Three

The girl’s answer turned my heart into a jackhammer. That plus the photograph in her mind— No Police . What did it mean? I could barely breathe. I knew that the girl-with-no-name needed help, but considering everything, I decided to hold off on calling Detective Tyrone. I had to think, but not here in this musty barn just down the lane from the Braided Woods.

“Come home with me,” I said. “We’ll figure out everything there.”

I led the girl-with-no-name out of the barn. Her nervousness was catching. Her gaze darted around, as if she felt anyone could be an enemy. I understood. It took me back to those first weeks after losing Eloise, when I would look into every face and wonder if that was the last face my sister saw. I still felt that way sometimes. So I chose a route where we were less likely to see people.

We cut through backyards, down a quiet road, onto a dirt path along the marsh. As we walked, I thought back to the start of the murder investigation, how the police had questioned everyone, even our friends.

Even me.

I thought of all the alibis, how we’d had to supply the police with details of our movements that day Eloise went missing. At first, that made me frantic, because it was obvious the police were wasting time. It seemed clear that a stranger had killed my sister, not someone we knew. I kept hammering that thought through my mind—and I kept saying it to Detective Tyrone. A stranger, maybe from our town. Someone who had spotted Eloise that last day and followed her into the woods.

At the edge of the marsh, I saw an oriole nest, shaped like a teardrop, dangling from a branch overhead. Two snowy egrets and one great blue heron fished the shallow waters. I had to harden my heart, because birds made me think of Eloise and if I thought of Eloise now, I would cry. And I never cried.

The girl beside me was pale. She kept up with me, but every so often she tripped over her own feet. Once, she grabbed my arm to steady herself, as if she was too weakened to proceed. I looked into her eyes to see if her pupils were dilating right—I knew how to check. I slowed my pace so the girl wouldn’t feel too taxed.

“The cut on your head looks bad,” I told her. “It’s full of dirt. We can wash it off at my house, but you might need stitches.”

“At least I’m waking up,” she said. “I think someone drugged me. My legs feel like rubber.”

That gave me a cold feeling—after Eloise died, the coroner discovered that she had been given a muscle relaxant and sedative. In fact, those drugs were the cause of her death. They had stopped her respiration.

That fact had been one of the reasons for that name, the one I kept pushing away.

“Who drugged you?” I asked the girl, afraid to hear her answer.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice sounding wobbly again.

We passed a shingled house with white shutters next to the creek that fed into the marsh. I heard the screen door squeak open, and a woman stood aside to let a black cat dash into the yard. I pulled the girl into a shadow, until the woman went back inside. The cat strutted toward us.

“Oh!” the girl exclaimed, sounding happy. It was the first time I’d seen her smile. She bent down and held her hand out to the cat.

“Hey, there,” she said. “Beautiful kitty.”

She scratched the cat under its chin. Doing this appeared to relax her. The cat leaned into her hand, basking in the affection. The smile didn’t leave the girl’s face until the cat stretched and stepped away. She watched it stride out of sight. Then the worried look returned to her eyes, and we started walking again.

We made it to Hubbard’s Point, the cozy little beach community where my grandmother lived—where Eloise and I had lived since our parents died.

It was only June, so most of the summer cottages were unoccupied, waiting for the July influx of vacationing families. But we lived here year-round. It felt so special, to have this beautiful place to enjoy before the crowds arrived.

When I saw my house, I grabbed the girl’s hand to pull her along. We had a garden that my grandmother had planted long before I was born. The narrow stretch of earth was full of late-spring flowers—purple, yellow, and pink blossoms on tall stems surrounded by spiky leaves. They had bloomed most brightly a week or two earlier, and now they were drooping, nearly dead. The girl stopped short and stared at them.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get inside.”

“What are they called?” she asked, as if the faded flowers were hypnotizing her. I ignored her question and tugged at her hand.

The spell cast by the garden seemed to be broken, and she came with me.

Our house was small, but it was perfect. Some of our neighbors had a lot of money. You could tell by their cars, their boats, their expensive beach toys. My grandparents had built our place when they were young, so it had been there forever and hardly changed at all. Others had bought cottages like ours and torn them down to put up houses that were bigger and fancier. It was typical of my grandmother’s sense of humor that she called our little place “The Palace.” And it was, to me: enchanted, magical, fortified not by walls but by the love inside.

Usually, I would have been proud to bring a friend over, show her around and introduce her to my grandmother and her home health aide, Noreen. But this was a different situation. I didn’t want Gram to see a girl bleeding and caked with dirt, and I was afraid that if Noreen caught sight of the girl, she would feel duty bound to call for help.

So I hustled the girl across the porch, through the hallway, and upstairs. I heard the TV going—Noreen and Gram were watching a cooking show—so I felt reassured they hadn’t heard us come in.

I steered the nameless girl into Eloise’s room. That action didn’t take much thought—I didn’t ponder all the things that would hit me like a ton of bricks just a few minutes later.

“Can I take a shower?” the girl asked.

“You’ll wash away evidence,” I said.

“Evidence?.?.?.” she said as if she had never heard the word before.

Ever since Eloise’s death, I’d been obsessively reading books and watching shows about crime and detective work. I made the girl sit on the edge of the bed. I used my phone to take photographs of all her injuries. Then I ran downstairs to the kitchen and came back with a few Ziploc bags. I plucked dead leaves and a dull gray feather out of the girl’s hair, and put these items in one bag.

What kind of bird had the feather come from? It looked like pewter, but when I held it to the light, I saw that it was tinged with blue, but not as bright as those on bluebirds and blue jays. At first, I dismissed it, figuring it had just drifted into the leaves in the crevice from a bird up above. But then my heart clenched. The feather was the color?.?.?.?the color of the sea at dawn.

I took a nail file from Eloise’s dresser and ran it under the girl’s dirty fingernails, then dropped the file and the scrapings into another Ziploc bag. I stared at the dirt: Were those glints of gold dust? They sparked something deep in my memory that I couldn’t quite get to.

“What are you going to do with those?” the girl asked, glaring at the bags.

“Give them to the police,” I said. Then, in response to the glowering look in her eyes, I added, “When the time comes.”

“The time will never come,” she said.

“What are these gold specks?” I asked, holding up the baggie to the light. I peered at them, trying to read their message.

“Who knows?” she asked. “It doesn’t matter. No one else is going to see them.”

“Aren’t you curious?” I asked, and I realized I was asking myself that more than the girl. “It might help you remember what happened. Or where you came from, who you are.”

“I’m trying to remember,” she said. “But one thing is for sure—you are not handing that ‘evidence’ to the police. Now I’m wondering if I can even trust you.”

Arguing with her, or trying to reassure her, seemed futile. But that didn’t matter. This was between me and Eloise. I knew I would stick the Ziploc bags into my backpack when I got downstairs. I went into Eloise’s bathroom and turned on the shower. I stood there with my hand under the stream, waiting for it to get hot. Our house is old and we get our water from a well, so neither the temperature nor the pressure is reliable.

“Come on,” I called to the girl, gesturing for her. “The hot water doesn’t last long—you have about seven minutes.”

The girl slipped off her filthy jeans and shirt. Still in her underwear, she came into the steamy bathroom, and I handed her a travel-sized bottle of Molton Brown shampoo. She probably had no idea how special that was; Eloise and I had stocked up on tiny hotel bottles during the last vacation we’d taken with Gram, before the Alzheimer’s got so bad, at an amazing seaside hotel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

The girl shut the bathroom door, and I heard the shower curtain rings clattering across the metal rod.

I wondered who she was, what had really happened to her, and how it all connected to Eloise. I grabbed a notebook off my sister’s desk and wrote things down:

Braided Woods

buried but still breathing

black cat

mesmerized by dying flowers

gold dust (October pollen, bits of yellow leaves)

pewter-blue feather (the color of the sea at dawn)

no police—why?

should I call Detective Tyrone anyway?

yes I should

or maybe I shouldn’t

what do this girl and Eloise have in common?

I stared at the list. I had the feeling that if I could figure out the answer to that last question, I’d be on the way to solving my sister’s murder. The reality of that hit me with a thud. I had never needed to know something more. The items on my list felt like deadweight, pressing down on me, because they seemed so disparate—how could they fit together and give me the truth that the police had so far been unable to provide?

I picked up the Ziploc bags, trying to see if those little tiny gold flakes were really precious metal or just bits of leaves, particles of pollen. And that soft gray-blue feather. Were these clues to finding the girl’s attacker, or traces of nature? I knew with everything I had that these were the elements that tied my sister and this girl together. I put both bags into my back pocket.

Those were my thoughts as I sat on Eloise’s bed for seven more minutes, waiting for the girl’s hot water to run out. During that time, I stared at the photo Eloise had taped to her mirror. It showed the two of us with our birding friends, including the boy Eloise had a huge crush on.

And, standing next to him, the one I did.

I heard the girl turn off the shower. She came out wearing my sister’s fluffy white robe that I hadn’t been able to put away, which still hung on a hook on the bathroom wall. She had washed the dirt and blood off her skin, but I could still see her cuts and bruises.

I went to the linen closet, where one shelf served as a medicine cabinet, and returned with hydrogen peroxide, Neosporin, and a box of Band-Aids. The girl perched on the chair by the desk where Eloise had always studied, and let me dab the cut on her head, dress it with the antiseptic, and cover it with Band-Aids.

“Stitches,” I said. “Pretty sure you should get them.”

“No,” she said. “Police are always at ERs. I told you already.”

“I know,” I said. “?‘No police.’ But you’re going to have a scar.”

She shrugged as if that was the least of her worries. She seemed exhausted. Her eyelids fluttered. I gestured at the pillow. That was all it took. She pulled back the covers and tumbled into bed and was asleep before I could even say “Get some rest.”

I stared at the girl, her head on my sister’s pillow. I knew that sometimes truth was revealed during deep sleep. Answers came in dreams. I hoped that when she woke up, she would know who she was.

And I hoped she would be able to tell me who had hurt her.

The same person, I was sure, who had killed my sister.