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There’s nothing. Not even a curtain twitching in a window. There are two greenhouses choked with plants on one side of the farmhouse, and beyond that, a little cottage tucked into another stand of trees. We couldn’t see that from the road. It’s dark, too.
“This is so fucking creepy.” I’ve got a constant drip-feed of adrenaline going on right now, and there’s no way I can resist it. “I’m going inside.”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”
Lily grips my armtight.We climb up on the porch. There’s a white storm door.
I try the handle.
It opens.
Soundlessly.
I exchange a look with Lily and push the second door open with my fingertips. It swings inward, opening on a narrow entry with a hallway and stairs leading up.
It’ssilent.
There’s nobody inside. I just know it.
I go in anyway, taking Lily with me.
On the first step across the threshold, I’m hit with the urge to hold my breath. Not really an urge—more like a habit. It feels so familiar that I do it, listening hard, and realize after a few seconds that Lily’s doing the same thing.
She lets hers out slow. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Neither do I.”
We make a quick, quiet circuit of the ground floor. There’s a living room with well-worn furniture and a braided rug. Some kind of sewing room with an antique sewing machine and pieces of fabric tucked into a shelf on the wall. Lily touches one of the rolls of fabric, and it slides out into her hand, a folded piece of paper coming with it.
She tucks the fabric back into place and unfolds the paper. I shine my phone at it and literally hear the breath go out of Lily.
It’s a child’s drawing. A boy in a blue shirt, with a round body and blocky arms and legs. He has yellow hair, two small, black circles for eyes, and a lopsided smile. He’s holding a bouquet of flowers.
Whoever drew this took special care to make each of the flowers a different color.
There’s writing next to the picture, with almost no space between the words.
“Eleanor,” Lily reads, tracing under the letters with a fingertip. “I love you. Even—” She squints. “Even though you didn’t take me away.”
Below that, there’s anH.
“Okay,” she says, her voice shaking. “Let’s…”
“Yeah.”
She puts the letter in her pocket. We peek into the kitchen, where there are some chairs around a table and a pan in a drying rack by the sink, then go upstairs.
There are four small bedrooms, almost empty except for blankets on the beds that look like they were made from fabric scraps. The bedroom in the front of the house is hard to breathe in, so we get the fuck out of there.
The bedroom in the back of the house—the biggest one—is so still that my heart pounds. Rumpled blankets cover the bed, and a chair is turned over on its side. For a second, I swear my heart stops.
It’s frozen in there. Not cold, but…unmoving, somehow.
I go to look out the back window and something crunches under my foot.
A watch.
I lean down to get a look at it.
