One second she was there; the next she was gone.

Without realizing it, I’ve been holding on to the car as if it will help me keep on my feet. To my surprise, Kennedy reaches out and grips my hand. Her fingers are icy.

“I didn’t know.” Even though she’s whispering, this is it: the high note, the crescendo. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.”

Her eyes are huge and dark, mirrors of the sky. For a second we stand there, only inches apart, staring at each other, and I know that in some way, we understand each other.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I say, because I know that this is what she wants—or needs—me to tell her.

She withdraws her hand, sighing a little, like someone who’s been walking all day and finally gets to sit.

“Hey!”

I whip around and freeze. Andre has just pushed out of the front doors. Backlit, he seems to be made wholly of shadow. “Hey, you!”

“Shit.” Kennedy twists around in her seat. “Go,” she says to me, her voice low, urgent. Then the window zips up and she guns it, her tires skidding a little on the gravel. I have to jump backward to keep from getting crushed; I bang my shin on a license plate, feel a dull nip of pain in my leg.

“Hey, you. Stop!”

Panic makes me slow. I skid across the lot, regretting my sandals now. My body feels unwieldy, bloated and foreign, like in those nightmares where you try to run and find you haven’t gone anywhere.

Andre is fast. I can hear his footsteps pounding on the gravel as he ricochets between parked cars.

I reach the car at last and hurl myself inside. My fingers are shaking so badly it takes me three tries to get the keys in the ignition. But I do, finally, and wrench the gear into reverse.

“Stop.” Andre slams up against my window, palms flat, face contorted with rage, and I scream. I punch down on the gas, whipping away from him even as he drums a fist against my hood. “Stop, damn it!”

I throw the gear into drive, cutting the wheel to the left, my palms slick with sweat even though my whole body is freezing. Little whimpers are working their way out of my throat, spasms of sound. He makes a final lunge at me, as if to throw himself in front of the car, but I’m already pulling away, bumping onto Route 101 and flooring it, watching the speedometer slowly tick upward.

Come on come on come on.

I half expect him to appear again on the road. But I check the rearview mirror and see nothing but empty highway; and then the road curves and bears me away from Beamer’s, away from Andre, toward home.

JULY 30

Nick

12:35 a.m.

I exit the highway in Springfield, where Dara and I used to take music lessons before our parents realized we had less than no talent, and zigzag through the streets, still paranoid that Andre might be pursuing me. Finally I park in the lot behind an all-night McDonald’s, reassured by the motion of the employees behind the counters, and the sight of a young couple eating burgers in a booth by the window, laughing.

I pull out my phone and do a quick search of the Madeline Snow case.

The most recent results pop up first, a stream of new blog posts, comments, and articles.

What Does the Snow Family Know? The first article I click on was posted to the Blotter only a few hours ago, at 10:00 p.m.

New questions plague the Madeline Snow investigation, it reads.

Police have recently turned up evidence that Sarah Snow’s statement about the night of her sister’s disappearance may be flawed, or even fabricated. According to the Snows’ neighbor, Susan Hardwell, Sarah Snow didn’t return home until nearly five o’clock that morning. When she did, she was obviously intoxicated.

“She drove right up on my lawn,” Hardwell told me, indicating an area of churned-up grass by the mailbox. “That girl’s been trouble for years. Not like the little one. Madeline was an angel.”

So where was Sarah all that time? And why did she lie?

I click out of the article, wipe my palms against my shorts. It fits with what Kennedy told me about Sarah: she was drinking the night her sister disappeared, maybe at one of Andre’s mysterious “parties.” I keep scrolling through the results and pull up an article about Nicholas Sanderson, the man who’d briefly been questioned about Madeline’s disappearance and then quickly exonerated, not totally sure what I’m looking for, but full of a vague, buzzing sense that I’m getting closer, circling around an enormous truth, bumping into it without fully grasping its shape.

I can barely hold my phone still. My hands are still shaking. I read half an article before realizing I’ve been processing only one out of every few words.

Police never formally arrested Mr. Sanderson, nor did they give a reason for his questioning or subsequent release.

Mr. Sanderson’s wife had no comment. . . .

“. . . but we’re confident that we’ll soon reach a breakthrough in the case,” stated Chief Lieutenant Frank Hernandez of the Springfield PD.

Beneath the article are twenty-two comments. Let’s hope so, reads the first one, presumably in response to Lieutenant Hernandez’s last statement.

The pigs are worse than useless. Not worth the tax dollars spent on their pensions, wrote someone named Freebird337.

Someone else had commented on this comment: People like you make me want to get my gun, and if there are no cops to catch me, maybe I will.

And below that, Anonymous had written: he likes young girls

I stare at those four words over and over: he likes young girls. No capitalizations, no punctuation, as if whoever sat down to type had to do it as quickly as possible. There’s a sick, twisting feeling in my stomach, and I suddenly realize I’m sweating. I punch on the AC, too scared to roll down the windows, imagining that if I do, a dark hand might come out of nowhere, reaching in to choke me with a monster grip.