Her door is open a crack. I nudge it open more with my toe and slip inside the empty room.
Lauren’s furniture is littered with things: ninety-nine-cent bottles of nail polish from Friendly Drugs, a brand I never saw until I moved here, on the nightstand. Jelly pens, a half-empty Nalgene, earrings shaped like sushi on the dresser. Dance shoes and dirty tights on her desk chair. She and Ashley fight over the state of this room weekly, especially the laundry strewn across her bed and carpet.
Some kids don’t even have warm clothes and you treat yours like they’re trash.
Her laptop is open on her desk, a video playing.
It’s Bailey. Bailey looking even rounder-faced and bright-eyed, like a baby. Bailey in a flowery peasant top, alone onstage with a microphone. Singing.
I move Lauren’s ballet shoes aside so I can sit in her desk chair. The video ends and begins looping. I click around—the video is embedded in an article. Missing Wisconsin Girl Planned to Attend University of Indiana at Bloomington.
Bailey has made national news.
The caption explains that the video is from Bailey’s eighth-grade talent show, where she sang “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” I let it play from the beginning again. Bailey has a sweet voice, a scrapy alto you might hear in a coffee shop. Her hands hug the microphone so tightly you’d have to peer closely to see that she’s shaking.
I had no idea she could sing.
I can’t bring myself to watch the video again. I feel like a gawker, watching some news story about a girl halfway across the country. The Bailey I knew didn’t sing, didn’t wear peasant tops. I pick up the jewelry holder on Lauren’s desk. It’s the macaron I sculpted and painted pastel green in Mr. White’s class last year.
I thought beginner drawing and painting would be a nightmare. But art at Broken Falls wasn’t like the art class I’d taken as a kid in New York, in stuffy rooms with crayon stubs and paintbrushes slimy from sitting in water overnight.
I’m not great at drawing and sketching—I have a long way to go—but this macaron, my first assignment in his class, convinced Mr. White I was ready to take AP art.
When I brought it home, Lauren locked eyes on it like a ferret on a shiny necklace. “That is so cool.”
I let her have it without question. She was hesitant, didn’t know what she’d owe me in return. I insisted she take it; I knew I’d win her trust eventually.
And here I am, at her computer, alone.
I switch tabs and open Lauren’s browser history. The first site on the list immediately catches my eye. HAUNTED WISCONSIN—THE RED WOMAN SIGHTINGS
No wonder she won’t sleep alone. Bailey showed me this site when she was trying to explain the Red Woman to me. Some of the stuff on it will keep you up at night no matter where you live.
I click through to the forum topic, where Lauren is logged in as mookie. I swallow to clear my throat. Mookie is on her bed; the nearly decapitated chimpanzee was Lauren’s first stuffed animal. She was too little to say monkey, so she branded him Mookie.
I scroll past the posts: Stories about the Red Woman jumping out in front of motorists. Stories about her slapping a bloody palm on the windshields of stalled cars, leaving behind a ghoulish handprint. Stories about brave souls going up to the barn and reporting hearing sobbing and children crying.
Nausea wells up in me. That streak of blood in the barn—it could have been a handprint.
I click on the navigation bar until I find Lauren’s profile. Apparently, she registered on Haunted Wisconsin on Monday—almost two days after Bailey disappeared.
Lauren’s only made one post, in a subforum called THE RED WOMAN—GENERAL DISCUSSION.
It’s time-stamped at 10:31 this morning.
Mookie: Do you think the Red Woman made the girl from Broken Falls disappear just like she disappeared?
A chill settles over me. I dig my socked toes into the carpet and scroll through the responses.
badgerboi209: Josephine Leeds didn’t disappear. She’s a pile of bones somewhere and that girl from BF is probably dead by now too
princess_of_darkness: I heard that the girl from broken falls died of a drug overdose at that party and someone dumped her body. sad
The latest response came three hours ago:
anthropomorphist: Mookie, what makes you think the missing girl has anything to do with the RW?
I scroll down, but Lauren never responded to anthropomorphist’s question. I toggle back to her search history, the pit in my gut growing when I see everything Lauren has looked up in the past few days.
the red woman
Josephine leeds murder
séances
how do you make the dead mad
And:
can ghosts kill people?
I click out of the window and leave Lauren’s desk and computer exactly as I found it.
When I get back to my room, I lock the door behind me.
—
I’m in bed, counting the minutes until everyone gets home from the vigil. When I hear the crunching of tires on snow in the driveway, I turn off my light.
Moments after the front door creaks open, there’s a soft knock on my door. I pretend to be asleep. I don’t want to know how the vigil went. It’s just a reminder that I should have been there. Should have gotten my shit together and shown up, like a real friend would.
But I can’t handle the inevitable questions from everyone. What did you see in the barn? I can’t answer them, and not because Sheriff Moser told me not to when he drove me home.
I can’t parse out what’s real and what’s not anymore. Lauren isn’t stupid—she might be a little na?ve—but she’s one of the smartest kids in her class. She watches Dateline with Ashley on Friday nights. She knows that girls disappear all the time: not at the hands of murderous spirits but at the hands of humans.
So why that post on the message boards about the Red Woman? Could she really believe that Bailey’s disappearance has something to do with Josephine Leeds?
I can’t turn off her scream, looping in my head.
On my nightstand, my phone starts buzzing frantically. Jade’s picture fills the screen; her judging stare has never seemed more appropriate. A tear rolls down my neck as I let the phone ring and ring.
When it’s done, I reach for my phone. A text message from Jade pops up on the screen.
Look at the goddamn news.
I scoot from my bed to my desk. Shake my laptop out of hibernation. The default news site on my computer shows all the usual misery—bombings halfway around the world, a fire at a Brooklyn apartment complex, and historic snowstorms headed for the East Coast. I let my fingers fly across the keyboard, typing Bailey Hammond into the search bar.
I’ve bitten my thumbnail nearly clean off by the time the top hit loads.