I’m being catfished. Maybe as a joke, but maybe not.
Send me what you have, and I’ll send you mine?
This is inevitably the start of every child abduction warning seminar my parents have been to, or have spoken at. KJ is some creepy dude trolling for some hapless kid, and the next thing you know I’ll be sending him my picture and meeting him in some dark mall parking lot under a streetlight that doesn’t work where he pulls up in an unmarked white van and I’m never heard from again.
Hard pass.
I already feel like a fool, now that it’s daylight. The whole thing seems like a dream now, like I was in some fugue state where my imagination was getting the best of me, ignoring every rational explanation.
But it’s still doing it. The dial. It keeps jumping around, like something’s over there, in Liam’s room. I set up my phone as a camera, and I hold it in one hand, and I take the reading against Liam’s wall with the other. So I have proof, in case it amounts to anything.
There are several likely possibilities: some unaccounted-for magnetic field. A solar flare. Or something outside—the wires that run along the side of the road; the electrical box outside the neighbor’s house. Last night, I took a bunch of readings in Liam’s room with the other equipment, but there was nothing unusual. Just the pattern, the needle bouncing around, like something’s messing with the readout.
Still, I stare at that wall connecting my room to Liam’s, and then at the gear hidden under my desk. And I get this hunch, this feeling, as my mind keeps drifting back to that house. The Jones House.
It was the only thing I did differently yesterday, other than visiting the back corner of the park. I held up the device to the outside wall of the house before I heard the footsteps, before I saw the girl. I watched as she biked down the driveway, her dark hair flying behind her, pedaling fast like something was chasing her. And then I got the hell out of there myself, running across the field, back to the park, and making my way to my car.
But now I start to wonder: Maybe whatever I thought was happening in the park is actually happening there as well. Maybe I was onto something yesterday, checking it out.
I run a search for the articles about the crime last winter, and quickly get a few hits. Double Homicide Rocks West Arbordale Community. There’s a picture of the house standing all alone in the middle of the field, taken from a distance, through the trees, so that it looks haunted and ominous. I read the summary again. This isn’t paranormal. The case is solved. There’s no mystery here. But I think of the feeling I got on their front porch, staring in the windows.
Liam disappeared after a feeling.
The phone rings downstairs, and I jump back from the screen. The house comes into focus again: I smell pancakes. I hear the squeak of the front door, the sound of my mom’s car. It suddenly feels like the perfect plan: pancakes, and an exit.
I have my bag slung over my shoulder, and I eat at the counter as my dad flips a fresh pancake onto his plate. “Thanks, Dad,” I say, still chewing as I head toward the door.
“You remember you’re helping this afternoon, right? I’m leaving at one and Mike can’t show up until three or so.”
I did not remember. “Yes, no problem.” Once again, I’m thankful for Mike, who is more reliable than me, and always willing to fill in when he can, which makes my lack of availability less questionable. But he has to split his time between here and the youth shelter, where he and Liam both volunteered. Still, it could be so much worse than just needing to fill in for two hours on a Sunday.
I hear the chatter of low conversation from the living room. “New volunteers?” I ask.
My dad peers around the wall. “Sophomores at the college,” he says, then stops. Like we’re both remembering—that’s how old Liam should be right now. He clears his throat. “Dave and Clara.” Then his brow furrows. “Maybe Sara.” He shrugs, like it doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t. They’ll be gone by the end of summer anyway. This is probably something for their résumés, not their lives.
I peek my head around the corner, and for a second, I can almost see Liam and Abby instead, sitting beside each other on the sofa, laughing in their own private world. Dave, I recognize. He’s got distinctively red hair, and I remember him from school, in Liam’s year. But I don’t think I’ve seen the girl before.
My dad frowns at my bag, the line between his eyes deepening. “Library again?”
“Finals, Dad,” I say, and he gives this noncommittal nod, like the idea of finals takes place in some other plane of existence. Or maybe he can see right through my lie.
My teachers say I’m not living up to my potential. But nobody here seems to care. You try holding up a report card, good or bad, in a room covered in faces of other people’s missing children. It’s like everything gets forced into perspective in an instant. Some things get wedged to the periphery.
For the record, one of those things is me.
This time, I don’t stop at the entrance to Freedom Battleground State Park. The address puts the driveway for the Jones House here, about two miles beyond the turnoff. I’m on the right street, but I can’t find the right house number. I end up driving past it twice before I spot it, a post in the road that looks like nothing more than a mile marker, the numbers engraved in the same color, barely visible. You can’t see the house from the road, either. It’s set back through the trees, and the driveway is long and unpaved, with no mailbox out front.
Once I pull into the drive, it angles to the left, and finally there’s the mailbox. It’s deceptively friendly, with a bright red flag and a decal of the sun. Then everything opens up behind the trees: the house, the field stretching in both directions, to the woods and the state park on the right, and another neighborhood past the fence, to the left.
I pull the car slowly up the drive until I’m parked in the roundabout directly in front of the porch. The dirt from the tires still hovers in the air when I step outside.
I listen for signs of life, but the day is quiet, and everything is still. There are birds in the distance, some sort of insect that hums in the grass to the side of the house. The sun is bright, and it reflects off the front windows, making me look away as my eyes start to tear.
“Right,” I say to myself. I turn back to the car and sling my backpack onto my shoulder. Then, on second thought, I take a photo of the house with my phone. I turn on my map program, marking the GPS coordinates. This is, after all, for science.
I note the time of day. The sun in the sky. The heat. The location: West Arbordale, Virginia. 323 Lance Road.
Nothing is irrelevant.
Or maybe I’m procrastinating.
“Right,” I say again. I leave my phone in the car so it won’t interfere and carry my gear up the front steps, cup my hands around my eyes, and peer into the windows again. It’s the same as yesterday: pictures off-kilter, that feeling of wrong.
My hand shakes as I take the EMF meter from my bag and hold it to the window, but nothing happens. It registers the same baseline reading as it does around my house. A normal measure of electricity—the dial doesn’t jump or do anything creepy, like diving back below zero. I make some notes, taking some more readings with the other devices.
The porch creaks under my steps as I walk the front perimeter, and the chain of the porch swing jangles as my arm accidentally brushes the wood. Just outside the front door, I can feel the tiniest gust of cold air seeping from underneath, and I freeze. I press my ear to the front door.
I think, I hope, it’s the air conditioning clicking on. But just in case, I knock.
I knock. I have just knocked on the door of an empty house because I felt a gust of cold air. Seriously, Nolan.
On a whim, I take the knob in my hand and twist it gently. There’s no resistance. My lungs are in my throat. My heart is in my stomach. What the hell am I doing?
Still, I twist it, and the door pushes open. A gust of air rushes out, and I was right—it’s the air conditioner. I laugh to myself under my breath.
From where I’m standing in the entrance with the door swung open, the house looks like any other house. Older wood floors, a rustic coffee table, drapes that hang in front of the windows, pulled back. If it weren’t for the fact that it looks like a windstorm went through the room, knocking the paintings askew, or off the walls, it would look like a normal house.
But there’s also this smell, something too fresh, too new. Like carpet fabric and paint, like wood polish and those pine tree things people hang from their car mirrors. Like something else needs to be covered up here.
I think of the article I read, picture the headline, the photo, and I step across the threshold. I close the door behind me, and I wait for something to happen. But when nothing does—no alarm, no automatic lights, no phone ringing—I decide to take the risk.
I keep the EMF meter in my hand as I circle the downstairs. The doors are all open, but I don’t step inside any of the rooms. I keep walking, staring at the device as I go. The kitchen. The living room. Three downstairs bedrooms. At the end of the hall near the back of the house, I round the corner, away from the open windows, and everything falls to shadow.
In front of me, there’s a dark stairway, where the smell of things new and replaced is the strongest.
Here. It happened here.
I blink, trying to imagine the scene, but it’s all hidden under shadow. There’s only a dark hallway upstairs, and a dark hallway here. Running my hand against the nearest wall, I flip the switch, and the area lights up, too bright. The bulb must’ve been recently replaced, because it’s too white. It buzzes all around me, like there’s a charge. My temple throbs with the start of a headache.
The device shakes in my other hand, the needle rising. I drop my bag to the ground to find my notebook, to document this, but my hand is trembling. There are footsteps in the fresh carpeting—a trail up and down. I turn off the light, and the dial settles again.
Just the electricity. Just the normal background noise. Just the footprints of a Realtor, or prospective buyers.
In the dark, the hallway falls to shadows again. This was where they were found. No, that’s not all of it. Sutton told us, whispered low the morning of the tri-county baseball clinic. This was where she found them. That girl he knew. On the staircase.