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“Except an income,” I answered. “Speaking of which…” I wriggled uncomfortably in my chair. “I owe you a lot of money. I haven’t forgotten about that, and I will absolutely pay you back once—”

  “Enough,” she said, raising her hand in stop-right-there fashion. “You’ve had a rough go of things, Char. Money should be the least of your worries.”

  “Tell that to Medi-Collections. They’ve called me twice this week. Turns out chemo isn’t cheap.”

  Images of my mother, of the way she looked at the end, strapped to machines and struggling for air, assaulted me the way the cancer had assaulted her. As always, tears stung my eyes.

  Keep it together, Char. Streaky-mascara-face is not your best look.

  I blinked hard and stared at my place. “I just want you to know I don’t expect a free ride.”

  “And you aren’t getting one,” Lulu answered, reaching across the table to place her hand on mine. “You’re not here for nothing, Char.” She gave my fingers a little jiggle. “With Eddie gone so much for work, it’s not really feasible for me to be by myself right now, especially with Jack.”

  “‘Cause I do such an amazing job watching him,” I muttered. “I really am sorry about earlier. What about the guy who’s supposed to fix the fence?”

  Lulu sighed and pulled her hand back to beside her plate. “Ester texted me before we sat down. The project at the Coleman Mill is running long. They’re going to be three days. At the earliest.”

  The anxiety in her tone didn’t make sense. It was only a fence. Not even the whole thing—just a single board…half of a board, actually. What was the big deal? But the way Lulu’s hands twisted around her napkin told me it was a big deal to her.

  “It’s okay,” she mumbled. “Eddie left the gun.”

  “The gun?” I almost choked on the air, my eyes flying wide. “Lulu, I get that your friends probably expect things to be perfect around here—Lord knows Ester seems like the type—but it’s a piece of wood. What the hell do you need a gun for?”

  Her eyes moved over to Jack. Her hands gripped the napkin even tighter. “It’s nothing,” she said, almost panting. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Because I’m not a mom?” I asked, already sick of that notion.

  “Because you’re not from here,” she answered. “At least not lately. New Haven isn’t the same place we grew up in, Char. Things have changed, and we’ve had to change with them. The woods are part of that.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, tilting my head. “How could the woods change?”

  “Look.” Lulu swigged another sip of water. “It’s not important, and neither is this whole money thing. Eddie makes a good living, certainly good enough that you don’t have to worry about stupid stuff like paying me back for snacks or whatever ridiculousness is cooking in that whacked out brain of yours.”

  “I just want to do something. I don’t want to overstay my welcome,” I lamented, remembering what Ester had said.

  “Then do something,” Lulu answered. “Get a job if you want. I, for one, would love the idea of you sticking around for more than a few weeks. Who knows, you might even find that this is somewhere you can call home again. Until then, my guest room definitely is.”

  She stood, cradling her pregnant stomach and letting out the sort of belch girls only do when guys aren’t present.

  “That was amazing. Thank you.” She smiled, the first non-strained gesture she’d made since the fence incident. “But I think Jack here is getting drowsy, and I need to sleep for a week after that.” She pulled Jack gently from his booster seat and took his hand. “Just remember to lock up before you go to bed, okay?”

  I nodded.

  Lock up. Right. Then she won’t need the gun.

  Ugh.

  “And Char,” she called over her shoulder from the kitchen doorway. “Do try not to be so hard on yourself. These morons out here, they don’t know the girl that I do.”

  I should have known better than to ever think Lulu would let one little transgression taint a friendship that had survived almost a decade of not being in the same zip code.

  Still, I was a guest in this house, one who had no way to show my host how unbelievably grateful I was to have her—not to mention her guest room—in my life. Pulling out my laptop, I decided that if I couldn’t pay for rent, food, or practically anything else (thanks a lot, medical bills), then I could at least try to chip in where I could.

  For whatever reason, this fence was bothering Lulu enough to consider brandishing a firearm. Setting that bit of lunacy aside, I figured if I could take matters into my own hands and fix the stupid thing, then that might be a good way to show her how appreciative I was for all she had done and was doing for me.

  Never mind that the closest I had ever come to real manual labor was that time I had to provocatively press a sledge hammer against my chest for the cover of Maxim.

  Fixing a fence couldn’t be that hard. A bit of wood, a couple nails, and some of that elbow grease I always heard the camera people talking about, and the job would be done. Lulu wouldn’t have to wait three days for those carpenter idiots to finish whatever crap they were doing at Dumbass Mills. It would be finished. I would have finished it, and aside from loosening Lulu’s death grip on that pistol, maybe getting something accomplished would actually make me feel better.

  I opened the browser and searched for the nearest hardware store.

  One hour away.

  “Seriously?” I muttered to myself.

  For all the expanding this stupid town had done, one would think a hardware store would be among the first improvements. Of course, my luck didn’t work that way.

  A drive out of town for a piece of wood was impractical; I couldn’t afford the wood and nails if I spent all my money on a tank of gas. I would have to go to the town’s open market. And I hated the town’s open market.

  I glanced at the clock and cursed under my breath. It was after eight, which meant most of the vendors would have closed shop by now. As much as I wanted to let Lulu wake up to a newly mended fence, it would have to wait until tomorrow. Better than three days, sure, but not the perfect surprise I had hoped for.

  An image of a very pregnant Lulu snoring and clutching her pistol flashed through my mind. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so…okay, it was still pretty funny. But it was strange, too. What was it about those woods, and what had Lulu meant when she told me I wouldn’t understand?

  On a whim, I typed Bookman’s Woods into the search engine. Bookman’s Woods was a mammoth, a national reserve really. It stretched through pieces of four towns and two counties and held more than three endangered species. But according to the search results, it turned out that wasn’t all it held.

  A news article from the Freemont Times (the second town to the left) led the search results.

  THIRD BODY IN TWO WEEKS FOUND IN BOOKMAN’S WOODS.

  When I clicked, a picture of a smiling girl loaded, beneath it a caption that read “Same strange markings cover the remains.” Same strange markings? As what? The other bodies?

  When I examined the picture more closely, I shuddered. She was brunette, like me. And she had blue-green eyes…also like me. In fact, she shared more than a passing resemblance with me, which made her death even more unsettling.

  I didn’t want to read the article. I shouldn’t have read the article. But I couldn’t stop myself. I scrolled through quickly, learning that the girl who looked like me was named Nancy Redcliff, was a second year pre-med student at Freemont U, and had recently gotten engaged to her boyfriend of a year.

  My scrolling finger froze as I neared the picture of her body. A lump grew in my throat the way it always did when I looked at something like this. But it wasn’t the gore that gave me pause.

  The markings—large scratches that crisscrossed the poor girl’s back—looked just like those I saw on Dad that night…the night he disappeared.

  The memories flooded my mind as fresh as if it’d just ha
ppened, when in reality, it’d been decades ago. Heck, I’d only been eight when he’d walked through the front door, silent and gruff. It wasn’t unusual for him, though. Dad was often that way. He laid concrete, and he hated it. Mom and I stayed out of his way on nights like those. But that night, for whatever reason, I decided to bring him cookies, something to make him feel better.

  When I walked in, he was changing his shirt. The unexpected markings on his back took my breath away.

  “Daddy! Oh, goodness! What—”

  He screamed at me get out, said I would be better off as far away from him as possible.

  I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, but he brushed past me. I hadn’t even noticed the bag in his hand until I stood at the window, perched on my tippy toes as I watched him march into the woods. The same woods that Lulu was so afraid of now.

  It was the last time I ever saw him.

  I slammed the laptop shut. This was ridiculous. So a couple of kids got themselves killed out in the woods. It was probably an animal and had absolutely nothing to do with what happened with my father.

  For so long, I had convinced myself that Dad disappeared, that something must have happened to him. Forget the telltale bag slugged over his shoulder. He would never leave us. He would never leave me.

  But now that I was grown, I knew better.

  My father ran away from us. Anything else was just a story I told myself to try and feel better. I was done with stories, and I was done with towns that told them. Getting yourself all worked up because there was a wolf or a mountain lion thirty miles away didn’t make any sense. God, a night in a real city would put all of these bumpkins in the looney bin.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to stay here, in some place where they spun tales tall enough to make your best friend sleep with a gun under her pillow.

  I didn’t want to be that person, not for anything. And something told me that if I stayed here long enough, I wouldn’t be able to help it.

  No, I would go to sleep, get up, pick up the supplies I needed from town, and fix the stupid fence. Then I would get a job, save up like crazy, and make a break for it. Maybe I could call my (former) agent and beg him to take me back.

  Hell, the Sears Catalog always needs models.

  I punched my pillow, trying not to think about this ridiculous place, about all it had seen me lose.

  “Idiots,” I muttered, climbing into bed. “They turn their town into a pressure cooker and then they make monsters out of thin—”

  A sudden howling cut off my words.

  Tensing, I threw my covers off and lurched for the window. The sound was nothing. A dog, or something. I would prove that to myself.

  I glared out into those goddamn woods. See, nothing. Absolutely—

  A shadow moved between the trees, hulking and burly, but also tall—too tall to be an animal.

  I blinked hard, once, and then again. When I looked back, there was nothing there.

  Stop it, Char.

  This place would drive me crazy if I let it. It was nothing. An animal.

  I got back in bed, trying to feel more New York and less New Haven. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I couldn’t let go of the howl…or the markings…or the dead girl who looked just like me.

  Chapter 3

  I set my alarm for 6:45 the next morning, thinking that if I got a handle on the whole fence issue, I might be able to wrestle the pistol out of Lulu’s hand without incident. Of course, after my internet escapades last night and that howl in the distance (which was absolutely positively a coyote…right?) I didn’t really need help waking up. I’d completely missed my “window” and was on my second wind when the clock radio sprang to life, blaring ‘My Humps’ and telling me that the night was mercifully over.

  I opened my closet with all the aplomb you would expect in the morning from someone who had spent her formative years sleeping until noon.

  Crap. Laundry day.

  Scanning the rack, I found the only clean thing I had was a dress the good people at Seventeen Magazine allowed me to keep after a particularly breezy photo-shoot. I wanted to be low key at the stupid open market. How could I do that in a sundress that featured a dangerously low cut top and a sparkling gold sequins?

  Oh, screw it. Might as well give these stuffy losers something to talk about.

  I grabbed the matching sky high heels, because when you jump down the rabbit hole, you do it with both feet. Quietly, I snuck out of the house, closing the door behind me, my heels clapping against the sidewalk like a runway model on her first trip to Milan.

  A slight breeze cut through the springtime warmth, and birds sang in the trees as if they were serenading some cartoon princess. The open market was just through town, a half-mile walk at the most if I went straight. But straight meant I would have to pass by the cemetery, and I wasn’t ready to do that, not yet. I made a quick left and hummed along with the birds, trying to keep my mind in a light place.

  The streets were obviously emptier than what I was used to back in New York. Even at this time of morning, the city would be a mass of people all buzzing about. But aside from some joggers (a few of whom did double takes when they caught a glimpse of my outfit), I was pretty much by myself.

  To stave off the boredom, I popped in my earbuds and shuffled through my downloads. If people judged me by the way I looked, they would probably assume there was some bubblegum club song jamming through my head, but the truth was, I had always been more of a book girl. After all, there was no law that said models couldn’t enjoy Steinbeck.

  Ten minutes and half of an audiobook chapter later, I was pulled from my third visit with Holden Caulfield by a hand on my shoulder. I spun around, removing the buds from my ears.

  A burly man with a five o’clock shadow and a baseball cap that read ‘John Deere’ stood grinning at me. A wad of chewing tobacco protruded from his lip and his tongue flicked disgustingly in and out of his mouth.

  “Well, how you doing, sweet thing?” he drawled. His smell—whiskey and sweat—nearly knocked me down.

  “Fine ‘til a minute ago.” I jerked away from him. “You need to sober up, dude.”

  “Me?” He scoffed, but his half-open, bloodshot eyes agreed. “I ain’t the one taking the walk of shame.”

  “What? I didn’t—”

  “Save it, sweet thing. That’s a club dress if I ever saw one. You leave your car over at Fangs? I could give you a ride. You know, it ain’t safe for a girl to be walking around these parts by herself.” He looked me up and down, drinking me in with a look that made me glad I’d skipped breakfast. “Especially one like you.”

  “I think I got it,” I said, stumbling backward and feeling one of my heels wobble under me. “Besides, it doesn’t look like you’re in any condition to be driving anyone anywhere.”

  “Come on,” he slurred. “You obviously ain’t the type to keep your legs closed for long. What’s one more time?”

  Okay, so I’d never been the type of girl to get stunned easily, but that sure as hell did it.

  I opened my mouth to speak, or barf, or something. Instead, a loud, raucous laugh burst out. To my surprise, I found myself nearly keeling over, grabbing my gut and chuckling.

  “Seriously?” I said, cupping my mouth with my hands. “Oh, my God! Are you serious?”

  Understandably, he was not amused.

  “You think this is a joke, bitch?” He spit tobacco-colored crud at my feet. His meaty hands balled into fists at his sides. “You think this is funny?”

  Before I could reply, another voice came from behind me: “It’s certainly pathetic enough to be funny.”

  I turned to find a sleek man with blond hair, angular features, and blue eyes so bright I was sure they could cut diamonds. His arms crossed his chest—his very…nice…chest.

  Wow.

  “This ain’t nothing to do with you, kid,” the drunken brute stammered, marching closer. “Step aside. You can’t handle this.”

  The blond man sm
iled wide. “As the foremost expert on all things me, I’ll have to disagree with that.”

  “He’s big,” I muttered to the blond man as he settled beside me.

  “They always are,” he answered. “Just means he thinks he doesn’t have to work as hard. You wanna hold my phone while I take care of this?” He shoved his white iPhone into my hands before I could answer.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” he answered. “Doesn’t mean you should have to.”

  With that, the blond man darted forward, bridging the gap between himself and the drunkard.

  The drunk man swung at him, but the blond ducked, causing the bigger man to stagger as he missed.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” the blond man asked, circling the drunk.

  “Pfft! You can’t hurt me, kid! You ain’t nothing but a twerp.”

  “Whatever you say.” The blond man shot me a smile. “This’ll only take a second.”

  The infuriated drunkard lunged at the blond man. As nimble as a dancer, the blond man spun around, pulling a pair of cuffs from his back pocket and slapping one onto the drunk man’s wrist. He gave him a swift kick to the knee, which sent him wobbling. The blond man closed the other handcuff onto a nearby stop sign.

  “See, just a second.” He turned to me, a grin still on his handsome face. He pulled a walkie talkie I hadn’t seen before from his hip and spoke into it. “10-94 on Crescent Avenue. Transport requested. Suspect is apprehended. Be aware, he’s as big as an ox and drunk enough to be flammable.”

  “10-4,” someone on the other side of the line answered. “Be there in three.”

  Before long, a New Haven police car screeched up to us. The blond man talked to an officer who helped the drunkard into the back and then promised to “get the girl’s statement.” Up until that point, I’d just been standing there stunned. After all, here I thought this handsome blond was trying to be my hero, but he was really just doing his job.

  “You okay?” the blond man asked as the car pulled away, taking the drunk to jail.