than she could count, but it had kept them safe. Or her, at least.
So she’d enrolled herself at Manley Senior High. A small indulgence as the world headed toward another war. A mistake in many ways, although it would save her just as her mistake in taking Charlie back to the island had saved her years ago.
Eddie Higgins’s body was discovered early one morning in the middle of October, just as the weather turned crisp and the waves of Lake Michigan began slapping harder at the shore, hinting at the winter yet to come. He had been strangled and dumped on the steps of the monument at Logan Square, a tall marble column with an eagle on top.
It was all everyone could talk about for days.
“It’s so awful,” her classmate Sylvie Parsons said to her in civics the day after Eddie’s body had been found. “Poor kid.”
Emma understood awful things.
“Bastards do what bastards do,” she’d responded, and Sylvie, who favored dark-red lipstick and bolero jackets over narrow-waist dresses and cursed loudly and creatively when she felt like it, shivered with delight and feigned shock.
Emma was—had been—in English class with Eddie. He was a senior at seventeen, handsome, slender, with dark, unruly hair. Her breath had caught in her throat the f irst day she walked into the classroom. Sitting there by the window, at f irst glance, he looked like Charlie. On closer inspection, he was taller, his nose was not as knife straight, and his skin was lighter and slightly pocked across the cheeks. And when he answered questions, his voice was higher-pitched. His thoughts were not particularly thoughtful.
And then he was dead, for no reason anyone could think of other than that horrible things sometimes happened, and this time a horrible thing had happened to a boy named Eddie Higgins. None of which would have been Emma’s particular concern except for what happened as she and Sylvie parted ways by the library. Sylvie headed toward the science classes, disappearing around the corner just as a man approached. He wore a brown suit with wide shoulders and cuffed trousers, a dark fedora angled low on his head, and a visitor’s badge pinned to his lapel.
“We’re interviewing Eddie’s classmates,” he said, homing in on Emma. “I’m with the police. Can I ask you a few questions?”
Her heart had raced for a few beats. Then she’d told herself to calm down.
“You’re Emma,” the man in the suit said, scribbling something on a notepad. “Emma O’Neill, correct?”
Now her heart was thundering. Still, she kept her wits about her enough to study him and tried to remember every detail of his face—square jaw and light gray eyes and silver-streaked hair. He didn’t look unusual or special, just the type of man who’d blend into a crowd.
“Did Eddie have any enemies?” he asked.
“I didn’t really know him,” Emma said, surprised that her voice sounded so even, so normal.
He asked some other things, but she wasn’t listening. Instead, she was rapidly calculating how long it would take her to collect her things from the rooming house where she was staying and if there was anything there worth collecting at all.
“I have study hall now,” she said. “Can I go?”
He nodded, and she walked off, past the library, and down the hall. Then she bolted around the corner and out a back door. Once outside, she broke into a panicked sprint. Because Emma had not registered at Manley Senior High School as Emma O’Neill. She had registered—in another frivolous but ultimately life-saving choice—as Emma Ryan.
Eddie’s murder and his resemblance to Charlie had to be connected. They were hunting him, too. Which meant that unlike poor Eddie, he was still alive. Maybe. Probably. Hopefully. She wouldn’t know, couldn’t know, unless and until she saw him with her own eyes. Emma knew only this: they had found her. It would be a long while before she made that mistake again.
But a new Emma did surface. One who refused to mind her own business even if it put her in danger. Tragedy had given her fuller purpose, though it might take her a while (maybe forever) to understand what that purpose was. She’d learned something else, too: Even if people helped you, came on strong and kind, that didn’t mean they weren’t out for something, weren’t looking to get around you, weren’t perfectly willing to do to you—or to those you cared about—whatever they needed.
Like Glen Walters. Like his generations of followers.
Like Kingsley Lloyd, even. He’d wanted something. But