besides this girl who had taken him away so he couldn’t even try to save his family?
“Please, Charlie.” Emma was crying now, tears having formed somehow even though she was hollow and dry. When he didn’t answer, she turned in the opposite direction and started down the other road, forcing one foot in front of the other. She listened, half-expecting to hear him running after her. But all she heard were the buzzing of insects and the occasional squawk of a bird.
By the time she allowed herself a f inal glance over her shoulder, he was gone.
Had she been older, Emma might have understood that Charlie was telling her at least one truth. Having lost everything but the one person he treasured most, the only thing Charlie had left to live for was keeping her safe. He’d abandoned her in this godforsaken place to protect her. That much was real. This is what happened in the worst of times. People hurt one another, said awful things, even as they tried to be brave. Gave up what they loved in order to save it.
But Emma was not older. Wouldn’t be, couldn’t be. She had yet to learn that the hero and the lame-brained idiot often wore the same face. And by the time she f igured it out, she would have gained a fuller and more colorful vocabulary to def ine both Charlie Ryan’s behavior that horrible day and her own. She would have remembered some other, important things about goshawks. But she also would have learned that both she and Charlie were actually quite excellent at dropping out of sight.
By the time she realized that, she would also realize something else: the only thing she knew for sure—the only thing the girl who prized certainty could be absolutely certain of—was that she was alone.
Chapter Four
Dallas, Texas
Present
“Turn right in two miles,” the GPS chirped.
Emma adjusted her sunglasses. The hangover was long gone but the day still seemed a little too bright. She tried not to think of Matt. That whole thing was best forgotten. It was time to focus on what mattered, on what could matter. A clue.
Elodie Callahan, age sixteen, had been found f loating face down in a gated subdivision swimming pool. Elodie Callahan, who was supposed to come straight home after her youth group’s holiday party, the next to last day of school.
No one remembered seeing her after the Secret Santa gift exchange. No one remembered a thing until she was naked and dead in a stranger’s backyard. She hadn’t drowned, though. She’d been poisoned.
Happy almost New Year, indeed.
“Keep right,” the GPS lady announced.
She was a bossy thing. In Emma’s weaker moments, the GPS lady reminded her of her own mother, who took a great delight—as Emma remembered it—in telling her daughter exactly what to do and how to do it. Sit up straight. Smile. Don’t smile. At least pretend you’re listening. But unlike her mother’s view on what and was not ladylike behavior at any given time, the GPS was generally accurate, which Emma appreciated.
Her thoughts turned back to Elodie. Emma tapped a f inger on the steering wheel. Cars had come a long way over the years. They’d probably go a long way more in the years to come, but a wrinkled ninety-year-old Elodie Callahan, tottering around at the turn of the twenty-second-century, would never know about that. Or about the sharp-as-a-needle, turquoise-colored Avanti Emma had driven for a few glorious months in the ’60s. Emma was fond of a pretty car. And fast ones, too, which had surprised her. Her current used Volvo was depressingly utilitarian, a box with Swedish safety engineering.
But she wouldn’t be able to tell Elodie any of that, either. Like Emma, Elodie was frozen in time, but with one crucial difference: she was no longer alive.
Someone had given her something to see if she would die. Same as the other girls. Yes, Emma had f igured out the pattern, but she had yet to f igure out how to stop it. How to keep dead girls from turning up. No one would be safe until she did. Including her, although she worried less about that these days than she used to.
They were still after her, the Church of Light. They would never stop, so long as they had their zealots. More than once since she’d landed in Dallas, Emma had pondered calling Pete. But she hadn’t. He already knew more than it was safe for him to know. Better go it