are, the two of them together at Yale, then at Brown, faces glowing in selfie after selfie. I click out of the app.
Fighting sleep, I open Google and search for Windermere. There’s more than I expected to find. Apparently it’s been landmarked by the Herron Mills Village Historical Society, so there are a couple articles on the estate over the generations, a blog run by a Hamptons history buff with a small entry on Windermere including some cool memorabilia like a photograph of an invitation to a ball on the grounds in 1906 and photos of the house in 1927 and again in 1968.
An image search pulls up a couple more recent photos, from the early 2000s. This is what the house would have looked like when Caden was growing up there. It looks fresh, vibrant, like it did in my dream.
My eyes shutter closed, and soon I’m drifting off again, back to the Windermere balcony, back to the dream. This time, Caden is with me. He’s sitting behind me on the balcony, sliding his arms around my waist. His lanky legs are bent on either side of my body. With fingers that feel like cotton candy or clouds, he brushes my tangle of hair to one side and rests his chin on my shoulder.
His lips brush my neck, feathery at first, then more insistent. I let my spine relax into his chest, tilt my head until my lips find his. Soft and warm with the night air. We fit together, new and familiar all at once. His fingers move from my hair to my shoulder, then play lightly across my throat, down to my collarbone. They stop. He pulls away, eyes fixed on the bare gleam of my chest, above the neckline of my camisole. Instinctively, my fingers rise to meet my skin, travel like soft brush bristles across it.
“Your necklace,” he says. “It’s gone.”
And then Caden is gone too, and I’m alone on the balcony again. Behind me, vines start creeping up the shingles. A crack appears along one windowpane. I grasp for the railing in front of me, but the wood is pulpy and rotten. It disintegrates beneath my touch, and I pitch forward, gasping. I think I’m going to fall, but just then, a flock of ravens descends, the force of their wing beats driving me backward, away from the edge. I roll over, curl into myself. The first sharp jab of a beak meets my flesh.
13 NOW
September
Herron Mills, NY
You need to stop.
Martina is in class. Her phone should be in her locker, not in her backpack, and her backpack certainly shouldn’t be open beneath her desk, barely concealing the glowing screen. But she can’t be disconnected right now. It’s physically impossible. Her entire body is buzzing; the world online suddenly more real and vividly alive than anything happening within the Jefferson walls. She almost skipped school today, but Mami would have killed her—metaphorically, obviously metaphorically—and then what use would she be to anyone? Realistically, Mami would have grounded her, taken her phone. A fate much worse than sitting through Mr. Cohu’s 9:00 a.m. lecture on the Crimean War.
Her eyes stay fixed on the text, its four words a caution or threat. The fifth episode of Missing Zoe posted yesterday afternoon—the first in nearly six months, the first since Zoe is no longer missing. But her death remains a mystery, now even more than when her body was found in August. Because Anna’s role in it no longer seems to fit quite so neatly, just as Martina has been suspecting since Anna confessed. And now everyone knows the truth about how little Anna really remembers from that night—in Anna’s own words.
The episode covered a lot of ground, everything from the discovery of Zoe’s body in Parrish Lake on up to the autopsy bombshell last week. Martina included audio from interviews with multiple sources, as she always does, but it’s the interview with Anna that’s been getting all the buzz. Suddenly, Missing Zoe has skyrocketed from a modest 300 average downloads per episode to 7,700 downloads of Episode Five alone.
It’s been less than twenty-four hours. Martina can’t stop checking her stats. People are still downloading, talking, reblogging. Her audience is no longer limited to her Jefferson classmates, her neighbors in Herron Mills, the people who have grown reticently accustomed to her podcasting efforts over the seven months since the police stopped looking and she started digging. Suddenly, strangers are listening. Nationwide. And they’re going back and listening