When he opens his eyes, she’s right up in his face. He jumps, hard, and lets out a scream. All he sees is her wide, white-and-blue eyes, her grinning mouth, the black holes of her nostrils, her fringe hanging down. He smells her breath, sweet and foul with rot, but he can’t turn his face away. She is sitting astride his chest, crouching there like an evil little imp. He tries to scream again, to make her move. But either she can’t hear him, or she doesn’t care.

Get off me get off help me someone please help.

The grin grows slowly on her face as she sits up and regards him with a cold kind of interest, as if he is a specimen that she has collected. The fact that he’s sure this is happening inside his head is no comfort. There’s no escape. He is trapped there with this malevolent girl, who he thinks he knows and is sure hates him, and he can’t move or speak or get away, and it’s not fair—why is this happening to him?

Then, the girl lifts her arm and fans out her fingers over his face. The pinkie is missing, cleaved off at the base. He remembers then who she is and how he knows her, and the knowledge of it makes him freeze with dread. He looks again, to make sure, but there’s no mistake. It’s his sister, Dora. She died in 1997, aged eight. He remembers, as a teenager, feeling angry with her because after she died, he was the only one there to help on the farm. Their parents barely spoke to him again unless it was to talk about the search for his sister. They never found the body, and yet here she is.

A drop of blood from the stump of the girl’s little finger falls in his open eye, turning half of the world a grisly red. He screams. He fades out.

CHAPTER

26

NOW

Joanna

Sunday, December 23

EDDIE LOOKED AT her over the top of his thin-framed spectacles. “I got the image you wanted.”

This time, when he handed it over, she was ready. Atkinson was watching her carefully. She shot him a look, a kind of what-are-you-looking-at-exactly?, and he shifted his eyes away, pretended he hadn’t been watching.

Briskly, she pinned up the print. There was her baby girl, without question. The picture captured the way she held herself, her limbs and body shape, the way she inclined her head. Ruby’s form was as individual to her as a fingerprint and as familiar to Joanna as her own face in the mirror.

“This is great, Eddie—thanks.”