I ignore Jade and leave her in the woods. That smell wafts my way again. The metallic smell. I cover my face, following the blood around the side of the house.
The snow in the Grossos’ backyard comes up to my calves. I hold on to the side of the house for support. On the deck, the snow is stained with a spot of red. Even though my face is covered, I gag when I take a breath.
I climb the deck. On the far end of it, pushed against the side of the house, there’s something boxy and covered with snow. I keep one hand pressing my scarf to my mouth, afraid I’ll spray vomit everywhere if I smell any more of the blood.
A freezer. The top has been wiped clean of snow. Someone’s been in it recently.
I squeeze my eyes shut, snow seeping through my mittens as I lift the top.
I force myself to look and let out the breath I’ve been holding. Inside is the body of a doe, a puncture wound at her neck. Her eyes are wide open in shock. Like she never saw the arrow from the crossbow coming.
“Kacey!”
I drop the lid of the freezer as Jade emerges from the side of the house. She looks from me to the blood and comes to a full stop.
“A deer,” I say. “It’s just a deer.”
“I called her mom.” Jade pulls her coat around her tight. “She says get the hell out of here. Bring it straight to the sheriff’s station.”
It. Bailey’s phone, she means. Which I am still holding in my unmittened hand. “My fingerprints are all over it.”
Jade’s mouth hangs open. “What does that matter?” She plucks the phone from my hand, staring at me with a strange look on her face.
I feel frozen in place. Sick from the smell of the dead deer. I force myself forward, knowing full well Jade will leave me behind if she has to. I trudge through the snow, my heart hammering so fast now I’m afraid it’ll shatter.
CHAPTER FIVE
I haven’t been inside a police precinct since an officer from the Syracuse Police Department recognized me as a runaway outside a 7-Eleven last January.
I’d run away a month before that, right before Christmas, but I was a dumbass about it and got caught by Dawn, my social worker. She saw my split and infected lower lip. I lied and said my mom’s latest boyfriend did it and got sent to New Beginnings Home for Girls while social services worked out the details of me going to live in Broken Falls, a town I’d never heard of, with Russ Markham, a man I’d never met.
My roommate at the group home, Missy, had been bounced around foster homes from the time she was two weeks old. I could tell why no one adopted her as soon as I met her and she snarled at me to stay out of her shit. In the weekly group therapy sessions, she bragged about going to juvie for the first time when she was twelve, for pulling a box cutter on a classmate.
My first and only night at New Beginnings, I woke up with Missy on top of me, her knees digging into my chest. Someone had most definitely been in her shit, and even though I insisted it wasn’t me, she said she could go to jail for felony possession and if I breathed a word to anyone she would cut my throat in my sleep.
I had been planning to make a run for it, before the thing with Missy. I thought hiding out with friends in New York and sleeping on their basement floors was better than being shipped off to Bumblefuck McCow-Town to live with strangers who would take one look at me and decide I was trouble.
But I knew I wasn’t smart enough or strong enough to make it on my own until I turned eighteen. I would wind up somewhere like New Beginnings again, some girl breathing in my ear that she would cut my throat while I slept.
My social worker took the flight to Madison, Wisconsin, with me. It was the first time I’d ever been on a plane. Dawn was silent throughout takeoff.
“Don’t you have your own family to deal with?” I asked. Dawn was flipping through one of those magazines selling things like patches of grass so your dog can pee in the house. I already knew from looking her up on Facebook that Dawn lived with her girlfriend, Renee, a woman who rescued retired greyhounds.
Dawn’s jaw set. I prayed to God I hadn’t accidentally said something horrible—like maybe she and her girlfriend wanted kids but couldn’t have them. “I’m not leaving you.”
It was all she said. My chest was tight as I went back to reading my book, one of the few possessions I’d managed not to lose over the years of constant shuffling back and forth between houses. A compilation of fairy tales that had belonged to my mom as a child, even though I don’t know why anyone would give this shit to a kid.
They weren’t the Disney type of fairy tales, where everyone gets a prince—they were the real stories, the ones that came first. The story where the sea witch cuts out the little mermaid’s tongue and she decides to throw herself over the side of a boat rather than stab the sleeping prince. The version of Cinderella where she commands her birds to peck out her evil stepsisters’ eyes.
I guess I got attached to the book because I knew all the other stories were bullshit, even as a kid. There was no prince waiting to rescue me—only a social worker with lipstick on her teeth and a crate full of files in the backseat of her car.
Girls are not princesses, and I know all the possible endings to the stories about the girls in peril. They’re rarely happy.
—
The door to the sheriff’s department is frozen. Jade punches down on the handle. The noise rattles my brain. How is this happening? How is this for real?
The woman behind the desk doesn’t look up from her stapling. Like most of Broken Falls, the sheriff’s office hasn’t gotten an upgrade since the 1970s. The walls are wood panels. Plastic trees in planters, the rocks inside covered with a visible layer of dust.
“Excuse me.” Jade taps on the counter. The woman keeps stapling. Her dark hair is pulled back so tightly it looks like it hurts. Overplucked eyebrows to match. She’s wearing too much foundation that she probably doesn’t need. She’s younger than I first thought. Early, maybe midtwenties. Her badge says Ellie Knepper.
Jade hisses in my ear: “Is she deaf or something?”
Ellie Knepper sets down her stapler. Looks up at Jade and smiles. “No, hon, I can hear just fine.”
I set Bailey’s phone on the counter, which is piss-yellow. It matches the tiled floor.
Ellie looks at the phone, then at me. “Whatcha got there?”
“It’s our friend’s,” I say. “Her mom called you guys to report her missing.”
Ellie looks at Bailey’s phone again and says, “Huh.”
I feel Jade’s pulse ticking beside me, like a bomb. Jade is one of the smartest people I know, but she was not blessed with a Midwesterner’s patience. Her face goes red, the snowflakes clinging to her curly bun dissolving. “Her name is Bailey Hammond.”
“Ah, sounds familiar. Yes—I talked to her mom this morning.”
“Then why aren’t you guys looking for her?” Jade asks.