It’s a pair of shoes. My legs are shaking and I can’t take another step. I recognize those shoes. They’re Bella’s. They’re the shoes she was wearing the night she died. She wasn’t wearing them when we were found. She was barefoot then, her feet scratched and muddy, suggesting she’d run through the woods barefoot. They didn’t ever find the shoes; no one believed my insistence that she was wearing them when she set out. Because I didn’t see her leave, because I don’t remember anything. But her shoes weren’t at home, weren’t in the hall where they always were, a pair of scruffy old white Converse, frayed edges and grass stains around the toes.

I searched the house for them afterward, searched everywhere, even in the most unlikely of places, but I never found them. I even went back in the woods, in case she’d taken them off there. But they were never there. I hold my breath and make myself walk over to them. They are her shoes—same frayed edges, patches of light green, one lace with its ragged end taped up. There’s even the faint hint of her initials in faded marker on the inside from when she’d wear them for school PE lessons.

Someone else has been here and put the shoes here for me to find. It makes me aware that I’m here alone at night and no one knows where I am. Except the person who sent me those texts. The person who left the shoes here for me to find.

I grab the shoes, turn, and run. I fumble with the window, convinced for a panicked moment that it won’t open, that someone has crept up and sealed me inside the house, but it opens and I almost fall out, setting out at a run, not bothering to close the window behind me.

I run home, almost falling several times, a stumbling, lurching run along the unlit lane. No one follows, but in my mind, he does, the monster, breathing fire, my death in his eyes. I won’t sleep tonight, I won’t even try. He’ll keep chasing if I close my eyes, Freddy Krueger with his razor fingers, waiting to kill me in my dreams.

Back at the house, I put the shoes on my bed, expecting them to disappear if I close my eyes. My trip to the house has already taken on a surreal edge—it feels like a dream but I know it’s real. I hug Bella’s shoes to my chest. This is real, my visit to the house was real. Someone’s had these shoes for ten years and they’ve left them and the blue suitcase for me to find. I was right. Someone else was in the woods with us that night. Someone else knows what happened to Bella.

Chapter 23

Chapter 23