We swing our lights that way, and at first, there is just water. Then a face breaks the surface. Green moss climbs her cheekbones. The rest of her skull is yellow with age. Her jaw is missing.
All this time. She’s been right here.
Isabelle Whitmore.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOURINGRID WHITMORE
2000
The high school auditorium is dim except for the spotlight illuminating the glamour of beautiful young contestants. Ingrid Whitmore stands amid the finalists, pain radiating up her leg. Her talent portion was a last-minute change of plans, a gymnastics routine she’d previously scrapped after suffering an ankle injury three days prior. Still, she smiles.
Squinting past the lights, she can make out the table of judges, and the first few rows of the audience. Her parents, who sit front and center. The empty chair beside them. Something begins crawling its way through the folds of Ingrid’s brain.
She was meant to do a magic trick tonight, a vanishing act with her sister. One twin disappears from one end of the stage—a bit of theater, a puff of smoke, the ripple of silky fabric—and the other “reappears” on the far side, as if she had teleported.
But Isabelle never showed. And behind Ingrid’s bright eyes, a worm folds and wedges its way through her skull. Earthworms breathe through their skin, through the cuticle, a thin, moist layer that protects the worm’s body while allowing for gas exchange. It must be worming its way through her hypothalamus now, or maybe curling itself around her brain stem, because the dark thoughts she’sbeen trying to keep at bay now pulse through her nervous system, and begin to overtake her.
There is a chill in the air. Ingrid can see her mother clutch at the front edges of her cardigan. In the wing, she notices a few of the tech theater kids, who designed and painted the grand backdrop behind the contestants. They pull a blanket tight around their shoulders and watch. Goose bumps rise on her own bare arms. A cold hand reaches out and grips hers tight, and she can feel the eager energy of her fellow contestants, an electric pulse of anticipation. But the connection is severed. She feels none of this excitement herself. Feels only the dark, wriggling thoughts.
Still, she smiles.
Her sister has, in fact, disappeared. And when she finally reappears so many years later, there will be no applause. There will be only worms.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVEINGRID
Two Days Before the Pageant
Mom’s in the passenger seat, Dad is driving, and I’m in the back of the Subaru, just like when Izzy and I were little. Only now, the seat beside me is empty.
We arrived at the hospital first thing this morning to bring Mom home. It should have been a happy day, one bright moment in a cloud of darkness. Instead, while we waited for the final paperwork to be signed, Sheriff Ryan knocked on the door to Mom’s hospital room. As soon as I saw him, saw the look on his face, I knew. I just knew.
They had finally found Izzy.
I wanted you to hear it from me first, Jim, he’d said, and Dad reached out and shook the sheriff’s hand.
Mom burst into tears. I stood frozen, unable to even look at them. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I’d still been holding on to hope.
Early on, I’d comfort myself with daydreams of Izzy’s return. They burned within me, hot and full of light. How when I saw her, I’d have already forgiven her for whatever stupid reason had made her run away, some embarrassing mistake she thought she had to hide from, some naive adventure she’d skipped off to without me. All that would matter was that she was back. That I would hear herlaugh again, that I could pick up the phone and she would answer, that we could share jeans and secrets and dreams of things that would happen in a faraway future. That I would have my sister again, be whole again.
But as the weeks turned to months, turned to years, those daydreams faded. Time killed each and every one, made them all the more improbable with each passing day, until only one possible ending remained.
So, when Sheriff Ryan told us that they found human remains in The Hollow last night, I was surprised to feel that last ember fade. Surprised that it had been there at all.
We haven’t talked about it. We remained quiet as we grabbed the last of Mom’s personal belongings to bring her home, loading up a few stuffed bears, her suitcase, and some knit blankets into the back of the car. She left her jigsaw puzzles behind for other patients.Oh, I don’t need this thing, she fussed as Dad pushed her wheelchair through the hospital hallways.
Already our phones have been ringing off the hook—calls from well-meaning neighbors offering condolences and quietly fishing for gossip, but also from the news stations and the true crime podcasts angling for interviews. I’ve silenced Mom’s phone. She doesn’t need to deal with any of that. Not today, at least.
Now, she puts a hand over Dad’s on the center console. I watch the way her wedding ring glints in the sunlight. He interlaces his fingers through hers. “We can finally have a service,” Mom says. “Lay her down beside her grandmother.”
“I’ll call the funeral home,” Dad says, and I want to hurl myself at him, jerk the wheel and flip the car. I want him to bellow, to break things, to be anything but practical. I want him to be the kind of dad that would have marched onto the Sherman property on day one and found out what happened to his little girl. Then maybe I wouldn’t have wasted so much of my life daydreaming.
Because she had been there all along. Right where we’d thought she’d been. Right where we had known. Cold and alone.Do yousee it, Iggy? Do you see?But I hadn’t wanted to see. A sob claws up my chest and lodges there, burning, because I know if I let it out, I won’t be able to stop. I hadn’t wanted to believe that Ben had killed her. Not back then. And not now. But of course he had. And I was the fool who let myself think otherwise.
Sitting in the back of my parents’ car, only the nightmare of our reality remains. And, more than anything, I want that last ember back.
But Izzy is gone. And without that last bit of hope, I am consumed by so much anger.
I reach into my purse and crumple the invitation tight in my fist.