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She took a few moments to open Izzy’s drawers, the built-in wardrobe, and all the while she was growing more and more certain that some of Izzy’s belongings were missing. Where was the wool sweater Cassie had bought her two Christmases ago? Where were her favorite leggings? The black jeans? Where was the small box of jewelry Izzy had kept in the drawers by her bed? Had they been burgled?
Cassie walked back to her own bedroom and dug around in the clothes she had shrugged off earlier. She found her phone and switched it on.
She waited impatiently for a few seconds as the phone ran through its start-up procedure. Then it was on, and Cassie gasped as she saw three things in quick succession.
First, it was early March; months had passed since the events in the ballroom.
Second, she had received a voice message from Izzy’s phone, in the days after Izzy had supposedly died.
And third, for the past three months, someone had been sending Cassie text messages every few days, each message containing only a picture of a door, and every door different from the last.
Beach Fires at Night
On a beach at dusk, on the West Coast of the United States, Lund built a fire. He had bought wood and kindling from a hardware store in town, as well as an old-style plastic cigarette lighter that he used to start the fire.
“Let me see that,” Izzy said, as she approached, a bag in one hand. He tossed the lighter over the fire to her and she caught it as she sat on the sand. “I used to have one of these when I was younger. I tried smoking for a while,” she explained. It felt like the start of a story, but she didn’t say anything else, and her eyes drifted off into the fire.
The Pacific Ocean murmured ahead of him, and the wind caressed Lund’s cheek as he stared out at the dark sky. It was March, but it was a warm evening, with little chill in the air.
They were quite far north now, out of California and into Oregon, but the weather had been kind to them over the last week or so. They were in Pacific City, a gathering of holiday homes and RV parks over three or four streets that ran along the length of a stretch of golden sand and a wide bay. It was a place of tourists, local and foreign, a place where a couple of travelers could blend in easily enough.
“I got some chips and some Coke,” Izzy said. She slipped the lighter into her pocket and passed him a bag of chips. “Hope that’s okay.”
“Yup,” he said.
The fire was going well now, licking the logs, and he saw the glow reflected in Izzy’s face as she stared into the flames.
They were killing time, he knew. Ever since the ballroom and New York, they had been moving around just to stay hidden, killing time until something happened. He didn’t know what they were waiting for, but he was happy to keep waiting. They had traveled south and west first, riding Greyhound buses on long stretches, deciding where to go next at each stop, and eventually they’d ended up on the West Coast in California. They’d stay in one town for a few weeks, until both of them had felt the need to move, suddenly suspicious that something was coming for them, fearing a shadow on the horizon growing nearer. For the last while they had been making a slow crawl up the coast, along the Pacific Coast Highway, hitchhiking or bumming rides from people they met in bars.
He looked at Izzy. She sat with her arms around her knees and her face to the Pacific. Her hair was tied up behind her head, the breeze playing with it. She was beautiful, and so unselfconscious about it.
Lund had liked her from the first moment he’d seen her, from the joke she’d made to Azaki about her friend’s bad fashion sense. He’d wanted to be with her ever since, and she’d seemed happy to have him around. It was nothing more than that, and she seemed so lost in her own thoughts much of the time that it had never seemed right to suggest anything more. Not that Lund expected to talk his way into her affections. He didn’t have the words for that. But he was happy to just be with her, to be trusted by her, and he was happy to wait to see what else she might want, or not. He had nowhere else to be.
Satisfied that the fire was now self-sustaining he lounged back in the sand, stretching his legs out and leaning on one elbow. He could feel the warmth from the flames on his face. The fire chatted in crackles, while the sea whispered and hushed, and Izzy was silent. Behind them, a row of holiday apartments stood at the edge of the beach, and he could hear the burbling of conversation from the people sitting on their balconies, watching the night with glasses of wine and warm blankets around their shoulders.
Lund opened the bag of chips. He ate for a while, studying the stars scattered across the sky.
“Pretty,” he said, gesturing vaguely above him.
Izzy didn’t seem to hear him. She was thinking about her friend, he knew. It was what had occupied her mind ever since they had fled from New York. The friend had disappeared through a door in the ballroom, and nothing more had been heard from her. On a couple of occasions he had tried to broach with her the possibility that her friend was gone for good, but Izzy had been unwilling or unable to entertain that, so he had stopped saying anything. Now he just waited. She had to work through what she was missing and what had happened to her friend in her own time.
“Eat,” he said, tossing the bag of chips across the sand to her.
Izzy glanced down at it, and as she did her head moved, and Lund saw a figure farther down the beach. There were other people out on the sand, sitting around fires like Izzy and Lund, couples strolling hand in hand, and even a group of young children racing around and screaming, but the figure stood out from this background noise, because it was alone and motionless. And it appeared to be looking toward Izzy and Lund.
Izzy grabbed a handful of chips and then saw that Lund’s eyes were staring past her.
“What?” she asked, turning her head.
The figure down the beach moved then, a few steps toward them, her face lit up by another fire.
“Cassie?” Izzy asked, a whispered question.
Lund pushed himself off the sand to sit upright.
The figure drew nearer, and Lund saw that Izzy was right.
“Cassie!” Izzy shouted, jumping up and throwing her chips aside.
