I didn’t bother knocking. I retrieved the key from the light post near the door and let myself inside. The house was cold, with winter air and snow hissing through broken windows. Sharp fragments of glass covered the hardwood floor.

“Jay?” I called. “Jay, it’s Rebecca. Are you here?”

There was no answer. I searched the whole house and couldn’t find him. His moving boxes had been delivered, but they sat on the floor of one of the upstairs bedrooms, unopened. When I went outside and checked the garage, I saw no sign of Gordon Brink’s Mercedes. Either Jay had left when he’d seen the damage, or he’d never come here at all.

The other kids in town were undoubtedly hunting for him. And Jay had a gun. That was a volatile combination. I needed to find him.

I thought about checking the house that Gordon had been renting, but I didn’t think Jay would go back there. And he was still a stranger to the area, so I doubted that he would know many of the hideaways that teenagers learned about growing up here. Plus, most of our secret places were summer escapes, and this was winter, and the snow was falling in waves.

Then I knew.

I knew exactly where Jay would go. He’d return to the place where he and Will had spent the night together.

I got back into my car and headed east. Night fell hard not long after I started out, and so I had to deal with the storm and the darkness at the same time. What would normally take me an hour took me two, as I fought the snow and tried to see. I missed the turnoff to the dirt road that led to Norm’s trailer, and I had to do a U-turn to go back and find it. The depth of the snow made the road almost impassible, but a couple of cars had obviously traveled this stretch before me, and I was able to use the ruts they’d left to make my way through the forest.

After several miles, my headlights reflected on the chassis of a car parked in a turnoff, barely visible among the trees. I could see that it was a Mercedes. I pulled in behind it and got out. The crowns of the trees overhead gave me a little protection from the snow, but the wind in my face was bitter and fierce. I trudged to the car and shined my flashlight inside, but it was empty.

“Jay?” I shouted, barely able to hear my own voice over the howl of the gales. “Jay, are you here?”

No one answered me.