“I’m too wiped,” I say, which is half true, and I’ve gotta see my dad, which I don’t even want to get into with Joe. “Besides, don’t you have to drive back to Indianapolis?”

“You’re. No. Fun.” Even his voice changes once he leaves the office, and he told me, when I once pointed that out, that mine does, too.

“Trust me, Carrigan’s isn’t really your scene.”

Joe gives me a wave and gets into his car. I turn away from the dust kicked up by his rental.

I have a headache from puzzling over records old and new. Patterns are like truth. They’ll set you free, but first they’ll give you a bitch of a migraine.

—

The sky is in that in-between phase, day and night throwing up a confused riot of blues and pinks and oranges to a soundtrack of crickets. At this hour, Barrens looks beautiful: the fields are wrapped in haze. That’s how beauty works in Barrens, by sidling up to you when you least expect it.

Muscle memory takes me straight out to the Barrens Dam. I spent a lot of time here when I was growing up, especially in summer, when the water was low and the current would wrap around my ankles. It was always freezing, but that never seemed to matter. If the weather was nice, it could be pretty lively. Kids catching crayfish, swinging on ropes, floating on tire tubes, fishermen in thighwaders trying their luck with the newly stocked trout.

Today there’s not a soul in sight. The water is high and rough and would surely knock me over. I close my eyes and imagine wading in anyway. I imagine the shock of the cold, the sudden weight of all that water. The pressure of the current like a long line of clutching hands trying to pull me under. I stumble backward, hardly managing to keep my balance.

Then: a distant sound of laugher makes me turn. Two girls, one dark-haired, one corn-silk blond, dart hand in hand into the trees, scattering dust and pebbles with every footstep.

Time wrenches away from the present, and instead it’s me and Kaycee I see, scabby kneed and wild.

The dark-haired girl drops a sandal and twists around to retrieve it, breaking from her friend. When she spots me, suspicion tightens her face. She looks as if she might say something, but her friend grabs her again by the hand and off they go. I exhale before realizing I’d been holding my breath.

I used to see her everywhere. I grabbed a girl on the L only last year, shouldered my way through a holiday-packed train car and barely managed to hook a hand around her purse strap before she plunged onto the platform.

“Kaycee,” I panted out, until she turned and I realized she was far too young—she was the age Kaycee was when she ran, not how old she would have been now.

One time, late senior year, I found her on her knees in the bathroom, the toilet flecked with blood. She kept saying the same thing, over and over, as I stood there wanting to feel vindicated but feeling nothing but panic and a hard dread: if this thing had come for Kaycee, none of us were safe.