TITLE PAGE

Contents

1. PART ONE: Who is She if Not Everyone Else’s?
   1. CHAPTER 1
   2. CHAPTER 2
   3. CHAPTER 3
   4. CHAPTER 4
   5. CHAPTER 5
   6. CHAPTER 6
   7. CHAPTER 7
   8. CHAPTER 8
2. PART TWO: Take the Bullet Out
   1. CHAPTER 9
   2. CHAPTER 10
   3. CHAPTER 11
   4. CHAPTER 12
   5. CHAPTER 13
   6. CHAPTER 14
   7. CHAPTER 15
   8. CHAPTER 16
   9. CHAPTER 17
   10. CHAPTER 18
   11. CHAPTER 19
   12. CHAPTER 20
   13. CHAPTER 21
   14. CHAPTER 22
   15. CHAPTER 23
   16. CHAPTER 24
   17. CHAPTER 25
   18. CHAPTER 26
   19. CHAPTER 27
   20. CHAPTER 28
3. PART THREE: Orion Waves
   1. CHAPTER 29
   2. CHAPTER 30
   3. CHAPTER 31
   4. CHAPTER 32
   5. CHAPTER 33
   6. CHAPTER 34
   7. CHAPTER 35
   8. CHAPTER 36
   9. CHAPTER 37
4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
5. AUTHOR INTERVIEW

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

About the Author

Savannah Brown grew up in a small town in Ohio and currently lives in London, England. She’s the author of a collection of poetry called Graffiti, which was a finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found watching conspiracy theory documentaries, making faces at her cat or worrying. The Truth About Keeping Secrets, her first novel, was published in 2019. The Things We Don’t See is her second novel.

PART ONE: Who is She if Not Everyone Else’s?

Part One

WHO IS SHE IF NOT EVERYONE ELSE’S?

HOW TO DISAPPEAR

Episode 21

Narrator: The year is 1986, and if my demographics are anything to go by, you’re not there.

I’ll set the scene: Reagan is president. DNA was just used for the first time in a criminal investigation. Challenger exploded over Cape Canaveral in January. Chernobyl, just after that. But, hey – the previous March, ‘We Are The World’ became the fastest-selling single in pop history.

The year is 1986 and the sleepy island of Sandown Bay is waking up.

To its nearly two hundred year-round residents, Sandown is its own self-contained world – to the rest of us, and to its seasonal visitors, it’s a miniscule island situated two miles off the coast of the Delawarean mainland, just past the end of the estuary of Delaware Bay.

Sandown Bay began as a sailors’ port, then, towards the turn of the twentieth century, became a food and drink tourism destination, known for an unmatched abundance of the Delaware Blue Crab; nowadays, Sandown is home to fifteen bars and pubs and no hospital. There’s one school for twenty-one students aged six to eighteen. One grocery store. One bank. One funeral home. A ferry travels to and from the island year-round, trips running every two hours in the summer. In the past, you could drive a quad bike across the frozen Atlantic – granted the winter was cold enough, which it hasn’t been for the past two decades.

To an outsider, the small population and eccentricities of life are cited with incredulity. Claustrophobia. How could anyone live this way? But the residents would tell you they find it the most natural thing in the world. Or, they might, once you got them to talk.

Brought together by their unique circumstances and love of Sandown, the sense of community on the island was – and remains – impenetrable. Which is why, given the mystery it would later become shrouded in, no one seems to have anything to say.

The year is 1986 and a young woman named Roxy Raines steps into the warm August night and is never seen again.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

FRIDAY 28 MAY

The morning ferry leaves at nine and I’ve been in the parking lot since six, watching the sun unfurl its first pinkish tendrils over the Atlantic, which is wide and vulnerable and, despite appearances, not actually blue.

Departure time’s approaching now but I’m still the only one here. Directly to my left is a small booth with an unmanned window, like a drive-through, covered in peeling white paint and with an indigo awning that reads TICKETS; to my right, a larger information centre framed by rickety benches and yellow-tipped ferns; ahead, the empty dock. I know the place is quiet because it’s still early, but the lack of noise feels more like abandonment than inactivity. I’m the ghost of the pier.

In the far distance, there’s the illuminated strip of land pressed against the horizon, thin as a strand of hair. That’s where I’m going.

This is what I’m saying about the ocean: it’s blue because of what it reflects rather than what it absorbs, as in, water molecules absorb the red and orange and yellow waves of light and reflect the blue, as in, the ocean is blue because blue is the only colour it’s not. This is true of everything. Not to mention the steps that occur in the brain to even perceive colour in the first place.

I’m simplifying things, of course, and anyway, I’m probably wrong.

There’s a prickle on the back of my neck and I turn, but nothing stirs. Behind is a quiet trailer park, patchy grass like an afterthought on top of the bone-dry lot. I’m under-stimulated. I tune my ears on to the radio.

… and a high of ninety-one. Whew! Heard reports just today that hurricane season’s comin’ early this year, the first storm predicted possibly as soon as mid-June, and it’s looking like a doozy, folks, so …

And then the speck of the ferry first appears along the curve of the earth, the natural spotlights casting across it like some inviolable holy direction.

I stare at the morsel for as long as I can without blinking and count. One minute seven. One minute fifty-four. My longest is two minutes thirty and by then the ferry’s grown to the size of my fist, close enough to make out the details: it’s shaped sort of like a heron’s head, an elongated lower bill and raised skull with seating and a windowed cubicle for the captain. There are no other passengers, as far as I can see. A faded American flag sags heavily against its helm, wilted in the windless summer-cusp heat.

The ocean spreads beyond me, infinite, like I’m at the edge of everything.

My phone vibrates in the cup holder.

Dad: I’m glad you’re safe but I need to know where you are. I worry that there’d be no way of knowing if something were to happen. Text/call. – Dad

Him signing ‘Dad’ makes my stomach ache. Obviously unnecessary and sweet at once. Zaps some humanity into the words. Of course it’s you, Dad, and of course you’re right. I imagine him as he probably is, faintly reeling, which isn’t difficult to do because I’ve seen it before, only once; the dark shadows of his trail-run face collapsed, heavy grey brow stitched, eyes split and searching. And truly, how could I do this to him? It’s the reasonability of his request that bothers me. I know I’m wrong. But this is the only way to become a synapse-trace, a nowhere girl.

I said it all already.

Me: I won’t be back for at least a few weeks. I promise I’m safe, and that this isn’t anything like Celeste, obviously. This is very important. I promise I wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t.

And then the frenzy in the middle of the night, zooming down the Virginia turnpike: the phone ringing and ringing and ringing without an answer or even a declining to show there was something alive on the other end. Declining would’ve made the choice too intentional. My justification was that I’d already said the kicker, which, to me, is all that matters. This isn’t anything like Celeste.

Or maybe I’m safe isn’t enough. How could he not feel my absence the same way? Both of us here one moment and gone the next.

My decision came from a combination of things. Less urgently, it was the desire to know how the leaving felt, to drive away, age seventeen, and savour the sting of the tether finally snapping against my back after years of pulling, pulling, pulling – a promise to myself that I’m captaining an autonomous vessel capable of vanishing into the night if only it could muster up the courage to floor the gas. More urgently, I knew I wouldn’t get a chance like this again, a corrosive mixture of a lack of responsibility, obligation, achievement and peace. Maybe I’m overdue something good. I didn’t lie: this is very important.

This isn’t only not like Celeste, or despite Celeste – it’s because of her. For her. She’s due something good too. Dad would never understand this. To be honest, it’s difficult to articulate, even to myself, why this whole endeavour is a running-towards, not away. Towards atonement. Towards peace.

Towards Roxy.

In a different way, towards Celeste.

I didn’t even think Dad would realize I was gone so quickly. Shit. I press into the jelly of my eyes with my middle fingers until my vision’s lousy with stars, and jab in another reply.

Me: I promise you. No danger. I just know that you would come and get me and that really can’t happen yet. I love you! I’m sorry.

I shut my phone off. I realize I’ve been sucking on the same gutted sunflower seed for the past ten minutes, maybe, and my tongue is eroded and sore from salt. I open my car door a crack and spit the shell on to the pavement, then shut my eyes and listen to the sea.

Soon the lull of the waves is sliced by the blare of a foghorn, impossibly loud; for all I know the ferry’s teleported here, up against the sharp of the dock. It lurches to a halt. A pair of deckhands rope the thing tight and the gate falls open.

An older man emerges from the captain’s deck, says something to the deckhand, and makes his way off the boat and into the booth I’m parked next to. I roll down my window.

‘You’re raring and ready, eh?’ he says with a voice about as gravelly as I anticipate.

‘Pretty much.’

‘Car ticket?’ he asks, and up close I can see the texture of his face, rough with sun damage. He’s got a wild head of white hair poking from beneath a red cap emblazoned with a Sandown patch. Dense and unruly beard to match. Nose thick with cartilage, small eyes peeking from a hooded brow.

‘Yeah, but I’m a Seasonal, so should be free.’

‘Seasonal?’ He performs a laboured pivot towards the back of the hut, where there’s a crossed-to-date calendar hung on a nail. ‘You’re early.’

The past twelve hours flash before my eyes, of another plate-scraping dinner and packing and gone, driving away from Indiana like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Blurry highway bokehs. Seventies classic radio. I’m not even tired. ‘Just eager.’

‘Mmph.’ He drags a clipboard towards him that rattles against the counter. ‘Name?’

‘Mona Perry.’

‘You got identification, Mona Perry?’

I fish my driver’s licence out of my back pocket and slide it across.

There’s a beat while he scrutinizes, and I worry he can tell it’s a fake, but he’s not looking at my birthday, the 2002 where there should be a 2004. The picture. His small eyes shrink. ‘This ain’t you.’

If he’s only teasing, it’s lost on me. ‘It is.’ And I smile like I’m smiling in the photo, baring teeth like an angry chimp, unmistakable because of the gaps between them and the way my canines sit elevated in my gums. Dad used to joke that he’d always be able to identify me by my teeth – makes more sense upon the discovery that he’s a sick-minded state counsel – but then stopped once that joke was no longer funny. Less funny after we could only wish there was a Celeste to identify. Less funny after I started dodging the nannies and driving out into Indianapolis late at night aged fifteen-and-a-half with only my temporary licence, nowhere to go and nothing to do except make trouble. This was always enough to bring Dad home, at least for a bit.

Anyway, I never got my teeth fixed.

‘Your hair’s different.’

This is correct. My licence says it’s blonde; in the photo it’s down to my elbows. Now it’s dark brown and barely brushes my chin, with bangs accidentally cut about an inch too short. The dye is so fresh it’s still bleeding on to my clothes, and I keep reaching for phantom lengths to pick through. I shrug.

The ferry master, whose badge tells me his name is Frank, tires of the inspection and hands me a laminated ticket from his moneybox. ‘Well, stick that on your dash and you’re good to go, I guess. Still ain’t leaving till nine.’

‘I know. That’s fine.’

‘All right.’ He gives my ID one last quizzical look then returns it. ‘I like it better blonde.’

So did Dad, which was unusual, as he never expresses any opinion towards me about anything. ‘You know what,’ I say, ‘I do too.’

I accelerate before he can respond, down the gentle slope and through the ferry’s yawning gates. Forward until my bumper nearly dings the far railing. Park and stall my engine. Here, I have an uninterrupted view of the journey: two miles of sea that will take a little less than a half-hour to traverse, if the website is right – which it ought to be, given this same trip has been taken thousands and thousands of times.

It’s a straight shot, direct to her.

I might as well be eye-locked with Pandora’s box and the urge to dig my fingernails under the lid and pull is already unbearable.

I swear my phone buzzes again but there’s nothing when I check, so I slide the pamphlet off my dash. The cover bears a group of grinning college-age kids in polos and bandanas and sunglasses, punctuated by a bubble-font title: ‘Welcome, Seasonals!’

Page one contains the information about the employment programme that I already know. It’s a mutualistic swapping of perks: simply for some easy labour, you and a bunch of other tanned and smiley people get free run of an island, a bed to sleep in and some pocket change. The applicant pool is largely made up of students in the tri-state area looking for a free vacation. I researched everything. Lurked on the forums. I made myself the perfect imaginary candidate on the application forms: over eighteen, retail and food service experience. Turns out there’s nothing easier than lying. The best jobs are at the bars but I knew with my baby-face I’d never pass for twenty-one. This was the deal I’d formally signed up for. And I was fine doing the work, because it was necessary to achieve something else: full immersion. Not just a front-row seat, but my show.

The last page has an itinerary. There’s a bonfire tomorrow night where the Seasonals are meant to mingle, more activities over the weekend to get settled, and then everyone starts work on Monday.

I plan to start work right away.

Without the car’s air conditioning the heat is already settling thick on my skin; cold sweat pinches the back of my neck and the windscreen is angling the sunlight into my eyes, like a magnifying glass cooking an ant. I get out to avoid the glare, lock my car and traipse up to the top deck via a rickety spiral staircase. Up here, the whole thing opens out, and I move to the railing, grip its edge and lean over as far as I can bear before I worry about falling and let my gaze travel over the indigo water to the jagged brown sliver at the break in the sea. Even from miles out it’s easy to see the way Sandown Bay is split in two: there’s the flattened half of civilization where the tourists visit and the islanders live, and then it’s the peaks of the trees, deep green and tall, and this goes up and up and up until the incline swells into a mass of rocky cliffs towards the north. Though it’s split in two, it’s not split in half; the woods win. They own fourteen of the island’s fifteen square miles, a largely untouched remnant of the past that probably would have looked the same in the 1800s as it does now. Same trees. Same Atlantic Ocean lapping at their feet. No point developing your island’s natural scenery when everyone comes to your island for the exclusive draw of cheap booze.

The foghorn blares again and I jolt. The ferry lurches forward.

The view had distracted me and only now do I notice the smattering of people who have joined me on the top deck. A twenty-something couple slathers sunscreen on to each other; a group of middle-aged women in floppy sunhats cackle at something, maybe already sloshed; a family with young kids sits within the shade of the canopy. No one that looks like a Seasonal, as far as I can see. This is good; there’s power in being the first.

From above, the island of Sandown Bay looks a bit like a misshapen person. This designation is understandable if not hugely accurate, but if someone were to point it out to you, you might say, Oh yes, that does look like a person, and Louisiana is a boot, and maybe everything actually looks like something else. All of us in a constant state of forced pareidolia, where if you stare at a mass of rustling leaves for long enough you might find a face; where if you stare at a Sandown Bay pamphlet long enough with its sort of vague, saturated pleasantness, you might see yourself there too.

The main ferry dock is situated on the southern half – that’s the part that looks like a head. Then there’s this long isthmus that stretches off, which is why one might say ‘misshapen’ – it’s a neck, sure, but ghoulish, but too long and thin to be human. Then two stout, branching cliffsides for arms, and around mid-torso is where the woods begin and stretch and stretch and stretch.

I need to know all this because there can’t be a learning curve, because anything could be a clue; knowing anything could unlock a door. Anywhere could hide answers. Anyone could hide bones.

I lean forward again, let the fear of it burn my ears to red; there’s something pleasurable about the thin line of pain digging underneath my ribs from the rail, about the beads of sweat prickling my forehead, born to steamed in barely a second.

Roxy’s name tumbles around in my head. ‘Glass Daughter’ slips past my lips without my thinking about it; barely a hum, only the notes, sound overpowered by the whirr of the ferry but the song is there and living.

Eyes stare

Oh, when a million eyes stare

Who is the woman they see there?

What of the life spread on display?

I fish my headphones from my back pocket and jam them into my ears and play the rest of the song. It’s Roxy’s voice, so seductively rough and full-bodied, that makes her music. Iron-clad. So not-delicate, so everything-in-the-room that sometimes she barely sounds like a girl at all – but she’s only nineteen in this recording, just two years older than me. It’s almost impossible to believe. Even then she never called herself a girl. Rightfully so; she had the voice of a thousand lifetimes lived. I can’t get enough. Neither can the rest of the cult following.

Neither could Celeste.

She’s lost

Oh, when they all learn that she’s lost

They’ll pick out the letters that she crossed

out when she gave them her name

Though even Roxy’s not enough to totally quell the crackle of nerves in my gut. Stimulus.

On my phone I navigate on to Twitter and I search the hashtag for How to Disappear.

The announcement of my hiatus dropped like a bomb. The podcast doesn’t have the biggest following, but enough people listen to justify it as a semi-fruitful endeavour.

I’d posted a short screenshot-explanation before I left yesterday. Melodramatic, sure, and it was all very in the moment so I hadn’t read it back, but it got the point across.

When I started creating these accounts, I was doing so in pursuit of truth. Now, looking back at the years of episodes – I’m not sure I’ve accomplished anything I set out to. What’s the point of any of this if there aren’t any answers? Any conclusions? Who am I even talking to? Who am I helping?

What is the point? … Is anyone there?

This summer I’m taking on my biggest story yet. Episodes will halt while I dedicate the next three months (maximum) to uprooting my life to reanimate the cold case of someone whose disappearance has interested me for a long time. I ask that you be patient with me until I’m back.

Basically: please know there’s no universe where I come back with nothing. I’m going to find out what happened to her. An entirely new experience for us all. Isn’t that something!

See you at the end of the summer.

Thanks, CAP

When I checked my phone at the first gas station in Ohio I hadn’t expected the excitement online. People were buzzing. Unusual, I assumed, for a so-called amateur crime writer to go to a scene themselves; amidst all this false, detached and saccharine empathy, I was going to do something real and good.

I couldn’t tell anyone why, though, of course. Why it was this case specifically. Too close. Too personal. I hoped no one would question it.

I scroll through the hashtag.

Maybe it’s someone she’s already covered?

this is LOW-KEY scary and real i hope she’s gonna be OK

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