The Creeping Read online

  Zoey lives on the opposite side of downtown from me, and even though fifteen blocks are all that separate our two houses, it’s like traveling from one world to the next. The homes get dollhouse small, and on every other street there’s a cluster of trailers. Pretty ones with plastic pink flamingos and fake green hedges, but still . . . houses on wheels. If the train tracks actually ran through town, this would be the wrong side of them. Zoey will antagonize just about everyone for just about everything, except not having a lot of money. Once I caught her in the locker room when she thought she was alone, telling her reflection that money can’t buy popularity. I think it probably can in most places, but not at our school, not under Zoey’s watch.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say to Sam when he throws the car into park in Zoey’s gravel driveway.

  It isn’t raining, but the sky is still brimming with clouds. Not the wispy kind, but the ones that look like sponges soaked with water, begging to be squeezed. I ring the doorbell rather than use my key. Zoey’s lost five spare keys to my house; I’ve hung on to hers since I was ten. Shuffling on the other side of the door, and then the lock clicks open.

  “Hey,” Caleb says as he flings it open. He drags Zoey’s yellow Lab Nanny back so that I can squeeze through and shouts, “Zoey! Stella’s here.” Nanny lunges forward, snorting furiously and sniffing my shoes like she means to inhale them. I scratch Nanny behind her ears, where the fur fades from gold to white. She’s fourteen and the reason we spent so much time at Jeanie’s as kids. Jeanie was allergic to dogs, and both my parents worked. That left Jeanie’s house for playdates.

  “Calm down, girl,” Caleb croons to Nanny. Then to me, “You left yesterday without saying good-bye. Are you really that pissed at me?”

  I shift my weight from foot to foot. “I’m not mad at you.” I smile sheepishly. “It got awkward with Taylor, and it was either fight or flight.” I wink at him, trying to make it a joke so I don’t have to give him all the gory details or talk about where we’re headed and why.

  “You and Zo really know how to pick douchewads,” he says, chuckling, as Zoey stomps from the hallway.

  She rolls her eyes and purrs, “And you pick such lovely young ladies, don’t you, Caleb? Didn’t your last girlfriend drop out of school after screwing a professor and posting the pics on her photography blog while she was dating you?”

  She nails us both with critical stares and then walks out of the house without another word. “So if you’re not pissed, where are you guys going and why wasn’t I invited?” I catch an undercurrent of hurt or suspicion in his breezy tone. “Zoey isn’t in a sharing mood,” he adds.

  I hang in the doorway. I’ve never been more grateful for Zoey’s gripe with Caleb. I don’t like lying to him, but it’s an unpleasant necessity. “I’ve been hanging out with Sam Worth.” I say it like I’m telling a scandalous secret—how I would have whispered it only a week ago. “We started talking the other night at the bonfire . . . before everything happened, obviously. And I don’t know . . .” I try to will on a blush. Make it convincing, Stella. “It just made me want to keep talking to him.” I wave vaguely. “It’s not going to turn into anything. I just want to see if Zoey can play nice.”

  He snorts loudly. “Good luck with that.” He’s totally buying it.

  “Yeah, I should really go supervise.” I walk backward, flashing an apologetic smile. “Text me tomorrow, ’kay?”

  “You got it, Cambren.” The front door clicks shut as I spin around and jog down the gravel path.

  Zoey is frozen halfway between the station wagon and the house. She’s staring daggers at Sam with her hands on her hips as she shouts, raspy-voiced and outraged, “What is he doing here?” Red-faced and shaking, she rushes to the car and flings the passenger door open, practically crawling into the car on her knees and stabbing her finger at Sam’s chest. “Why are you trying to ruin Stella’s senior year? Do you realize that she blew off Taylor Martinson for you? Taylor effing Martinson. Captain of the varsity lacrosse gods! Every girl at Wildwood would kill—literally kill—to hook up with him. And he wanted her.”

  She pauses for the full weight of her words to sink in. Instead Sam cranes his neck, looks past her, and smiles at me. That slow smile he gave me when he offered me the corsage and after our first kiss and in the cemetery the night I shouted at him in front of Janey Bear. The one that says he knows something that no one else does. I can’t stop it; I smile back.

  Zoey ducks out of the car and looks around hurriedly, like it’s just occurred to her that someone might see her in the throes of an argument with a peasant. She smooths her tank top, straightens her miniskirt, and tucks her pixie hair behind her ears. Satisfied that there’s no one around but her obese neighbor rocking on her porch swing, Zoey looks back to me. I give her a helpless shrug. Her jaw drops.

  “Oh. My. Fucking. God,” she says. “You like him.”

  I cover my mouth to hide that I’m still smiling. “Zo, please come with us. I need you.”

  “What gives, Stella? I’m your best friend forever.” She waves her palm at me furiously, showing off the hardly there scar from where we pricked our hands with tweezers to be blood sisters in middle school. She backtracks until she’s right in front of me and holds me by my shoulders. “How did this happen?” she whispers like I’ve contracted some rare and tropical disease. Sam strains his neck to hear.

  “I don’t like him,” I whisper back. I’m unnerved by how feeble it sounds.

  “Uh-uh, Stella Cambren, I know you better than anyone does, and I have never seen that flushed gooey-eyed-bullshit-I-want-to-have-your-babies look on your face. Ever.” She presses her fingers to her temples, as if I’m giving her a migraine. “Okay, look, I love you. You love me. How about you avoid Sam for senior year, and then you can do whatever you want to him after?”

  My smile fades. “Zo, I might not make it to senior year, let alone survive the whole thing. Jeanie’s killer is out there. Whoever it is might know that I’m trying to remember. There are cops watching my house twenty-four/seven. Do you understand?”

  First she rolls her eyes and juts out her bottom lip. When I don’t cave, she exhales loudly. “Fine. Whatevs.” She crosses her arms and pops her hip. “I don’t approve of this kinky thing you’ve got going with the King of Loserdom. But I love you, and I’d go banshee on anyone to keep you safe.”

  “Thanks, Zo.” I lock my arm with hers and have to give her a little tug toward the station wagon to get her feet moving. This momentary cease-fire is really the best reaction I could have dared to dream.

  As she climbs into the backseat, she grumbles, “But I call dibs on selecting your senior prom date. I am not going to let you ruin the single most important night of our lives. And did you guys hear that the cops took Daniel Talcott in for questioning late last night?”

  Sam and I both whirl around. “What?” we say in unison.

  “You know I don’t believe in watching the news—too depressing,” she says, pointedly not looking at Sam. “But Cole texted me at the butt crack of dawn this morning. I guess Daniel just strolled right into the police station and announced who he was. No one squealed on him for being at Day of Bones, and now the cops are calling him a suspect because they had no idea he was here—which BTW, makes zero sense since he turned himself in.” She waves again, dismissing the topic. “So tell me one good reason why we’re wasting an awetastic day in the library.”

  As we drive, Sam fills Zoey in on everything. She slouches low in the backseat so no one sees her riding in his station wagon. Her upper lip, shimmery with coral-colored lip gloss, curls in distaste at speaking to him directly. But for the most part, she listens to him. As they talk, I worry about Daniel. I guess he figured it was only a matter of time before someone who recognized him told the police he was here, and it’s better to talk with the cops voluntarily. With Savage’s residents in a tizzy over the crimes, maybe the safest place for Daniel is with the police? Maybe it’ll keep all the bible-thumping wa
nnabe vigilantes, who probably have arsenals full of apocalypse-ready firearms in fortified basement bunkers, away from Daniel and his dad? Maybe Daniel will be able to convince the police his father had nothing to do with any of this?

  The library parking lot is underground and deserted. We hurry up the stairs to the surface to escape the sulfur smell that Zoey worries will stick to her clothes. The library is empty too, except for the librarian. She looks up, penciled-in eyebrows scowling as we make the turnstiles shriek walking through them.

  “I’ll check with the archivist if you guys want to get us a table,” Sam offers, angling toward the reference desk.

  Zoey sashays forward, batting her eyelashes as she snickers over her shoulder, “Yeah, we better hurry, ’cause the place is so effing crowded.” I follow her through the stacks, trying to ignore how dark it is between the shelves. “What a dungeon. Anything could be lurking in here,” she adds, practically reading my mind. “Hell, Jeanie’s killer has probably been hiding out in children’s books diddling himself for the last decade.”

  “Don’t say that,” I hiss-whisper, taking a seat across from her at a table. It’s against the farthest wall from the door. I watch her remove a tiny packet of wet wipes and swab the dust from the table before she leans her elbows on it.

  “It’s weird,” she whispers, eyeing where Sam stands across the library at the reference desk before she continues, “I think I kind of remember that day we went hunting for monsters.” I frown. When Sam asked her in the car if she remembered the spring before Jeanie went missing, Zoey grimaced and massaged her temples like he was a trumpeting pygmy elephant. “The thing is”—she crumples the soiled wet wipe and tosses it over her shoulder—“it’s like I remember more than one day. I knew we played outside a lot at Jeanie’s, but the memories are fragments rather than whole.”

  I fight the urge to peer deeper into the shadowy corridors around us. “I bet Caleb would remember,” I say, keeping my volume low. “I want to ask, but yesterday when I tried to ask him about that summer, he told me it was too dangerous to be hunting for Jeanie’s killer.” I lean over the table to be closer to her. “He said he’d tell my dad on me if I didn’t stay out of it.”

  “Well, duh,” Zoey says. A half roll of her eyes, because Caleb doesn’t even warrant a full roll, in her opinion. “My handi-capable brother is not exactly known for his courage. He needed a night-light until he was thirteen.” She flicks her hair from her eyes and taps a disjointed melody on the table. She’s instantly impatient when Caleb’s the subject. A hum buzzes from her throat, and I’m about to lose her completely to the lyrics of an unidentifiable song.

  I reach across the table and hold her hands. “You could ask Caleb. Don’t mention me, just act like it’s something you’re wondering. He’ll probably remember.”

  Zoey’s face crinkles with mean-spirited amusement. “He smoked so much pot in high school I’m surprised he doesn’t forget his own name.” Her mouth cuts a neutral line. “You’d think if he or Daniel remembered us hunting something in the woods, one of them would have had the brain cells to mention it at some point during all these years.” Her eyes settle on my hands over hers. “If it’s that important, I’ll ask.”

  Having exhausted the subject, Zoey gives me the rundown on what I missed yesterday—Caleb ogling Cole, the Ds ending up in a shoving match over Zoey, Michaela noticing the rain clouds gathering, Caleb ditching the others, and Zoey refusing to go home until the hail pelted her in the water. Imagining the bedraggled group, shrieking and sprinting through the wood toward the shelter of the cars, does bring a smile on. Zoey tactfully—so tactfully that I suspect an alien hijacked control of her brain—doesn’t mention Taylor.

  “Why did Caleb ditch you guys?” I ask.

  She drums her sparkly painted nails on the table between us. “He probably had one of his stoner-ific boys pick him up. He came home reeking of stale beer.” She pinches the tip of her nose and sticks her tongue out.

  Sam lets two beige folders thud on the table between us. “Been in a library much? Keep quiet,” Zoey purrs. I give her a chastening glare until she adds, “Kidding. What’ve you got there, Wikipedia?”

  “Clippings the archivist pulled for me.”

  Zoey shoves the folders toward Sam, who catches them before they glide off the table. He takes the chair next to me and starts thumbing through the pages. All photocopies of newspaper articles. He divides the sheets into equal stacks and slides us each one. After the task of combing through articles of unrelated missing children last night, I feel too gutted for it today. But sometimes you have to suck it up. I look over my pile, keeping one eye slightly squinted as though it helps buffer me from the awful details. The Savage Bee covered crimes that were big news throughout the state, and many of my articles are on the missing children I read about last night. Zoey’s luck isn’t any better.

  “Look at these,” Sam murmurs excitedly, his hair a wayward pile from all the absentminded rubbing as he read. He arranges three photocopied articles in front of us. “This one is Betty Balco, the girl in 1938 that Mrs. Griever told us about. She was playing in the front yard. Her mom went inside to grab laundry for the clothesline and when she came out, Betty was gone. And these”—he points to the others—“are for two other missing girls. In 1930, Rosalyn Jensen disappeared while hiking in Blackdog with her brother. He said she was lagging behind and then vanished. She was five. And this one, Penelope Petersen, disappeared when she was six in 1936. Her family was picnicking somewhere called Norse Rock.”

  Zoey snatches up the articles on Penelope Petersen and squints at the faded black-and-white photograph. “All this proves is that there were sickos in the olden days,” she says. “I have an entire stack of articles testifying to that fact. Big surprise.”

  “Read the second paragraph,” Sam tells her.

  Her eyes skim quickly over each line. As she reads, the blood drains from her cheeks. “They’re little gingersnaps too.” She places the page down delicately as if she’s afraid of disturbing their sleep. “Redheads just like Jeanie,” she adds in the barest of whispers.

  “There’s nothing in these clippings about their remains being found or any serious suspects or arrests ever being made,” Sam says. I reach for the articles, hands shaking. I scan them for the details Sam says aren’t there. I have to make sure. As I do, Zoey rests her head on her folded arms, and Sam stares over his shoulder at the bank of front windows. Their panes give the forest across the street the look of a cubist painting. I imagine his gaze sticks to the dark mesh of trees, searching for the monstrous explanation. The articles are short, and it doesn’t take long for me to drop them on the table. Sam was right: no bodies, no suspects, only fruitless leads.

  Sam’s irises are darker as he turns back to us and says, “They vanished just like Jeanie.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It’s too much to be a coincidence,” Sam says for the third time. I slump in the passenger seat and cover my face. Since we left the library, I’ve been trying to stitch my words into anything believable, anything less horrible than the evil taking shape in Savage. Griever warned us, didn’t she? She said I’d wish to be blind if I kept looking in Savage’s dark corners. I’m not ready to gouge my eyes out, but I’m close.

  Sam turns onto the two-lane highway heading toward Old Savage Cemetery.

  “Wait a sec, let me get this straight. I almost lost it in the library I’m so eeked out, and now you’re taking me to the cemetery?” Zoey asks, a nervous laugh fluting her voice. “We should be heading home to pack. We should be booking it to make the first flight to Chi-town to stay with Stella’s whorebag of a mother. And I mean whorebag in the worst way possible.” She leans forward and wraps her arms around me and the seat. I hug her arms back; Zoey took my mother leaving me almost as hard as I did.

  “There could be more little girls, Zo. The newspaper archives weren’t complete. If we find a bunch of headstones for kids, then that’s even more of a pattern to show Sha
ne,” I explain as she rests her chin on my shoulder.

  “Otherwise he’ll say it’s a coincidence or that it doesn’t mean anything,” Sam adds.

  Zoey pops up and wags a finger triumphantly. “But what if the families never added a headstone? Hello? No kiddie corpse, no grave, mathemagicians.”

  Sam tilts his head, mulling it over. “That’s possible, I guess. But I bet that if families held out hope, they’d still want their daughter to have a headstone in the family plot.”

  Zoey stomps her heel against the back of the driver’s seat. “Fine, but at the first sign of any monsters, I’m out. I just wish the Savage PD wasn’t so epically snowballs incompetent. I’m not effing Nancy Drew.”

  The sky darkens as we get closer—kind of an ominous sign—and tiny drops of rain speckle the highway. The air in the wagon sweats. I wrap my hair in a knot on the nape of my neck and concentrate on deep, calming breaths.

  As we come to a stop on the gravel lot adjacent to the cemetery, Zoey says, “About all this monster randomness, nothing like that actually exists, right?” She sounds young and scared.

  “No, Zo. Of course not,” I say, my stomach flip-flopping in a way it wouldn’t have if she’d asked me a week ago.

  She leans forward, tugging on my sleeve. “So why were you talking about monsters? Why did that dumpy old lady mention them? Why were we hunting them?” Panic makes her pitch rise.

  Sam twists to face her. “People are always looking for someone or something to blame for the bad that happens. It’s just the scariest thing people can think up.”

  He probably can’t see it, but I can spot her vulnerability fading as she tips her head and blinks lazily at him. “It’s not the scariest thing I can think of,” she says smoothly.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, suspicious.

  “The devil,” she says in a singsong voice, slipping out of the car, into the rain.