Two

As soon as we got out of the woods, I realized I had left my backpack behind, along with the strawberries and flowers. My cell phone was in my bag.

“Wait here,” I said to the girl. I felt electricity running through me. “I have to go back.”

“You can’t!” she cried.

“I need my phone. We have to call 911.”

“No police!” she said.

I stared at her. Did she have any idea what she looked like? What had she been through?

“You need an ambulance,” I told her. “And the police—”

“Didn’t you hear me?” the girl said. “I said no police. There’s a reason.”

“What is the reason?” I asked.

She gazed down at the ground, and when she looked up at me, her eyes were blank. “I don’t know,” she said.

She wasn’t making sense. I chalked that up to the fact I had just pulled her out of a hole in the ground, and her thoughts probably weren’t tracking all that well.

I was going to have to take charge here. I glanced around. My heart was racing. I felt the shock of danger, and a shiver ran down my spine. Whoever had left the girl in my sister’s grave could still be around. I had to think clearly.

We were on the village outskirts, on a lane with pretty houses, the kind you would expect to find full of nice, happy families. But one thing about having a sister murdered in your own hometown—everyone was guilty until proven innocent.

I spotted a FOR SALE sign at the end of a driveway. The yard was overgrown, and there were some newspapers on the front porch, which made me think the people had already moved out.

A red barn stood behind the house. I ran to it, discovered that the door was unlocked, and hurried the girl inside, into an old horse stall piled high with musty bales of hay. Swallows had nested in the rafters. There must have been eggs because the adult birds were swooping in and out, trying to chase us away. Farm implements like shovels, an axe, and a pitchfork leaned against the splintery wall. I made the girl sit down on a hay bale.

“Hide here. I’ll be right back,” I said.

“Don’t leave me!” she said.

“Count to a hundred, I won’t be long,” I said, closing the door behind me. I tore down the lane back to the Braided Woods. I had never run faster. When I got to the spot where Eloise and this girl had been buried, I couldn’t find my backpack.

Terror can do that.

I walked around the clearing, and there was my backpack, right where I had left it, nestled in the roots of a tall spruce tree. But as I picked it up, I saw something glint on the ground. I bent down and picked it up—a tiny gold charm, about a half inch in diameter, with an enameled white figure etched on the front: It looked like a ghost girl.

I turned the charm over in my hand, saw microscopic etching on the back, and my neck prickled: Who had dropped it? The girl I’d just found in the grave? Her attacker? Eloise , all those months ago? No way—I would have known if my sister had something like this. Besides, the police would have found it. Right?

I was holding my breath, like I was in my own private horror movie, and I forced myself to breathe. I had to get back to the girl. I shoved the charm into my pocket, grabbed my backpack, and raced toward the barn.

The door’s rusty hinges creaked when I pushed it open, and as I stepped into the horse stall, I heard a terrified shriek. The girl was standing there with wild eyes, holding the pitchfork waist-height, thrusting it forward.

“Hey!” I said, jumping back.

“Sorry,” she said, lowering the pitchfork. She wiped her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand. “I wasn’t sure who it was.”

I was completely freaked out by the sight of those long, sharp, curved tines pointed straight at me. I fumbled inside the outer pocket of my backpack and pulled out my phone, ready to call the police.

The girl had the speed of a feral barn cat and leapt toward me, yanking the phone from my hand. Her violence shocked me.

“Don’t you listen?” she asked. “You are not going to call anyone.”

“You’re not thinking straight,” I said, taking a step back to get away from her rage. “This is an emergency. You get that, right? You were buried alive. Who did this to you? You could have died!”

“I know,” she said, her tone dropping a few notches. She shook her head, and her expression softened. She reluctantly handed me my phone. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” I said. “Listen. My sister—she was found in that exact same spot where I found you. Her body. She was killed.”

“Sister,” the girl whispered, and as soon as she said the word, she began to shake uncontrollably.

“Eloise,” I said. “That’s my sister’s name.”

The girl didn’t reply, just stood there.

I stepped toward her, put a hand on her shoulder, wanting to help her stop trembling. “You’re okay now,” I said. “You’re safe.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” she said.

I took a deep breath. “If you’re not safe, that’s all the more reason to call the police,” I explained. “They’ve been trying to find out who killed my sister.” I held out some hope that this horrible situation could breathe life into my sister’s cold case. “And not only that, we should get you to the emergency room—”

She interrupted me midsentence. “Have you ever had something that’s not really a memory? Just a picture in your mind, and you’re not even sure where you saw it before, but you know you did? Because I can see two words, just the words, like in a black-and-white photograph.”

“What words?” I asked, thinking of that name that kept shimmering in my mind.

“No Police,” the girl said, gazing down, as if reading it from an invisible page. She wrapped her arms around herself, like she was trying to keep from breaking into pieces.

“Who told you that?” I asked. “Who said ‘no police’?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But you’re not calling them.” She sounded angry and glared up at me. “Got it, Eloise’s sister? What’s your name, anyway?”

“Oli Parrish,” I said. “What’s yours?”

No answer. She just held herself tighter. She looked away again, frowning, staring at the ground. Her silence felt rude.

“I rescued you, remember?” I asked a little harshly. “You can tell me.”

“Remember?” she asked, and laughed slightly, in a high, shrill tone.

“That’s what I said. You were in that hole? I pulled you out?” I asked. “A few minutes ago? Did you forget that?”

“No, I didn’t forget that,” she said. “What a miracle.”

“A miracle? That I rescued you?”

“No. That I remember.” Now she wasn’t just shaking—she was wobbling. I thought she might fall over or pass out, so I put my arm around her shoulders and eased her back down onto the bale of hay.

“Put your head down, between your knees,” I said, remembering that old direction from my therapist, Dr. Hirsch. She had told me to do that when I got really upset and started to hyperventilate. “Take deep breaths.”

The girl did what I said. I stared at the back of her head. Her brown hair was tangled and matted with twigs, sticky with blood. When she calmed down a little, she looked up at me.

I remembered the gold charm. I dug it out of my pocket, held it toward her. “Is this yours?” I asked.

She glanced at it, shook her head. Her face was streaked with grime, and I saw that along with the cut on her head, there were scrapes on her cheek and above her eyebrow.

I crouched down beside her so I could look into her brown eyes.

“Still dizzy?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. I shouldn’t have even bothered asking, because she was so obviously not fine.

“We can’t stay here,” I told her. “You’ve made it clear you don’t want me to call the police. I don’t know why—I think that’s a mistake—but I’m not going to argue with you right now.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“There is one thing I really need to know, though. You’ve got to tell me, okay?”

She watched me with this incredible sadness in her eyes, as if, without even hearing the question yet, she already knew I wouldn’t like her answer.

“What’s your name?” I asked again.

She took another deep breath. Sitting there, she stared at me for a long time. I thought she was going to hold her breath forever, but then she exhaled hard and bent over almost double, so her head was touching her knees. She shuddered and said something in a voice so low I couldn’t understand.

“What?” I asked, leaning close to her, straining to hear.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

Had I heard right? I was about to ask her to repeat what she had said, but then she lifted her head, looked into my eyes, and spoke clearly.

“I don’t know my name,” she said, her voice rising in despair.