Page 43 of Nowhere Good

Claire opened her mouth to retort—maybe even yell at Clementine because how could her own sister be this stupid?—but Sully’s cries cut into the silence.

“Oh, hell, now look what you’ve done,” Clementine said. She hurried down the hall, leaving Claire standing there, stunned. Moments later, Clem returned, cradling Sully in her arms, whispering sweet nothings in his ear.

Claire stepped out into the hallway with knots in her chest. Despite her own fervor, she still pathetically feared the worst. “Are you gonna tell Dad what I did?”

Bouncing Sully, Clem shot her a dirty look. “No, I am not gonna tell him. But if you keep doin’ stuff like this, he’ll catch you himself.”

Claire weakly nodded. That was all she needed to hear. She slipped down the staircase. Before leaving out the front, she took one last glance at the door to the basement, forever closed.

Clementine was wrong.

Just because they were out, walking freely, didn’t mean they weren’t both still in that cage.

THIRTEEN

It wasn’t hard to find the road drawn on the map using Google satellite.

Twenty minutes on the outskirts of town, going east past someone else’s farm, a family named Bursell owned a massive plot of corn. Eventually, the corn cut off and gave way to a forest. A dirt road had been carved between them, leading toward more farmland in the north.

Seth idled at the corner of the dirt road, his headlights splicing through the night. He held the hand-drawn map in front of him, flattened in an evidence bag. If it were accurate, then he should be able to follow the map to a cabin of some kind.

Unless this was a waste of time. Or a trap to get him alone in the woods—a trap Haylock didn’t fall for.

He felt the weight of his gun on his belt. He’d already gone this far.

Seth put the car in drive and maneuvered onto the dirt road, staring down the barrel. One half of the road was a wall of cornstalks, the other trees. Rocks tinged beneath his wheels and snapped up against the windshield. This car was no off-roader, and the conditions were worse than he thought. His brain rattled in his skull as the shocks of the Caprice absorbed every bump.

What was he even doing? This was the exact opposite end of town Celine Dyer had allegedly died in. They’d found hard evidence in the western woods—no body, no crime, but blood was the next best thing. She had definitely died—or was attacked—out there, unless there had been some serious tampering.

Either way, Seth wouldn’t sleep tonight unless he followed this as far as it would take him. His obsessiveness had led him to dead ends before. But it had also led him to killers.

As a headache crept in from all the motion, he kept his eyes peeled for the landmark. He found it after a good ten minutes—a split in an old elm tree. He parked the car along a smooth enough patch of grass. The Caprice’s part of this journey would have to end here.

When Seth got out of the car, the wilderness hit him like a wall; trilling insects, chirps and barks, pecks and howls. A distant growl from something reminded him that there were bears out here.

And here he was, a city boy with a handgun, harshly reminded that humans were not the only dangers here.

He shut the car door anyway and let the lights go out. The natural darkness fell over him. His feet crunched over gravel and sticks, sounding too loud as he crept into the woods. Pillars of cold moonlight filled the interstices of the trees. At least it was a clear night, so his eyes adjusted fast. As he got deeper into the forest, though, the vegetation grew denser, and he had no choice but to take out his flashlight. The earth grew damp, his running shoes squelching in the mud.

Still, he kept going, grateful for the hoodie shielding him from mosquitoes.

Eventually, his flashlight caught the edge of a wooden post. As he got closer, he realized it wasn’t part of a building—it was the bones of one.

Charred bits of wood spread over a small plot of land, not much bigger than a shed. Seth hurried over to it, looking for evidence of something, anything. He kicked at the wood, but it crumbled to damp ash beneath his feet. It’d been raining recently, but based on the level of char and decay, he’d guess this hadn’t happened all that long ago. Weeks, days, maybe, but the rain had washed away any smell of gasoline, any evidence of what caused this to burn without taking any part of the forest with it.

Either way, if there ever was any evidence here, it had all been burned to the ground.

Claire’s heart was as heavy as a brick as she walked her bike down the country road, too tired to get on and pedal yet. She’d need her strength for when she got back into town, but for now, she enjoyed the solitude of the night’s embrace, leaning her weight on the handlebars as she walked.

She hated herself for feeling guilty, like trying to regain some control in her own life would mean destroying Clementine’s. Clementine’s life was an illusion, but it was still hers. All Claire truly wanted was so simple.

She wanted to leave.

But she’d learned, time and time again, that leaving was not an option.

What Clementine said was true. She’d stopped getting thrown in the cage long before Claire did. When they were little kids, they felt more like a team; when one of them got in trouble, the other did too. They’d both get trapped in darkness for hours. Forced to confront the horrors their childhood imaginations would conjure up when alone in a basement.

But there were never any ghosts or ghouls in that house. The only monster was the man who’d put them there.