One

I hadn’t visited my sister in thirty days, but today was June 9, and I always showed up on the ninth of the month.

I felt guilty for staying away so long. To make it up to her, I packed a basket of wild strawberries into my backpack, picked a bouquet of sweet peas—her favorites—and headed out.

It was late afternoon, and a steady breeze had picked up. It made me think of sailing. Eloise and I should have been on a boat, feeling the breeze in our hair. We should have been taking this picnic to Dauntless Island instead of having it in the woods where I was meeting her.

I walked through town. We live in Black Hall, one of those postcard-pretty New England villages with sea captains’ houses, rose gardens, and white picket fences. Stately maple trees lined the streets. The deep yellow sunlight burnished everything, made the town even more beautiful. I passed our high school. As of yesterday, we were out for summer vacation, so no one was there. In September I’d be a junior. And Eloise was just one year behind.

I wished I’d left earlier in the day, but honestly, I’d been finding reasons not to leave the house. I wanted to see her, but I also didn’t.

Eloise would be disappointed. She could read my mind, and I could read hers. She’d be hurt that I only came to see her once a month. She would have preferred it be more often; she would have liked it to be every day. I could hear her voice, predict what she would say when I stood in front of her.

Seriously, Oli? Where have you been? I could see her little frown, her furrowed brow, the familiar expression she wore when she was frustrated.

You know, I’ve been busy , I would reply.

Doing what?

Um?.?.?.

Exactly— um . Come on, Oli!

You should know better than anyone, Eloise. We’re?.?.?.

TGWTMR , she would say, her expression softening, a smile entering her voice .

Yep. The Girls With Too Much Responsibility , I would say, and we would crack up laughing, and everything would be okay again.

Our grandmother used to tell us: “You’ll have many friends in life, but only one sister.” And she was right—I felt it in my bones, that I would never love anyone as much as Eloise.

People sometimes thought we were twins at first glance, because we were the same height and had similar features. But Eloise’s hair was blonde, and mine was more reddish in color. And while my eyes were blue, Eloise’s were hazel—the same color of the green leaves overhead, touched by the magical late-day golden light.

You can trust the universe , Eloise liked to say.

In response, I’d give her my best skeptical raised eyebrow. “You sound like Dr. Hirsch,” I’d say. Dr. Hirsch was the therapist we used to see.

“Well, she’s right!” Eloise would insist. My sister was sunshine and optimism, and she believed that everything worked out in the end. I was shadows and hesitation, with a hard shell. This was the best way—protect myself from ever getting hurt, let things roll off my back.

Our parents had died when we were very young, so long ago that only I remembered them—Eloise didn’t at all. But I knew she felt their leaving—the emptiness that filled our house after they were gone. So it made perfect sense, our need to hold tight to each other.

I reached the arched stone bridge that led from Main Street onto a footpath into the Braided Woods, and my whole body tensed. In spite of the almost-summer air, the temperature seemed to drop, coating me with frost.

Eloise and I would come here to go birding, either just the two of us or with our nature club from school. We had been avid birders since we were little. These woods were the perfect place to see migrating warblers each spring and fall, to listen for barred and great horned owls at dusk and search for their pellets in daylight, to spot red-tailed hawks hiding in the foliage as they watched for prey.

We had actually come to these woods with our nature club the morning of October 9: the same day it happened. Later that day, Eloise had disappeared.

Exactly eight months ago.

My sister had been gone that long.

We told each other that we were best friends, not just sisters, and that we would always stay close. We would probably go to the same college. Definitely live in the same town after graduation. It was our promise, and she had broken hers. I knew it wasn’t fair of me to feel that way—she hadn’t meant to go away forever. It wasn’t her fault.

But the fact was, she wasn’t here with me anymore. The best I could do to keep my vow was to stay true to the ninth. Every month since October 9, rain or snow or shine, I’d been there.

November 9

December 9

January 9

February 9

March 9

April 9

May 9

Now June 9

People might think me strange for bringing strawberries and flowers. They’d say: What does Eloise care, what good are they to her? Well, I knew she would love them, so that was why I brought them. Just like I brought apple cider, Christmas cookies, pine cones, roasted chestnuts, clementines, lemon cake, valentine hearts, and lilacs on some of the other ninths. I packed up her favorite treats, things I was sure she would like, and carried them right here, into the Braided Woods.

This was where I visited her.

Not the cemetery, with its tall oaks and weeping willows, its centuries-old gravestones. For twelve years, ever since our parents died, our grandmother took me and Eloise there to leave flowers on their graves. It is a place full of history, with some of the tombstones dating back to the 1600s and crumbling with age. While Gram tended the grass and plantings, Eloise and I would make grave rubbings of the angels and epitaphs carved into the ancient sandstone and shale, and think about the people and their lives. Believe it or not, those were happy times for us.

Now that Eloise was buried there, next to our mom and dad, I never wanted to go back. It was too hard, too final, seeing her name and the dates of her life engraved in that gray stone.

Here in the Braided Woods, where her life was stolen from her, she seemed more alive somehow. As I walked along the narrow path, the trees closing in around me, I could feel her breath in my own chest. I was following the footsteps she took that October day.

The police found little clues, as surely as if she had left a trail of breadcrumbs: a long blonde hair caught on a bayberry bush, a little fuzz from her blue fleece jacket stuck to the rough bark of an oak tree, the footprints of boots in the spongy soil.

Nature had left clues as well: a sprinkle of pollen, bits of yellow leaves that seemed to have turned to gold dust. A downy feather the color of the sea at dawn.

But they still hadn’t caught who did it.

I thought about my sister’s case all the time. Case: such an insignificant word for the most important thing on earth, my sister’s murder.

At first the detective assigned to the case would visit my grandmother regularly, to fill her in on the investigation. Once Detective Tyrone realized that Gram wasn’t exactly retaining the information, she would still stop by, just to check on us, but not say very much.

I explained to Detective Tyrone about Gram’s Alzheimer’s, and I asked her to report the case’s progress to me instead. I knew how to talk to Gram, how to get through to her, in the hit-or-miss language of the wind trying to get through the drafty walls of a beloved summer cottage. But the detective didn’t take me seriously. As much as I liked her, she seemed to be looking beyond me, as if I had nothing to offer the investigation. She was young and kind, but she gave me a sad, indulgent smile that said you’re just a kid, you can’t handle this.

That drove me out of my mind. Can’t handle what, Detective? I wanted to scream. The small details, the tiny threads of information, the dead ends, the wrong turns of your stupid investigation? Grilling our friends, wasting all that time when you should have been finding an actual killer? Because those details were nothing compared to having to handle the fact Eloise was gone.

The whole thing made me want to jump right in and do what the police couldn’t: solve Eloise’s murder. I was constantly trying to put this huge, terrible puzzle together, and it made me realize that I wanted to become a detective when I graduated.

Eloise used to tease me that I knew a little about a lot of things.

“You go from curious to obsessed in ten seconds flat,” she’d say, and I could only shrug, because she was correct. My current and overwhelming obsession was needing to learn who had taken my sister away from me, and why.

There were no leads. Some nights, one name would shimmer through my dreams. I refused to let it come to the surface while I was awake. It would be even more unbearable to think that someone my sister had known, someone we had hung out with, could have done this to her.

I looked around the woods. That person could be here now, waiting for another girl to come along. But I was not afraid. I was not even sad. thing for sure, I wouldn’t cry—I never cry. I am tough. If bad things happen, once you start crying, you might never stop. Other than feeling wound too tight, I was numb. I might as well have been floating, as if I had left my body, just as Eloise had left hers.

When I approached the clearing, I slung off my backpack. There was the spot up ahead, the rock crevice where hikers had found her body, buried under dirt and fallen leaves, two days after we reported her missing. This was her real grave—the place where she took her last breath and turned from a human into a ghost—nothing like that manicured area in the cemetery.

Some people might find this place creepy. I didn’t. I walked slowly to the disturbed ground—it was a narrow furrow, the earth softer than everything around it. The killer had dug leaves and dirt out of the rock ledge, placed Eloise inside. After they found her, yellow crime scene tape had surrounded the perimeter. There was still a scrap of it wedged under a stone. I felt a knife in my heart because it reminded me once again of how the investigation had dwindled away.

I looked up. A shaft of that lovely fading sunlight came through the trees’ canopy. Yep, picnic time. I was hungry for those berries. My sister would be, too. I took the basket of strawberries out of my backpack and placed them, along with the bouquet of sweet peas, on the ground.

“Hi, Eloise,” I said out loud.

Since she died, she had spoken to me through nature—the sound of the breeze, stones tossed around in the waves, the rustle of seagrasses at the beach, the call of the owls. The ospreys had returned from their winters down south, and I heard Eloise in their exuberant, high-pitched cries. I didn’t expect to hear her actual human voice, but then:

“Help,” she whispered. “Help me.”

The words were not clear, but garbled, as if coming through a tunnel. I wasn’t startled—I had lost my mind after I lost Eloise, so expecting weirdness, terribleness, cruel tricks was just part of my life now.

I had gotten pretty good at turning the worst into the normal, so I said, “I want to go back in time. I would help you. I would do anything for you.”

“Then dig me up!” she said, her voice rising to a muffled yet outraged shriek.

Here was how I know I had gone around the bend and completely lost it: I saw the dirt moving. I was staring at the fissure in the rock ledge where Eloise’s body had been found. Just like then, it was filled with leaves and branches and mud. But now the dirt was heaving, tossing, like the ground was alive. I leaned closer and saw her left hand reaching up from the depths of the crevice.

I fell to my knees, grabbing her hand with one of mine, frantically digging and scraping with the other. Her fingers were scored with cuts, the skin dirty and cracked, her fingernails torn and broken. I let go of her hand to dig deeper, my arms windmilling like mad, scooping dirt and mud, until I was looking straight into her face.

But it wasn’t Eloise’s face. It was someone else, a girl with short dark hair, there in the same grave where the murderer had left my sister. She lay perfectly still. Her forehead and cheeks were caked with dirt that shimmered in the late light, as if it was flecked with bits of real gold.

“Help me,” the girl said.

She put her arms around my neck, and I hauled her out of the ground. It took all my strength because she was covered with leaves and mud, but I did it as if she was as weightless as air. She tried to stand, but her legs buckled. She was like a baby deer walking for the first time. She faltered, all knees and elbows, got up, fell down again. She coughed, choking on debris. I crouched and brushed dirt from her eyes and mouth.

“We have to hurry,” she said, voice rasping.

“Who are you?” I cried. “Who put you here?”

“Hurry. Now,” she said, and I could tell from the panic pouring off her that we didn’t have time for questions. I lifted her to her feet. I put my arm around her shoulders and helped her take the first few steps. Then she was okay. Or at least okay enough to walk fast, and then we began to run.