I shake my head. I had found Ruthie’s camera stuffed into the side of one of those worn leather couches in the back of the barn that night. Annie had squirreled it in there for safe keeping and forgot. But I couldn’t leave without it.

I never looked at the photos. I couldn’t do it. I kept the camera inside a sock in a bathroom cabinet or couch cushion or glove compartment, moving it around with every failed attempt to print the photos. I couldn’t fathom looking at a picture of us dancing or smiling or feeling invincible, while knowing what would happen next. It would feel like peeping into someone else’s life. A kind of happiness, innocence, sincerity I’d never feel again.

“Did you look at them?” I ask.

“A couple. Not everything.”

“And?”

She nods, considering it. “I think this is going to work.”

She puts her hand on my shoulder and I rest mine over it.

“I left posters in their room, too,” Jess says, lightening the mood. “Molly had a few left over from the trees, figured we shouldn’t waste them.”

“Good idea...”

“The idiot thinks he’s so smart ordering grits,” Molly adds. “I can put those berries in there just as easily as I did his appetizer last night.”

They laugh together, thinking of Reed growing paler and paler as the night went on, eventually running upstairs with his hand over his mouth, barely making it to the bedroom before vomiting everywhere. I didn’t laugh, though. I couldn’t. Something was bugging me about what Lorraine said. They gave the barn to her the day after Ruthie disappeared? The day after?

They look at each other, then back at me. “You okay?”

“I found the barn,” I say. “I know where the barn is.”

Part Three

PART THREE

TWENTY

Covenant University’s one-year reunion banners littered the town of Eden, Vermont, like clumps of trash on the beach. They were hanging on fences above overpasses next to homemade and faded Welcome Our Troops Home flags and padlocks that overzealous virgins carved their initials into.

The signs were dangling from light posts down Main Street, advertised on full pages of the local newspaper, and handed out as fucking coasters at the diner where I was sweating my ass off working, making sure some fat fuck with a motorcycle helmet got his coffee and feta egg scramble on time.