When we’re shut back in Jade’s father’s truck, I lick my thumb and wipe away a salty patch on my boot. Jade is on her third attempt to call Cliff Grosso.
“Either his phone’s dead or he’s hitting the eff you button,” she says. “Kace, I’m so goddamned scared right now.”
“Let’s just stick to the facts,” I say. “We don’t know that something bad happened to her.”
Jade eyeballs me, as if to say, Really? Because the facts are this: Bailey lied about why she was leaving the party. Cliff Grosso followed her to her car. She somehow never made it home.
An idea springs into my head: “Why don’t we just go to Cliff’s?”
“Like his house?” Jade blinks. Her eyeliner has gone grimy, and there are gold curls falling from the bun atop her head. “Do you want to get shot?”
Cliff Grosso lives alone with his father, Jim, and even I know what happened five years ago when a bunch of high school kids tried to cross through the woods behind Jim Grosso’s house. He took his hunting rifle off the mantel and shot one of the boys in the ass. I guess it was a miracle the kid could walk again, but nothing happened to Jim over the whole thing because apparently in Wisconsin you’re allowed to defend your property.
“We can just drive by,” I say. “To see if her car is there.”
Jade picks at a remnant of plum lipstick flaking on her mouth. “Okay. But we’re just driving by.”
And then she makes a right, toward Pleasant Plains, up Cypress Hill, where Cliff Grosso lives.
We don’t talk on the drive up the hill. Jade has to focus on the bad conditions outside, and I am trying to come up with an alternative to Bailey being dead in a ditch somewhere.
There is the smallest chance she went home with Cliff Grosso. She almost hooked up with him once, and it’s been nearly a year. Cliff might not blame her anymore for the accident. What if Cliff got into a fight with Bridget last night and decided to hook up with Bailey as payback?
Bailey might just have gone along with it—either because she wanted to relish the chance to piss off Bridget or because she was bored.
The thing about growing up in a town like this is that some people catch boredom like a virus. Bailey has it bad—bad enough to get into that car with Cliff Grosso last spring after he’d been drinking. Bad enough to sneak out every weekend in search of something—what it is, I don’t even think she knows.
I think of her idea to hold the séance in the barn, and a shiver runs through me. I roll up my window.
When we reach the top of Cypress Hill, Jade parks at the bottom of the Grossos’ driveway. It’s too risky to drive up it in this weather, even with four-wheel drive. I climb out of the car and shade my eyes; atop the hill, a row of cypress trees blocks my view of the house.
“We’re trespassing,” Jade says.
“We’re already here,” I say. “He’s not going to shoot us for ringing his doorbell.”
We’re panting by the time we get to the top. The head of the driveway loops around the cabin. There are no cars in sight, but smoke puffs out of the cabin’s chimney, white as gauze against the orange-pink sky.
Jade climbs up the shoveled path and I pull out my phone and follow her. I feel dramatic, but I type 911 into my keypad, just in case. A tawny cat, almost as pale as the snow, darts past us and around the back of the cabin. The sound makes my heart lurch.
Jade shields her eyes and peers through the garage window. “Cliff’s Jeep is here.”
In the woods off the side of the house, there’s a low-pitched shriek. Snow owl, maybe. I shiver in place. Jade climbs up the porch and rings the doorbell.
No footsteps. Just silence. Jade rings the bell again, then jangles the knob. Locked.
The wind carries toward me, bringing a sour, metallic smell with it. I pull the front crook of my scarf over my mouth. Jade steps around to the side of the cabin. I follow. A high window—bathroom, probably—is cracked open. Jade calls “Hello” into it.
The ensuing silence ripples through me like a current.
Jade gets out her phone, peeling away her mitten to scroll down the screen.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Calling Bailey. If she’s passed out inside, we’ll at least hear her stupid-ass ringtone.”
“But her car’s not—”
Jade shushes me. It’s so quiet on the hill I can hear the first ring leaking from Jade’s phone clearly. But there’s another noise, farther away.
“I hear something,” I whisper.
Jade points to the house, brow furrowed. I shake my head. It’s a tinkling sound, like a bell, coming from the woods adjacent to the Grossos’ cabin.
I take off after the sound. It’s not Bailey’s ringtone. Still, it’s a phone, and it’s ringing, at the same moment Jade is calling Bailey’s phone. The thought makes my toes curl.
I pick my way around the trees. Step over brown, soggy leaves weighed down with melting snow.
“Call it again,” I say, just loud enough for Jade to hear me. She frowns, starts to come toward me.
The tinkling starts up again. Wind chimes. I turn—the sound is behind me—coming face to face with a barren balsam tree. A phone in a case with a peeling photo of the northern lights is on the ground, resting on dead pine needles.
We were with her when she bought it—Bailey is obsessed with the northern lights, and when she saw the phone case at the Pleasant Plains flea market last summer she freaked out, even though Jade told her it looked like shit quality.
Blood pounding in my ears. I reach for Bailey’s phone. I’m prompted for a passcode. I type in Bailey’s birthday—0427. Access granted. The phone is clinging to life with a five percent charge.
I peel off a mitten and open Bailey’s call log. She has dozens of missed calls and texts. All from numbers with the Broken Falls area code, except mine. I open my text.
Where are you?? This isn’t funny.
My number is displayed above the text, but not my name. My heart lurches. Why would she delete me from her contacts? I flip through to her phone book.
All of Bailey’s contacts are gone. Deleted. My pulse picks up.
I thumb through to the next screen. Pull up the camera. No pictures. I know for a fact that Bailey had a minimum of four hundred pictures on here. Selfies. The three of us, making stupid faces. Something delicious she’d eaten.
I look up at Jade, who’s staring down at the needles covering the forest floor, her face white. “Someone erased everything.”
“Kacey. Do you see this?”
I follow her eyes to the ground, several feet away from us. The pine needles, shielded from the storm by tree cover, are stained red, and the snow around them has been flattened.
Something was dragged here.
Jade looks paralyzed. I follow the tunnel in the snow the body made—it had to have been a body—avoiding stepping too close to the streaks of blood. Don’t touch anything. Crime scene.
“Kacey, stop.”