Someone has been here. In the past few hours.
I look at Robert. His face is completely calm. He walks past me and down the steps, stops by one of the marks, and squats down for a closer look.
“What is it?” Emmy asks, giving me a start.
Clearly she wasn’t so sound asleep after all. She’s standing in the doorway behind me, looking at Robert. It seems to take her a few seconds longer than us to register what we’re looking at, but then her eyes widen, and some of the color drains from her cheeks.
Without a word, she walks out and down the steps, too. I hastily look up and out at the countryside around us. All I can see are empty houses and swaying greenery revived by the night’s rainfall, but that doesn’t make me any calmer. One thousand empty windows stare back at me on every side. I look left and right, try to catch some sort of movement, spot something out of the corner of my eye, but everything is quiet and still.
Meanwhile, Emmy has squatted down next to a print, which she studies intently. She reaches over and picks something out of the mud. It looks like a small, light pebble.
“Chalk,” she says quietly.
“What?”
I’m barely listening to her, so preoccupied I am with our surroundings. My paranoia is making everything both slow down and speed up at the same time.
“It’s a piece of chalk,” she says. She lifts it up at me.
“It must have gotten caught in the sole of her shoe,” I say.
My lips start to tingle.
“It’s from the school,” I continue. “There was crushed chalk on the floor in the classrooms.”
“Do you think it was…?” Emmy asks.
“If it was Tone we heard last night over the walkie-talkie,” I say, interrupting her, “then she must have gone back to the school. It’s where she lost it, when she went through the step.”
I look out over Silvertjärn. From up here it looks almost like a normal village in bloom. If you squint, that is.
“It’s where she hurt herself,” I go on. “And where her mom was found. It wouldn’t be so strange for her to feel a pull back there.”
“Back where?”
Max hasn’t come out onto the steps, but stands half in shadow.
“Tone was here,” I say. “Last night. I think she’s in the school.”
“We don’t know it was Tone,” says Emmy. “It could have been one of us. It could just as easily have come from your shoe, Alice.”
“But that wouldn’t explain why there are crumbs of chalk in the prints,” I say, hearing the impatience shining through my own voice.
“And even if she was in the school, we can’t be sure she’s still there,” Emmy says.
“But it’s the best lead we have,” I say, looking at the others. “We have to at least try.”
“This changes nothing,” says Emmy. “I know it might feel like it, but it doesn’t. Not really. We voted that it’s safest to stay here.”
I look at the others. Robert’s lips are pinched. Max’s eyes don’t meet mine.
She’s right. They all are. I can feel it in my bones, that fear, like a sour taste on my tongue. I want nothing more than to stay there, to give in to their reason. I’ve seen the movies, too—I know what happens to the person who leaves safety to head out into the dark forest, the haunted psychiatric ward, the abandoned school.
But what those movies don’t show is the guilt surging like a current through my skin; how it feels to know someone you care about is already there, alone and vulnerable and terrified.
What the moviegoers don’t see is that the shame of staying can weigh heavier than the fear of going.
“Then I’ll go alone,” I say.
The sun stings my eyes. I turn around and walk past Max, back into the church.
NOW
It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the church, and I hit my thigh on one of the pews we’ve shoved to one side. I curse under my breath—ugly, explosive words I wouldn’t normally use—but hobble on into the chapel.
It’s warm in there. I close the door behind me, sit down on one of the chairs, and bury my face in my hands. Try to take slow, deep breaths. In and out.
Can I do this?
I have to. Even though the stress is making me sick. Even though the sound of that walkie-talkie is echoing through my head, off the inside of my skull. That inhuman, many-edged roar.
It must have been Tone. Just like it must have been Tone in the van—if there really was anyone there. Just because it didn’t sound like the Tone I know, doesn’t mean it isn’t her. The Tone I know probably isn’t the same person who’s hiding out there now.
But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. I have to go. If there’s a chance she’ll be there I have to look.
When the door opens, I say quietly:
“Do you want to come with me?”
I’m expecting Max’s voice. I’m expecting a no. It’s only when I hear nothing that I look up.
Emmy has already closed the door behind her. Her eyes are looking at the window, out onto the graveyard. The sunlight plays over her face, washing away the tiredness and dirt.
“You can’t stop me,” I say, even though some small part of me really hopes she can.
“Oh no,” she says. “I probably could. If I tried.”
She sounds so naturally confident that it grates on me like flint on steel, lights a spark that turns fear to anger.
“I don’t get how you can just sit here,” I say to her. “If you hadn’t taken off this would never have happened—you do see that, right? If you’d been there, like you said you would, she would never—never—”
“I know,” Emmy cuts me off. “OK? I know. I know.”
This stuns me into silence.
“You’re acting like you’re the only one here who cares about Tone,” she says, looking straight at me for the first time,
