Dorian Gray.
Daisy Buchanan.
Simon Vandenberg.
Clara Green.
I press my nose into the sleeve of her denim jacket, like the faded scent might conjure her tangible presence. Is she the reason Simon had that collection of CDs in his cubby hole? Clara Green loved alternative rock, so she introduced the genre to the tortured boy who drank cognac and smoked Djarums. Did they smoke them together? Was she standing here with him when he carved these initials inside this heart?
I think of her disappearing in fading pixels. My desperation as I tried to put her back togetheragain. The spidery tendrils that gathered into a black hole and sucked her inside.
Could it have been the rift?
Simon disappeared in 1995.
My mom disappeared much later.
After she married Dad.
After they had me.
If the monster was real, how did it get to her? And why did it wait so long?
A gust of wind makes the barn doors groan. I leave the carriage uncovered and wander through the woods, hair blown this way and that, numb to the chill until I reach the graveyard.
I wander from tombstone to tombstone, pausing at Isaiah Vandenberg’s. He lost everyone he loved in a train crash. And afterward, he was tormented by a cousin named Lucian, who spawned Rueben and tormented Daniel, who spawned Frank and tormented John, who spawned Thomas. Did he torment Simon? Did these bad apples have something to do with the disappearance?
Or was it the rift?
And what did my mother know? What did she see when she was here, at the Vandenberg Estate?
I stop at Ruth Vandenberg’s gravestone and run my hand over the top. Was she killed by a wild animal or a monster that slipped through a tear between worlds? I keep wandering, further back in time. To Amos. His wife. His mother. And then …
My breath catches.
Ezra’s grave is different. There’s no grass. No moss or leaves. Just raw earth—scattered soil, dark and clumpy. As though someone has dug up his grave.
When I knock on the front door, Jude answers, his hair looking as disheveled as my own, as though he’d spent the day raking his hands through it.
After seeing my teenage mother in a photograph that came from Simon’s bedroom, I clammed up. I shut down. I left him in the lurch, and now I’m back and breathless, and he looks relieved, like he thought I’d gone and jumped in the Blackwillow River.
“Someone dug up Ezra’s grave,” I blurt.
“What?”
“His grave,” I repeat. “There’s fresh dirt where the grass should be.”
Before Jude has a chance to reply, Mr. Tulane steps into the foyer dressed in his butler attire. And something in my brain fires, a connection I’m surprised I haven’t thought of until now. He was here when my mother was here, and not too long ago, he called me by her name. Not Sara, as Jude assumed. But Clara. My ears weren’t playing tricks on me after all.
“You called me Clara,” I say to him.
“You look just like her,” he replies.
Jude goes very still.
I step around him and show Tulane the photograph that has rocked my world.
He takes it with a fond smile. “Miss Clara and Master Simon were good friends.”
