The Creeping

Sam reaches for the flannel blanket hanging from the back of the couch and wraps it around my shoulders like a cape. Still holding on to the corners, he tugs me a foot closer. There’s the faint whistle of his breath between his teeth. “Okay, we won’t say anything to Detective Shane until we have more proof. But if this gets more dangerous”—he angles his head until he’s certain he has my attention—“if something else happens where you’re targeted, I’ll tell him myself. I’ll say it’s my theory; I’ll show him the picture, and if he wants to act like I’m crazy, fine.”


Sam leaves soon after with a wave. It makes me feel disappointed somehow. Empty. But I can’t obsess. Whatever I’m feeling will have to wait. There’s too much to process. And I have the sense that I’ve been disassembled and put back together, but none of my pieces fit seamlessly anymore. I stare at the blank space between the lines of a book for an untold amount of time. My whirring mind won’t concentrate on what’s in front of me. I force myself to wash up for bed even though it’s early. After one text to Dad telling him I’m home, I turn my ring tone to silent.

Something occurred to me as I showered, and I prop my laptop on my thighs. Killers and kidnappers don’t always limit their crimes geographically. Sam’s only looking for a girl who went missing in Savage. I jump from search engine to news database, looking for disappearances of young girls with red hair throughout Minnesota. I hold my breath speed-reading an article that appears to be a report of a six-year-old strawberry blonde vanishing during a walk home from school. Two paragraphs down I discover she turned up with her estranged mother in California. That’s the closest I get, and in the results of every search—no matter how I try to filter them—Jeanie Talcott always pops up in the first few names. I snap my laptop shut and drop it to the carpet below.

I curl up around my bunny and try to find peaceful sleep as Jeanie’s name runs across the ticker of my eyelids. Sleep comes easy, but peace doesn’t.

*

Mom hasn’t taken my summer clothes down from the attic yet, so I’m wearing my Easter dress, even though next week is the last of school. I pinch the dimples on my elbows as I sun my bare arms in Jeanie’s front yard. Their Christmas lights still frost the house, but they don’t light them up anymore. Too bad, since they’re the twinkly kind. It was a rainy week, and I’m a bottle rocket ready to explode with pent-up yips and hollers. The hum of the TV wafts into the front yard. Sometimes Mrs. Talcott lets us watch her grown-up shows. Mom never lets me watch TV.

“Can we ask your mom for a juice bar?” Zoey calls on the upswing of a leg pump. Her hair is in long pigtails, their strands getting stuck in the rusty chain of the swing looped over a low-hanging branch of a tree. Once she tipped backward, whacked her head on a rock, and bit hard on her tongue, so she doesn’t swing as high as I do anymore.

Jeanie and I kneel, surrounding a red mound of dirt. There used to be ants streaming out of it. Yesterday Daniel sprayed it with water until all the little black specks were drowned and washed away. Jeanie and I pick a ladybug family out of the strawberry vines. They’re going to live in the anthill, and we won’t let Daniel know.

“Can we, Jeanie?” Zoey whines louder. I look up from stuffing the mama ladybug into the tiny tunnel the ants dug. Best thing about Jeanie’s is the Popsicles. Jeanie isn’t answering Zoey, though. She was trying to feed blades of grass to two little green winged bugs she said were baby boys. Now she’s staring over my shoulder at the line of strawberry bushes bordering the woods. Her eyes bulge and water. Her bottom lip quivers. There’s a streak of snot under her nose. I turn to see what the matter is.

The slender strawberry vines quiver as if something’s just escaped their cover, the red berries wagging back and forth. Beyond them there are only shadows in the wood. It’s almost time to go home, since the sun is tucking itself behind treetops. I turn back to Jeanie. Tears, silent except for her breath slipping through her gap-toothed smile, stripe her cheeks. She’s panting, her fists wadded into balls and shaking.

“Is it the witch?” I whisper. Daniel says a witch lives in the wood, but Jeanie says she isn’t a bad one. She walked Jeanie home one time when Jeanie got lost and Daniel left her out there. But Jeanie doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even look at me.

“Is it the monster?” I ask even quieter. Daniel says it can leave the forest, but Jeanie thinks he’s wrong. She said so to his face last week. He told her that the monster can smell that she doesn’t believe it can leave the woods. He said it’s going to come show her.

I think it might be showing her now. A stream of stinking water trickles downhill from Jeanie. Hot on my legs. I hop from the ground as a current of it carries the ladybugs between my sneakers, whisking them away. Jeanie stays cross-legged in pee. She opens her fist slowly, cradling it in her lap, trying to shield it with her other hand. But I see. I see mangled green wings and black guts staining her palm.

“They’re dead,” I say.