I listen for signs of life, but the day is quiet, and everything is still. There are birds in the distance, some sort of insect that hums in the grass to the side of the house. The sun is bright, and it reflects off the front windows, making me look away as my eyes start to tear.
“Right,” I say to myself. I turn back to the car and sling my backpack onto my shoulder. Then, on second thought, I take a photo of the house with my phone. I turn on my map program, marking the GPS coordinates. This is, after all, for science.
I note the time of day. The sun in the sky. The heat. The location: West Arbordale, Virginia. 323 Lance Road.
Nothing is irrelevant.
Or maybe I’m procrastinating.
“Right,” I say again. I leave my phone in the car so it won’t interfere and carry my gear up the front steps, cup my hands around my eyes, and peer into the windows again. It’s the same as yesterday: pictures off-kilter, that feeling of wrong.
My hand shakes as I take the EMF meter from my bag and hold it to the window, but nothing happens. It registers the same baseline reading as it does around my house. A normal measure of electricity—the dial doesn’t jump or do anything creepy, like diving back below zero. I make some notes, taking some more readings with the other devices.
The porch creaks under my steps as I walk the front perimeter, and the chain of the porch swing jangles as my arm accidentally brushes the wood. Just outside the front door, I can feel the tiniest gust of cold air seeping from underneath, and I freeze. I press my ear to the front door.
I think, I hope, it’s the air conditioning clicking on. But just in case, I knock.
I knock. I have just knocked on the door of an empty house because I felt a gust of cold air. Seriously, Nolan.
On a whim, I take the knob in my hand and twist it gently. There’s no resistance. My lungs are in my throat. My heart is in my stomach. What the hell am I doing?
Still, I twist it, and the door pushes open. A gust of air rushes out, and I was right—it’s the air conditioner. I laugh to myself under my breath.
From where I’m standing in the entrance with the door swung open, the house looks like any other house. Older wood floors, a rustic coffee table, drapes that hang in front of the windows, pulled back. If it weren’t for the fact that it looks like a windstorm went through the room, knocking the paintings askew, or off the walls, it would look like a normal house.
But there’s also this smell, something too fresh, too new. Like carpet fabric and paint, like wood polish and those pine tree things people hang from their car mirrors. Like something else needs to be covered up here.
I think of the article I read, picture the headline, the photo, and I step across the threshold. I close the door behind me, and I wait for something to happen. But when nothing does—no alarm, no automatic lights, no phone ringing—I decide to take the risk.
I keep the EMF meter in my hand as I circle the downstairs. The doors are all open, but I don’t step inside any of the rooms. I keep walking, staring at the device as I go. The kitchen. The living room. Three downstairs bedrooms. At the end of the hall near the back of the house, I round the corner, away from the open windows, and everything falls to shadow.
In front of me, there’s a dark stairway, where the smell of things new and replaced is the strongest.
Here. It happened here.
I blink, trying to imagine the scene, but it’s all hidden under shadow. There’s only a dark hallway upstairs, and a dark hallway here. Running my hand against the nearest wall, I flip the switch, and the area lights up, too bright. The bulb must’ve been recently replaced, because it’s too white. It buzzes all around me, like there’s a charge. My temple throbs with the start of a headache.
The device shakes in my other hand, the needle rising. I drop my bag to the ground to find my notebook, to document this, but my hand is trembling. There are footsteps in the fresh carpeting—a trail up and down. I turn off the light, and the dial settles again.
Just the electricity. Just the normal background noise. Just the footprints of a Realtor, or prospective buyers.
In the dark, the hallway falls to shadows again. This was where they were found. No, that’s not all of it. Sutton told us, whispered low the morning of the tri-county baseball clinic. This was where she found them. That girl he knew. On the staircase.
Inside the shed again, Lydia looks at the box in my hands, and her eyes go large. “Please tell me you know what we’re looking for,” she says.
“I was hoping it would make more sense to you,” I say, dropping the box between us.
She bites the side of her nail, lowers into a squat, doesn’t move to touch anything. She sees the letters written in ink on the cover of the first journal. Elliot Jones. “This was all his?”
“Yes,” I say, and I grab a handful of notebooks off the top, spreading them out before me, to break her trance. They’re just paper.
Lydia takes a few, opening and closing the covers. “These are physics. Wrong subject.” She keeps going until we’re halfway down the box, and she opens a journal and says, “Oh, hold on.” She hops back to the chair, pivots to the computer screen, starts moving her fingers in time to some music I don’t hear at all.
“What are you—”
She holds up a finger. Her gold nail polish sparkles in the light from the window. She slides a pen between her teeth and starts typing. “I’m just,” she says around the pen, “seeing how the script runs. Can’t see if anything’s wrong before I know what it’s supposed to do.”
The screen turns black, and commands scroll across it. I’m in over my head there.
I keep looking through the journals, in case he’s left specific notes, or labeled things. I picture him sitting at his desk, reading some textbook, his hand off to the side scribbling notes at the same time, like he was split in two. When he was working on something in his bedroom, I could walk right up to his shoulder and he wouldn’t even notice, especially when he had headphones on, which was often. I did it all the time, as a game. Seeing how close I could get before dropping a hand on his shoulder, or shouting Boo—how high I could make him jump. He’d drop his pen and yell, but once the shock passed, his laughter would echo mine.
The problem with Elliot’s notes is that, however organized he was in person, his mind was not. Or it was, but in a way that only he could decipher. Nothing is labeled. Nothing is summarized. Still, I try.
My phone abruptly rings, cutting through the air. I fumble for it, sucking in a deep breath, like I’ve fallen asleep in the bathtub and am fighting my way to the surface. Lydia stops typing, too, peering at me over her shoulder.
The call is from Joe, and I answer before he can start to worry, calling the neighbors, asking if anyone’s seen me. “Hello?”
“Where are you, Kennedy?” He sounds irritated. Impatient.
I frown. It’s still Sunday morning; he’s probably just getting up. I think of my options: risky to claim I’m at the Albertsons’, if he’s still home. Or anywhere farther than a quick bike ride would take me. “I’m with a friend,” I say.
There’s a pause before Joe repeats the question, lower this time. “Kennedy, where are you? We’re supposed to be on the road soon.”
“On the…”
“Road,” he says, clearly exasperated. “Come on, Kennedy. You know this.”
I press my lips together. “I forgot,” I say.
Lydia spins around, and I hate that she’s listening.
“You forgot?” Joe says, his voice rising. He repeats things I say a lot, I’ve noticed, as if he expects the phrase to suddenly bring extra meaning. Will used to do the same, sitting across from me at the dinner table, though in his case, I thought it was probably more to seem like he was interested in what I had to say, as his girlfriend’s child, than a real question.
“Sorry.”
He sighs. “You weren’t here when I woke up.” It sounds like he’s trying to accuse me of something, but he’s not sure what.
“I just forgot to tell you. I was meeting my friend.”
“You were meeting a friend,” he repeats. I mean, I don’t blame him, the way he’s questioning this. I haven’t met up with a friend on the weekend in, oh, all the time I’ve been staying with him.
“Yes, here, Lydia, say hi to my uncle.” I hold the phone up in her direction.
She looks at me like I’m out of my mind, but after a beat she calls, “Hi, Kennedy’s uncle.”
This must appease him, as he doesn’t seem to know what to say. Finally, he relents. “Okay, we’re leaving in an hour. Do you need me to pick you up?”
I cringe, imagining him driving by this house on the way to Lydia’s address. I don’t want to draw any attention to the fact that I bike over this way on a consistent basis. “No,” I say. “I’m not far. I’ll be back soon.”
When I hang up, Lydia returns to typing. She doesn’t ask any questions. “So…I have to go,” I say.