asks. If she’s confident and competent, perhaps they won’t take her phone and try to do it themselves. Who knows what they might push or unlock. She straightens her posture and keeps a firm grip on her phone. She’s got this. She’s in control.
“A woman is taking pumpkins from people’s porches,” Rowan explains. “There might be some footage or a forum or something.”
A knock sounds at the front door. Libby and her mother exchange a look, each questioning the other on who it could be. Her dad is already gone to work.
“I’ll get it,” Libby offers. It gets colder as she nears the door. The morning chill seeps in through the windows, tiny fractures in the glass, the hair-thin space where the pane meets the sill. She peers through the peephole and her internal temperature drops to match that of her surroundings.
Fudge.
Axel Winthorp is standing on her front porch. He looks right at her, as though the fish-eye lens magnifies her eyeball. Reluctantly, and with all the horrible potential reasons why he could be at her house right now at this hour a melee in her mind, Libby opens the door.
“Good morning, Libby,” he says, his voice hoarse. “May I come in?”
She steps aside and feels as though she’s just let a vampire into her house. He’s pale and sallow, and walks with a hunch as though he dragged himself out of a grave to get here. She looks outside as she shuts the door behind him and notices his black Impala parked in his driveway. She wonders if her kit is still in the backseat with her silver locket and if the vehicle is unlocked.
“Oh. Hi.” Her mother’s voice is breathy, surprised at Axel’s sudden appearance.
“Hello, Marnie. Rowan. I, um, stopped home to shower and whatnot and you weren’t there. I thought you might be over here.”
This is awkward. They’ve been fighting; Libby can tell by the way neither wants to meet the other’s eyes. She observes how Rowan wraps her cardigan around herself tighter. A muscle twitches in her jaw. She looks ashamed and stares down at the bag of frozen vegetables in her lap.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Axel moves closer. While Rowan explains that she dropped a coffee mug, Libby takes the opportunity to recede to the outer edges of this unorthodox gathering. She doesn’t need to be here when Axel changes his mind and brings up the topic of the locket and whose teeth are where. She can sneak upstairs and put pants on, then climb out the window and just wander a bit. Return when her mom cools down.
But her phone is still on the countertop. She can’t go too far.
If she could just—
Toast. She’ll start making toast. And while she’s buttering her bread, she will nonchalantly slip the phone back into her waistba—
“Can I get you some coffee, Axel? I was going to make a fresh pot.” Her mom whizzes behind her, already grabbing another mug from the cupboard.
“No, thank you, Marnie. I was hoping I could talk to you about something.”
“Oh.” A startle. “Of course.”
Fudge. Oh fudge. Oh fudge.
Libby grips the edge of the island, bracing herself. It’s too late to run now. In the next thirty seconds, everyone will know about her gruesome hobby. She collected Madison’s teeth. It’s not as if they were still in her skull when she took them. It isn’t a crime and yet—
It’s obstructing, Axel made sure to tell her yesterday. She could be charged with concealing information that could have helped the investigation. But she didn’t see anything. She already swore that to him. And if she gets him dirt on Reeves Singh, she’ll be free as a bird.
Which is why she needs her phone back. Desperately. Like Thing from The Addams Family, her fingers dance across the countertop and grab the device. She scrolls frantically, searching for anything that could derail this conversation. Then, something silver flashes. As adept as a cat locking onto a laser dot, Libby’s gaze darts to Axel’s hand that’s half out of his pocket. He’s holding her locket chain.
“Oh!” Libby cries. The grown-ups in the room all startle. “Is this who you’re looking for, Rowan?”
She pauses on a grainy fish-eyed video of what appears to be a person in a drab, olive-green jacket and a maroon stocking cap. The post is captioned Porch Pirate Stealing Pumpkins!!
The time stamp on the video is 22:14:03, just a few minutes after 10 p.m. and plenty dark. They watch intently as a bony woman approaches the porch, then gathers the glowing jack-o’-lanterns one at a time and deposits them in a stroller. With the gourds in tow, she ambles on, probably to the next house.
Libby reads the comments. While some people express sympathy, others are judgmental and/or fearful.
She must be mental.
Wouldn’t be surprised if she turns out to have killed that Caldwell girl.
As she continues to scan the thread, she sees a comment where someone suspects where the woman—who’s been coined the Pumpkin Lady—stays: that old haunted house on Winslow Street.
She knows that house. There isn’t a soul in Black Harbor who doesn’t. A girl was kept there once and tortured, pimped out by her aunt. Just last year she became an important piece to solving the twenty-year-old mystery of Clive Reynolds’s disappearance. Rumor has it she left and never set foot on Black Harbor soil again. Good for her.
“Play it again.” Axel’s voice is suddenly in her ear. She taps the play button and he leans closer. The cold October air clings to him. “Oh my God.” His words are hardly more than a whisper.
“What?”
Her mom comes to watch as Axel presses play a third time. “That’s the Glencasters’,” she says, noting the red bricks and the pair of teal planters.
Axel taps the screen to pause the video. The woman is frozen mid-bend and Libby sees it, too. On her back is a purple, star-speckled bag. “That’s Sari Simon’s backpack,” she says.