She called us. Spoke to my father. Told a white lie about her health to him and the truth to me. We all decided I should move in with her. Back home. If the Malcolms can be said to have a home.

Aunt Mae and my father were born just outside Greenwood. The family has lived in the area longer than anyone can trace—in part because they had to change names and homes so many times. My ancestors had a gift for getting run out of town. When someone is present wherever and whenever bad things happen, always turning up stained with blood or ash, always arriving too promptly for coincidence, people decide one of two things. Either that someone has a gift for helping, always being in the right place at the right time. Or that someone is behind the bad things themselves.

I know what people usually choose.

Still, Aunt Mae has stayed in Greenwood, keeping to herself in that house outside of town, because she knows she’s needed here. Darkness takes whatever space it’s given.

Small towns. Back roads. Deep forests.

The woods outside Greenwood have given it plenty of space.

Maybe I’ll try to explain this to Frankie later tonight. I’ve told her about the searches, all the hundreds of people lining up to comb the woods.

It’s good for her to know that people are looking. To think that they’re getting closer to finding her. It keeps her from getting desperate. From trying to break out on her own.

I visit the root cellar twice a day. Make sure her ropes are secure. That she has water and enough to eat. Then I sit on the steps, just for a few minutes.

She always tries to keep me talking. She wants to keep me there for as long as she possibly can. She’s asked all about my family, about me and Aunt Mae and my father. I give her fragments. The whiskey that soaks through both of them. My father, fixing boats. The way he’d bring me pretty stones. She’s told me about her family, too: her mother and her father and her brother, Leo, her grandparents, her adorable little cousin, Emilio, the way they all get together for Sunday dinner twice a month.

The cellar still smells like earth. But there are other smells in it now. Smells of fear and sweat and passing time. Frankie’s legs are tied with rope much too thick to break or fray, no matter how she picks at it, and the rope knots around each of her ankles and weaves behind the shelves that are bolted to the wall. She can move around the cellar. Get water or food, use the lidded bucket in the corner. But she can’t climb higher than the first step.

By the time I’ve shut the door and covered it again, I can barely hear her screaming.

I think of all this as I ride through the woods, paralleling Anders’s path toward town. I’ll beat him to the music studio. Hide in the shadows of the alley and wait until he steps inside.