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“I’m positive. I saw her open the kitchen door and leave with the wine—though I have no idea what direction she went in.” He paused for a moment. “This might not be worth anything, but the way most people were getting out to the pool was through the door in the family room. Since she went out through the kitchen, maybe she was headed someplace else instead.”
Butwhere? The three of us shuffled out of the building, and Dan glanced back at the house, seeming to focus on the door from the kitchen. Then he swiveled his head and looked out across the lawn. There were clusters of dogwood trees at the end, alreadyblooming with white and pink flowers, and the thick wooded area rose behind them.
“Rob mentioned there were paths in the woods,” I said. “Where do they go?”
“The main one goes to a gazebo,” Jamie said wearily. “It’s about a ten-minute walk from here, in a little clearing.”
My heart seemed to kick the wall of my chest. Is that where Chloe had gone—to the gazebo?
“Show me how to get there.”
I was aware that I was barking orders at them, but I had to keep moving—because the constant motion was the only thing making me feel there was still a reason to hope.
Jamie ended up in the lead, and Dan and I trekked behind her across the lawn. The sun had been shining when I’d left the hotel this morning, but now huge cumulus clouds muscled their way across the sky. We reached the dogwoods, snaked through them, and found ourselves at the start of the real woods—a mix, it appeared, of firs, maples, and oaks. I spotted the mouth of the trail right away. It hadn’t been visible from the house, or even the pool, but if someone had been wandering around out here, using the flashlight on a phone, they could have easily come upon it.
With Jamie still in the lead, we entered the woods, where my nostrils instantly filled with the scent of fir trees and decaying leaves left over from last fall. The path was pretty wide at the start, and easy to follow, but within a couple of minutes it narrowed, and the woods grew denser and dimmer.
Would Chloe have really come here the night of the party? There was something so ominous about the path and the woods and all the twisted branches, like a scene from a scary fairy tale. But Chloe was impetuous, a risk-taker, someone usually game for adventure. So, yeah, it was easy to see her sneaking off here with a guy from the party, on a mission to reach the gazebo.
A fresh wave of fear gripped me, but I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other, trying to keep pace with Jamie. Though the path was still fairly well defined, we were suddenly going uphill, and a ravine plastered with rotting leaves was taking shape on our left.
A ringtone sounded ahead, freezing the breath in my chest. It was from Jamie’s phone, I realized, and she stuffed a hand into the back pocket of her jeans to pull it free.
“It’s Rob,” she called back to us.
Had he found something?
She brought the phone to her ear, spoke to someone briefly, and then glanced back at me.
“He said the cops are at the house and they need to speak with Skyler.”
“Okay,” I muttered, instinctively clenching my hands. Someone else was in charge now, which I wished could have calmed me, but it didn’t. If I let go, how could I be sure they took every possible step to find Chloe?
“We’ll go with you,” Jamie said, jogging back toward me. I turned on the path and began to reverse course toward the house. Dan, who had been last in line, now passed us to head farther into the woods, his loafers crunching the ground beneath.
“I should keep going, right?” he called out. “So we don’t lose time?”
Should he?I asked myself, my heart beating hard. Maybe the police were only here to interview me at this stage, and it would be better to have Dan out here looking for evidence of Chloe’s presence. But, I realized, the cops would want to speak to everyone, including him.
I spun around to tell him to stay with us, but he was already a few yards away, about to round a bend in the path.
“Wait,” I yelled to him. “You need to come with us....Wait.”
He didn’t answer me, but instead stopped dead in his tracks and craned his neck to the left. Then he took a few steps in that direction, toward the ravine we’d been following, and leaned over a little from the waist.
“Oh god,” he screamed suddenly. “Jamie, getoverhere.”
My knees buckled.Please, I thought,please, please, please, no. I regained control of my legs and propelled myself in Dan’s direction, stumbling along the path and dizzy with panic. I could hear Jamie coming up behind me, panting, until she suddenly overtook me, running toward Dan.
“Oh fuck,” she exclaimed as soon as she reached him, her attention trained on the same place as his.
“Skyler, don’t look,” Dan called out as I closed in on them. “I beg you—don’t look.”
But I did look. I twisted my head to the left and stared through the tree branches, already thick with leaves, and down the steep, scraggly side of the ravine.
She was there, at the bottom. My beautiful sister Chloe. Lying faceup and wearing only her jeans and a single boot, her pale white breasts pointed toward the sky and her blond hair fanned out around her head. Her eyes appeared to be closed, and her head was tilted at a weird angle. For a few brief seconds I let myself wonder if she’d been horribly injured and was lying there waiting for help, but that was stupid of me. It was clear that Chloe was dead.
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