There had been a search like this in my town once, when I was a kid. That time it was Crissy who went missing. Searchers found her unconscious and injured. Something bad happened to her in those woods, though she never talked about what it was.

Come on, Trey, I thought. Please be close.

The ground had no give under the weight of my boots, the fallen leaves were tissue-thin, and the creeks were halfway frozen. If Trey was here, we’d see him straightaway. We searched the underbrush near the trails, looking for a lean-to or a snatch of color, any sign of life. For the most part the search party stayed together—Tim on one end of the line and me near the other—but an hour and a half into the hunt he slowed his pace, doubled back, and drew up beside me. Quietly, we veered away from the group until we had privacy enough to talk.

Leaves rustled and bounced lightly over the ground. The wind was picking up, and the cold made my teeth tingle. Tim coughed into his sleeve and wiped his nose on his glove. “How long do you want to keep this up?” he asked.

“By which you mean ‘when the hell is your ESP gonna kick in?’”

“If this is what you think we need to do, we’ll do it.”

“Even though there’s no evidence Trey has been, or ever will be, in these woods?”

“Even then.”

While I appreciated the vote of confidence, part of me wished he’d second-guess my every move. What if I was dead wrong, and we were wasting time we didn’t have? What if I was seeing connections where there were none?

I wanted to feel secure in the whispers that drifted in, the stirrings in my gut. I needed to be able to trust my intuition. There were plenty of things I remembered about Abe. Just as many were as elusive as smoke slipping through my outstretched fingers. Lately, I felt like I was wandering the hinterland of my mind like a ghost. Thinking about my childhood in Swanton often turned up nothing but noise. It was as if someone cut the cable and the picture started twitching, a nightmarish phantasm of static and light. The only explanation I could come up with was that Bram reconditioned them somehow. His stories were my stories, too, but the retelling of my past made me doubt what I knew. I couldn’t be sure my memories were still mine.

“If I could explain all this,” I said to Tim, “I would.”

“I trust you,” he said. Then, “That message on the poster. Seems like it was personal to you. Have you gotten anywhere with figuring out who Bram is?”

Crap. “I think we went to school together,” I said quietly. “It’s not a big town.”

In the faint moonlight, I saw Tim nod. “Do you think he was a friend?”

Damn it, Shay. Keeping things from Tim hadn’t served me well before. The regret I felt—over Abe, and the people Bram killed, and the secret I was keeping from the man who was my partner—chewed at my insides like battery acid.