Bella’s mother nodded, but she didn’t move to take the flyers to him. “Do you get a lot of people through here?” There was something deep and cutting about the set of her features. “Families? Hikers? Survivalist types?” She pressed her lips together into a firm line. After a moment, that line wavered. “Drifters?”

Jude came to stand beside me. “She knows,” he whispered in my left ear. “She knows that Bella was kidnapped.”

I searched Angela Anthony’s features for whatever clues Jude had seen. Had the sheriff been the one to break the news to her? If she knew, how could she possibly stomach being here, instead of out there?

“I’ve been talking to folks around town.” Mrs. Anthony’s voice quivered, but she thrust her chin out. “A couple of fellows in the bar said that Bella’s not the first person around here to go missing.”

“These fellows,” the shopkeeper said, leaning forward as his eyebrows knit together. “They wouldn’t happen to have the last name Wade, would they?”

No reply.

“Wades like to talk.” The shopkeeper’s tone reminded me that Mac had said that most people in Hunter’s Point didn’t care much for his kind. “And they like to drink.”

We waited for Bella’s mom to reply, but she didn’t.

“Talking and drinking doesn’t preclude the possibility that they could be telling the truth.” Free never had trouble inserting herself into conversations. She rocked back on her heels slightly, her eyes eagle-sharp. “Has anyone else gone missing?”

I thought back to what Gabriel had said, his face moonlit and his tone impossible to decode. Around here, people go missing all the time.

Our trip to town was supposed to be a distraction, but all I could think, looking between the shopkeeper and Bella’s mom, was that what Saskia and I had done, the evidence we’d found—it wasn’t enough.

I needed to move. I couldn’t bring myself to walk past Bella’s mother, so instead of leaving the store, I stalked toward the back wall. Pull it together, Kira. This wasn’t my tragedy. I wasn’t Bella. The shell of a woman in the doorway wasn’t my mother.

For all I knew, my mother hadn’t looked for me at all.

I focused on the sound of my own breathing. I fixed my eyes on a point in front of me—and immediately wished that I hadn’t. Sitting on the shelf, there was a large metal trap, the kind that didn’t concern itself with being humane.

Meat smell. Food. Girl crouches, hunched on all fours. I shook, but couldn’t fight it—and suddenly, I didn’t want to. Girl knows which berries to eat now, which berries not to, but this…this…

Meat smells good.

She creeps closer, her eyes stinging, her hands aching to reach out, to bury themselves in the meat.

Eat it.