It’s not a crime to go missing, but there does seem to be a telling void here, a familiar dark shimmer that makes me wonder. She may have been coerced into leaving, or even complicit in whatever harm has befallen her. There’s an old ghost story about that, I remember, how the devil steals souls by asking for them openly. He isn’t a thief, but a master manipulator. The real danger, or so the story goes, isn’t in the devil himself, but in not knowing you have a choice to turn him away.

That’s the saddest piece as I see it, and have over and over. How some victims don’t have even a whisper of no inside them. Because they don’t believe the life they have is theirs to save.

(seven)

All the way to the village, I feel like a shaken-up snow globe, sharp flecks of memory colliding head on. Will is still here. He’s become the town sheriff, just like his father, and now what? How can I answer any of the questions he’s likely to throw at me about my life and why I’ve come home? How can I avoid hearing anything more about his case, which is already pressing on me? And how will we avoid talking about the past? We aren’t just two old friends with no baggage, after all.

All those years, from the time I was ten and Will was fourteen, we were part of each other’s story. His father, Ellis Flood, was Hap’s closest friend, and so we were often thrown together. But even if that hadn’t been the case, in a small town like Mendocino, the kids ran in packs, building driftwood forts on Portuguese Beach, wandering through the woods behind Jackson Street, or playing flashlight tag out on the bluffs on moonless nights. Two more in our gang were Caleb and Jenny Ford, twins who had been living alone with their dad since their mother ran off years before for a man, wanting a life that had nothing to do with them.

I always felt drawn to kids with a story similar to mine, as if we were a kind of club, with an unspoken password. They were two years older than me, a gap that seemed wider with Jenny than with Caleb for some reason. He was smart in a way that was interesting to me, his head full of odd facts and stories about the town, which made him a natural fit as a friend. I’d always liked to know things too, not just history, but anything that was going on. Details about people and places, old stories and new mysteries, and secrets of every variety.