Lydia stares at the crumpled paper, her jaw still set. “Well, someone was here,” she whispers, her eyes widening. Like maybe it’s a ghost, who’s eavesdropping even now. She steps back, staring at the house.
“Oh,” I say, “the Realtors have been in and out. I saw a car before I left. I should’ve mentioned it. But I have every right to be here. I still own the house. They can’t kick us out.” Then I imagine being her, alone at the Jones House, and hearing someone else. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it,” I mumble. But I don’t get it, what she thinks I did with her phone.
“I thought it was you.”
“Thought what was me?”
“The lights. They all went on. Every one of them. In the shed, in the house, like it was brighter than they should’ve been.” She shakes her head. “And then everything shut down.” She looks to the shed. “Everything.”
Realtors, electric company, grid overload—there are a hundred possible causes. We live in an old farmhouse, after all. But she’s staring at the shed like she believes it’s haunted. I’ve lost her. “So where’s your phone?”
She drags her eyes slowly from the shed back to me. “When everything came back online, just for a second, I swear I heard your voice through the headphones.”
“The headphones?”
“Through the audio output? I had just plugged them in, hadn’t done anything with it. Anyway, I just got the hell out in a hurry. Sorry, I feel ridiculous now.”
But she doesn’t step any closer, and her apology feels more for her own benefit, like she’s talking herself out of something, calming her nerves.
“Seriously,” I say, rolling my eyes. I enter the shed, move notebooks around the desk until I find her phone, facedown and silenced, in a pink-and-gold case. I pick it up, see my missed texts, my missed calls. I bring it out to her, and she mumbles her thanks, grabbing Marco by the sleeve, turning to go.
“Wait. Lydia. The date,” I say. “Did you write it?”
They both stop, looking back over their shoulders. “What date?” Lydia asks.
“The numbers. On the pad of paper.”
“Oh yes. I wrote that down right before the lights thing happened…and then…” And then she took off, spooked. “Look, that’s all I can tell you. Whatever’s running on that thing”—she points to the shed—“it originated December fourth. That’s as far as I got.”
“December fourth. You’re sure.”
She makes a face, like she’s insulted I’d doubt her. “I’m sure.”
Neither of them remembers. The date is just one more in a string of numbers. The crack that runs straight through my life: 12/4, 12/4, 12/4…
“Well,” Lydia says, waving awkwardly toward me, toward the house. She turns on her heel, and Marco gives me some self-deprecating grin that I can no longer decipher, and it’s like he’s summing up our entire relationship with this one expression. I watch them go. I’m still not sure whether she believes me, but either way, I know she won’t be coming back.
I duck inside the shed again to escape from the heat, sitting inside with the overhead fan, the computer humming. I stare again at the numbers Lydia has written on the pad of paper, as if they will tell me something more. The date repeats in my head, over and over, until it’s all I can think. I close my eyes and see a flicker of the shadow house. Then I picture Elliot sitting in this very spot, maybe earlier in the night, fingers flying over the keyboard, with his headphones on. Music blaring and him humming along—
And then the scene splits and I see him in the shadow house instead, and I squeeze my eyes shut, until all I can really see are the spots behind my eyelids.
Alone in the shed, I take out my phone to log on to the forum to see if Visitor357 has responded to my request for more information, to see if I can piece together some explanation that makes sense. When a new message notification from Visitor357 comes up, I sit straighter, hyperfocused.
But he’s responded to my request for more information with two short lines. His brother has disappeared. And that signal is coming from his room. That’s it. That’s all it says.
My heart sinks, because it’s not the right direction, but also because I understand, suddenly, why the equipment. Why he’s the ghost-hunting type.
I swivel back and forth in the chair, the noise cutting through the empty room.
Through the window, I watch as Marco and Lydia climb over the fence, one after the other, back to their neighborhood. I hit Reply.
The person looking into this event for me disappeared, but it was just for a moment. But for that moment, I felt it. It was like anything was suddenly possible, almost like I was on the edge of understanding something. Of course, she came back, and it’s not the same. I guess what I’m saying is, I think I know how the universe looks to you right now. The not knowing, where everything and anything is possible. Even if it was just for a moment.
Then I take the flash drive back to Joe’s, with all the new data, to see if the signal is still coming through.
I don’t think this guy is going to look at this the same way. He’s looking for something else—something that isn’t there. But after his last message, I don’t have the heart to tell him.
And I don’t have a way to explain what I’ve just started thinking. That this date means more than a random potential contact coming from somewhere in the vastness of space. That it was a signal meant for me to receive.
Like maybe whatever I’m receiving right now is not just a message, but a warning. And it’s taken me this long to notice.
Agent Lowell has always seemed overly interested in my story of Liam’s disappearance. It was a mistake, telling him anything when he came on board the case. But at the time, I still thought honesty could help. Unlike the others, Agent Lowell wasn’t interested in the fact that Liam was wearing a maroon shirt, or that Colby had a brown-and-white coat but a tail that was solid brown—little details I gave while others nodded along in support. It had felt like we were all on the same side, until Agent Lowell.
Why did you start to panic, Nolan? He’d only been gone a handful of minutes.
I told him it was a feeling; I told him about the dream. He became convinced I knew more than I was saying. I had overheard another agent, months later, saying I had given a suspicious statement. I didn’t know whether that meant I was suspicious, or that the statement itself wasn’t particularly trustworthy, but I stopped talking after that. Kept my feelings and thoughts to myself. Kept a good distance from the actual investigation.
Now, standing eye to eye with Agent Lowell, I see he hasn’t dropped this perception of me. But I no longer feel intimidated by his gaze. I’ve been through it. Straight through. An entire investigation, your whole world ripped apart, while you stand there, begging them to do it.
Abby says you’re close—
What can you tell us about your brother—
How did you feel about him?
Offering up your belongings, and his, to try to track him down. Turning over your phones, your computers, your entire privacy, in the hopes of eventually finding him. Closing your eyes and imagining the sound of his music on the other side of the wall, the shake of a collar out in the hallway—imagining that everything would eventually lead us back to this.
“I’m going out,” I tell Agent Lowell now, knowing better than to get involved once more. “If my parents are looking for me, tell them I’m not interested in wasting time with this.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You think this—an email claiming to know what happened—is a waste of time? Why would that be, Nolan?”
Because the only explanation for what happened to my brother is that he was taken by something we can’t understand. That something pulled him, against his will. Some crack in reality, and my brother slipped through.
When Liam first disappeared, the number one theory, in the absence of any sign of foul play, was that he had run away. There were several points in favor of this theory. He volunteered at a shelter that was rumored to be frequented by teen runaways—he would know what to do, how to do it. It’s one thing to take a person, the police said. It’s another to take a person and a dog. Same goes for accidental injury or death—both Liam and the dog? A tougher thing to explain, though my dad insisted that Colby wouldn’t have left Liam’s side if he’d been hurt.
My parents asked Mike if he agreed with the runaway theory—he said that at first he didn’t think Liam was the type, but what he had learned was that there wasn’t really a type.
So everyone agreed: Liam and the dog both disappearing was a sign.
This gave my parents a shred of hope, even though it was a ridiculous idea. Liam Chandler, running away.
He had the girlfriend. The social status. The college scouts. The future. And all the searching through his life turned up nothing—no reason, no explanation.