Chapter 5
And no one—not Miller, not my parents, not the town—would ever have a reason to look beneath the collapsed concrete foundation in Blackwood Ravine.
I turned the brass knob of Daisy’s bedroom door and slipped inside.
The room smelled faintly of lavender and old paper. The bed was neatly made, the quilt pulled tight.
I walked straight across the floral rug to the white vanity table in the corner.
Sitting beside an old jar of cold cream was a vintage tortoiseshell hairbrush. Eleanor had placed it there yesterday morning before the girl arrived, a sentimental relic from the bottom of an old keepsake box.
I leaned over the vanity, my heart drumming a steady, controlled rhythm against my ribs.
Trapped in the stiff nylon bristles were several long, dark chestnut hairs.
I pulled a pair of sterile tweezers and a small plastic specimen bag from my cardigan pocket. With steady fingers, I clamped the tweezers around three long strands, ensuring the translucent white bulbs of the roots were intact. That was where the nuclear DNA lived.
I pulled them free and dropped them into the bag, sealing the zip-top with a firm slide of my thumb.
*One clean strike,* I thought, sliding the plastic bag deep into the inner pocket of my cardigan. *That is all it takes.*
I turned to leave.
As I took a step toward the doorway, my foot bumped against the lower drawer of the nightstand. The drawer was cracked open by an inch.
I froze.
I had personally cleaned and inspected this room every month for ten years. Every drawer was always shut flush against the mahogany frame.
I reached down and slowly pulled the drawer open.
Inside, resting directly on top of an old stack of Daisy’s lined spiral notebooks, lay an object that did not belong.
It was a small, clear glass jar, no larger than a medicine vial.
Inside the vial was a clump of dark, wet earth. It wasn't the sandy, pale topsoil of the Vance backyard garden. It was thick, heavy, reddish-black clay, dense with decaying pine needles and the unmistakable gray flecks of slate shale.
Blackwood Ravine loam. The specific, iron-rich silt that only formed along the stagnant drainage basin below the reservoir ruins.
And resting across the brass lid of the vial was a single, charred wooden match.
The phosphorus head was burned down to the wood, black and curled, smelling faintly of sulfur and cold dampness.
The air left my chest in a sharp, jagged gasp.
My vision flared white at the edges.
A vial of soil from the ravine. A burnt match.
*She had been there.*
Or someone working for her had been there.
Someone had walked into the dense, forbidden timber of Blackwood Ravine, descended the steep, slick embankment, and stood over the dark hollow where the earth had swallowed my sister.
Was it a threat? A warning? Or proof that they had already found the site?
My hands began to shake—a violent, uncontrollable tremor that threatened to drop the vial onto the floorboards. I forced myself to close the drawer, shoving it back into place with a muffled thump.
*Breathe, Clara,* I commanded myself, pressing a hand against my spinning forehead. *Think. Use your head.*
If they had found the body, the police would already be here. If they had dug up the bones, Miller wouldn't have brought this girl to our door with tears in his eyes; he would have arrived with arrest warrants, handcuffs, and a forensic convoy.
They hadn't dug it up.
They didn't have the proof.
This girl was a lure. She was a stalking horse designed to flush me out. Someone suspected. Someone had pieced together fragments of the truth from ten years ago, but they lacked the body. Without the body, they had no case.
So they had engineered a ghost to drive me insane.
"Find what you were looking for, Clara?"
A voice sliced through the silence like a straight razor.
I spun around.
The girl was standing in the doorway.
The door was closed behind her, the latch resting silently in the strike plate. She must have slipped away from the living room while Mrs. Gable was pouring coffee, gliding up the carpeted stairs without making a single sound.
She was leaning casually against the doorframe, her arms crossed over the oversized wool sweater, watching me with an amused, predatory stillness.
"I was checking the drawers," I said, my voice dropping into that smooth, practiced register that had fooled this town for a decade. "Making sure Mother didn't leave any of her old medication in here by mistake."
"You always were so attentive," she murmured.
She stepped away from the door and walked toward me.
She didn't stop until she was standing less than a foot away. She was slightly shorter than me, just as Daisy had been, but the energy radiating from her was suffocating. Up close, I could smell the cheap mint chewing gum she was rolling between her molars, masking the scent of fear, or triumph.
"You have something in your pocket, Clara," she whispered.
I didn't flinch. I kept my hands at my sides. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"A little plastic bag, maybe?" She tilted her head, her hazel eyes dancing with wicked delight. "A few stray hairs from the brush? Going to take a little drive down to Indianapolis on Monday morning?"
A cold bead of sweat trickled down the center of my spine.
She knew. She had anticipated every single move.
"Go ahead," she breathed, leaning in closer. Her breath was warm against the sensitive skin below my ear. "Take it to the lab. Spend your savings. See what the machine prints out."
"Who are you?" I hissed, dropping all pretense of sisterly affection, my voice a jagged blade scraping against bone. "Who paid for this? Was it the Lin family? Did Maya’s people hire you?"
At the mention of Maya’s name, the girl’s left eye twitched.
It was the barest microscopic reaction—a momentary tightening of the eyelid that vanished so quickly I might have imagined it.
"Maya Lin was a terrified child who ran away because nobody believed her," the girl whispered, her lips almost grazing my earlobe. "Nobody listened to the girl who saw the headlights by the reservoir. Nobody cared about the screaming in the trees."
My heart hammered against my ribcage like a trapped bird.
*Headlights by the reservoir.*
The night of the murder, I had parked Father’s station wagon on the gravel access road behind the reservoir pump house. I had left the parking lights on while I dragged the heavy wooden tool chest into the woods.
Nobody had known about the car. The police report had never mentioned a vehicle. Miller had assumed Daisy walked into the woods on foot from the bonfire.
"You weren't there," I snarled, grabbing her wrist with crushing force.
My fingers clamped around her skin, digging into the tendons. I expected her to pull away, to cry out for Eleanor, to play the fragile victim.
She didn't move an inch.
Instead, she slowly turned her head, looking down at my hand gripping her wrist, then slowly brought her eyes back up to mine. Her gaze was as cold and dark as a winter well.
