The Creeping

Shane nods. “That jells with why we think Daniel placed Becca’s remains in the cemetery.”


I nod; working through the details and laying them to rest makes my insides solid. “He knew she’d be found at the bonfire on the anniversary of Jeanie’s disappearance,” I say. Not only was it the most dramatic way for Daniel to reveal the body, but the timing would serve as yet another link to Jeanie. We round the corner on to my street. I hold my breath until I see it’s mostly deserted. Any news vans camped out for a glimpse of the “girl who was left behind” must be at the police station where Caleb was taken.

“So what about the finger bone?” The thousand-year-old bone is one of the last remaining pieces without a place.

“It’s likely he found the bone in the woods near Mrs. Griever’s, and he assumed it was Jeanie’s,” he says. “Daniel was smart. He must have known that Becca looking so much like Jeanie would link the cases, but the finger bone would solidify the link. The bone is likely a Chippewa artifact, as we first suspected.” Shane exhales a long, whistling breath. “Why do you think Daniel came back? We weren’t looking for him.”

I sink lower in my seat as we pass a clump of neighbors standing on their lawn. I’m not in the mood to be gawked at. “He thought it was only a matter of time until I remembered. He just wanted someone—anyone—to be arrested for Jeanie,” I say. “He thought Griever must have come across Jeanie’s body. He wondered if she was still waiting to be discovered in the woods. He probably planned to find Jeanie—well, the rest of her, if he thought he already had her finger—and phone in an anonymous tip or something. He didn’t care who was arrested for the crime. He blamed everyone else—me, his father, Griever, and Caleb.”

He was wrong, not only because he shot the arrow. If Jeanie had survived that summer, there would have been more games in the woods. I keep coming back to the tin of spiders around Jeanie’s neck. My stomach twists over it. With every kink, I remember what I couldn’t make sense of as a child: Jeanie despondent when she learned that Daniel was riding on our bus for the school picnic at Blackdog; Jeanie petrified that Daniel would kill the ladybugs on the strawberries because he killed every little critter or pet she ever loved; Jeanie spooked, guarding against the woods, because Daniel was watching her. He was always watching, I recall. He liked seeing her squirm and cry. He liked making her cave to his will.

Who knows, maybe Daniel was lying about aiming the arrow at me. Maybe his violence against Jeanie had escalated, and when he saw what he’d done, he realized he couldn’t take it back and ran for his mother? The concerned-brother routine was all an act. Daniel didn’t care about justice for Jeanie. He cared about escaping what he’d done to her. Maybe it was the woods? The monster? The hunt? Or maybe Daniel was rotten, fated to maim from the start?

I splay my mottled fingers on my thighs. Tying up the loose ends of the mystery surrounding Jeanie is all I’ve thought about for days, but there’s no great satisfaction in solving it. “What about Betty Balco and the others from the 1930s? Why wasn’t Jeanie’s case connected with theirs?” I ask. It’s the last of the blurry details plaguing me.

Shane drags his hand across his mouth. “You gotta understand that was a long time ago, kid. There’s no one alive now—or even when Jeanie was taken—who was on the force then. Hell, the children of the men on the force in the 1930s aren’t even alive today. It was decades before records were stored on computers and at a time when people didn’t talk like we do now about criminals who hurt children. Generations pass and crimes get left behind.” The car bumps up my driveway, and he puts it in park. He twists to face me, his forehead pleating. “But between you and me, I think people wanted those disappearances forgotten. They were unsolved and ugly. Savage was a small town at its beginning. I bet they tried their best to keep it quiet after they didn’t make an arrest. The tampered graves appear to be evidence of that. I took a look and agree that they were vandalized a long time ago.”