“Did she ever tell you that we had no memories from before the disappearance? We knew our names, and we knew we were sisters. To this day, no amount of therapy or medicineor meditation has helped me remember my childhood or the months we were gone. I still don’t know what happened to us. All I know is we came back different, and Dasree was furious about it.
“She thought she’d find the answers in Black Creek Woods. I didn’t; the woods still scare me. I only wanted to stop what happened to us from happening to anyone else. The older we got, the more concerned I became with keeping this town alive. Dasree convinced me that solving the mysteries would do that. So we agreed—she’d take care of the dead, and I’d take care of the living. It worked out well, because she didn’t care about her reputation, and I cared too much about mine. We didn’t spend much time together, in the last few years.”
“Do you really think she’s gone?”
“She would have sent word.” It wasn’t really an answer, and she looked back out the window when she said it. Steam clouded her expression. “Answer a question for me: do you still believe Addamsville is only a cute little tourist town?”
I frowned at her. “Youbelieve Addamsville is only a cute little tourist town.”
Her lips curled on the rim of her mug. “Your mom would have a fit if she saw you acting like this.”
“Like what?”
“Passive. The one thing I always saw when I looked at you, no matter what the circumstances, was her unflinching refusalto be or to think the way anyone else wanted her to. She got on my nerves more often than not, but I envied her for that. I was so concerned with the hows and whys of becoming my own person that for a long time I let this town tell me who I was. Just one of those poor girls, lost in the woods. Dasree didn’t care about the hows or the whys of learning to be herself again. She didn’t wallow. She didn’t rest. We weren’t the same after we were kidnapped, and she had toknowwhat had changed us. Those mysteries would have killed her, if she’d let them. But she didn’t; she went out and hunted them down. I think she found the truth, in the end.
“She taught you to hunt firestarters because she hoped one day you might find the answers she couldn’t. She hoped you would go at life with your teeth bared, instead of getting beaten down by bad things that happen to you. Like I did.”
She looked at me again. Dark and furious.
“What’s going on now isn’t right. These fires. This unrest. I can deal with the living in this town, but that’s as far as my reach goes. I don’t know any more about firestarters than you. We both know there are answers here, and you’re one of the few people who can find them. So what’s it going to be? Death or hunting?”
She watched me for a heartbeat, then returned to sipping coffee in the night.
I took my water and stumbled back to the third floor.Artemis hadn’t moved even to swat a corner of the blanket off her face. I stopped at the end of the bed and stared at my boots on the trunk, both standing up. I tipped one over with a finger.
I fell asleep a second time to a soft pounding in my head, like words spoken over and over, a chanted question that chased me into my dreams.
Doubt or belief.
Ignorance or truth.
Death or hunting.
28
No one knew where I was.
Aunt Greta told Chief Rivera I had disappeared after the incident at the bluffs. Rivera had relayed the news to the Harrisburg police. Officers Jack and Norm were out looking for me, but Rivera herself was busy dealing with theDead Men Walkingcrew and Tad Thompson, still shaken over their ordeal, and now Buster Gates, who refused to admit he’d pushed the trailer off a cliff despite the deep tracks in the ground, the damage to his truck, and the fact that several of the people who had accompanied him there had already confessed.
Early the next morning, Dad paced around the house for a while, speaking to Aunt Greta alone in the kitchen, then talking to someone over the phone. After he hung up, he said, “I’vefound a few people who are going to help me with the trailer. We’re going to see what we can get out of it, and hopefully the water didn’t destroy too much. This could take a while.”
“We’ll be okay,” I told him, patting his arm. I sat on the couch and he leaned over me. “Go get our stuff; I don’t want all my things washing into the lake.”
Someone stopped by in a white pickup to get him. Not even a week back from jail and he already had friends again. One trailer over the bluffs was enough to win us back some sympathy.
Sadie watched him leave, then marched to the couch and loomed over me while she pinned her hair up. “Lorelei told Grim that you’re meeting up with her, Hal, and Mads today, and they’re helping you clear your name.”
“It was their idea,” I said immediately.
“I’m not accusing you,” she sniped back. “I’m telling you Grim and I are coming, too. I’ve got appointments this morning, but I can leave this afternoon. Grim’s getting off work early. When your friends get out of school, we’ll come meet wherever you are.”
“You’re helping now? Are you actually going to believe what I say?”
Sadie shoved the last pin into her bun and dropped her arms. She glanced at the kitchen door; Aunt Greta had gone outside to take the trash cans down the driveway. Artemis’s blow dryer hissed from upstairs. “Do you know howsometimes you think you hear someone say something when they didn’t? Or you hear a voice call your name, but there’s no one there?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been hearing things like that my whole life.Allthe time. At school, in town. The only place it stopped was at home. It’s really annoying, you know, when people are whispering in your ears all day long, especially when they say things about death and sadness and grief—” She shuddered and wrapped her arms around her middle. “I thought something was wrong for a really long time, but I could ignore it, so I did. But when you told me what Mom and you could do, I started thinking maybe all these distant voices I hear when I walk through town, the half sentences, the weird mumbling, maybe it’s not my ears going haywire.”
