Fiona waited until dawn, when the sky had turned cold slate gray and the first neighbors in her building had begun to leave for work. She’d stayed home from Jamie’s last night, begging off with an excuse when he’d texted her. He hadn’t pushed.
So she’d stayed home, done her laundry, thrown out some of the more disgusting remnants in the fridge, and replaced them with fresh groceries. Her apartment was in a low-rise building on the south end of town, on a smattering of old residential streets that had once been intended as a suburb perhaps, but had frozen in size as Barrons itself had stopped growing, like a bug in amber. The rent was cheap, the building was ugly—they made nothing beautiful in the early 1980s—and the apartment itself was functional, filled with secondhand furniture she’d scoured from her parents’ spare rooms and off Internet listing sites. The only artwork on the walls was a framed Chagall print Jamie had bought back in the summer and put up himself. Fiona had wanted to argue with him about it until she saw how the print looked on the wall, with its dreamy figures floating upward, looking into one another’s eyes. She had to admit then that it was the best thing in the entire apartment, and she’d left it up.
She barely slept, and when the sky began to turn light, she rolled out of bed, showered, and pulled on jeans, a T-shirt with a gray flannel shirt buttoned over it, and her hiking boots. She zipped up her heavy late-fall coat and tucked her damp hair into a knit cap against the cold. Then she took the elevator down to the building’s small lot, got in her car, and drove toward Old Barrons Road.
She parked on the side of the road, at the bottom of the hill, near where she’d stopped the car a few nights ago. She’d studied the Idlewild property lines more than once, trying to figure out Tim Christopher’s path with her sister’s body. The west side of the property, past the woods on the other side of the sports field, bordered government land, sealed off with a high fence. The north side contained all the school’s buildings—the main hall, the dorm, the gymnasium and old locker rooms, the teachers’ hall, the cafeteria, the support buildings. Past that, the land dropped off in a slow tangle of thick, weedy brush, wet and muddy, nearly impossible to walk, three miles toward the nearest back road. The south side likewise had no access, deep with brush and freezing mud, spattered with trees, bordered by old overgrown fields. This place, on the east edge where Old Barrons Road twisted up toward the gates of the school—this place was the fastest way to get from a car to the Idlewild grounds if you weren’t driving through the front gate. If you knew your way through the gaps in the old fence.
Fiona swung her legs out of the car and got her bearings. The wind howled a gust straight down the hill, dense with early cold, and too late she realized she’d forgotten gloves. She shoved her hands in her pockets and walked toward the trees.
It was dark in the thicket of trees, even though the canopy of leaves was gone. The trunks were narrow, packed dense, hard to see past. As the light came through the other side of the trees, Fiona saw Anthony Eden’s new fence, a high chain-link with signs posted warning trespassers to keep away. Keeping the kids out, as well as the vagrants and the curious people and any other locals who had been using this land since the school closed in 1979.
Gritting her teeth at the cold metal against her bare hands, Fiona climbed the fence. By the time she got to the top, she was sweating beneath her coat. Normally she ran for exercise, a route she did around her neighborhood and back, but lately she’d fallen off the wagon.
From her high vantage point, she could see across the grounds. The main school building loomed off to her left, its teeth bared at her in the dim light. I see you, it seemed to leer. Behind it were the shapes of the school’s other buildings, blurred in shadow. Farther toward the other end of the property she could see the ruins of the well, indicated by the last strips of police tape that had cordoned off the site. Beneath her was the edge of the sports field. There was no one in sight, and no cars sounded on the road behind her through the trees. Fiona swung her leg over the top of the fence and started down the other side.
What the hell are you doing here, Fiona? The question came as her hiking boots hit the ground. It was Jamie’s voice, as clear as if he were standing at her shoulder, shaking his head. She walked across the field and toward the buildings as the wind buffeted her hat. She shoved her hands in her pockets again.
She had no interest in getting inside any of the buildings, even though she’d watched Anthony key his security code into the main keypad and memorized it in case she needed it later. She skirted past the main building, forcing herself to stop and look up into its grim face, to stare at its blank windows and sagging roof. She tried to picture Sonia here, standing where she was right now, having escaped an unknown hell in Europe only to come to a strange country and face this forbidding building, her new home. Had she felt relief, or had she been just as frightened here as she’d been in some godforsaken concentration camp?
Past the main building, she followed the same path she and Anthony had walked, toward the dining hall. As she passed the garden, icy cold in its dank shadows between buildings, her phone vibrated with a text. Fiona took out her phone and swiped it with a numb finger. It was Jamie.
Why do I have the feeling you’re not home in bed right now?
Fiona stopped, staring down at the words. How the hell did he know? She wiped tears of cold from her eyes and typed a reply. Wrong. I’m snug under my covers, asleep.
His reply was immediate. Oh shit. Where are you?
Fiona blew out a frustrated breath. She didn’t mean to make him worry; she really didn’t. He didn’t have to. She could handle it. She was handling it. She quickly typed I’m fine and sent it, then dropped the phone back into her pocket.
From the corner of her eye, a shadow moved in the garden.
She turned and looked. It was an animal, perhaps—a fox or a rabbit. Gone now. But from the corner of her eye, the shape had been . . . strange. Nothing like an animal. Smooth, sinuous, like something bent, bowing its head to the ground.
Over the silence came a faint high-pitched sound. Fiona turned back, facing the way she’d come, listening. Voices? No, not voices, exactly. Music. Someone was playing a song, back out past the main building, in the direction of the field.
She started toward it. She couldn’t catch the tune, exactly, though it sounded familiar—it was too far away, the wind whipping it and dispersing it. Who the hell was at Idlewild, playing music at this hour? Some teenager with an MP3 player? She started to jog as she rounded the side of the main building, her heart speeding up. Someone was here, messing around—there was no reason to be afraid. But there was something about the music—the familiar rhythm and cadence of it, which her brain hadn’t quite placed—that made her wonder if she was alone here. That made her realize she was armed with absolutely nothing with which she could defend herself.
There was no one in front of the school, no one visible on the muddy half-dug road or in the dark stand of trees. No one at the gate. The music didn’t come from there anyway—it was coming from the direction of the field.
There was someone in the field.
Fiona stopped dead when she saw the figure. It was a woman, small and slight—a girl, perhaps. She wore a black dress that was long and heavy, a costume from a bygone era. She faced away, looking off at nothing over the field, utterly still.