Saturday, 8:50 a.m.
Before she’d left Sierraville, Leyna called Dominic to let him know she was twenty minutes away. A few minutes into their conversation, the call dropped. Strange that she couldn’t get a signal on that stretch of highway. Dominic had mentioned the power was out at Ridgepoint Ranch—a preemptive measure, he’d said—but she wouldn’t have thought it would affect service that far south.
Leyna couldn’t help but take it as a warning. With the exception of Dominic, no one in the old neighborhood would want her there. And, truthfully, she wasn’t even sure how Dominic would react. A phone call was one thing, being face to face for the first time in a decade another.
Their relationship had started slow. Too slow. The problem was, Dominic knew her too well. A version of her, anyway. Growing up, Leyna was the girl who’d sulked when she got a B in English—she could handle failing math, but that less-than-perfect grade on a midterm paper had been a minor devastation. She was the girl who’d eaten a whole jar of maraschino cherries and gotten sick—Grace had called her Pinkie for a month for the color of the vomit she’d left on the bathroom floor only a couple of feet from the toilet.
That’s you, Pinkie. Always falling just short. Back then, Grace had said such things with a teasing smile.
But that’s who Leyna was at Ridgepoint Ranch. A girl to be teased for vomiting cherry juice, for disappearing into the forest with a tattered copy of And Then There Were None. A girl who could climb trees effortlessly but sometimes tripped while walking on asphalt.
A child.
That summer before her nineteenth birthday, Leyna hadn’t wanted to be a child in Dominic’s eyes. So they’d spent a long weekend in San Francisco, ostensibly to attend a music festival, but most of the time they’d been in their hotel, talking over plates of crispy-skinned chicken and watching movies on the TV in their room, everything from romantic comedies to The Purge.
The five hours that separated them from home had done the trick. They’d left a couple.
Recently, Leyna had come across The Purge on TV, and she’d instantly heard his voice in her head.
If there was a Purge here, I would build a shelter where no one could get to you.
I assume you’d be there too?
It’s only fair, since I built it.
We’d need to stay put, though. We couldn’t fall for their tricks to flush us out.
His voice had rasped when he’d said, If we were there together, what reason would I have to leave?
Later, Leyna gave him plenty of reasons to change his mind about that.
The closer Leyna got to the old neighborhood, the lighter her foot got on the gas pedal. Though she was in no hurry to return to it, the Ridgepoint Ranch of Leyna’s childhood had been a place of wonder. Homes like scaled-down castles. Azure skies, cloudless until evening, when puffs of white would appear as if conjured by a child’s wish. Pine- and ozone-scented air that felt heavy in her lungs. The scent of woodsmoke, but only in the winter, when night started early and fire wasn’t a threat.
But mostly, the lure for Leyna had been the forest. The pines and firs and cedars that marched shoulder to shoulder from her backyard and up the mountainside.
That glossier, brochure-ready version had stopped existing long before Grace went missing. As Leyna pulled up, she saw that the street that dead-ended at the Clarke home was well maintained—weeds trimmed, asphalt intact. The Miller house, now operated as a short-term rental, was starting to show signs of wear, but the other houses had been kept up. Glass still gleamed, front doors were freshly painted, and cars were kept in the driveways.
But Leyna knew that a quarter mile down the main road, slabs intended for houses had cracked. A few houses from the second phase of construction had been framed, but most of the wood had been scavenged. The last time she’d been home, only a few pieces, warped and water-stained, had littered the ground. Now, after ten years, those were probably gone too.
Another few hundred feet up the road, no slabs had been poured; the street was gravel and dirt. Beyond that, the golf course and its empty pool. As they were the only children on the street back then, the grounds had belonged to the four of them—the Duran brothers, the Clarke sisters. They would sneak onto the fairway and toss rocks into the water traps, climb the trees with branches closest to the ground. They broke into the half-built clubhouse and claimed it as their own until Grace found a dead possum next to a roll of discarded insulation.
Leyna had no intention of staying long enough to see what had become of their former playground. An hour, two max, and she’d be back on the road to Reno. She climbed out of the car and held up her phone, tapping the top of the screen. No bars. Not even the SOS showing she could summon emergency services.
She scanned the neighborhood but saw no sign of Dominic. She wondered again what he might look like now and if he still used the same cologne—the one with notes of cedar and fir that smelled as much like home in her memory as the surrounding forest.
It was dangerous, being here.
Leyna started to punch in a text, then remembered she had no service. She wasn’t about to knock on the Durans’ door. She glanced reluctantly at her mom’s house. Only one step better than going to the Durans’.
But this she had to do, if for no other reason than to get Grace’s old photos. Leyna told herself they might hold some connection to Ellie, but she didn’t really believe that. She wanted the Polaroids because they wouldn’t fade as much as her memories would. Leyna worried that eventually, she’d forget all the moments that once brought Grace joy, and the last of her sister would disappear.
And then there were the questions she could ask only her mom. About Adam.
Despite Leyna’s resolve, her stomach twisted as she climbed the steps to the front porch of her childhood home. She brushed her fingers across the scar in the middle of her left forearm. A couple of inches long, the scar had once been ropy and pink, and it had itched like crazy. Her skin had produced too much collagen during healing, the doctor said. But injections and time had softened it until all that remained was a small strip of discolored skin and a phantom itch during times of stress. Like now. She fought the urge to pick at it.
She imagined her mom’s drawl and the judgment that always masqueraded as concern: You need to move on, Leyna. Stop seeing your sister in the faces of strangers. Wind whistled through the pines that lined the driveway, sounding a lot like one of her mom’s disappointed sighs.
That sigh of wind worried her, but she focused on more immediate concerns.
She tapped on the door, then peered through one of the sidelights that flanked it. Behind the house, the generator hummed, but candles flickered on the entryway table, as if her mom were inside channeling the dead. Maybe she’d finally accepted that Grace wasn’t coming home.
A gust rattled the pines again, scattering needles on the ground.
As Leyna balled her fist and prepared to knock with more authority, the door swung open, revealing her mom in a red painter’s smock, blond hair pulled back into an artfully messy bun, a small ruby pendant nestling in the hollow of her throat.
Despite the strategically curated elegance, there was nothing delicate about Meredith Clarke. Her spine seemed a rod anchored in the ground, her arms muscle and bone, as if anything unnecessary had been stripped away.
When she saw Leyna, her forehead puckered, and her jaw went slack. She managed a quick “Oh.”
After ten years, that was what Leyna got: A startled exhalation followed by an awkward silence. More than she’d expected.
Her mom had four inches on her, five if you took into account Leyna’s slouch. Only Grace had had the height to look their mom in the eye. Leyna pulled her shoulders back, her gaze falling to a plastic bag in her mom’s hand. Was that—
“Is that a bag of dog crap?” Her mom wasn’t a dog person. She was even less a dog-crap person.
“It is indeed a bag of dog crap.” Her eyes glittered like the ruby at her neck. “It belongs to the Durans. I was on my way to return it.”
Leyna couldn’t imagine her mom talking to Dominic’s mom, even to prove a point.
As if she’d read her daughter’s skepticism, she sighed heavily.
“I’m not lighting it on fire and ringing the doorbell, if that’s what that look is about. And I’m certainly not talking to that woman.” She frowned, nose crinkling, her default expression when mentioning the neighbor. “I’m merely going to leave it on their porch to remind her to keep her dog out of my garden.”
This wasn’t how Leyna had envisioned their first face-to-face conversation in a decade, though she guessed the bag of crap was symbolic enough. Leyna tilted her head toward the side of the house, where the garbage bins were kept. “Don’t you think it’s better just to throw it away?”
Meredith’s cool blue eyes held her daughter’s. “Let’s not argue today,” she said, as if the arguments were always Leyna’s doing and as if they could be so easily avoided. She stalked over to the bin and tossed in the bag with exaggerated reluctance. Back on the steps, she gestured to the door. “I suppose you want to come inside.”
Not really. “If you’re not busy.”
Her mom looked down at her paint-splattered smock, then up again. “It’s fine.” She pushed open the door.
Leyna was only a couple of steps across the threshold before her chest constricted. Her mom had a way of filling a space so that it became hard for her to breathe, but that wasn’t why she now planted a steadying palm against the wall. It was the smell, thick and sickly sweet. Another scent from the past.
Spiced vanilla.
The scent of the candles on the entryway table burned her nostrils. She fought a wave of vertigo, pressing her palm more firmly against the wall. Too many memories had intruded lately.
Her back to Leyna, her mom missed the reaction. She walked to the kitchen sink to wash her hands, calling over her shoulder, “Why are you here?”
The scent of spiced vanilla grew stronger. Leyna hadn’t experienced the scent of those particular candles since she was a child. An image of Grace flashed, as bright as the row of dancing flames. She switched to breathing through her mouth, then pushed away from the wall.
Her mom returned to the entryway and picked up the candle snuffer on the table. She lowered the metal cup over each flame in turn. Leyna worked to mask her gratitude, which her mom would’ve read as weakness.
“I’ve come to talk to Dominic about that missing girl,” she said. “And I was hoping to get Grace’s photos.”
Her mom’s eyes narrowed at Dominic’s name, and she harrumphed. “Everyone wants to talk about that girl,” she said. “As far as the photos, I could’ve mailed them to you.”
“I’d hate to put you out.” Her mom would’ve thrown them in a box with little care. Leyna wanted to preserve the memory of all of it—the order in which they’d been hung, the blank wall left by those that were missing, even the way the twine had been coiled by her sister’s hand.
Her mom cocked her head, gaze predatory. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I’m off today.” And tomorrow, and the day after that…
Her mom set the snuffer down and looked at Leyna for the first time since they’d entered the house.
“I don’t know why everyone’s so interested in that girl. She’s not even from here, and that car she was driving was found in Sierra County.”
“Heard she was in the neighborhood that day.”
Her mom’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I didn’t know you and Dominic were still talking.”
“We aren’t.”
Leyna moved into the living room, away from her mom and the lingering scent of the candles. She’d always heard that childhood homes shrank with the passage of time, no longer exaggerated by a child’s perception. To her, though, this room seemed to have grown larger, even stuffed as it was—there were four tufted armchairs, a gray velvet sofa, and a cherry leather ottoman the size of a twin bed. All new. Her mom got bored with furniture quickly. Even though she rarely entertained, ten guests could’ve lounged comfortably here. On cooler autumn nights, when a fire blazed in the fireplace, the living room could feel almost cozy. But that afternoon, the stacked granite that stretched to the ceiling overwhelmed the space, and the blackened fireplace served as a reminder of the threat posed by the current weather.
“Grab your photos and go home, Leyna.”
“Soon.” No one was more eager for Leyna to leave than she herself was. “Did you talk to her that day? See her in the neighborhood?”
“If that girl was here, she didn’t knock on my door.”
Her mom was the queen of loopholes, so Leyna tried again. “Then you didn’t see her?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Actually, it isn’t.”
Her mom’s face pinched with weariness. “Why must you be difficult?”
That’s right. I’m supposed to be the good daughter. Leyna had been shoehorned into that role at birth for no other reason than that she’d arrived last in her small family. By then, there hadn’t been room for another big personality. Now, even with the Clarke family pruned to just the two of them, it felt like there wasn’t enough room for her, and Leyna had stopped being the good daughter ten years ago.
Leyna walked to the dining room, which had a better view of the forest and of the Duran home. In contrast to the living room, the dining area was empty except for the easel near the window with a canvas propped on it, a table holding painting supplies, and the large tarp covering the floor. Her mom used the dining area for her painting since, she said, it got the best light. Though the canvas faced mostly away from her, Leyna caught a sliver of green and gray. She could guess what her mom had been painting. What she always painted. Her mom’s artwork had paid for the house and allowed them to keep it after her father left.
When her mom noticed Leyna looking, she shifted the easel so the sliver of canvas disappeared. In the kitchen, a phone started ringing. The landline. Her mom made no move to answer.
“You’re not getting that?”
“There aren’t many people I want to talk to.” Her expression indicated that she counted Leyna among the people she preferred to avoid.
“What if it’s important?”
“Then they’ll call back.”
When the phone trilled into silence, Leyna turned to the window. Though the houses sat on large lots, she had a decent view of the Miller house and, just beyond that, the Durans’. The house where Adam once lived.
“If Ellie was in the neighborhood Thursday, you would’ve heard something.”
“So maybe she wasn’t here.”
“She was.”
“You’ve always been so certain of your convictions.” Her tone made it clear this was an insult.
“That’s why they’re convictions,” Leyna said. “Who else was in the neighborhood Thursday?”
“I don’t know. The Silvestris. The Durans. Not sure about the Kims.” She inhaled sharply, as if a conversation with her younger daughter exhausted her. “The Miller house has been empty all week.”
“How about Adam?”
In the window’s reflection, Leyna caught her mom’s flinch.
“Why would you ask about Adam?”
“Could he be back too?”
Leyna studied her mom’s reflection, but she’d recovered from her surprise. Or whatever the hell it was that had made her draw back at the mention of Adam’s name.
“Why would you think Adam might have returned?” Meredith crossed her arms. “I know we don’t speak often, but I definitely would’ve called you about that.”
“Ellie bears a resemblance to Grace.”
Even in the window, Leyna saw her mom roll her eyes.
“Really, Leyna.”
Leyna started to turn away from the window, but a flash of movement at the door of the Miller house caught her mid-pivot. At first she thought it might be Dominic. But then tension snaked between her shoulders.
Wasn’t the Miller house supposed to be empty?
Leyna stepped closer to the window, her forehead an inch from the glass. The door of the house between the Clarkes’ and the Durans’ was open, but no one stood in the doorway. If someone had been there, whoever it was had retreated into the house’s dim interior. Leyna told herself she was seeing things again. Just as she had at the café when she’d imagined Ellie might be Grace. But if the house was unoccupied, why was the door open at all?
Leyna worried the scar on her arm. “Are you sure no one’s staying next door?”
“There shouldn’t be.”
“The door’s open.”
“Probably the cleaner preparing for the next guest.”
An odd time to clean, given the heat and the power outage.
Leyna squinted at the house. She was sure now. Someone had definitely gone in. Because the houses on the street sat close to the forest, most were in partial shadow, yet the lights inside remained off. The power was out, but like most people out there, the Millers probably owned a generator.
She took a step to the side so she was no longer framed in the window and checked her watch. Where the hell was Dominic?
Leyna remembered a story she’d heard in childhood about a hiker who had been mauled by a mother bear protecting her cubs. The bear had torn the skin from the woman’s face and dislocated her jaw.
Beyond the Miller house, she saw golden shafts of sunlight cutting through the trees. Moss-covered trunks. The yellow-green leaves of dying ferns. It all felt oddly peaceful.
Still, Leyna’s ears roared as if they contained the gathering wind. She couldn’t help wondering if the hiker had felt something similar the moment before the bear mauled her.