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The Lost Girl was keeping us here. First, she’d physically kept us from leaving town, and then she’d kept us here in other ways, by drawing us into her secrets. We were tangled up with her now in ways I couldn’t understand, and even if we left Coldlake Falls right now—if we got in our car and started driving—we wouldn’t fully escape. The Lost Girl was too powerful, and sooner or later, we’d come back.
I’d made a promise to the Lost Girl, whoever she was. I’d also told her she owed me. It was time to settle up.
I couldn’t fix everything with Eddie and build the life I wanted so badly. Not until I fixed what was happening on Atticus Line.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Dusk was falling when I parked Robbie’s Accord on the side of the road, under an overhang of trees. The sky was purplish gray, and mosquitoes flitted past my face as I got out. The sound of the driver’s door closing was loud in the silent air.
I had left a near-empty house. Eddie, still silent, had gone for a nighttime run an hour ago and hadn’t come back. Rose was in her bedroom, watching TV. Quentin’s visit had left a crater, as if he’d dropped a bomb among the three of us.
I didn’t know what Eddie was thinking. Was he angry with me? With himself? Was he rethinking everything that had happened since we left the interstate? Was he rethinking everything that had happened since the moment we met?
I zipped up my navy blue windbreaker and put my hands in the pockets. I was wearing jeans and sneakers, the clothes I’d brought in case it rained on my honeymoon. I had tied my hair back in a ponytail, and though I sweated into the tee I was wearing under my jacket, I kept the windbreaker zipped up. It made me feel less exposed and it kept the mosquitoes away.
Atticus Line was dim and silent, stretching away in both directions. There was no sign of a car. My feet crunched on the gravel as I walked away from Robbie’s Accord. I had parked just off the interstate, near where I had seen the strange light in the trees that first night. The first time I’d had an idea that something was wrong with this place.
I was in no hurry, so I walked slowly. The light faded moment by moment, and I touched the small flashlight I kept in the pocket of the windbreaker. I’d found it in the toolbox in Rose’s garage—I assumed it had been Robbie’s. So, too, was the folded pocketknife I carried in my back pocket. A girl couldn’t be too careful, alone on a deserted road at night.
When my mother had roused me from sleep that night all those years ago, she’d taught me one of her important lessons—that helplessness gets you nowhere. She may have taken it to a demented extreme, but that night, my mother had taken charge of her life instead of waiting for someone else to run it for her.
Now, though the situation was different, I was facing the same kind of decision. With Eddie withdrawn from me and my future as April Carter in the balance, I could either wait around for something to happen, or I could go and get answers. You can’t run from your demons forever—sometimes you have to walk into them head-on.
Despite everything—the insanity of my situation and the crashing hopelessness of my life—I settled into a rhythm, my sneakers making a beat on the gravel. A breeze blew, drying the sweat on my neck. I heard a single bird in a tree high overhead, and then nothing.
There was something very, very wrong with this road.
The landscape didn’t change as I walked, moving slowly past the trees. I wondered how many hitchhikers had come before me over the years on this same road. I wondered how many sets of sneakers had made this noise in the silence. Had the others felt the same disquiet that I did? Had Katharine O’Connor or Carter Friesen felt fear as they walked, not hearing any sound in the trees? Had they hoped a car would come along to take them off this road?
Maybe this was a fool’s errand. But as a waft of icy cold air hit my spine, crawling under the hem of my windbreaker, I knew it wasn’t. The Lost Girl hadn’t shown herself yet, but she knew I was here. She knew every time someone walked this road, and she certainly knew me.
If you see her, you’ll be the next one found at the side of the road.
Well, I’d seen her already, more than once, and so far I was still alive. I started to whistle, the sound carrying through the dead air.
The sky grew darker, and then I saw it—the light in the trees. It started dim, then flared up, like a lantern. I was cold now, my neck prickled with gooseflesh. I stopped whistling but I kept my pace, one foot in front of the other.
Far overhead, lightning flickered in the sky between the clouds, a midsummer storm. The air was expectant, and I wondered if I would see her from the corner of my eye. I wondered if I would turn my head to see her walking next to me. I thought I heard the sound of leaves swirling to my left, but before I could turn to look, I heard the far-off sound of a car, coming down the road.
I turned and started to walk backward. When I could see headlights, I put out my thumb. Was this part of the game? The Lost Girl liked to kill hitchhikers, right? Fine, then. She could try and kill me.
Or I would try and end her, any way I could.
The car slowed as the driver obviously caught sight of me in the headlights. Because of the light shining in my eyes, I couldn’t see the driver. I kept my thumb out. I kept my chin up.
The car slowed more, pulling up beside me. “Come and get me,” I whispered into the darkness. Crystal Cross. April Delray. April Carter. She could come and get all of us.
I stopped walking, lowering my thumb. The passenger window rolled down. “Are you out here all alone?” It was a woman’s voice.
I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting. Another unnatural storm? A girl screaming and running in the road? A different ghostly trick? I paused for a beat too long, wondering how the Lost Girl was trying to trap me, before I spoke.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m headed to Hunter Beach.”
“That’s another hour’s drive up the road.”
“Do you think you could take me at least part of the way? However far you’re going? It would help me out a lot, and I’d appreciate it.”
There was a pause as the woman in the car thought it over. I still couldn’t see her clearly in the dark, just a shadowy shape. She was alone.
