Seven

“Birds,” I said, picturing the early-morning quiet, the net in the thicket. “We went birding with our nature club that morning.” Matt, Fitch, Chris, Adalyn, Eloise, and me.

Eloise and I had woken up before dawn, when it was still dark and cold, the grass and leaves tinged silver with an early frost. Matt, Chris, and Fitch were waiting outside our house in Matt’s Jeep. Matt drove us to the highest elevation in the seven-hundred-acre Braided Woods. We met Adalyn in the parking lot, then trekked down a narrow trail into a hollow that spread into the grasslands.

Adalyn was beautiful, with golden-brown eyes and wavy dark hair that she wore pulled back in a thick ponytail. We’d known each other since fourth grade, when her family had moved here from Ohio, and we’d become friends right away. Adalyn was an unlikely birder—she wasn’t really into nature. She didn’t like walking through narrow trails where there might be mud, or branches that would brush up against her, or bugs or snakes. She loved pretty things, had impeccable style, dreamed of being a fashion designer. She’d joined the nature club to be a good friend to me, but also because she had a slight crush on Fitch. The two of them walked side by side that morning. I ended up walking next to Matt, and Eloise next to Chris.

I tripped over a root, and Matt grabbed my hand just long enough to steady me. I felt my heart flip. He looked at me with those gold-flecked blue eyes and smiled before he let go of my hand.

Chris and Eloise were talking softly, as they had up on the roof of Ocean House a few months before. Chris carried an expensive Swarovski telescope that probably cost as much as some of the old used cars our classmates drove.

The six of us came to the blind our group had built to hide in while watching a net. The net was made of threads that formed inch-squared openings that would catch but not harm the birds, and was assembled in a fifty-foot-long curve—like a giant badminton net. Chris set up the telescope on a tripod, through which we could watch far-off birds and other wildlife.

October 9 was toward the end of fall migration, when birds flew down from northern Canada, stopping in New England on their way to a warmer climate. That autumn was especially exciting because it was an irruption year—when certain species not usually seen on the Connecticut shoreline arrived in impressive numbers.

We were spotting white-winged crossbills, evening grosbeaks, redpolls, and red-breasted nuthatches. None of us had ever seen crossbills before; they fed on the seeds of closed spruce cones, and we heard them up above, their bills clicking as they cracked open the cones.

As we stood in the blind in the gray predawn light, I saw Eloise lean close to Chris, the two of them taking turns looking through the telescope. He pointed it toward the sky. She pressed her eye to the scope and I knew she was looking up at Venus glowing beside the morning moon—the last quarter, suspended above the horizon just before sunrise. He was whispering to her. She laughed and nodded, and I heard her say, “Definitely.”

I turned away from them. I faced the net and could see that it had caught several birds. A storm the night before had caused a “fallout”—more migrants than usual, landing to rest and feed during their long flight north.

Adalyn, Fitch, Matt, and I got to work. We documented every species. Adalyn took pictures on her phone. Fitch kept an ongoing list in his tablet, making meticulous notes of all his observations. Matt prepared the bands to gently press around the birds’ legs. His delight was obvious, the way he beamed at me when I pointed out a late migrant, a very unusual bird for our area: a Louisiana water thrush.

Matt stood beside me as I carefully removed a male black-throated blue warbler from the netting. The four-inch beauty rippled and felt impossibly delicate. I held him steady while Matt wrapped a narrow band around his leg and documented the number. In the future, if another birder found the warbler, it would be possible to track where he had been, and the distance traveled.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Matt asked softly. “Holding life in your hands?”

I nodded, momentarily unable to speak.

Chris and Eloise came over then. Chris checked the warbler for any signs of injury or disease, for lice or other parasites, for general health. The bird’s head and back were bright blue, fading to blue-gray closer to the tail and in the wings. He sported a black mask and had a white breast. After Chris recorded the description, we let him fly away. Matt and I glanced at each other, exhilarated from holding the bird, contributing to research, and, especially, standing so close together.

The six of us traded back and forth, partnering for different birds, taking turns holding and recording. When it was time to pack up and go, my sister and I walked a little way off the trail to look up at a roosting great horned owl. Owls were Eloise’s favorite. She and I had come here one night last month to hear a male and female calling to each other from pines on opposite sides of the clearing—a duetting pair. By winter they would mate, and by January the female would be sitting on eggs.

“What were you and Chris whispering about?” I asked Eloise.

“Wouldn’t you love to know?” she asked, with a sweetly wicked glint in her eyes.

“I would.”

“He asked me if I’d come back here with him tonight,” she said. “To hear the owls calling.”

So that’s why she’d said “definitely.”

“I don’t think you should do it,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked.

I was silent; I couldn’t answer that. It was just a cold feeling that rippled through me, that something could happen to her. It was the month of Halloween, and maybe that’s what made things feel scary, as if the woods we loved could turn dangerous, as if malevolent spirits might come drifting down from the treetops.

“I’ll be safe with Chris,” Eloise said. “You and I came here at night, and we were fine.”

“That was September,” I said.

“You sound so superstitious,” she said, and I could tell she was impatient, annoyed at me for not wanting her to go out on a school night with the boy she liked. “Are you jealous?” she asked.

“Why would I be?”

“Because Chris asked me and Matt didn’t ask you?”

“Of course not,” I said, my face flushing. But what if she was right?

“Sometimes I think you don’t even like Chris,” Eloise went on. “Or trust him. You think he’s too handsome and popular to want to go out with me.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “It’s just that you’re my little sister, and I’m protective of you.”

“Well, I don’t need you to be,” she said, sounding upset.

I gave her a hug to let her know I loved and trusted her. But I still had that uneasy feeling. In a way she was right; I wasn’t sure about Chris. For one thing, I thought she was jumping in too fast with him. My crush on Matt had lasted forever, and in a weird way, that made it more exciting. Whatever was happening between us had been simmering a long time. But her question did linger in my mind: Was I jealous about Chris asking her to go owling that night when Matt hadn’t asked me?

The terrible thing was that my premonition was right.

The day of that birding excursion was the last time I saw my sister.

That afternoon, when she wasn’t on the school bus home, I texted and called her over and over, but got no answer. I texted everyone—our nature group, Eloise’s friends from her grade—to ask if she was with them. She wasn’t.

And, it turned out, she hadn’t shown up at school that day at all.

She hadn’t even been on the late bus that morning.

That’s when I knew something terrible had happened. When I got home, I ran into the house, but Eloise wasn’t there. Neither Gram nor Noreen had seen or heard from her since she’d left to catch the bus that morning.

I called the police, and two patrol officers came over. The officers asked me, Gram, and Noreen a few questions, and they learned that Eloise wasn’t the type to go running off. So they called Detective Tyrone.

She was very calm. She had wide brown eyes and dark brown hair, and she wore a navy blue blazer that made her look very official. We stood in the kitchen while Noreen tidied up and Gram dozed in the living room.

The detective watched me with a neutral gaze as I started to lose it.

“You have to find her!” I shouted. “It’s dark, it’s been dark for over an hour, and Eloise is missing! She must be hurt, lying somewhere. She’d call if she could!”

“Breathe, Oli,” Detective Tyrone said. “You can’t help Eloise if you pass out.”

So I did—I breathed.

“Tell me about the day,” she said. “Were you and Eloise getting along? Did you have a fight?”

“No,” I said. Why was she asking me that? But I thought of the blip of disagreement Eloise and I had had, over her going out with Chris, and the detective noticed the look in my eyes.

“A little fight maybe?” the detective asked.

“Not really,” I said. “Just sister stuff. And we hugged—no one was mad.”

“You sure it wasn’t more than that? Maybe she was upset at you and took off?”

“Why are you asking me these things?” I wailed with frustration.

“It’s just procedure, Oli,” Detective Tyrone said. “We have to talk to everyone, even family members—people who love Eloise.”

“But I don’t know where she is,” I said, my voice wobbling from the terror building inside me. “Can’t you stop all this now and look for her? Please, go out and find her!”

“We are looking for her, Oli,” the detective said. “Pretty much the whole force is out. But the more you can tell me, the better chance we’ll have of finding her. Let’s start at the beginning. When did you last see her?”

“Here, at home, this morning,” I said. “We were getting ready for school. We were rushing because we didn’t want to be late. We’d been out earlier?.?.?.”

“Out where?”

“In the Braided Woods,” I said. “Birding.”

“And what about after that? Did you go to school together?”

“No,” I said. “We had different class schedules. I went on the early bus, and she was going to get the later one.”

“What about after school?”

I shook my head. “No. She didn’t come home.”

“Tell me more about birding,” the detective asked. “Who was with you?”

“We went with our friends. We always do—it’s our nature group.”

She asked me their names, and I gave them. But when I got to Chris, I felt a huge jolt, and Detective Tyrone noticed.

“What is it, Oli?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I really didn’t want to tell. It seemed completely far-fetched that Chris could have been in any way involved with Eloise disappearing. Or what if he was—not in a guilty way, but in a romantic way? Maybe the two of them had made a plan to run away together. But no, Eloise would never do that without telling me. She would never make Gram and me worry.

“You had a reaction when you said Chris Nicholson’s name,” Detective Tyrone said.

I blurted it out: “He asked Eloise to go out tonight. To look for owls. And that?.?.?.?that’s what our fight was about. I didn’t think she should go.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “I was just being protective.”

“Do you and your sister ever like the same guy? Was that what happened? You didn’t want her going with Chris because you like him?”

I glared at the detective. Could she be more wrong? “No,” I said. “I like someone else.”

“Okay,” she said, looking into my eyes as if she could read whether I was telling the truth or not.

She asked me a few more questions, but I hardly heard them. I felt too panicked, knowing time was ticking by, it was nighttime, and Eloise was out there somewhere.

But by the next morning, Eloise still hadn’t been found. Detective Tyrone asked everyone who knew Eloise to come to the police station, just outside town. Gram, Noreen, me. Our teachers. All our friends from school.

Individually, we had to go into an interview room and sit at a table across from Detective Tyrone and another police officer. We had to give our alibis—where we had been when Eloise had disappeared—so the police could check them.

The last time Eloise had been seen by anyone—by Gram and Noreen—was when she left the house that morning to catch the late school bus. Which she never caught.

Everyone had an alibi.

My friends and I had been at school, or on our way there. Same with nearly every student or teacher at the school; anyone who’d been absent that day had a good excuse. Gram and Noreen had been at doctors’ appointments all day, and our neighbors had all been at work. After school, I had hurried straight home to see if Eloise was there. Adalyn’s mother had picked up Adalyn and taken her to get her hair cut. Fitch’s mother was on a business trip. His sister was sick and she needed help, so he went home to be with her. Matt’s family had boats, and since it was October, it was time to haul them and get them ready for winter. He had been down at the dock with his dad and brother.

Chris had a paper due, and he worked on it at the library. The librarian confirmed that. He had repeatedly tried to contact my sister, but she never replied. The police examined his cell phone. It provided location data—showing that he was at the library, then he went straight home. And all his unanswered texts and calls to Eloise proved what he’d told them.

So Chris had ended up not meeting Eloise that night. If only he had, or if we had all stayed together, she might still be alive. Her killer wouldn’t have gotten to her—we could have protected her.

Detective Tyrone asked us all if we would be willing to give DNA samples. She said it was because forensic evidence was always left behind during crimes, and DNA could help identify the criminal. That scared me because at that point, I wanted so badly to believe no one had taken or hurt Eloise, that she had somehow left on her own, that no crime had occurred.

Both Chris’s and Adalyn’s parents were against them giving DNA at first. But Detective Tyrone said that it was very important, because it would let her exclude them as suspects—they would be off the list. Eventually we all let them swab our mouths, to collect saliva, and the samples were sent to the police lab.

One day later, Eloise’s body was found in the Braided Woods. And there was no DNA evidence found on her. No match.

And the case went cold.

“Birds,” Iris repeated, bringing me back to the present. I shivered, shaking away the memories of those terrible days—and that moment when we got the call from the police that Eloise’s body had been found.

I looked at Iris. I thought I saw a flicker of memory in her brown eyes. I waited for a few moments, but she didn’t say anything more.

“Did anything come up?” I asked her.

“Dead owls flying overhead,” she said, then shook her head. “But no. That’s not a real memory. Just something from my nightmare. Because dead birds can’t fly. Right?” She looked at me, but I didn’t say anything. “Oli, I think it’s real. I think there really were dead birds up above. Every time I looked, they were there.”

It sounded completely bizarre.

And something was haunting me. That blue-gray feather I’d found in Iris’s hair. It was the same color as the back and wings of the black-throated blue warbler our nature club had found the morning of Eloise’s disappearance. I thought about how Chris’s parents worked for that pharmaceutical company, and how easy it would have been for him to get the substance that had drugged my sister and Iris. Plus he had invited Eloise to go owling in the Braided Woods, the same day she had died.

Were those clues? Or just coincidences?

I wanted them to be coincidences.

But his was the name that kept swirling and shimmering through my mind.

Chris

Chris

Chris

I told myself: It couldn’t be him. I’d seen how tender he was toward Eloise. There was no way someone we knew could have murdered her. And Chris had an alibi—his phone data proved it.

But

What if

What if

What if he had written those unanswered texts to my sister after he had killed her? What if he had invented an alibi and gotten someone to lie and back him up? He had that handsome-boy way about him; his smile could melt hearts—and he knew it.

I tried to push these thoughts of Chris away. But they wouldn’t leave. They lodged in the part of my brain that held instincts and suspicion.

“Do you remember anything else?” I asked Iris.

“No,” she said. “I can’t get hold of the thread.” She tilted her head. “A thread! Or a string?.?.?.?something about a string.”

“You’re doing great, Iris,” I said. “Letting little bursts come through. Your name, Hayley’s name. The paintings of those girls. Someone in a white dress. Cats. Birds. A string. It seems like your memory is starting to come back.”

“I hope so,” she said.

Something occurred to me then. “What if we drove around, starting where I found you?” I asked. “Then we’d work our way out, in wider circles. We might see things that could help you remember more.”

She nodded, resolute in a way that showed me she thought it was a really good idea. “Do you have a car?” she asked.

My grandmother’s old Volvo was parked in the driveway outside our house. I had my license, but the car battery was dead and one of the tires was flat.

“I do, but it isn’t running right now.” I paused. The perfect solution came to me. I gave her a smile. “Don’t worry, though. I know someone who can help.”