The Creeping Read online

  Halfway back to the Talcotts’ abandoned house, Daniel begins muttering under his breath. First cursing and then repeating “impossible” over and over again. “You can’t stay here,” I tell him. “You have to go to your dad’s.” The trees lining the path nod in the wind, agreeing with me, feeding my panic. “It doesn’t feel right here. It can’t be safe.” He doesn’t respond. I whirl around. “Do you hear me? You can’t stay anywhere near here!” I’m losing it. Suddenly this dirt lane is the most dangerous place in the world to me.

  My mind races. Monsters. Other little girls have been taken. Other little girls who look like Jeanie. Redheads. My stomach churns. “ The body from the cemetery was a redhead. I puked when I saw her picture, she looked so much like Jeanie.” I try to connect the dots. My horror multiplies. “Do you know they found a finger bone in her hand?” If anyone deserves to know, it’s Daniel; after all, it might be Jeanie’s. “The news said something about a sacrificial killing. I thought they were crazy, but maybe it is a cult? That could explain the disappearances spanning generations. You know, because there would have to be multiple people taking the girls? Maybe it’s a religious cult?” My pitch climbs, my words spewing out fast and messy. “Although I don’t know what religion sacrifices little redheaded girls. Jane Doe was one, and her scalp was torn clean off. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t taken? I don’t have red hair.” I tug hard on a clump of my honey-brown locks. “Neither did your mother. She must have been on to them.”

  The path widens as we pass the large Victorian. I clench my mouth shut. Daniel doesn’t need to hear the harpy song of my innermost fear screaming that the finger bone found is going to be—has to be—Jeanie’s. That Jeanie and the tiny redhead in the graveyard will be linked for certain. My thoughts are a hysterical snarl, yes, but they are also perfectly reasonable.

  After a minute of quiet, Sam says, “What was with all the little heaps of dirt in her yard? Do you think something was buried? Animals? They’re too small for children.” He averts his eyes quickly when I give him a horrified look.

  “She didn’t say anything about the others before,” Daniel says. He buffets his arms against his sides as he walks, like he’s punishing them for something. “I went to her a few years ago, asking if she’d found any sign of what happened to Jeanie. She was in the woods a lot, and I thought . . . I thought . . . maybe she saw more than she was letting on. Maybe she found signs of a body? But that crazy old hag never said there were more. Why now?”

  Sam answers more to himself than to us. “Why any of this now? Why did Jane Doe turn up dead? Why was your mom murdered? Why after eleven years of nothing has so much happened in only twenty-four hours?” He flicks hair from his wide eyes. “And Mrs. Griever didn’t tell you. She told Stella,” Sam adds pointedly. “It sounded like a warning meant only for Stella. She’s probably just an old lady with dementia who’s been alone too long. The police were right not to take her seriously, and if they suspected her of anything more than being senile, they would have investigated her.”

  I stop, rooted to the spot. “Do you know what I told the cops when they questioned me after Jeanie disappeared?” Both boys swivel to face me. I look from Sam to Daniel; one gnawing on his lip as if faced with a confounding puzzle he’ll think through, the other pulsing his hands into fists like he’ll beat the answer free.

  Sam backtracks to stand near me; he rests his hands on my shoulders and squeezes softly. “It doesn’t matter, Stella. You were only six.”

  I shake him off. “That’s where you’re wrong, Sam. I was saying, ‘If you hunt for monsters, you’ll find them.’ I said it two hundred and fifty-five times.” Daniel sucks in a breath hard.

  My eyes brim with tears. In this moment I understand Daniel’s instinct to pummel the trouble rather than solve it. I want it out of me: everything I’ve held back, every word I’ve ever spoken about Jeanie, every bit of me that exists because of that day. There have to be parts, right? Parts born out of whatever I saw without me even knowing that that’s where they came from. I don’t want them anymore. I plow onward, certain that if I can say everything, then those parts won’t have to belong to me.

  “All these years you’ve thought I was holding something back. But I have only one memory of that day, Daniel. Something I remembered at the bonfire right before you showed up. Jeanie hit her head. She was bleeding. She peed her pants. That’s it. That’s all I’ve managed to remember over eleven years.” I half laugh, half sob. “No wonder you hate me. I’d hate me too.”

  For once Daniel looks at me without glaring; his eyes are swimming in their sockets. “I don’t hate you,” he whispers. “It just should’ve been you and not my sister.” You’d think that would make me cry more—especially the conviction he says it with—but it doesn’t. Daniel loved Jeanie. I understand.

  We march in stunned silence until we reach the abandoned house. All along the way I glower at the strawberry vines. Dad had a vegetable garden two springs ago, and these prehistoric-looking weeds kept popping up in the arugula. For weeks he kept hacking them down rather than yanking them up by their root-balls. Each time, the weeds resurrected themselves with knobbier and thicker stalks. They began to resemble miniature spinal columns. Their bristles catching at my skin was why I stopped picking the vegetables myself. These strawberries remind me of them; feral and stronger for being half murdered over and over again. Nature even lent a hand and sent the bramble as armor.

  I go out of my way to stomp on the juicy berries that rest on the lane. The way they rupture, popping red pulp under my shoe, is oddly satisfying. With each miniature explosion, I get a firmer hold on reason. The bone will be Jeanie’s; she was bound to turn up at some point. The little girl will have been the psycho’s next victim. Serial killers have types, and he must like redheads. Bev Talcott will have been on the verge of discovering the killer’s identity. The cops will hunt him down—there are two bodies now covered in evidence and clues—and he’ll go to jail forever. Mystery solved.

  “Look, man,” Sam says to Daniel as we spill back onto the Talcotts’ marred lawn, “I know we’ve had our differences, but if you need somewhere to stay, you’re welcome at my place. My mom and dad won’t have any idea who you are, and they’ll be cool with a friend from school crashing. If you’re avoiding the cops, then going to your folks’ isn’t a great idea. And Stella’s right about you not staying here.”

  Daniel’s lost his edge. The older boy with his unruly hair, five o’clock shadow, and sharply defined arms looks sunken in. Deflated by the afternoon. He nods slowly and says, “That’s decent of you, thanks. I’ve got to clean up here, but I could head over tonight.” Sam gives Daniel his address, and I wave a silent good-bye to him as we trudge back into the bleak woods. There were birds cawing, toothy rodents scampering, the buzz of swarming bees before. Now it’s eerily quiet. The sky’s clogged with clouds and there’s a stormy cast of light. I’m not even sure what time it is, since I left my purse and cell in Sam’s car.

  With each step the water filling my flats gurgles and my fingers turn bluer. Our pace slows to a crawl as my feet grow sore and tired. “You look cold,” Sam says after he helps me over a rocky stream. He pulls his T-shirt up and over his head, revealing a white sleeveless undershirt, his skin showing through the thin fabric. His shoulders are tan and freckled from the sun. “Here.” He offers it to me.

  “But you’ll be cold,” I say. There’s a purple welt on Sam’s cheekbone from Daniel punching him. Zoey dated a freshman in college for a week last year; their relationship lasted until the black eye he’d been given at a party healed. Zoey said that bruises do to guys’ faces what makeup does to girls’. I think she was on to something.

  “I won’t. I run warm, remember?” Sam says. I take the T-shirt reluctantly. His big muddy-brown eyes on my face as I do, my gaze sticking to his. He grins when I pull the still warm shirt over my head. It hangs low, to my mid-thigh, and smells of my childhood. I can’t pinpoint it exactly . . . maybe chlorine from hi
s pool, coconut sunblock his mom made us wear, and something vaguely mint. Shampoo or peppermint iced tea.

  He jams his hands into his pockets and wades forward through the mucky woods. I slip and slide after him, too tongue-tied to talk, an old sensation sneaking on me. It reminds me of gardenias. For a month before homecoming freshman year, Zoey and I obsessed over getting senior guys to ask us. When Lucas Fitzpatrick, senior class royalty, waved a homecoming flyer in my face and grunted, “You wanna?” I was ecstatic. Believe it or not, the actual night was just as swoon-worthy.

  I noticed when Sam showed up because he came stag with a bunch of boys, their adolescent bodies sized all wrong. For all I know, they were younger versions of Sweater-Vest and company. I remember Zoey dragging me to the bathroom to adjust her push-up bra so her boobs looked extra big. Zoey’s all about being desired, especially by those who could never get her. Sam had this little plastic box with him: a single gardenia wrapped in a blue silk ribbon. Once I saw it, I knew it was for me, as much as I knew that my date hadn’t given me one.

  You see, there used to be this photo on our mantel of my mom wearing an identical corsage at prom. She looked glamorous in the picture; grown-up for only seventeen. I wanted to be her. I told Sam I wanted a corsage just like it someday. Being Sam—years later—he remembered.

  Sam stood with his group of friends most of the night. They danced in a wide circle, laughing and smiling way more than I was, and he never put that box down. He wasn’t staring at me or anything. Nothing stalkerish. But when my Neanderthal date went out to the parking lot for shots with a bunch of jocks, Sam found me. I was standing with Zoey and a trio of junior girls she was trying to impress. They were the kind of popular girls who are cruel because they enjoy it. Zoey’s only nasty as a means to an end. Trust me, there’s a difference. Zoey saw him first and purred, “Hi, Samantha, you hoping to be deflowered tonight?” The juniors burst into mean fits of giggles. He ignored them.

  “Hey, Stella. I brought this for you,” he said, opening the container and removing the corsage. “I remembered you always wanted one like in the picture.” I was horrified. I could sense Zoey mentally screaming at me to chuck it; that this was our chance to prove that we belonged.

  It was stupid, but the only thing I could think to say was, “Gross. I’m not deflowering you, Samantha.” Lucas walked up right then and slapped the corsage from Sam’s hand. The trio of juniors laughed like hyenas. Sam didn’t say a word. He looked right into my eyes, smiled like he felt bad for me, and walked away. When no one but Zoey was looking, I scooped up the flattened corsage and tucked it in my clutch. A year later, Zoey dethroned those three junior girls—who were seniors then—by seducing each of their boyfriends into dumping them over the course of a month. I’m sure she didn’t remember us trying to impress them at Sam’s expense. Popularity’s just a zero-sum game to her.

  There have been a lot of chances since then to prove that Zoey and I belong. And I’ve taken them mostly. This time I don’t want to. I don’t cave to the bazillion what-ifs. What if Janey Bear sees us walking out of the woods together? What if Taylor hears I wore Sam’s shirt? What if Zoey gets pissed that I spent the day with Sam? What if the rumors start and I get more stares than I already do? I bat the what-ifs away. I’m not twelve anymore. I can have both Zoey and Sam in my world.

  “Do you want to do some research on past abductions and disappearances?” Sam asks abruptly. “Because of what Mrs. Griever said about there being others. If we could show the police a pattern, they’d have to take her seriously. Right?” His body is angled toward me, the arm nearest to me extending each time we navigate over a log or a stream, in case I need it.

  “I think that’s brilliant,” I say. “But I’ll probably be on lockdown after going rogue today.” Without thinking, I pull the collar of his T-shirt to my face and inhale deeply. Oh. My. God. What is happening to me? I veer to allow more space between us. Was I this psycho when we were young playing together? It’s as if I’ve been poisoned by the nostalgia of remembering us as kids and I’m losing brain function.

  I manage to control myself for the duration of the walk—not without having to defeat the urge to take one more whiff of the T-shirt to prove that I only imagined that it smelled like childhood. After nearly twice the time it took us to travel to Jeanie’s, we arrive back at the cement loading dock. I follow Sam around the perimeter of the giant building he works in to the parking lot. I can only imagine the holy hell I look, with twigs and leaves sticking from my hair, soiled shoes, and muddy jeans. We probably look like a pair of mountain people setting eyes on civilization for the first time.

  The teal station wagon is right where we left it, and to my sublime relief, the police are not. Taped to the passenger-side window is a folded piece of paper. I climb into the dry interior of the wagon and unfold the note to behold Shane’s frantic chicken scratch:

  Stella Cambren, call me the INSTANT you get back to this car.

  I frown at Shane’s obvious fury and pass Sam the note. I wiggle out of his T-shirt and toss it to him once he’s done. He tugs it over his head and grins. “Smells like you,” he says. There’s a bizarre stirring in my chest. It’s suddenly tighter, making me work harder to breathe. I close my eyes and count to ten.

  Sam’s voice cuts me off at seven. “There’s something familiar about what you told the cops that day. I can’t shake the feeling of déjà vu.”

  “If you hunt for monsters, you’ll find them,” I speak slowly.

  “Yeah, I swear I’ve heard that before, or maybe I’ve even said it,” Sam says thoughtfully. I look at him, startled. The late-afternoon sky is dark with clouds, and Sam’s edges are silver as he shakes his head. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” His eyes click to me before returning to the asphalt in front of us.

  I rest my head against the seat back. “There’s a whole lot of twisted crap that’s upsetting me lately, Sam. Anything you can remember helps.”

  “Here’s the thing.” He steers us out of the parking lot. “You were six, right? Six-year-olds believe in monsters and all sorts of things: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, werewolves. But that doesn’t sound like something a kid would come up with.” His eyes gleam with electric thought. “At least not a kid that young. To me it sounds like a warning someone else told you, and then you repeated it because you were traumatized.”

  My eyes are suddenly damp hearing Sam say it. I was traumatized. I watch the houses pass by, their shapes smearing and bleeding like watercolors as I let a few tears fall. I was the lucky one, and I was traumatized. It’s hard to make sense of. I try to focus only on the houses and trees streaking by as we pass, to let their shapelessness numb my mind.

  “Do you see what I’m seeing?” Sam asks. I squint through the windshield at a corner house. I roll down my window for a better look at the vague outlines crowding the lawns on the block we’ve turned up.

  Every few houses there’s one decorated with symbols and candles. Porch lights illuminate rosaries dangling over front stoops. Bungalows are lit up like birthday cakes in the gray dusk. Eaves are festooned with loops of daisy chains. Wood crosses spear apron lawns and tidy flower beds. We pass a ranch home with a clot of white pillar candles and a framed picture of Jeanie at the center. Orange ribbon knots, like those worn in remembrance of Jeanie for months after her disappearance, are tied around doorknobs and car antennas. Big, clumsy bows are secured around tree trunks; candles, photos, and newspaper clippings are displayed at their bases. Everywhere I look there are vigils for the dead, displayed in front yards like tiny lawn-gnome funerals.

  Chapter Ten

  Everyone’s heard about the body in the cemetery and Mrs. Talcott’s murder,” Sam says quietly. “It’s a small town. This place was messed-up enough over Jeanie’s disappearance. Remember how long it was before we were allowed to trick-or-treat? People are bound to lose it again.”

  I turn away and burrow through my purse for my cell. Sam’s right. I don’t like to recall
what Zoey refers to as “the lost years,” the three years after Jeanie was taken. Three Halloweens canceled—trick-or-treating actually outlawed. Three years of town curfews, police patrolling, flashing lights seeping through the blinds. Three years of students hustled from classrooms to their parents’ idling cars, teachers yapping into walkie-talkies at the sight of a stranger. Three years of mandatory weekly town council meetings in the church’s pews—the fire-and-brimstone preacher sharing the pulpit with the mayor to outline safety measures the town was taking. Three is how many years it took Savage to stop being afraid. I can’t face what’s happening outside the car window, time reversing its course. I’m not ready to see the stitches on that collective wound torn open. Not yet at least.

  I have only two texts. The first is from Shane. And although he uses a few more curse words, it’s basically the same as the note he left. The second is from Michaela.

  Parents have me on lockdown today, but I will break out if you need me. XO

  Poor Michaela. Her parents are always griping about her needing to spend time with “constructive influences.” Ron and Helen don’t mind me so much, since they judge all of Michaela’s friends by how many As they earn. Me: I get a lot. It helps that Dad plays golf with Michaela’s dad. But Michaela’s parents condemn Zoey whenever they get the chance. According to them, she’s some kind of anarchist. They’re probably injecting Michaela with one of those GPS micro-chips as we speak and brainstorming ways Zoey is likely to blame for Mrs. Talcott’s demise.

  “My dad didn’t even call.” My voice is a near whine. “And I thought Zoey would text for sure.” How is it that I’m left with only Sam?

  The next five blocks leading to my street are exactly the same. Crucifixes of all sizes, candlelight vigils, framed photos of Jeanie Talcott, rosaries, dream catchers, piles of acorns, tiny mountains of salt. Anything that anyone believes will ward off death has been rounded up and displayed. I hope my neighbors haven’t lost it too. But once we turn onto my street, I can’t even see the surrounding homes. The sidewalks are filled with reporters; news vans line the drive; nosy neighbors huddle together; kids circle their parents, kept near with invisible leashes of fear. The lights of cop cars cast a red, white, and blue wash on the carnival. Before I can beg Sam not to stop, he wrenches the wheel and makes a sharp U-turn.