When the Bones Sing
Author: Ginny Myers Sain
Date: 2025-03-04 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Mystery; Young Adult; Fantasy; Paranormal; Thriller
Description: From New York Times bestselling author of Dark and Shallow Lies comes a new southern gothic supernatural thriller about a teen girl in a small Ozark town who can hear the bones of the dead. For fans of House of Hollow and She Is a Haunting. The past three years have been tough for Lucifer’s Creek, Arkansas, a small town quietly tucked away in the Ozark mountains. More than two dozen people have disappeared on the local hiking trails; there one moment, gone the next, not a trace left behind, until their buried bodies are discovered.17-year-old Dovie doesn’t believe in magic even though she come
Publisher: Penguin

Also by Ginny Myers Sain

Dark and Shallow Lies

Secrets So Deep

One Last Breath

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

1745 Broadway, New York, New York 10019

First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2025

Copyright © 2025 by Ginny Myers Sain

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sain, Ginny Myers, author.

Title: When the bones sing / Ginny Myers Sain.

Description: New York : G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2025. | Audience term: Teenagers | Audience: Ages 14 years and up. |

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Dovie, who can hear the bones of the dead, and her best friend Lo, who believes he is haunted by the ghosts of murdered hikers, must uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearances in their Ozark mountain town before anyone else is killed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024040127 (print) | LCCN 2024040128 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593625484 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593625491 (epub)

Subjects: CYAC: Ability—Fiction. | Bones—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories. | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S2456 Wh 2025 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.S2456 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024040127

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024040128

Ebook ISBN 9780593625491

Cover photo illustration and design by Kristie Radwilowicz

Design by Rebecca Aidlin, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

pid_prh_7.1a_150437961_c0_r0

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

_150437961_

For my son, Paul, a gentle Arkansas boy who was born believing in magic.

And for my nana, Cecil Eaton Hoover, who walked the hills of eastern Oklahoma as a girl, and who taught me a version of the White Rose song.

I wish they could have known each other.

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

One

The first time I pulled a skeleton from the ground, I wasn’t even four years old. I’d wandered away from a church picnic while Daddy sat in the shade turning the crank on our old ice cream maker and mopping sweat from his forehead with a faded red bandana. Nana found me on my hands and knees just inside the tree line, chubby fingers plunged deep into the rich, black dirt. Dovie girl, she had scolded. You can’t be takin’ off like that. It’s danger— She froze when she saw me holding a pale finger bone out to her like a prize in an Easter egg hunt. Then her eyes caught fire and she opened up wide enough for me to see clear down her throat when she threw her head back and hollered, “Del! Come look what Dovie’s got! Come see what our girl can do!”

Daddy left the ice cream to melt and scooped me up quick as summer lightning. In one move, his strong hands knocked the bone from my fingers and the damp earth from the front of my dress, and I wailed as he carried me back home.

“Like her mama, God help her,” my Sunday School teacher whispered as we passed. “And her grandmother.” The words wormed their way into my ear, even over the sound of my own shrieking.

“Cryin’ for the dead,” one of the old men added. There were always a handful of them gathered like crows outside the little coffee shop on Mud Street. And the rest agreed like a Greek chorus.

But they were all wrong. I wasn’t worked up over whoever that finger belonged to. I didn’t understand enough back then to weep for someone who was only bones. Somebody I didn’t know, besides.

I was crying because I knew I wasn’t gonna get any of that strawberry ice cream Daddy had been churning. And I’d had my mouth set for it so bad.

I must have been dreaming about that day, because I wake up craving the taste of fresh strawberries cold on my tongue. But as soon as I sit up in bed, I know what it was that pulled me out of my dreams, and it wasn’t the memory of ice cream I didn’t get thirteen years ago.

My teeth are chattering louder than the shuddering air conditioner propped up in the attic window. My whole body is humming. Vibrating at a familiar frequency.

I can feel the dead deep in my bones.

Not all of them. Just one particular soul tonight.

Someone is pissed as hell, and he’s strumming my ribs like a harp. Sliding his fingers up and down my spine like my backbone is the neck of a guitar.

Or a banjo.

That trembling is coming from somewhere outside. It’s seeping into my attic bedroom and soaking into my skin. I throw off Nana’s thick quilt and tiptoe across the creaking wood floor. I stand in the pitch black, willing myself not to peek.

Not to feel what I know I’m feeling.

But the music of the bones gets too loud, and I part the dusty lace curtains to peek out over the air conditioner at the sliver of a moon hanging low above a row of dogwood trees at the dark edge of town.

Out toward the woods beyond our house. Toward the hills.

And the dead.

Down below me, on the front steps, someone clicks on a flashlight and shines it up in my direction. The light bounces off the window glass, and I shield my eyes from the sudden glare.

“She’s up,” Sheriff shouts. “Time to move.” He reaches over to shake the deputy who’s dozing beside him, slouched against our porch railing like an old hound dog at the end of a long hunt. They’ve been posted up out there every night for two months.

Since the latest hiker went missing.

Nana is already knocking on my bedroom door. “Dovie?” She doesn’t bother to keep her voice down, which tells me Daddy must not be home. “Can you feel it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “The bones are playin’ their song.”

It’s just as well Daddy’s working late at the gallery. He never bothers to see me off to do this dark business in the dead of night, anyway. He washed his hands of all that years ago.

About the same time we stopped going to church.

Nana pushes the door open and light spills into my room. “This is a loud one.” Her voice is hushed, and her eyes are closed, like she’s tuning the station on a radio nobody else can hear. “I don’t feel it so strong anymore, but this one woke me up.”

I pull on a pair of shorts and tug a University of Arkansas sweatshirt over my tank top. It’s mid-July—the stickiest, most miserable part of summer in the Ozarks—but these woods get cool at night. Sometimes. When a breeze is sliding through the pines.

And the bones are singing.

I slip on a pair of tennis shoes and follow Nana downstairs. She stops in the kitchen to pour fresh coffee into a thermos for the sheriff and his man. Then she pushes my stringy dark hair back out of my face. “We gotta do what we’re born to do, Dovie,” she tells me.

She knows how much I hate these midnight hikes. The close press of the black forest.

The way Sheriff watches me.

How, at the end of it, I’m left with nothing but this terrible empty ache and dirt under my broken fingernails.

Outside on the front porch, Nana hands the thermos to the sheriff. Her long hair is loose tonight, flowing down her back like a silver river in the moonlight. He smiles and says, “Thank ya much, Miss Fern.”

“Bit of a chill in the air tonight, ain’t there, ma’am?” the deputy adds. His voice is still thick with sleep.

I don’t tell Nana that they won’t drink a drop of her coffee. They never do. Nobody in Lucifer’s Creek would dare let a drop of anything brewed up by Fern Clover cross their lips. I’m sure she knows the sheriff’ll pour it out later, once dawn is tearing at the edges of the sky. Once we’re done with what we’ve got to do.

What I’ve got to do.

Then he’ll leave the empty thermos on the front steps for next time. Because it’s part of the ritual.

Nana and me used to go into the woods together on these kinds of nights, but that was years ago. She’s too old for that now. Her knees can’t handle the steep climbs, and she doesn’t hear the bones as clear as she used to. So she hugs me goodbye and I follow Sheriff and the deputy down the uneven stone path in front of our house and out onto Mud Street.

When I turn and start trudging toward the uphill end of town, Sheriff and Deputy What’s-His-Face step aside to let me lead. They might be the ones with badges and guns, but I’m the one with some kind of magnet buried deep inside me. A strange little seed planted there by DNA handed down from Nana to Mama, and then on to me.

The closer we get to the edge of town, the stronger I feel that mournful hum rattling through me. Kind of a soundless song. Nana was right—the bones are loud tonight. This one is desperate to be found. He’s all jagged staccato notes and the crash of dissonant chords. Cymbals. A violin string twisted tight enough to snap. I shudder and pull the sleeves of my sweatshirt down over my hands, even though a river of sweat is already snaking its way down my back.

And I keep walking.

Lucifer’s Creek is just a speck of a town. It’s been in this spot for almost two hundred years, but Daddy says one real good sneeze would blow it clean away. The only way in is an old logging road that winds its way fifteen miles northeast through the thick national forest from Rogers, the nearest town of any real size. The bumpy ride takes just over an hour, unless it’s been raining so hard the road is washed out. In which case, it’s a total no-go.

Less than five hundred of us call this place home. Creek people don’t count the hill folk living out in the boonies, beyond our neatly swept sidewalks and flowerpots.

And we also don’t count all the city-dwellers who have vacation cabins tucked away in these parts. They come up here weekends during deer season or elk season, or in the fall to see the leaves, all decked out in their fancy outdoor gear. But they spend more time drinking expensive beer and lounging in their hot tubs trying to impress each other with bullshit stories than anything else. Then, come Sunday evening, they head home to their big, important jobs at law firms and banks in Little Rock. Or St. Louis.

The richest of them don’t even have to stop at the brewery in Rogers to pick up their own craft beer, and they hardly feel the bumps at all as they get driven up the old logging road in shiny black Hummers with Moonlight Crag Lodge splashed across the side in bright yellow letters. Those lucky bastards have it made. They get the best of everything while they’re here.

In our hills.

But those of us who call the Creek home full time aren’t rich. Not by a long shot. We scratch out a living off the hikers and hipsters, and it’s barely enough to keep us clothed and fed in a good year.

Tonight, the shops are all deserted, and I don’t even see anyone peeking out from the houses that we pass. It’s so still you’d swear the population of Lucifer’s Creek, Arkansas, was just three.

Me. The sheriff.

And the deputy.

This one is new on the job. The last one only made it a year. Too many damn bodies. That’s what he’d scrawled on a sticky note meant to pass as a resignation letter before he hightailed it back to Fort Smith.

I can’t say anybody blamed him for taking off. Twenty-three bodies in three years would be enough to send anyone running. At least anyone with good sense.

This new guy is only a few years older than I am, and he’s a local. Now that I see him in the moonlight, I recognize his face from school.

We graduate maybe five or six seniors a year, so you’d think I’d remember his name, but despite living right in the middle of town, I don’t pay much attention to the Creek kids. And they don’t like me or my family. I’ve just finished my junior year, and there are some of them I’ve sat right beside in our tiny little schoolhouse since kindergarten and never exchanged a word with.

We continue up Mud Street, and as we start across the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek, the mountain stream that gives this town its unfortunate name, the rotten-egg odor of sulfur drifts up from beneath us, thick in the humid air. This whole area smells like someone without any manners left the doorway to hell standing wide open, but those of us who’ve lived our whole lives here have gotten used to it.

The slow-moving water flowing under the bridge looks black tonight. Slick as obsidian in the moonshine. It can rage like a monster in the spring, when the rains come hard and heavy, but this time of year it’s meek and harmless. Even at its widest point, you could jump across it if you got a running start.

“The kid’s name is Riley,” the sheriff tells me as we leave the old wooden bridge behind, and I repeat the name under my breath, holding it like a stone in my mouth. Feeling the weight of it. “Riley Alden. Age twenty-one. He come over with a church group from Tulsa.” We reach the end of Mud Street and peer into the dark beyond, teetering on the edge where town ends and the woods begin. “Made the first part of the trek just fine, then, comin’ out of Lucifer’s Creek, his buddies lost sight of him around a bend in the trail. Swore he was right up ahead of ’em.” Sheriff sighs and shifts that thermos of coffee he won’t drink from one hand to the other. “That was the middle of May. Ain’t nobody seen hide nor hair of him since.”

I don’t say anything. I’ve heard this before. Sheriff told me all of it the morning he turned up at our front door to warn me that another hiker had gone missing off the Aux-Arc Trail. Stick close to home, Miss Dove, he’d mumbled without looking me in the eye. It pisses him off that I can do what he can’t. We’ll most likely be needin’ you.

“Dovie’ll find him, won’t you?” The young deputy kicks at the ground and raises a cautious eye in my direction. “She always does.” I notice the freckles scattered across his forehead. “She’s a human cadaver dog.” One corner of his mouth twitches up. Like he thinks that’s real funny. “That what the kids at school call her, ain’t it, Dovie?”

Jonah. That’s his name. Jonah Cardell. He’s almost smiling at me.

“Yeah,” I say. “I can feel Riley real strong. We’ll find him tonight, sure.”

That’s enough to spook Jonah, I guess, because he snatches his eyes away from my face and looks back out toward the trees while we stand there smack in the middle of Mud Street.

Stalling.

On our left is the biggest building in town, Lucifer’s Creek Community Church, where everyone but Daddy and Nana and me gathers on Sundays to sing hymns and complain about the weather, and directly across the street from that, on our right hand side, is my daddy’s stained glass gallery, where he spends as much time as he can every day of the week. He works late most nights too, until two or three o’clock in the morning, and when he comes home, his eyes are strained red and his fingers are covered with tiny cuts.

Tonight he must be working in the back room, and I’m grateful he isn’t watching me from the other side of the window glass.

There are no streetlights in Lucifer’s Creek, so the handful of little shops and galleries scattered along Mud Street leave their lights on at night, to give the town a bit of a glow. So it feels friendlier for the hikers who amble back and forth between the Morning Glory Bed and Breakfast down here and the pub tucked away on the other end of town.

Right now the light from Daddy’s gallery window is filtered through a collection of delicate stained glass birds that hang just inside. Cardinals and blue jays. Woodpeckers. Robins. Bright yellow goldfinches. And one midnight-black crow that I’ve always loved best, but nobody has ever bought. The display has us lit up in a rainbow-colored circle of protection, and I’m not ready to leave that warmth and head into the forest. But Sheriff coughs. Shuffles a little. So I know it’s time.

I can’t make my feet move, though.

“Dovie,” Sheriff says, and his voice has a gentle sound to it. Like he’s almost sorry he’s gotta make me do this. “It ain’t gonna get any better. Not till we find him.”

I know he’s right. We can stand here forever, but Riley Alden isn’t going to get any less dead. Now that his bones have started humming, they won’t let me rest until I pluck them one by one from the ground.

So I sigh and dig a rubber band out of my pocket. I pull my hair back into a tight ponytail, to keep it from catching in the undergrowth. Then I take a deep breath.

“All right,” I say. “Let’s go find us a body.”

Two

I start across the thin strip of grass that separates the edge of town from the edge of the forest, and Sheriff and Jonah the Deputy fall in right behind me.

Just before we step into the trees, I glance up toward the highest point on the tallest mountain in these parts, up toward Moonlight Crag. Even when the hills and the woods around town seem black as pitch, that pale rock outcropping glows bright over the valley. And behind it, the three-story glass windows of the lodge blaze with a warm yellow light that makes the dark down here seem less scary.

For a minute, I let myself dream about being all snuggled up in one of those fancy rooms with their high thread count sheets and their memory foam mattresses—a bowl of Swiss chocolates on the nightstand beside me and a bottle of French champagne chilling in the ice bucket—but then I pull my head out of my ass and get moving.

Because the dead boy’s getting louder.

More insistent.

And Sheriff’s right. The only cure for it is to find him.

Sheriff and Deputy Jonah both have their flashlights out, but the night still swallows us up once we find the trailhead and step into the trees to start our climb toward Riley’s temporary resting place.

The Aux-Arc Trail is one of the most popular hiking paths in the country. The beginning, over in eastern Oklahoma, isn’t that rough, but then it winds and twists its way across northern Arkansas like a copperhead, skirting deep lakes and climbing up and up and up the whole time before finally snaking into Missouri, where it ends just a few miles shy of the corny country music jamborees, neon-lit mini golf courses, and all-you-can-stuff-yourself-with breakfast buffets of Branson. And the last half of the trail is a doozy.

Most people who hit the AAT are out-and-back day-trippers, but every year a few thousand or so serious thru-hikers do the whole thing. The very best of them can make the full trek in just under three weeks, but that’s still an awful long time sleeping rough in the woods, eating shitty rations, and washing in streams.

Lucky for them, Lucifer’s Creek sits right at the midpoint of the two-hundred-mile thru-hike, the only town they’ll encounter along the way. Our one-and-only street, Mud Street, is actually designated as part of the trail. The Ozark Mountains spit hikers out west of town, at mile marker 101, and they’re always fall-on-their-knees grateful to see the little coffee shop. Not to mention Morning Glory Bed and Breakfast, with its hot showers and real pillows. And Bite-Size, the tiny diner serving up heaps of fresh scrambled eggs and bacon. Mostly, though, they make a beeline for Donny Blue’s, a hole-in-the-wall Irish pub with real live fiddle players and frosty pint glasses.

So they spend a couple of nights enjoying all that and browsing the half-dozen or so antique shops and folk art galleries that take up the rest of Mud Street, picking out treasures to have mailed back home. Daddy’s stained glass birds. Handmade quilts and wreaths crafted from dried wildflowers. Jams and jellies and local honey. Beautiful things to remember their adventure by. As if the blister scars won’t be enough. Then they step off this end of town, the east side, and head up even higher into these mountains for the last hundred miles of their journey.

We don’t have nearly that far to go tonight, and I’m grateful, because with every step, that unheard music of the dead gets more violent, until it’s swirling inside me like the climax of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

A feeling that feels like music. That’s the way I described it to Nana when I was little. Like all my bones are humming.

She nodded and kept wrestling my messy, dark hair into neat braids. Like somebody’s playin’ your bones like a flute, she told me. That’s the way it used to feel to me and your mama.

And that’s it, exactly. Not the sound of the flute. Just the vibration of the notes. That relentless, thrumming energy from somewhere up on the dark mountain is like a rope dragging me uphill.

Pulling me toward Riley Alden.

Or whatever’s left of him after almost two months in this heat.

We’ve been hiking maybe thirty minutes, and my calves are starting to burn. I hear Sheriff and Jonah huffing and puffing behind me, but there’s no way in hell they’re gonna tell me to slow down. Their delicate man-egos won’t let them admit they can’t keep up with a seventeen-year-old girl.

The trail is getting really steep now, and my tennis shoes slip on a loose rock. “Shit.” I reach out and grab onto a scraggly branch to keep myself from going down hard, but my palm snags on the thorny brambles that have taken over the pitiful tree. I hiss like a pissed-off cottonmouth and rub blood on my sweatshirt front. “Goddammit.”

“You kiss your mama with that mouth?” Deputy Jonah says, and the grin on his face makes it clear he’s real proud of himself, until Sheriff and I both glare at him. “Aw, dang,” he mutters. “Sorry. Shit. I didn’t think—”

“How much farther you reckon, Dove?” Sheriff takes off his hat to mop sweat from his forehead with a yellowed handkerchief. Underneath, wet hair is plastered to his scalp like a helmet.

I stop for a minute, letting the melody of the bones wash over me like water over rocks in a stream. Thanks to Jonah and his big mouth, I’m trying not to think about Mama. How she just took off one day and left me on my own here, like I never mattered to her at all.

It’s okay, though. I’m an expert at not thinking about Mama.

I push her out of my head, and Riley comes rushing back in to fill the empty space. He barrels into me with the force of an avalanche rolling down a mountain. Every bone song is different, but Riley’s is all crashing cymbals and screeching strings. “Not far,” I tell them, and I point up the hill a bit. “He’s lyin’ that direction. Off the trail a ways. To the right.”

Sheriff sighs and shoves his handkerchief back in his pocket. The hat goes back on his head. “Best keep movin’, then.” I turn to start hiking again, but not before I catch him giving his mouthy deputy a look that clearly means Keep your big trap shut from here on out.

We’re really climbing now, and that fire is already back to burning in my calves. But at least I can breathe a little better. That minute or two of pause did my lungs some good.

We’re getting really close to Riley, and I’m trying to find a place to exit the trail and head into the woods. I peer into the flashlight-lit tangle of trees and vines, looking for a path through the undergrowth. But there isn’t one.

This is the worst part of these treks. It’s not so bad dragging myself up the hiking trail. The Aux-Arc is well maintained. Pretty easy to travel. But once you step off into the woods, it’s like being pulled at by a million thorny fingers. Grabbed and taunted. Pinched and poked. Ripped apart.

There’s tree roots to trip you up and jagged rocks to rip your palms to shreds when you fall, not to mention deep ravines that open up wide out of nowhere like yawning mouths, leaving you skittering backward right at the edge, almost before you even see the drop-off.

Sheriff pulls a machete out of the sheath he keeps strapped to his thigh. He’ll go first for now, hacking our way in according to my directions.

He’s about to lift his blade for the first swing when a piercing sound slices through the heavy night air. It’s almost like the bugle of an elk mixed with the scream of a peacock. Strangled and high-pitched.

Animal in the beginning.

Too human for comfort at the end.

We glance around and the sound comes again, closer this time. It cuts into us like we’re made of butter, and we freeze as some primal instinct rises up from our collective memory. Don’t move, it whispers. Even Jonah is still for the first time all night.

We wait, not breathing, but the cry doesn’t come again.

Sheriff raises his machete to take a swipe at the vines blocking our way. “Elk,” he tells us. “Or coyote, maybe.” And the spell is broken. “Come on,” he mumbles as we step off the trail and into the close embrace of the trees. “The boy’s family is waitin’ for word.”

Riley Alden isn’t the first hiker to go missing in this part of the Arkansas Ozarks. Not even close. And I’d bet a million dollars he won’t be the last. People get lost. They have accidents. I’ve been finding bodies in these woods since before I knew my shapes and colors. It wasn’t a regular thing, though. Not back then.

Not like now.

Everything changed three years ago when I found the first hiker. Emberlynn Kemper out of Memphis. Her bone song had been frantic. Panicked and erratic. A shrill wail that jumped and skittered like a terrified rabbit behind my rib cage. She’d stepped off the trail to pee and never rejoined her girlfriend. Nobody saw her again until I found her planted shallow in the black earth at the base of a towering pine tree, all covered up with needles thick as one of Nana’s quilts.

Over the three years since, the knocks on our door have come steady. Six, sometimes seven a year. Sheriff can’t find the bodies. Even the teams they drag in from the state police don’t turn up a damn thing.

But I always do, because sooner or later, their bones will start to sing. Sometimes it takes a while for that song to get loud enough to hear.

A few weeks. A month.

Two, even, for some of them. Like Riley.

He’ll be number twenty-four for me since this business with the hikers started. Since Emberlynn Kemper. I chart the number on a yellow legal pad tucked away in my desk drawer. Twenty-three little slash marks in red ink. I used to remember the names of all the murdered hikers, but I gave up on that a while back. Because they just keep coming.

That strangled noise comes again, sharp on the night wind.

“The Ozark Howler’s on the prowl,” Jonah the Deputy whispers in my ear. Then he lets out a long, low howl of his own before he grins at his own joke. I don’t remember him being such a cut-up in school.

“Shut the fuck up,” I hiss. “That’s a bunch of bullshit and you know it.” The sound of his voice is like barbed wire against my eardrums. “Have a little respect for the dead.”

He’s forgetting that this is a recovery mission.

Jonah mumbles something I don’t catch, then he shrinks back and lets me move on ahead of him. It strikes me that he’s probably nervous about being out here in these woods way past midnight. Not with the made-up Ozark Howler.

But with me.

The real-life Human Cadaver Dog of Lucifer’s Creek.

Sheriff looks back to make sure we’re coming, and Jonah puffs up like a bullfrog, trying to act all tough. Like I didn’t just hand him his ass on a plate. I roll my eyes and reach up to push the next branch aside.

It’s slow going, moving through the thick tangle, especially in the dark. Thorny blackberry brambles demand blood sacrifices under the moon, and climbing milkweed seems intent on strangling the life out of us. I walk face-first into more than one enormous spiderweb.

It takes an hour or so of fighting our way, inch by inch, before we come to the spot, and by then we’re all covered with deep scratches and bugbites and grime, not to mention so sweat-soaked it looks like we stopped for a midnight dip in Lucifer’s Creek.

“This is it,” I tell them when we finally reach a little clearing. I can barely spit the words out. My teeth are knocking together hard enough to make my heart hurt, and my hands are trembling something awful. The soundless music of the dead is reverberating off the trees and echoing off the hillside so loud that it just about shakes me apart. It feels like my own skull might pop off any minute and go rolling, and I’ll have to chase it across the grass.

“You okay?” Sheriff asks me, and I nod, because I know he doesn’t want to hear the truth. And it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m used to this misery.

There’s a big rock jutting out of the ground. Wild mountain violets grow from a crack in its center. I move around the boulder, slow and careful, until I find a place to one side where the earth looks different. Uneven and lumpy.

The rattling inside me gets even more violent—more desperate—and I clench my jaw tight.

“Riley.” I drop to my knees and lay my quivering palms on the little mound to whisper the name like an incantation, even though what I do isn’t magic. “Riley Alden. Let’s get you home.”

“Amen,” the sheriff murmurs behind me. That’s his own kind of magic, I guess. But I’m not a believer in religion, either. That’s why you won’t find me Sundays enjoying the potluck lunches at Lucifer’s Creek Community Church. Not anymore. No matter how good the fried chicken and Jell-O salad are.

I’m an equal opportunity skeptic. I don’t buy any of it.

Not Bible stories.

And definitely not spells or magic words and charms.

Lo does. He made me a protective amulet once. Something to keep me safe on these midnight hikes. My initials stitched in blue thread onto a red felt heart. Even though I didn’t put any stock in it, I wore it on a string around my neck until it fell apart, and it always made me feel safe. Not because it was magic. Because it came from him.

But I don’t believe in Lo anymore, either.

He left me. Just like my mama did all those years ago.

The sheriff coughs and I wonder how long I’ve been staring down at the ground.

Time to get to work, I guess.

No shovels. I gotta do this part by hand. Fingers in the dirt. That’s the only way to feel it. To know I’m digging in exactly the right spot.

It takes me twenty solid minutes to unearth the remains of a torso inside a moldy Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt.

A mop of dirty-blond hair falling away from an exposed skull.

Deputy Jonah turns and vomits into the leaves when the stench hits him, and I can’t help but feel like he deserves it.

All I really notice is that the bones have stopped singing. Everything has gone all still, and the night sounds of the woods suddenly feel so loud.

I glance up at the sheriff and he’s watching me with the same mix of amazement and horror as always. “Good work, Dove,” he tells me. But I see the revulsion in his eyes and hear it in his voice.

He looks away from my face, at something behind me, and I glance back over my shoulder to see a single dim light burning in the distance, through the trees a ways, on up the steep hillside.

Suddenly I know exactly where we are. I used to play in this clearing when I was little. I hadn’t been paying attention before, with all the rattling going on in my head. Or maybe I just hadn’t recognized it in the dark.

“Could finally have us a witness,” Sheriff says. He jerks his head in the direction of the flickering light, and the tumbling-down cabin we all know is hidden in the shadows. “We’ll have to get up there come mornin’. Ask some questions.”

“Don’t waste your time.” The smart-ass tone of Deputy Jonah’s voice makes my palms itch to slap him. “Since Lowan took off, ain’t nobody up at the old Wilder place but Granny Pearl.” He laughs. It’s a cruel and dismissive sound, one I’m more than familiar with. “And she’s blind as a damn bat. Plus senile to boot.”

My head whips back around, and now I think I really will slap him.

“Watch that goddamn mouth,” Sheriff snaps. “I’m sick to death of your yappin’.” Jonah zips his lip real quick, and I have a moment of deep satisfaction before Sheriff adds, “And Lowan Wilder ain’t gone. Not no more.”

“Lo’s back?” I jerk my head up and the beam from Sheriff’s flashlight hits me square in the eyes. “When?” I can barely make my mouth work. “I didn’t—”

“Got back a few days ago,” Sheriff says, and he lowers his flashlight. But it doesn’t matter. I still can’t see. Everything in my whole world has gone black. I can’t even think how to respond. “I figured you’d heard.”

Lo came home.

Those are the only words I know, and they echo so loud inside my skull that I don’t even realize I still have the finger bone of a dead boy clutched tight in my hand.

Three

Nana is sitting on the porch waiting up for me when I get home, even though pink dawn is starting to show through jagged cracks in the sky. She opens the door and takes me by the hand to pull me inside, ignoring the dirt caked into my palm. Then she guides me upstairs and tells me she’s proud of me. “You done a good thing, Dovie. A service for a grievin’ family.” She turns on the shower before she steps out of the bathroom and eases the door closed behind her.

I strip naked and stand under the stream of hot water to let it wash the grime from my body. I’m not thinking about Riley Alden anymore, if I ever really was. I learned a long time ago not to dwell on the bones.

My job is to find them. That’s all.

Instead I’m thinking about Lo. That one singular phrase keeps repeating in my head.

Lo came home.

I don’t know why I’m shocked. Hardly anybody leaves this place for good. They try. But they don’t make it long in the world outside these hills. Then they come crawling back to this cozy little corner of the Ozarks where things move slower. Where life is uncomplicated. And people are safe.

Unless you’re a hiker on the AAT.

But Lo swore he’d never come home. He said it to my face that night almost two months ago. This is our forever goodbye, Dovie. And something in his eyes meant it. If there’s anything you gotta say to me, say it now.

But I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

The water’s gone cold, so I switch it off and reach for the fraying towel Nana left on the sink for me.

When I’m dried and dressed, I head downstairs. Nana’s in the kitchen cooking up bacon and eggs. She’s got her thick hair wrangled into a long, silver braid down the middle of her back now, the way she usually wears it.

Daddy’s place at the table is vacant. Nothing but an empty coffee cup and a crumpled-up napkin to show he was ever there.

“He went on back to the gallery,” Nana tells me as she reaches for a spatula to flip the eggs. “Has a new piece he’s workin’ on. Custom order.”

I figure that’s a lie. He just didn’t want to sit across the table from me this morning. Not after my adventures last night.

Nana puts a couple of pieces of bacon and a runny egg on my plate, then she slices up a big, juicy tomato plucked from our garden and shakes salt on it for me. I stare out the window at our old tomcat, Phantom, hunting bugs in the grass.

“Sleepy, Dovie girl?” Nana settles into her usual chair. She reaches out and smoothes my damp hair with one wrinkled hand. “This was a hard one, wasn’t it?” She dumps sugar in her chipped coffee cup and I listen to the familiar clinking of her spoon as she stirs. “You oughta try to eat,” she starts. “I was always starvin’. After. And your mama was. It takes a lot outta—”

“Did you know Lo was home?”

The spoon stills in Nana’s hand and the kitchen falls quiet. Suddenly she’s watching Phantom out the window too. The huge white cat pounces toward a grasshopper and misses. He’s too fat to catch much of anything these days.

I sit there waiting for her to answer.

“No,” she finally admits. She’s watching Phantom, but he’s rolled belly-up to nap in the sun. “I ain’t spoke to Pearl in years. You know that.” She starts stirring that coffee again. Clink, clink, clink. “You seen him yet?”

I shake my head because I don’t trust myself to talk without crying. I’m worn out from last night. Frazzled and cut all to ribbons from the brambles. But it’s my insides that feel torn and bloody. Not the deep scratches on my arms and legs.

When Nana gets up to refill her coffee, I slip out of the kitchen while her back is turned, and I’m pushing open the front door before she has a chance to ask where I’m going. I make my way down the stone path toward the gate, past the bright pink crepe myrtles my mama left us to remember her by, and head east on Mud Street.

It’s early—just after seven on a Saturday morning—but it should be a good day for hikers coming through, so people are already getting things opened up. I can feel eyes on me. Watching. Trying to work out where I’m going and what I’m up to.

Mrs. Pickering is sweeping the sidewalk in front of the tiny shop where she sells handmade jewelry, and she gets so caught up in staring at me that she trips on her own broom and practically falls on her face.

Just two doors down, outside the Mountain Spring antique store, the two old-maid sisters who run the place stop watering the lanky sunflowers in their whiskey barrel planters to whisper and glance in my direction.

But I just keep walking. I’m used to talk about me.

Down the block, there’s a cluster of hikers gathered outside the Bite-Size diner waiting their turn for one of the tiny tables inside. Judging by the somber looks on their faces, they’ve heard the news about Riley Alden being found, but they got no way of knowing who I am, or that I’m the one who found him. Sheriff keeps my name out of all that. That’s the deal he struck with my daddy when this whole mess with the hikers started three years ago.

My services in exchange for my anonymity.

Lucifer’s Creek folks all know, though. Because I’m my mother’s daughter, through and through.

And Nana’s granddaughter.

Mama and Nana were hill people. They lived most of their lives in a little house tucked up on the edge of a cliff, a good ten miles from town. The two of them only came down every few months to stock up on supplies. But on one of those trips, my mama and daddy knocked shoulders with each other when they both reached for the same bag of flour, and to hear Nana tell it, it was love at first sight, right there in the aisle at Sutton’s Grocery. Nothing to be done about it.

After that, it wasn’t long before Mama came down off that cliff to marry Daddy. Then, when I came along, Nana followed her to town to help take care of me. She says that was love at first sight, too. So she stayed. And I guess it’s a good thing she did, because it was barely three years later that Mama cleared out for good.

Even after she up and left us, most people in town never forgave Daddy for marrying a hill girl. Especially one as strange and beautiful as Lucy Clover.

They definitely don’t forgive me for looking exactly like her and having her ways, even though my last name is Warner, like my daddy’s. Everybody around here knows I inherited more than my mama’s coal black hair and her icy blue eyes. I also got her uncanny ability to bring home the dead, a little something she inherited from her own mother. And while it may be a useful skill to have, particularly around here, it’s not one that’s likely to win you any friends.

I hit the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek, and the water looks milky blue now. Not black like it did in the dead of night. A couple of blond women sit on the bank with their hiking boots off and their pants rolled up to their knees, soaking their blistered feet in the mineral-rich mud and the cold water. Their noses are wrinkled against the overpowering sulfur smell, but they look happy. I can hear them laughing together, and I wonder if maybe they’re sisters. They look so much alike.

I have this impulse to warn them—to tell them to turn around and hike right back the way they came—because I don’t want to end up pulling their bones from a shallow grave by the light of a full moon.

But I don’t, because the last thing we need is a bunch of panicked hikers. Everybody in town is clear on one thing: if the hikers quit coming and spending their money, we quit eating.

After the bridge, I cross over to the other side of Mud Street and duck through the creaking graveyard gate so I can work my way around to the back of the square-framed church building that sits at the edge of town. The plastic flowers folks stuck in the ground on Decoration Day back in May are fading in the July heat, and weeds and volunteer seedlings are threatening to take over between the neat rows.

I’ve stopped to bend down and pull stickers out of my socks when I feel eyes on me. I glance toward the church and see the preacher, Brother Turley, standing on the back steps.

I take my time pulling the last of the stickers free before I stand up and continue on my way, because I refuse to let him intimidate me. The churchyard isn’t his private property, and I’m not hurting anybody cutting through.

“Come on inside next time, Dovie,” the preacher calls to me in an overly friendly voice. “Bring your daddy and Miss Fern. Y’all need the forgiveness of the Lord, same as everyone else.”

I keep walking. There’s not much chance of any of us showing up in church. Daddy doesn’t believe in religion anymore, so he doesn’t give a flip what Turley thinks, and Nana may be a believer, but she sure as shit isn’t buying what Turley’s selling. The preacher ain’t supposed to be a chef, she always grumbles. He’s supposed to be a waiter. God don’t want his ministers makin’ the meal. He just wants ’em to deliver it to the table without messing it up. And as far as Nana is concerned, there’s a fly in the soup Turley is serving his followers every Sunday.

It’s a mutual scorn. We think he’s a swaggering charlatan, and he resents the fact that our little family are the only ones in all of Lucifer’s Creek who aren’t under his righteous thumb.

Usually I go out of my way to skirt around the tiny cemetery with Turley standing guard over its crumbling stone markers and leaning wooden crosses, but today I’m more intent on avoiding my daddy’s stained glass gallery on the other side of the street. If he happens to be leaning in the doorway or looking out the window, I don’t want to catch his eye. If I do, he’ll wave me over and I’ll have to go in and come up with something to say to him.

I’d rather deal with Turley.

At the back of the churchyard, I duck under the fence and take one of the little dirt roads that lead out of town and up into the hills. There are two ways to get to the Wilder homestead. The first is to follow the Aux-Arc Trail up a ways and then cut across through the forest. That’s what we did last night to get to Riley’s burial spot. That means fighting brambles, though. Especially this time of year. Plus you have to haul yourself up a steep ravine to finally reach the cabin.

The second is to follow this road up about two miles. It’s a longer distance, but an easier trek, even though, like all the roads around here, this one isn’t much more than a glorified trail itself. Barely wide enough for a pickup to squeeze down and overgrown with weeds in the center.

The road starts to climb, and at first it feels good to walk. The sky is blue and beautiful, and the steady movement of my feet eases my mind a little. It almost stops me thinking about where I’m going and what’s going to happen when I get there.

What I’m going to say.

And who it is I’m planning to say it to.

By the time I’m a mile out of town, though, I’m wishing I’d taken the truck that sits mostly unused under our carport. Nobody drives it much, except the couple of times a year we have to go down to Rogers or Fayetteville for a doctor’s appointment or to get a tooth fixed. Usually, I don’t mind walking, but there’s another mile to go still, and it’s already hotter than Satan’s armpit this morning.

I stop for a few minutes on the loose planks where this road crosses Lucifer’s Creek for the first time. As it flows down the mountain toward town, the strong-smelling stream winds and weaves, changes direction, and doubles back on itself so often that you can cross it a dozen times or more on a day hike. When I continue on up this road toward Lo and Granny Pearl’s place, I’ll cross it three more times before I reach their cabin.

It’s disorienting, meeting the same creek over and over and over. That’s why the first settlers here gave it such a miserable name. Well, that and the fact that it literally smells like hell.

Nana told me once that if you try to follow it from start to finish, you’ll never reach the end of Lucifer’s Creek. You’ll just keep walking and walking forever, doubling back and retracing your steps—somehow finding yourself at the beginning again and starting all over—until you’re lost in the Ozarks for all eternity.

That’s what the old hill folks say. They tell all sorts of wild tales.

None of those stories scare me, though. I’ve known the difference between what’s real and what’s pretend since I was a really little girl. Since Mama ditched me with nothing but a yard full of crepe myrtles to remember her by, and none of the magic words or charms she’d taught me to have such faith in were strong enough to bring her back to us.

Prayers weren’t enough to do the trick either, even though back then I’d prayed till my knees were bruised.

I push Mama out of my thoughts the same way I wave away the gnats and no-see-ums that are swarming around my head. I pretend she’s nothing more than a low buzz in my ear. A memory I can swat at absentmindedly while I wipe away the sweat running down my neck.

The trees hugging the creekbank are shady and the stream looks cool and inviting, so I sit down and slip off my shoes and socks to let my feet dangle in the milky blue water. I feel the bite of it. A little sting that sort of brings me back to life. The sound of the creek hopping and dancing over the rocks soothes me in a way nothing else ever does. It cools off my soul the way the water cools off my body.

I watch my reflection distort as I wiggle my toes beneath the surface. My chin’s a little too pointy, and my long arms and bug-bit legs a shade too skinny. It strikes me as unfair that I could be a dead ringer for my mother and somehow lack every bit of her beauty.

A red-eared turtle moves through the water and my reflection blurs, so I shift my attention to the little fish darting in and out of the weeds along the creekbank.

That’s when I hear the sound of shoes crunching on dirt and gravel. Someone is coming up behind me, and I don’t even have to turn around to know who it is. I’d recognize the rhythm of his footsteps anywhere, even if it’d been a hundred years since I’d seen him.

But it hasn’t been a hundred years. It’s only been two months that felt like a lonely, miserable century.

Four

“Dovie.” Lo breathes my name like it’s a charm. A bewitchment he’s reading from one of his beloved Ozark mountain spell books. Lowan Wilder is the only one who’s ever been able to make my name sound like that.

Like it’s some kind of magic word.

“Heard you were back,” I say in the most disinterested tone I can manage, but I don’t turn around to look at him yet. My heart is pounding in my throat, and I need a second to steady myself before I can meet his eyes.

He doesn’t give me a chance, though. Before I can even blink, Lo is kicking off his shoes, then peeling off his socks and lowering himself down to sit beside me on the rough planks that span the creek. I’m staring hard at my feet. Concentrating on the neon orange polish that’s chipping at the edges of my toenails.

I feel the warmth of Lo’s arm against mine and I breathe in his familiar scent. Cedar and burnt sage and a hundred other things I can’t name. It’s warm and comforting. Like walking into a familiar kitchen and smelling something wonderful, and maybe a little mysterious, simmering on the stove.

“Sheriff came to see me real early this mornin’,” he tells me. “Said you found that missing hiker not far from our place.” I feel his eyes on me, but I’m still studying my toes like I have no idea how they showed up at the ends of my feet. “Asked if I knew anything.”

I hate myself for not being able to talk. I’ve spent the last two months working out this conversation in my mind, imagining exactly what I’d say to my best friend when I got the chance. When Lowan Wilder eventually came back to town with his tail tucked between his legs.

Now here he is, and I can’t make my damn mouth work.

“Dovie,” he says. And there’s that magic sound to my name again. “You mad at me?”

“Jesus, Lo,” I mutter. “I was never mad at you.”

But that’s a lie. I’ve spent the last two months boiling with a rage so hot that anyone who touched me would’ve burned the flesh right off their fingers.

Now that he’s sitting here beside me, though, on this bridge over Lucifer’s Creek where we’ve sat together a million and a half summer afternoons, I can’t seem to rake up a single scrap of that anger.

There’s only bone-deep exhaustion mixed with confusion and hurt.

I grit my teeth hard to stop the tears coming, and Lo slips his arm around my shoulders. “Hey.” His breath is warm on my cheek. “Don’t cry, Dovie,” he murmurs. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

That white-hot anger comes roaring back like someone took a blow torch to my backside.

I shove him off me, hard, and scramble to my feet. Lo looks up, surprised. His hair falls across his huge dark eyes in soft waves the color of polished cherry wood, and it’s all so achingly familiar that it comes close to sapping the madness right out of me again.

Only, this time I don’t let it go. I grab that fury and hold on tight. I dig my fingernails in and hang on for dear life.

“Don’t say that,” I snap. “Don’t you dare sit there and tell me it’s all okay. You left me, Lo! You left me here all alone!”

“Dovie—”

“And then you didn’t even come tell me you were back? I had to hear it from the goddamn sheriff over that kid’s rotting corpse.” I shudder. “Jesus, Lo. Go to hell!”

“Where do you think I was headin’ just now?” he teases. “Vacation Bible School?”

I don’t laugh.

Of course we were making our way toward each other at the exact same moment, meeting halfway in the middle. That’s the way it’s always been with Lo and me, each of us pulled hard toward the other one like a couple of magnetized paperclips.

Lo blinks up at me. He’s got on an old pair of cut-off shorts and a soft T-shirt the color of the wide Arkansas sky, but they both hang loose on his frame. When he raises one arm to shield his face from the sun, it hits me just how much weight he’s lost. He’s skin and bones. I suck in my breath from the shock of it. Lowan was never a big guy, but he looks like a ghost of himself.

He reminds me of Riley Alden’s skeleton. Nothing much left.

Then I notice the dark circles under his eyes.

How he’s bitten his fingernails all the way down.

The bare spots where he’s pulled at his eyebrows.

He runs his hand through those gorgeous red-brown waves on the top of his head and drops his arm to his lap. “I’m fine, Dovie,” he reassures me. “I know I look bad. A little worse for wear, maybe, but—”

“You don’t look bad, Lo,” I mumble. “You’re beautiful.” My voice breaks and I curse at myself inside my head. “I just— Shit.”

My anger is evaporating again. Rising off me the way heat rises off a blacktop highway in the summer. I can almost see it floating up and away in the still air.

Why can’t I stay mad at Lowan Wilder?

“I’m sorry, Dovie,” he says. “I didn’t wanna leave you. You know that.” He almost grins at me. “But it never went away. That special friendship you and me have. It’s still there. I know you feel it.”

Lo and I have been best friends our whole lives. Our mamas were best friends, too, until his died and mine took off. And so were our grandmothers before them, until Nana and Pearl Wilder had a falling-out neither of them has ever said a word about.

Two generations of Clovers and Wilders ripped apart.

The daughters by death.

Their mothers by a feud.

It’s a curse. That’s what Nana told me once. The only time she ever spoke on the subject.

But Lo and I always knew we were different. We were born to walk through life together. Side by side. We promised we’d never leave each other alone. Swore we’d beat the family curse.

When we were both ten, we wrote our names in blood on the weathered trunk of an old maple tree out behind his house, then circled the trunk with strips of cloth cut from one of Granny Pearl’s old aprons. It was a binding ceremony Lo found in one of his spell books. A ritual meant to tie us together. Best friends forever.

I guess forever lasted up until a couple of months ago, because it was just a few days after Riley Alden vanished in the middle of May that Lo came to me and announced out of the blue that he was leaving for good. He said he couldn’t take it anymore.

The missing.

All the dead.

Lo’s not hard like I am. He feels deep, and things weigh heavy on him.

“You said you weren’t ever coming back.” I stop to swallow hot tears because I flat-out refuse to cry. Not right in front of his face, anyway. Not when I’ve already spent the last two months lying in my attic bedroom crying myself to sleep every night from wanting him so desperately. “You didn’t even let me hug you goodbye.”

Lo reaches for my hand, and I give it to him without thinking, because loving Lo is a really old habit of mine. I let him pull me down to sit beside him again on the rough planks of the makeshift bridge.

“That was shitty of me,” he admits. “But I knew if you hugged me I wouldn’t be able to leave.” Lo’s rubbing little circles on the back of my hand with his thumb, and I almost throw my head back and sob from the sudden tidal wave of feeling it unleashes inside me. “But I’m back. For good.”

“Are you still—” I pause, searching for the right words.

Delusional?

Having hallucinations?

Seeing and hearing things that aren’t there?

“Haunted?” he finishes for me, and I bristle without meaning to. I go along with his mountain magic and his spells. I wear his charms and drink the concoctions he brews up for me in Granny Pearl’s ancient mason jars. I light the candles and say the rhymes when he asks me to. Burn the sage and tie the knots. Write the words in chalk. Because he’s my best friend in the whole world. But I don’t take any of it seriously.

I don’t take him seriously.

That’s what we fought about before he left.

Now we’ve been back together all of five minutes and I’ve already got my back up again, like our old cat Phantom does when he feels cornered.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts or evil spirits,” I insist, and Lo looks at me like I’m some kind of riddle he’s trying to solve.

“Jesus, Dovie.” I hear the frustration rippling like mountain stream water under his words. “I’ll never understand how you can do what you do, and not believe that there are things beyond our understanding.” Lo reaches down with one long finger to stir at our reflections in the creek. “The world is full of magic.” When he shakes the water droplets from his hand, one flies through the air to land on my cheek. Lo reaches over to rub it away with his thumb, and I shiver. “You’re full of magic, Dovie.”

“No. I’m not. That’s different,” I argue. Now it’s my turn to get frustrated. “What I do is different.” We’ve been over this so many times. “It’s not magic, finding bones, Lo.”

“What is it, then?”

I shrug. “Some kind of talent. Like having perfect pitch. Or being able to draw a rose so real it looks like you grew it.” I always struggle to explain this. “It’s rare. An ability not everybody has. But it’s not magic. Not any more than having a strong sense of smell or a photographic memory.” I pick up a little stone and toss it into the water just to see the tiny splash. “Believing in magic doesn’t make sense.”

The truth is that magic failed me. Let me down. But the way I hear the bones, that’s something I can count on every single time. It’s something much more dependable than magic.

“Come on, Dovie. You and me both know there’s plenty goin’ on in these hills that don’t make any sense when you haul it out in the light of day.”

Even when he’s being stubborn, there’s something about the way Lo talks that reminds me of fiddle music. His voice is my favorite song. It’s wild and sweet like the mountain honeysuckle that grows along the old fence lines out here. The sound of it melts into the trickling of the stream and the buzzing of the bees, like it’s always been part of the soundscape of these hills.

“How can I believe in ghosts and spirits when I don’t believe in heaven or hell or anything else?” I shrug. “When you’re dead, you’re dead.” Every rotting body I find leaves me more convinced of that, not less. I’ve seen enough skeletons to know for a fact that they don’t get up and dance around, rattling and smiling and wearing top hats, the way they do in old black and white cartoons. They just lie there, bits of skin and hair stuck to their scalp and someone’s favorite T-shirt molding on their rib cage.

“Listen to me, Dovie. I was seein’ ’em everywhere. All the time. That’s why I left back in May.” His words have the flat ring of truth.

“The shadows?”

Lo nods. “Spirits. Or whatever. I couldn’t get away from ’em. They were always there. At the edges of my vision. Around corners. Behind every tree. Right out in the middle of the afternoon. Watchin’ me and whisperin’ to me and—”

“Lo—”

“I was afraid they were gonna get me. Or Granny Pearl.” He stops and looks away from my face. “Or you.” His jaw tightens. “I didn’t want to keep bringing that darkness around the people I love most.”

I reach out and put my hand on his thigh. The skin there is warm from the summer sun, but I’m suddenly cold. I knew things had been bad for him, but I didn’t know how bad.

“You could’ve told me, Lo.”

“I tried,” he says, and I wince. “But that’s the truth of it. That’s why I left. I figured I could leave ’em behind if I left this place. I’d disappear and be gone. And maybe I’d be free, finally. Seemed like it would be better for everyone that way.” He stares down toward our faces in the milky surface of the creek again. “You could go on with your life imagining me living up in New York City or somewhere.”

My stomach lurches and I think I might throw up, because if he’d asked me, I could have told him that wouldn’t be better. Not knowing is never better. It leaves you with a million questions—deep holes—that are always there, just below the surface. Most days you might walk around almost okay, but then all of a sudden—bam—you slip up and find yourself at the bottom of one of those damn questions.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds. I’m living proof. Only having answers can do that.

Lo is staring at something off on the creek bank now. Something I can’t see. I watch him squint at it, eyes narrowed and wary.

He starts to tremble and I reach out to hold his hand tight. I’d tell him there’s nothing there—just the breeze moving through the pines—but I know it won’t help. And sometimes it makes it worse. It’s too late now, anyway. In a few seconds we’ll be surrounded by an invisible army that only Lo can see.

It’s been like this the last couple of years. It’s almost never just him and me anymore. It’s always him and me and them. The shadow people.

Whoever they are.

I won’t say they’re real, Lo’s spirits, but I do know he’s not making them up. He sees them, and they terrify him. That I believe. And I don’t know how to keep him safe from something that only exists in his mind.

I get up and pull Lo to his feet. “Come on,” I urge him. “Let’s go back to my place.” We tug socks over wet feet and start to slip on our shoes.

Lo’s focused on the dark, black mud at the edges of the stream now. “Lucifer’s Creek starts its life way up in the hills. Just water trickling out of a stone,” he tells me. “That’s why it smells so strong. Why it has that bite to it. ‘Cause of all the minerals it leeches from the rock layers it passes through on its fight to get outta the earth.”

I’m trying to be patient, but I’m covered with a thin film of sticky sweat and the flies are biting me something awful, and Lo is standing there with one beat-up tennis shoe on his foot and the other still dangling from his hand. “The English and German settlers used to bottle it and sell it as a cure-all,” he goes on. “But way back before there were any white people in these mountains, the Osage and the Quapaw would come here to drink the healing water and bathe in the mud. They used it for all kinds of important rituals.”

He doesn’t mention how his mama drowned in it when he was a baby. Not even walking yet. My mama found her best friend face down in Lucifer’s Creek one morning, the petals of a white rose floating around her lifeless body like beautiful confetti.

“It’s just water,” I tell him, and Lo bends down to slip on his other shoe.

“Not all the stories are healing stories, Dovie. Hill people used to say that if you drank too much—”

“If you drank too much water from Lucifer’s Creek, you’d go mad,” I finish for him. “But those are made-up stories. You know that.”

“But what about—”

“Come on,” I practically beg. “It’s hot.”

Lo’s distracted again, peering back into the undergrowth beyond the tree line.

“Can’t you see them?” His words are a desperate whisper.

I crouch down to tie the laces for him. “Come home with me.” I stand up and reach out to touch his cheek. “Please?” I’m not ready to say goodbye to him yet. Not when I just got him back.

Lo follows me down the old road toward town. We walk in silence for a bit, sweating and shooing away horseflies—trying not to kick up too much dust—while Lo keeps glancing back every few minutes at his invisible stalkers. I’d hoped wherever he went in the two months he’s been gone, maybe he left his demons behind there. But I guess they’ve been tailing him the whole time, because they’ve evidently followed him right back here to the hills he loves so much.

We’re coming up to the churchyard when a question falls out of my mind and lands in my mouth. “Why’d you come back?”

Lo’s moved ahead of me, and he turns back to gaze in my direction. The sight of him standing there, rail thin and pale as an apparition, with that old white church and that little cemetery spread out behind him almost stops me cold. It looks like a painting. Or the cover of a novel. Some kind of Southern gothic horror story.

“I never got to hug you goodbye.” Lo reaches for my hand again and we duck under the fence together to pop up among the dead of Lucifer’s Creek.

Much as I’d like to believe that, I know there’s more to it. “Lo—”

“I had to come home,” he whispers, as if the bones in those old coffins could hear us. “So I could tell you who they are. I figured it out.”

“The shadow people?” I ask him. He nods, and the look in his eyes tells me I’m not going to like whatever he’s about to tell me.

“They’re the murdered hikers, Dovie. And they want me to put a stop to it.”

Five

I stand there stunned for a second before Lo reaches out all of a sudden and pulls me into his arms. He crushes me against his chest and we’re frozen in the sweltering sun, all wrapped up in each other while sweat runs down the backs of our knees and the no-see-ums circle our heads.

It’s so unbearably hot that I might pass out, but I don’t move, because this is the hug I’ve been craving.

“I missed you, Dovie,” he whispers against my hair.

I whisper it back, my lips pressed against his neck. Being without Lo was like walking around for two months with one of my arms missing. I didn’t die from it, but absolutely nothing was the same.

We pry ourselves apart where sweat has sealed our skin together. When he takes my hand to lead me across the churchyard, I look up toward the big window of the church. And there’s Brother Turley again. He’s standing inside watching Lo and me with an intensity that makes me uneasy, so I walk a little faster.

When we step through the creaking gate and out onto Mud Street, Daddy is leaning in the doorway of his glass gallery just across the way. He raises a hand to wave me over, and he doesn’t seem surprised to see Lo with me.

“Mornin’, Lowan,” Daddy says. “Heard you was back around.” I can’t help wondering how everyone in town was privy to that nugget of information except me. Lo reaches out to awkwardly shake my daddy’s offered hand, and I know we’re both seventeen now, but it still strikes me as funny. Like Lo’s playing at being a grown-up.

Daddy shifts his focus to me, and I see him sweep his eyes across my face, checking to see if I’m all right. “Long night, Bird?” It’s the only reference he’ll make to my midnight hike into the woods with the sheriff, which irritates me. There’s no use pretending like it didn’t happen. But the use of my old nickname softens me up a little.

My mama named me Dove after her favorite creature, Nana told me. For the peace and tranquility it symbolized. Daddy took to calling me his little bird when I was a baby.

I start to answer him, but I get interrupted.

“Mornin’, Del. I’m not too early, am I?” The voice from behind us is booming and boisterous compared to Daddy’s, but it’s almost as familiar to me. The sound of it is enough to make me smile.

“Just openin’ up now,” Daddy says, and he steps back out of the doorway into the dusty, air-conditioned coolness of his little shop. “Come on in, Ira.”

A heavy hand claps Lo on the shoulder and gives him a friendly shake. “Good to see you, boy,” Ira Langdon tells him with a genuine smile. “It’s always a good day when one of our young people comes home.”

Lo stares down at our shadows on the sidewalk, and his hair falls across his eyes. I can tell by the way he pulls into himself that he’s uncomfortable. Living up in the hills with just Granny Pearl, he’s not used to attention. Friendly as Ira might be, a regular conversation with anyone but me is enough to send Lo scrambling right back up the mountain, even on his best days.

The truth is, most people in Lucifer’s Creek wouldn’t give two shits whether Lowan Wilder was here or gone. He’s from an old hill family, and other than Granny Pearl, nobody but me much missed him, or even noticed, when he took off. But Daddy and Ira don’t care who’s townfolk and who’s hill folk, and that’s something I’ve always admired about both of them.

“Dovie girl.” Ira gives me a wink. His eyes are ocean blue and his face is round and freckled underneath a mop of bright red curls that makes him look way younger than he is. He glances around, then leans in and lowers his voice. “You done good last night. That’s what Sheriff told me when I run into him gettin’ his coffee this mornin’.” My daddy doesn’t say anything, but even with his beard all grown out long and bushy, salt-and-pepper gray to match his hair, it’s hard to miss the tightness that comes into his jaw. Or the way his mouth settles into a thin line. Ira elbows him in the ribs. “You oughta be proud of our girl, here, Delbert.” I notice the way he said our. We’re not related, but I always think about Ira as a kind of uncle. He’s someone that’s always been there. He slips an arm around my shoulders and gives me a little squeeze. “Whole town oughta be proud of her.”

Ira’s the only one who’d have the nerve to call Daddy out like that. They’ve been like brothers since they were kids, and the two of them are cut from the same cloth. They’re real live mountain men, for sure. They’ve spent their whole lives running these hills together, hunting and fishing and camping.

Only difference now is, since his lodge up on Moonlight Crag started pulling in money from three surrounding states, Ira Langdon is rich enough to buy this whole town a thousand times over…and my daddy still barely squeaks by making his lamps and stained glass birds. Folks around here would probably resent the hell out of Ira and his gobs of new money if he weren’t so damn generous with it. He sprinkles it around like glitter.

Daddy says, growing up, Ira’s people were so dirt poor they couldn’t even afford to complain about it. But Ira was a born businessman. He scraped and saved and borrowed and sold off some family land until he had enough to open up a little lodge up on the crag. These days, cash from Ira Langdon’s operation keeps this town afloat when things get lean, and things have been lean more often than not lately. I remember bein’ hard up against it, he likes to say. Suddenly havin’ money don’t give you amnesia.

“You come by to see the new piece?” Daddy asks. That’s his attempt at changing the subject from me and my trek through the woods last night. “I got it all cut and laid out this mornin’.”

Maybe Nana wasn’t lying about him going into the gallery early to work on something new. Ira’s always ordering custom designs for the lodge. He’s basically been feeding our little family for years.

“Just wanted to give it a little look-see. Make sure it’s gonna be big enough to hang over that front staircase.” Ira winks at me again. “I need me somethin’ that’s gonna make those city suckers stop cold when they walk in.”

I pretty much grew up at the lodge. Lots of evenings when I was a kid, Daddy would load me up into the old truck after dinner and we’d drive up to Moonlight Crag so I could chase fireflies while he and Ira sat on the deck passing a beer back and forth and swapping stories. I watched them build the huge new place from the ground up, but even after all these years, it still takes my breath away. Moonlight Crag Lodge has the best views in all of Arkansas from the three-story floor-to-ceiling windows in its common area. The big lounge is stuffed with dark leather sofas and reading lamps, plus taxidermied foxes and deer that look so alive you’d swear you saw them moving. The most beautiful folk art pieces from the shops along Mud Street decorate the walls. Pressed flowers, framed quilts, hand-painted landscapes, and more stained glass than Notre Dame.

“It’ll be big enough,” Daddy says, and I see him start to crack a smile. “Don’t you worry about that. Come on in and see for yourself.” He can be way too serious, but sometimes Ira can get him laughing.

And I’ve always loved that about Ira.

Lo and I say goodbye and turn to go, but Ira stops us with a hand on Lo’s shoulder again. “I know you and Pearl probably got things you need.” He hesitates, and I know he’s being careful of Lo’s pride. “Did she tell ya I checked in on her a couple times while you was gone?”

“Yes, sir. She did,” Lo says, but he doesn’t look up. “And I sure appreciate it.”

“You come on up to the lodge and see me this week, when you get a chance,” Ira goes on. “Might be I could find some work for ya. Somethin’ steady.” He slaps Lo on the back. “Keep ya outta trouble.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll do that,” Lo says, and I see him visibly relax when Ira and Daddy step into the gallery and close the door behind them. Overhead three tiny silver bells jingle on a green ribbon. An Ozarks charm to bring good business. Abundance and prosperity.

Money.

“Might be nice,” I say as we cross the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek and pass the crowded diner. “Workin’ up at the lodge. It’d be something to do.” Lo did his schooling at home, like a lot of the hill kids do. I’ve got another year of high school yet, but Lo finished up a whole year early. Got done with it all in May, just before he took off. That means he’s gonna have a lot of empty time on his hands this fall and winter while I’m stuck inside the little collection of prefab metal trailers that passes for a school.

And Ira’s right. Lo and Granny Pearl are hard up for money. Their tiny little cabin is all but falling down around them. They barely scrape by on food stamps and the bit of cash Lo makes doing odd jobs here and there. Plus the piddling amount they make selling charms and potions from their front porch.

Besides, maybe Lo would be less haunted up there at Moonlight Crag, in the bright glow of the cozy reading lamps Daddy’s made for Ira.

I don’t want to push him, though, so we’re quiet for the three or four minutes it takes to reach our small blue house at the center of town. Each of us is lost in our own thoughts and busy avoiding the eyes we can feel watching us from behind shop windows and from inside the pickup trucks that cruise slowly along Mud Street with country music drifting out their rolled-down windows.

When we start up the little stone path to our front steps, Nana is in the yard trimming Mama’s crepe myrtles. Phantom appears from somewhere in the shade to weave circles around our feet, and Lo bends down to scratch the old white cat behind the ears.

“Lowan Wilder,” Nana says. “Bless your heart.” She sets down her shears and pulls off her gardening gloves. Whatever feud she had with Granny Pearl, it doesn’t extend to Pearl’s grandson. Nana has always doted on Lo like he was her own.

He stands up and reaches into his pocket to pull out a little pouch tied with a curling yellow ribbon. “Brought you a charm, Fern,” he tells her. “The Magic of Nine. To help with your arthritis.”

Her eyes light up and she grins like a little girl. “Three branches. Elderberry. Spicebush. And witch hazel.”

“Three leaves.” Lo holds up his fingers to count them. “Common mint. Horsemint. And rabbit tobacco.”

She finishes the spell. “Three roots. Burdock. Dandelion. And…” She searches her memory for the last one.

“Sassafras,” he tells her, and she gives him a coy smile from underneath her wide-brimmed straw hat.

Nana tucks the little bag into her apron pocket and lays a hand on Lo’s cheek. “I feel better already, sugar.” She ushers us both into the kitchen and pours sweet tea with fresh garden mint into tall jelly jars filled with ice. When she hands Lo his drink, he swallows it down in one gulp, without the least little bit of fear.

Nana looks at him like maybe there’s something she wants to ask, but all she says is, “Does my old heart good to see you two together.” Then she picks up her gloves and heads back out to the front yard to battle the unruly bushes with their bright pink flowers.

I figure maybe she was wanting to know how Granny Pearl’s doing. Nana still keeps a framed photo of her and Pearl as young women on her nightstand. They’re standing together under a pear tree holding hands—dressed in their Sunday best—and each of them has a baby girl tucked in her other arm.

Sometimes when I walk by her bedroom late at night, if the door is cracked open and her lamp is on, I peek in and see Nana sitting on the edge of the bed holding that picture.

I reach across the space between us and grab Lo’s hand. I don’t believe in curses, and there’s no way I’ll let that happen to us. It’s a vow I’ve made to myself a million times. I won’t lose him like Nana lost Pearl. Like Mama lost Claire.

Not without one hell of a fight.

Lo squeezes my fingers, but when I look in his direction, I catch him eyeing the dark inside of our pantry closet. Nana left the door ajar when she got out the sugar for the tea, and now Lo won’t stop staring into the shadows.

We’re playing hide-and-seek with his demons.

“Come on,” I tell him, and I close the pantry door to shut out the dark. “Let’s go up to my room.”

Maybe Lo’s ghosts won’t find us there.

Six

Lo holds my hand as we climb the narrow attic stairs together. When we step into my bedroom, his shoulders immediately relax and his breathing evens out. “It smells like you in here,” he says, and I can’t help but laugh.

“What do I smell like?”

“Desdemona roses and lavender tea.” He closes his eyes. “And night jasmine.”

I roll my eyes and we settle on the purple rug to lean back against my bed. The window air conditioner kicks on and a soft tinkling sound moves through the room. We glance up toward a homemade wind chime that hangs from a hook in the ceiling. It’s made from nine skeleton keys tied to a piece of yellow yarn. Lo gave it to me a few years back, about the time the shadows started tormenting him. The keys lock the bad spirits out, he told me. So you’ll be safe from the things that follow me.

“Did I ever tell you I found each one of those keys?” he asks me, and I shake my head. “Some of ’em up in the hills. Some of ’em down here in town. Even found one in your yard, out by the sidewalk. That’s extra good luck. Took me years to gather ’em all. You have to find ’em wild or they don’t work.”

Lo points up toward the dangling charm. “It’s a Witch’s Ladder. Count the knots. See? By knot of one, the spell’s begun. By knot of two, the magic comes true. By knot of three, so it shall be. By knot of four, this power is stored. By knot of five, my will shall drive. By knot of six, this spell I fix. By knot of seven, the future I leaven. By knot of eight, my will be fate. By knot of nine, what is done is mine.” He smiles. “That’s called the Magic of Nine.”

Granny Pearl is a folk healer. She’s been doing it her whole life, and she taught the spells and hill magic to Lo’s mama, and then eventually to Lo.

And he took to it like a fish to water.

Even today town folks will make the long walk up to their cabin for a special charm or a potion. Something to bring them luck. Or love. Maybe a little bag to fight off cancer or a candle ritual to save a marriage.

They’ll lie about it, Lucifer’s Creek residents, and say they don’t believe in the old ways. They’ll laugh at the hill people. At Granny Pearl and Lo especially. They’ll look down their noses and carry on and act like they’re too good for those silly superstitions. But most of them still keep those little silver bells on a green ribbon over their shop door. And when someone’s sick, or in love, the desperate still come calling at the old Wilder place when the sun sinks low, and they’ll happily fork over a couple of dollars for a little bag or a mason jar filled with just the right ingredients.

Not me, though.

I know nothing in life is magical. Everything has an explanation.

And most of the explanations aren’t very nice.

Lo’s glancing around the room again. I can feel his fear ticking up, and it makes me furious at his shadow stalkers. Lo shouldn’t ever be afraid when he’s with me.

Suddenly I have an idea.

“Hey,” I tell him. “Wanna go to the office? For old time’s sake?”

“Yeah.” He nods. “That sounds good.”

When we were little, we used to pretend we were architects running a business out of my closet. We’d push back my dresses and sweaters and winter coats to spread our paper and pencils on the wooden floor so we could draw dream castles and twisting skyscrapers for rich, imaginary clients.

We called it our office, and we kept hanging out there sometimes, even after we stopped playing architect, because what we really wanted was a private place. Somewhere we could be together, just the two of us. Safe. Hidden. And happy.

It’s been years since we crawled into the closet together, but it sounds so nice right now.

I push myself up off the floor and move toward the opposite wall. Lo follows me, but he stops halfway across the room to study himself in my cracked full-length mirror. I wonder if he sees the way his collarbones stick out or how hollow his eyes have become.

He looks like he’s been away two decades instead of two months.

“Come on,” I tell him, and I take his hand and tug him toward the open closet door. I push back the clothes and jerk the string to turn on the light. Then we step inside and I pull the door closed before the two of us settle on the floor together.

Lo’s almost smiling. “God,” he says. “I forgot how it feels, being in here.” He reaches up to touch a soft pink sweater I haven’t worn in years. I’m sure it’s way too small for me now. “It’s like being inside a cocoon.” He looks at me. “Or a time machine.”

“Good memories,” I say.

He nudges me with his shoulder. “All my best memories are of you, Dovie.”

I’m sitting crisscross on the floor and Lo scooches down to put his head in my lap. He pulls his knees to his chest and hugs them tight, but he doesn’t seem afraid anymore.

The closet is tiny. Spare and neat. Brightly lit by the bare bulb on the ceiling. There’s only enough room for the two of us.

Definitely no place for ghosts to hide. Or spirits.

No shadows.

So no shadow people.

“Promise me you’ll be my best friend forever,” he says, and he sounds so much like a little kid. So much like his old self.

“I will if you’ll let me,” I promise. It’s quiet for a few seconds. Just the sound of us breathing together. Finally I ask, “Where the hell have you been, Lo?” Close to sixty days straight of me missing him the way I’d miss oxygen if somebody suddenly told me I wasn’t allowed to breathe anymore.

He rolls onto his back so he’s looking up at me. I’m stroking his hair now. Raking my fingers through waves that never quite become curls. Lo doesn’t know who his daddy is, but I wonder if he has hair like his. Thick and soft and the color of warm molasses.

“I was in Fayetteville,” he says, and it’s such an obvious answer that I have an urge to smack my forehead. “Walked the first part of the way, then hitchhiked the rest.” Fifteen miles down the old logging road to Rogers. Then just thirty-five miles down the highway to Fayetteville. So close, and still a world away from Lucifer’s Creek. “Slept in an alley the first couple of weeks. Behind the newspaper office. Almost starved to death.” I cringe and run my hands over his stick-like arms and his bony shoulders. “But then I met a woman who runs a folk healing shop, and she let me come work for her a couple of hours a day. Brought me bread and soup. Let me sleep in the back room of the store, even.”

It’s weird to think about all those people down in Fayetteville—big-city people, by our standards—and there, in the middle of them, an old-time mountain folk healer. Just like Lo and Granny Pearl.

“But the shadow spirits.” Lo hesitates. “They wouldn’t turn loose of me. Tracked me all the way to Fayetteville. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, when I was sellin’ charms and herbs to customers, I’d hear a knockin’ on the glass, and I’d look up to see those black shapes peerin’ in the window at me. Watchin’ me from the street.”

“Lo,” I start. I’ve got to be cautious, choose my words wisely. He’s comfortable now. Feeling safe. And I don’t want to wreck that. “Are you sure that the shadow people are—”

“Real?” Lo sits up to look at me and his soft eyes are so full of hurt. “I’m not a liar, Dovie.”

“No.” I reach out and put a hand on his knee. “I know that. But maybe—” I see his spine stiffen.

“And I’m not crazy either.”

“No,” I tell him again. “I just think sometimes people—”

“See things that aren’t real?”

“Sometimes people need a little help,” I finish. “That’s all.”

Lo’s life hasn’t been easy. Never knowing his daddy, then losing his mama before his first birthday. Living up in that ramshackle cabin with no electricity or running water. Granny Pearl filling his head with stories about Ozark mountain magic. Then having a whole slew of dead hikers turn up in the hills around him.

It might be enough to make anyone question what’s real.

Lo sighs and reaches up to push back a winter coat that’s dangling over his head.

“These are some of the oldest hills in the world, Dovie. The ground we walk on every day—you and me—is ancient. Some of these mountains have been here five hundred million years or more.”

“I know that, Lo, but—”

“And our kind of magic—mountain magic—good magic—flows from nature. The trees and plants and roots and rocks. Flowers. The rivers and streams. That’s what Granny Pearl taught me.” Lo’s dark eyes are lit up with fire from the inside. His face is flushed, and his words are hushed but urgent. He’s in his element and he looks more like himself than I’ve seen him look in ages. I know that’s because he’s talking about what he loves best, and even if I don’t buy a word of it, I’d let him talk forever on the subject just to see that spark in his eyes again.

“The older the land,” he goes on, “the longer that magic has been simmerin’ and brewin’. Bubblin’ below the surface. In every crack and crevice of every rock. In the dirt and in the water. Feedin’ all the wild things and then pullin’ in their life force when they die, gettin’ stronger and more powerful. Like tea left to steep. That’s what makes these mountains so special.” He leans in close. “It’s time, Dovie. That’s the secret to Ozarks magic.”

That makes me smile because I figure maybe time is the secret to our magic, too. Mine and Lo’s. We’ve known each other an awful lot of years. Every single breath of our lives we’ve breathed together. A bond like that has deep power. Even I can believe in that kind of magic.

Something in his expression changes, and Lo suddenly seems a hundred miles away. The change in him hits so hard and so fast it leaves me unnerved and off balance. If I were to reach out to touch him now, I wouldn’t quite be able to lay my hands on him. The distance between us has grown too wide. “But these are dark hills, too. Full of hidden places. And there are things that walk the forests. Spirits and demons, and worse, that get stronger with every passing year.”

“Those are just stories.” I don’t want to be dismissive, but I don’t want to encourage his fear, either. “Hill folk have always told tall tal—”

“Some stories get told ’cause they’re true, Dovie.” He looks at me for a second, then cocks his head to one side, like he’s thinking. “You want me to list all the places around here with dark names?” He ticks them off on his fingers. “Devil’s Den. Devil’s Backbone. Devil’s Kitchen. Devil’s Racetrack. Devil’s Well. Devil’s Rock Pile. Devil’s Half-Acre. Devil’s Promenade. Want me to go on?” He pauses. “Lucifer’s goddamn Creek? You think that’s all a coincidence?” He shakes his head. “You’re smarter than that, Dovie. I know you are.”

Lo isn’t religious, at least not like most folks around here are. The majority of Lucifer’s Creek residents would call themselves Baptists or Methodists. Maybe there’s a Presbyterian or two. But they all meet up Sundays at Lucifer’s Creek Community Church to worship the same God, because it’s the only game in town.

I don’t believe in anything. Not God. And not the devil. No matter what he’s got named after him.

But Lo is the most spiritual person I know. His belief system is wide and sprawling, somehow it makes room for everything from Jesus to angels and demons to root magic and water witches to trickster fairies that dart among the river stones.

And ghosts. Of course. All the things that haunt us.

That haunt him.

Lo believes in heaven, but he also believes hell is a real, actual place. Like Utah is. So the idea of heaven never gives him much peace. Not with hell just a stone’s throw away. And that always seems like such a rip-off to me. Why have any belief at all if there’s no comfort in it?

“What makes you so sure these shadows you see are the dead hikers?” I ask him. “Why would they be after you like that?”

“I told you. They want me to find out who’s doin’ the killing around here. So I can put a stop to it.” Lo’s watching me with so much focus now, burning a hole in me with those intense eyes of his. “If I can do that, maybe they’ll leave me alone. And if I can’t, I’m not gonna last much longer.”

“But why you?” None of this makes any sense. “How are you gonna figure it out on your own?”

“I’m not.” He scoots a little closer to me, so we’re sitting knee-to-knee. Then he wraps his long, slender fingers around mine. Gentle, but strong. Just that little bit of his skin against mine, and I know I’d die to keep him safe, even from his own darkness. “You gotta help me, Dovie.” He squeezes my hand hard. “Please?”

“Yeah,” I tell him, and I reach out to run a hand through his hair. Whatever demons he’s got to face down, real or imaginary, I’ll be right beside him. “Of course, Lo. You know I’ll help you.” He leans into my touch and goose bumps break out across the tops of my thighs.

“I need you, Dovie. So much.” His words feel heavy in the closeness of the closet. I don’t just hear them. I feel the weight of them, too. I shiver as they slide down my throat and settle in the pit of my stomach, and then I whisper them back.

“I need you, too.”

Because Lo is so much more than just my best friend.

He’s the only thing in this world that could almost make me believe in magic again.

Seven

Late that afternoon, Lo and I crawl out of my closet and we agree to meet up tomorrow so we can make a plan. Before he leaves, I take the scissors from my desk drawer and cut the bottom skeleton key off the dangling yellow yarn that hangs above my air conditioner. “Here,” I tell him. “Something to protect you when we can’t be together. If anything scares you, you take out that key and think about me. Okay? And I’ll be right there with you.”

I don’t believe the keys are magic, but Lo does, and he needs something to hang on to. Something to make him brave.

“Thanks,” he tells me, and he smiles as he slips the skeleton key with the little loop of yellow yarn into his pocket for safe keeping.

Then Lo heads back up to his place and I crank the window air conditioner as high as it will go and burrow into bed under Nana’s quilts. My bones ache and my head is spinning, but exhaustion finally gets the best of me and I drift off to sleep.

When I wake up, my mama is on my mind. I figure I must’ve been dreaming about her, because that feeling of wanting her is stronger than it’s been in a long time. But I can’t remember the dream, so she’s lost to me again.

The clock says it’s three thirty in the morning. I’ve slept all evening, straight through dinner, and late into the night.

I slip out of bed and tiptoe down the stairs for something to eat. A bowl of cereal, maybe—or a ham sandwich—but before I make it into the kitchen, I notice that the front door is open, and I hear the rhythmic creaking of Nana’s rocking chair coming from out on the porch. She’s singing to herself, soft and low under her breath, and I stop at the screen door to listen for a minute. It’s a melody that reminds me of the way bones sing sometimes. Mournful and deep. Aching.

Almost familiar.

I will tell you a story of a pretty white rose,

It is true but oh how sad,

Of a poor young woman whose heart was pure as gold,

But cruel she was treated by her lad.

She was found one morning in a cold, cold stream,

Where he threw his love there to drown,

With that rose between her teeth, as if she seemed to say,

I want to wear this rose in my crown.

“That’s pretty,” I say, and Nana turns to reach for me, almost like she already knew I was there. She’s been brushing out her silver hair, and it sparkles like Christmas tree tinsel in the light of a pale slip of moon pinned to the dark sky.

“Come on out, Dovie girl. Sit with me a spell.”

I push open the screen door and ease it closed behind me, so it doesn’t wake up Daddy with its banging. “What are you doing out here?” I ask her.

“Lookin’ at the stars and listenin’ to the wind in the trees.” I move to sit on the steps in front of her chair and she pulls her brush through my tangled hair, just like she used to do when I was little. “Havin’ church, I guess.” She tugs her old gray robe tighter around her shoulders. “What’re you doing awake at this hour?”

“I had a dream, I think.” Phantom is snoring on the top step, and I reach down to scratch him behind the ears. He doesn’t even bother to wake up and see who’s messing with him. “Guess it woke me up.”

“Dreamin’ about your mama?” Nana asks, and I wonder how she guessed it. Sometimes I’d swear she can read my mind.

“I think so,” I tell her, and she nods.

“I dream about Lucy nearly every time I close my eyes. Some of them dreams are nice.” She hesitates. “And some of ’em ain’t.” Nana’s staring out at those crepe myrtles glowing bright pink against the dark. Last thing Mama did before she left us on our own was to plant a row of them at the edge of our property, right along Mud Street. This time of year, our yard is the prettiest one in Lucifer’s Creek, the little blue house almost hidden behind an explosion of fuchsia blooms. It’s a beautiful fence of flowers that separates us from the rest of the town, and a colorful metaphor for the other things that divide us from our neighbors. “Guess I’ll always see her face when I close my eyes,” Nana goes on. “I imagine you will, too.”

I picture myself as old as Nana, wrinkled skin and beautiful hair the color of mountain frost, still dreaming about my lost mother.

“That song you were singin’. I think maybe I’ve heard it before.”

“My mama used to sing it when I was a girl up on the home place.” Nana laughs a little. “I don’t know why. It’s not very nice, is it?”

It makes me think of Lo’s mama, Claire. How my mama found her best friend face down in Lucifer’s Creek, white rose petals floating around her body like pearls scattered from the string of a broken necklace.

An accident. Springtime and the creek was running high.

Fast.

The bank where she was standing must’ve given way. That’s what everybody figured.

“Is it a true song?”

Nana thinks for a second before she answers my question. “I expect it might be.” She’s still brushing my hair in long, slow strokes, and I lean over to put my head on her knee. “A lot of those old ballads tell about somethin’ true, or at least partly true. That’s the mountain way of rememberin’ things.”

I feel a little uneasy when I think about what Lo said earlier about Ozarks ghosts. Some stories get told ’cause they’re true, Dovie.

When Nana speaks again her voice is thick with an old sorrow. “Pearl would know. She was always the keeper of the old stories.”

It’s quiet for a few long minutes. There’s only the buzzing insects and the creak creak creak of Nana’s rocker. The rustling of a possum digging around the roots of Mama’s crepe myrtles.

Time slows down and the universe melts and shrinks until there’s nothing but our front porch, and all I know is the feeling of Nana’s brush moving through my hair, patiently working out the tangles.

I wish she could do her magic down inside me, where I always feel so knotted up and tender.

“What’s ailin’ Lowan, sugar?” she asks me eventually. “He’s sufferin’, ain’t he?”

I guess it’s the moon and the cicadas that urge me to tell her the truth, because the words tumble out of my mouth before I can think better of it. “He says he’s seein’ spirits. Bad ones.” I’m suddenly chilly in my shorts and tank top, and I pull my knees up to hug them to my chest. “Says they’re after him.”

Nana sighs long and low behind me, and her brush stills. “That why he left?” I nod against Nana’s knee and she sighs again. “I figured it was somethin’ like that. Anybody can tell the boy’s haunted.”

I look up at her surprised. “You believe in ghosts?”

“Course I do, girl. Cain’t hardly grow up in these hills without believing in ghosts.” Nana lowers her voice and leans toward my ear, like we’re two best friends whispering secrets at a slumber party. “Even seen one once.” Her brush is moving through my hair again. “But there are a hundred different ways a soul can be haunted, and ghosts ain’t the worst of it. Not by no means.”

She reaches up to touch a little silver cross that always hangs around her neck, even though I’ve never known her to set foot inside a church.

“He thinks the hikers are after him,” I tell her. “The dead ones.” I stare out toward Mud Street, deserted and still on the other side of all those pink flowers. The whole world must be asleep except Nana and me. “He says they follow him everywhere. Watch him all the time. Talk to him, even.”

“Be patient with him, Dovie.” Nana’s voice floats into my ears, soft and gentle as fog off the creek. Mournful as the call of a loon. “It’s a terrible thing to be haunted.”

“Why him, though?” It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. “Why would Lowan be haunted by the dead hikers?”

“You’re asking the wrong thing, sugar pie.” Nana’s stopped brushing my hair, but I feel her hand resting on my head. “Don’t wonder why the boy’s so haunted by them poor souls. What you oughta be wonderin’ about is why the rest of us ain’t.” She leans back in her chair and starts rocking again. “What’s wrong with folks here? Why ain’t we bothered about all them bodies? That’s the thing that keeps me up nights like this.”

It’s a good question, when you put it that way.

Off in the distance, a jagged streak of light splits the sky in two. I wait, but no thunder comes.

“Heat lightnin’,” Nana says. “Pretty to look at, but it won’t bring us no rain.” We keep our eyes trained on the strip of sky above the hills, and the blinding flash comes again. “Pearl used to say Lightnin’ and Thunder was twin brothers, so when you see the lightnin’ bolt by himself like that, it ain’t no good. Means Thunder got himself lost somewhere and poor Lightnin’ had to go out huntin’ him.”

I don’t say anything, and Nana gives my head a little tap with one bony finger.

“Why does Lowan think those poor spirits are pesterin’ him?” she asks me.

“He says they want his help.” It sounds so ridiculous when I say it out loud. “He figures if we can find out what’s happening to the hikers—if we can put a stop to the killing—maybe he won’t see them anymore.”

“You don’t believe that?” she asks, and I shrug.

“I don’t believe in ghosts.”

Nana clicks her tongue. “You don’t believe in much, girl, and it makes me sad. You wasn’t brought up that way.”

A memory comes creeping on the night wind. It curls around me like a shawl. It’s a decision spell, Dovie Bird. I’m sitting on my mother’s lap in a pool of moonlight while she sorts pebbles of different sizes into two tiny piles. For when you have to choose a hard thing. She lights a candle and sprinkles salt crystals onto both rock piles. A wick and a lick. Help me pick. Her words make me giggle, and I reach out with a chubby fist to grab a stone from one of the piles and lick the salt from it with a grin. I picked, Mama. My mother squeezes me tight. But then her smile fades and she leans down to blow out the flickering candle. I guess you did, baby.

A few days later, she was gone. So I guess I decided for all of us.

“Magic isn’t real,” I say. That’s something I know for certain, no matter how much hill blood is pumping through my veins.

“Some things have to be believed to be seen, Dovie.” Nana reaches into the pocket of her robe and pulls out a newspaper clipping folded in half. Before she hands it to me, she opens it up and presses it flat on her lap. “I saved this for you,” she tells me. “Clipped it from the Democrat-Gazette a few weeks back. Thought you might want it.”

I take the paper and hold it so the moonlight hits it. A boy a few years older than I am stares up at me with sleepy eyes the same color as the milky blue water that flows in Lucifer’s Creek. He’s posed at the edge of a lake, wearing a red hiking vest and jeans. His blond hair blows in the wind, and he’s grinning in a way that makes me think being content probably comes easy to him.

I know who it has to be, even before I see the headline.

RILEY ALDEN STILL MISSING IN OZARK MOUNTAINS

“He’s not missing anymore,” I say. “I found him.”

“That you did. I thought you might want to see his face.”

There will be another article tomorrow, I’m sure. Or the next day. Smaller than this one. Maybe on page three or four. It’ll announce that Riley Alden’s body was found, but there won’t be any details.

It won’t say where.

Or by who.

But it’ll mention the dangers inherent in hiking a wild trail like the AAT. The writer will hint that Riley Alden was inexperienced. Or careless. That it’s a tragedy, but he got himself killed. That’s all there is to it.

Riley Alden will barely be a blip on anyone’s radar.

Nobody talks about it outright, but we all know how things work in these hills. There are big weed operations up here. Multi-million-dollar fields. Have been for decades. Now the meth labs have moved in, too. The growers and the lab rats keep to themselves, but their big bosses have friends in very important places. Newspapers. The state police. Congress, even. Their buddies do a real good job of making sure the missing hikers don’t get too much media attention and that the deaths barely make the papers at all. Last thing they need is people swarming these woods looking for clues.

Ira does his part, too. He’s a one-man public relations firm for Lucifer’s Creek. Always winking and grinning and pouring the good liquor. Smoothing things over. Charming up the right people.

“Thanks,” I say, and I fold the photo up and stick it in my pocket.

Nana announces that she better get to bed. Her old bones are stiff from sitting so long in the night air. She leans down to kiss me on the head and ask me if I’m coming in, but I tell her I’m gonna sit up for a while yet.

Nana’s eyes search the dark corners of our yard. “I know it’s a hard thing to hear, but I imagine Lowan’s right. He ain’t gonna know peace until we figure out what darkness is walkin’ our hills. I don’t expect any of us will.” She pushes herself to her feet with a little groan. “And maybe we don’t deserve to.”

I tell her goodnight, and Nana heads on in. I’m left alone on our sagging porch steps, picking at the flaking white paint and rolling her words around and around in my brain.

Three or four times, I pull that newspaper picture back out of my pocket to study it. Over in Tulsa, there’s a family missing the boy who’s staring back up at me.

They’ll always want to know how he ended up in that shallow grave with mountain violets for his funeral flowers. Years and years from now, they’ll still be falling asleep dreaming about what might’ve happened to him.

Waking up in a cold sweat wondering.

The idea of that makes me angry.

I know what it feels like to live with questions, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

It hits me that Nana’s right. Lo isn’t the only one I have a responsibility to.

I owe it to Riley to try and figure out what happened to him.

I owe it to all of them.

I sit there until the sky starts to turn pink, just staring at Riley’s face and wondering why it’s taken me this long to get good and pissed. Because someone is turning our hills into their own personal burying ground, and I’m getting awful tired of cleaning up the mess.

Eight

It’s early still, so I wait a few hours before I set out to talk to Lo, but I never manage to go back to sleep. Instead I take a shower and wrap my damp hair in a towel to dry, then I pull that yellow legal pad out of my desk drawer. The one with the little slashes. One for every body I’ve pulled from the ground since the murders began. As my eyes move down the page, the red marks get closer and closer together. I look at each angry line and try to recall the name that goes with it. I do better than I think I will, but there are still too many I’ve forgotten.

I get up and head downstairs to dig that photo out of the shorts I left crumpled up on the bathroom floor, then I settle on my bed and smooth the wrinkled newspaper clipping flat to study it.

He has dimples.

Had dimples.

And a chin that looked like it was carved from stone. Full lips. A perfect smile. The kind of features it’s easy to get lost in.

I bet the girls back in Tulsa loved him.

“Riley Alden.” I whisper the name aloud before I add his red slash mark—number twenty-four—and slip the yellow pad back in my desk drawer. The echo of it seems to blow back to me on the breeze from the shuddering air conditioner in my window. Above my head those wild mountain keys jingle on their yellow yarn, and I wonder if anyone ever made a protective charm for the beautiful boy in the bright red hiking vest.

If they did, it didn’t do him one damn bit of good.

It’s just after nine in the morning when I tuck Riley’s photo back in my pocket and slip on my shoes to head downstairs. The shops on Mud Street open later on Sundays, because most of the town is at church, so Daddy is still sitting at the kitchen table finishing his coffee. His salt-and-pepper hair hasn’t been combed yet, and he’s still in his robe. “Mornin’, Bird,” he tells me without glancing up from his book. “You’re up early.”

“Goin’ up to see Lo,” I tell him as I fill up a water bottle for the walk.

Daddy closes the book when he hears Lo’s name and pushes his glasses up on top of his head to study me. “Everything okay with him?”

“Yeah.” I shut off the faucet and turn to face him. “Why?”

“He tell you where he’s been all this time?”

“Fayetteville,” I say as I turn back to dig through the drawer for the lid to the water bottle. Why is Lo suddenly the main topic of conversation around here? He’d hate it if he knew how all these tongues were wagging about him. “Workin’ for some lady who runs a healing shop down there.”

“The boy doesn’t seem right.” Daddy swallows a long drink of coffee. “Hasn’t seemed right for a long while now. All you gotta do is look at his eyes to know it.”

“It’s just Lo bein’ moody,” I tell him, as I finally find the lid I’m searching for and screw it on the water bottle. “You know how he gets sometimes.”

Daddy studies me for a second. “Secrets don’t do nobody no good,” he tells me. Then he goes back to his reading, and I slip out of the kitchen before he can ask any more questions about Lo, or anything else. I hear him yell for me to watch out for myself as the screen door slams and I head down the front steps.

Much as I hate to admit it, I know Daddy’s right. And Nana, too. Lo’s in bad shape, and if Daddy noticed it, it’s got to be pretty obvious.

If we don’t find a way to get rid of his shadow tormentors, real or imaginary, it won’t be long before I’ll have to add another red slash mark to the yellow pad—one more victim of these hills—because Lo won’t last much longer. He said it himself.

Mud Street is mostly deserted, and I’m glad to avoid the eyes and the whispers this morning, but as my feet hit the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek, I come to a dead stop.

Instead of sitting nice and quiet inside the church, with the ceiling fans twirling slowly overhead, the entire congregation—pretty much every soul in town except Daddy, Nana, and me—is gathered out front of the square, white building. They’re all crowded together in the grass below the wide steps.

One man, dressed head-to-toe in black despite the fact that it’s already close to a hundred degrees on this mid-July morning, stands atop the steps waving his arms and addressing his flock.

“We come before you, Heavenly Father,” Brother Turley booms in his best pulpit voice, face beet-red and dripping with the sweat of the righteous, “to ask your protection from the devil that walks these hills!”

A chorus of amens bubbles up from the crowd as they stretch their arms toward the steeple that decorates the church roof, pointing like a radio antenna straight up to their God.

“Death has come to our doorstep once again,” the preacher continues, “and we lift up the family of Riley Alden.” Hearing Riley’s name feels like a punch to the gut, and it also makes me realize that, somewhere in the night, I started thinking of him on a first-name basis. “Today we leave the safety of the church behind to stand before you, Lord—outside in the open—to vow that we will make amends for the wrongs that we have done, and we will ask your forgiveness.” His breath hitches on that last word and it comes out all strangled and desperate, but it’s followed by a rumbling of amens that peaks like rolling thunder. “Every last one of us.”

It’s a perfect scene. The boxy white church with the bell and steeple perched on top and the dead of Lucifer’s Creek resting peacefully in the background while the hills stretch out beyond their neat graves.

But something makes me uneasy. The simmering energy of the crowd feels off.

A little girl at the back of the group looks over her shoulder and sees me standing on the bridge watching them. She tugs on her mother’s skirt, and the woman leans down so the girl can whisper in her ear. Then the woman is looking at me, too. And she’s touching the shoulder of the woman next to her. That woman leans over to say something to one of the men. And that man nudges another woman.

In a matter of seconds, the entire congregation of Lucifer’s Creek Community Church is staring at me.

I don’t know why I’m trembling. I’m used to being eyeballed by my neighbors, and I’m no stranger to their whispers. Don’t pay ’em no mind, that’s what Nana always says.

The strong smell of sulfur drifts up from the water flowing beneath me. Usually I don’t even notice it, but today it burns my nose and makes me gag.

“And so,” Brother Turley says, “we cannot rest until all are brought into our fold. It is our duty to seek out those who need us most. For an enemy stalks these hills like a lion, looking for wandering sheep to devour.”

The little girl in the back starts to wail and her mother shushes her as a concerned murmur moves through the crowd. Someone starts the first verse of “The Old Rugged Cross,” and Turley descends the steps like Moses coming down from on high.

I hurry through the graveyard gate and make a beeline for the back fence. I’m almost there when I hear Brother Turley’s voice over the sound of the singing out front.

“This is a warning, Dovie Warner!” I look back over my shoulder and the preacher locks eyes with me across the tops of the tombstones. He’s left his flock to follow me around the corner of the church, and I can’t help wondering why he’s suddenly so interested in my every move. “Come home, child!” he shouts in my direction. “Before it’s too late.”

I turn and duck under the fence to leave Turley standing among the dead and the good people of Lucifer’s Creek heading home to their Sunday dinners and their afternoon naps.

Grasshoppers are jumping in the weeds growing up through the tire tracks in the dirt road and an old crow is making a terrible racket off in the trees somewhere.

The heat is miserable, but I can’t shake the chill in my bones. I keep thinking about Turley and that strange come-to-Jesus revival meeting on the church lawn.

I cross over Lucifer’s Creek, but I don’t stop to soak my feet today. I only pause long enough to pluck a few of the ripe blackberries that grow wild along a falling-down fence nearby, then I keep on walking. My mind is too uneasy to sit on the rough planks and enjoy the water.

The farther I get up into the hills, the better it feels to be leaving the narrow sidewalks and narrowed eyes of town behind. I can’t figure out why Turley called me out by name like that. It’s been a long time since any of my family has seen the inside of Lucifer’s Creek Community Church, and the preacher might not like it, but he’s always left us alone.

I kick at a rock in the road, and it goes flying out from under my feet to strike the bark of a huge oak tree. Probably the biggest one in this part of the hills. There are at least a hundred strips of tattered cloth—all different shades and prints of green—fixed to a hundred different branches. Green represents abundance. The decorations are supposed to bring prosperity to the one who ties the knot, especially if you bring a little fresh water to sprinkle on the roots of the tree as an offering. The sheer number of cloth strips blowing in the breeze is proof that, no matter who shows up in Turley’s pews come Sunday, there are still a ton of folks in these parts that hedge their bets with a little magic.

They’re also proof that most of them are poorer than dirt and absolutely desperate for money.

“Old Man of the Woods,” I say out of respect to the ancient tree, like Granny Pearl taught me and Lo when we were barely big enough to talk. “Luck and wealth fall from your branches.”

I may not believe in their power, but the words still come easy. Like the verses of a hymn I memorized a million years ago.

Lo said it yesterday. There are lots of things in the Ozarks that would seem flat-out bizarre anywhere else. But here, they’re just part of life. Made-up things, like the money trees and the Ozark Howler, but also real things like snake handlers who take up serpents in the service of Jesus and lakes with long-submerged towns sitting buried in mud along their murky bottoms.

We’ve got fairy rings.

And caverns full of nothing but endless dark.

Bottomless sinkholes that can swallow you up without any warning.

But the more I think about it, nothing going on in these mountains is as strange as whatever is happening to the hikers. Now that the seed of the idea has been planted in my head, I can’t figure out why it’s been so easy for all of us to ignore the deaths up to this point. We’ve all worked so hard at not giving a damn. Even me, the one who pulls their rotting corpses from the ground.

Nana’s words keep running through my mind.

Don’t wonder why the boy’s so haunted by them poor souls. What you oughta be wonderin’ about is why the rest of us ain’t.

Everyone in Lucifer’s Creek has a theory about what’s happening on the Aux-Arc Trail. They’ll talk about it in hushed voices when there aren’t any hikers around to overhear. But nobody is doing anything to stop it.

Could be a serial killer.

Or ravenous, inbred cannibals. That’s what people out in the real world would probably think if word got out, because most of them have seen too many low-budget hillbilly horror movies for their own damn good.

Might be something to do with one of the large-scale drug operations. People protect what’s theirs. Stumble across the wrong thing and you’ll wind up dead as a doornail. So that explanation probably makes the most sense.

Some people think it’s satanic sacrifices, but according to Daddy, that tired rumor has been the go-to for every dead dog or cow that’s turned up in the Ozarks since the 1980s. And nobody’s ever found hide nor horn of any satanists.

Then there’s the rogue bear theory. But I’ve seen the bodies up close. Bears don’t do the things I’ve seen. So it’s gotta be aliens, some people swear.

Some of the old timers are even convinced it’s the Ozark Howler.

The truth, after three years and more than twenty bodies, is that nobody knows shit about who or what is killing these hikers.

I’m trudging up the last steep incline before the old Wilder place now, and my mind has been racing so fast I’ve barely noticed how much I’m sweating or how hard I’m panting.

When I come around the bend in the road, the homestead clearing opens up to one side and I stop a second to lean against the rock face so I can take a swig from my water bottle and catch my breath. The air is thick and wet and it clings to my lungs like the stubborn film of grease on a cast iron skillet.

I flick a crawling tick from my forearm and lift my hair off the back of my neck as I take in the weathered, unpainted boards of my best friend’s childhood home. The tiny cabin doesn’t look like much from the outside. There’s a crumbling rock chimney and a wide covered porch runs the length of the front. A rusting tin roof slopes at an odd angle and the glass in the single front window is cracked and fogged over from age.

If I took a picture and showed it to someone who’d never set foot in the Ozarks, they’d have no idea what time period it was from. This cabin could exist at any point in the last two hundred years.

The door opens and Granny Pearl steps out onto the front porch. She stands on her tiptoes to hang a big copper pot out to dry on a hook above her head, then she squints against the sun and waves me toward her.

“Dovie Lovie,” she calls out in her high, quivering singsong voice. When Pearl Wilder talks, it sounds like someone plucking the prettiest notes on a mandolin. “I been ’spectin’ you.” That’s probably because she knew I’d be up to see Lo sooner rather than later, but Lo would say it’s because his grandmother is an Ozark mountain witch, and it’s her job to know things. Either way, I’m glad for the welcome. It makes me feel guilty for not coming up to see her during those two months Lo was gone. But I couldn’t be here, not without him. I guess Granny Pearl can read my mind, because she throws back her head and shouts over her shoulder, “Lowan! Come see what the mornin’ breeze blowed up.” Then she gives me a crooked little grin. “Well, girl. You gonna stare all day or are ya comin’ in to visit?”

Nine

I down the last of my water and head toward the front porch. As soon as I get close enough for her to grab, I’m wrapped in a hug that seems much bigger than the tiny woman should be able to manage.

She pulls back to look me over and pat me on the cheek. Granny Pearl’s face is lined with wrinkles so deep they remind me of the washed-out gulleys along the edges of country roads, and a few wispy white curls peek out from under a straw hat that’s definitely seen better days. She’s missing a couple of teeth, and her dress with faded blue flowers is missing some buttons. A rusted safety pin holds it closed at the top. But her eyes are bright and sharp. “Lowan!” she sings. “You got some mighty pretty company out here!”

I roll my eyes as I look down at myself. Dust from the road sticks to my legs and the tops of my shoulders are turning red from the scorching sun. I’m covered with chigger bites and dripping with sweat. My black hair hangs in limp, wet strings that cling to my face.

But Pearl always tells me I’m beautiful. And I tell her she is too.

She grabs my hand and pulls me inside the cabin, and I’m instantly absorbed into the dark coolness of it, like we’re ducking into a cave.

The first thing that hits me is the smell. It’s my favorite part about coming here, that scent that’s soaked into the wood. Rich and musky and dark with spices you can’t quite name but mixed with the perfume of lilacs and lavender and roses and a hundred other beautiful things. There’s a hint of wood smoke. Pine and cedar. And burned sage. Ripe fruit and homemade bread. Brewed coffee. And something that reminds me of the way it smells right after it rains on a summer day.

When I’m a hundred years old and I’ve forgotten most of the stuff I ever knew, I bet I’ll still be able to recall the smell of Granny Pearl’s cabin. It smells like these hills.

It smells like Lo.

Pearl moves a stack of books to make a spot for me on a bench made from wood that’s been polished smooth as glass from years of sitting, then she crosses to a big silver bucket by the window and uses a dipper to refill my bottle with cool, sweet well water. Before she hands it back to me, she drops in a couple of plump raspberries and a slice of lemon.

I look around the main room that serves as a parlor and kitchen. A wash basin stands along the wall under the window and an ancient wood cooking stove crouches in one corner, but a heavy table takes up most of the space. Its scarred surface is covered with all kinds of drying herbs and flowers and plants. They’re scattered everywhere. Some are tied together in bunches with string. Others are pressed under heavy books of poetry. Even more lie drying on the windowsills or hang in bundles from the ceiling overhead, along with copper kettles and pots of varying sizes.

Some of the plants I know the names of—like Solomon’s seal and witch hazel—but most of them I don’t recognize, despite years and years of Lo’s patient tutoring.

More books with yellowing paper are open on the table, their dog-eared pages fluttering in the little bit of a breeze that sneaks in through the open window. Roots and bits of bark are chopped and waiting in tiny bowls, and pink flower petals are sprinkled around like someone was in the middle of making a colorful salad. At least fifty mysterious mason jars line the tall shelves along one wall, all of them filled with meticulously gathered and sorted ingredients for Pearl and Lo’s healing work. Acorns and juniper berries. Dried mosses and mushrooms and midnight-black mud from Lucifer’s Creek.

I can barely remember coming here with my mother when I was little. We’d gather up jars and ingredients to take home. Ancient remedies and concoctions to brew up on our modern gas stove down in town. Daddy would sigh and shake his head, but I’d clap as she’d stir the bubbling pots, reciting beautiful spells like Shakespearean sonnets.

Then, after she left, I spent years pocketing herbs and bark when nobody was looking. Casually leafing through spell books looking for just the right words to bring Mama home.

But my words never sounded like Shakespeare. They sounded silly and pointless, and it wasn’t long before I gave up. At one point, though, I thought this must be the most magical place in the world, and when I sit in this room now, part of me wishes I could still believe it.

The window is small and overhung by the porch and the huge trees, so even during the day, they keep the candles burning in here, and it gives the whole place a cozy glow.

A back door leads to a washroom and an outhouse, and tucked off to the sides of the main room are a tiny bedroom for Lo and one for Granny Pearl.

The door to the room on the right creaks open, and Lo comes out with a book in his hand. His hair is messy, and his eyes are bloodshot enough to make me wonder if he slept at all last night. He grins when he sees me, though, and it lights up the whole cabin brighter than the three-story windows of Moonlight Crag Lodge.

Lo slides in next to me on the bench and picks up a purple bloom. “Coneflower.” He tucks it behind my ear and gives me an approving smile. “It suits you. With your dark hair.” I watch him stretch out a long arm to reach across the table and snag a handful of blueberries. Granny Pearl giggles and swats at his hand. He offers me a few of the juicy berries before he pops the rest in his mouth. “They called it Promise Flower in the old days. For friendship and loyalty.”

“For love, too,” Nana adds, and I feel my cheeks go pink. Lots of people expected Lo and me to get together like that when we got older, but it’s never been that way between us. We’ve always been best friends.

“I would’ve been here earlier,” I tell them, “but I got slowed down comin’ out of town.” I reach up to adjust the flower in my hair. “Brother Turley was holding forth on the church steps. Had everyone all worked up.”

Granny Pearl stops mashing boiled roots in a pot and huffs. “That man thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.” She chuckles a little at her own joke. “You say a prayer for the preacher man, tonight, Dovie Lovie,” Granny Pearl tells me. “He’s one of God’s wild creatures.”

She’s tearing up petals now, probably for tea. If I asked her about the flower they came from, she could tell me every bit of botanical information about it. And I know she means it about the prayer, too.

For Granny Pearl and Lo, there’s no distinction at all between science and religion and magic. They’re all branches of the same tree. Boil them down together to make your own brew and flavor it with whatever else you want to believe in.

That’s the way they see it.

“You wanna take a walk?” Lo asks me when Pearl wanders back to the stove. “I could use a little air.”

Even though I’m still sweating from my hike up here, there’s something in his eyes that tells me to say yes, so I do. I down the rest of my water before it has a chance to get warm, then I refill the bottle again and the two of us head out onto the wide front porch.

As we’re leaving I hear Granny Pearl singing to herself in that high, sweet voice. The same old mountain song I found Nana singing last night in the moonlight.

I will tell you a story of a pretty white rose,

It is true but oh how sad,

Of a poor, young woman whose heart was pure as gold,

But cruel she was treated by her lad.

It tugs on my memory again, and it makes me shiver. Like bone music. Lo notices and nudges me with his shoulder. “Somebody walkin’ over your grave, Dovie?”

We step off the porch into the shade of the big old trees that surround the cabin, and I follow Lo down a little slope. We’re heading deeper into the woods, and the forest creeps closer and closer, blocking out more and more of the sunlight until all that’s left is shadow.

The ground is uneven and steeper now, so we don’t talk much. We’re focused on our footing. Once I slip on some leaves and he reaches back without a word to take my hand. Even after I regain my balance, neither one of us lets go.

We finally make it to the bottom of the deep ravine, and I look back over my shoulder at the cabin. I barely see it through the trees.

And suddenly I know where we’re going.

Lo leads me straight to the spot, and when we step out into the small clearing, I hate seeing the bright yellow crime scene tape around the excavated grave site. Without it, the place would be beautiful—peaceful—with the tall pines encircling us like weeping mourners and those wild violets growing in the rock like an Ozark casket spray.

But that neon crime scene tape makes it ugly.

Lo settles on the ground right outside the tape and I sit down beside him. We’re quiet for a few seconds, and it feels like a purposeful moment of silence. Like this is some kind of memorial service.

And I guess it is.

“Rest in peace, Riley Alden,” Lo says, and the words have the weight of a prayer. He turns to look at me. “I’m glad you found him, Dovie. I knew you would.”

“How’d you know the spot?” I ask, and he reaches over to pick up a stick. He’s writing Riley’s name in the damp ground, leaving proof that the easy-smiling boy from Tulsa existed.

“Sheriff brought me down and showed me when he came to see me that next mornin’. Asked if me or Granny Pearl had any idea how the body got here.” Lo shrugs. “But it’s too far from the cabin for us to be much help.”

I dig Riley’s newspaper photo out of my pocket and hand it to Lo. He studies it for a few long seconds. When he hands the photo back to me, his hands are shaking. “I’m gonna try to remember him like that,” he tells me.

“Me too,” I say, still staring at the newspaper clipping. I can’t seem to put it back in my pocket. Those eyes have a chokehold on me.

“Do you think he was scared?” Lo asks. “Do you think he knew he was dying?”

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

“I wonder about that a lot,” he says. “I wonder that about all of them.”

Now I’m wondering, too, and I’m wondering why those questions never occurred to me before. About Riley, or any of the others that came before him.

I sense a change in Lo’s breathing. I see him staring into the trees, and I notice the way he’s inched closer to me.

“They found me, Dovie,” he whispers. “We need to go.” Lo scrambles to his feet. “They weren’t here a second ago.” He turns in a slow circle. “But they’re everywhere now.” His voice is hoarse. “Behind every tree. All around us.” Lo winces like he’s in pain. His eyes are darting back and forth.

“It’s okay, Lo,” I promise as I get to my feet beside him. I don’t bother to tell him there’s nothing there. That I don’t see anything. It won’t make him feel any better. “I’m here, too. I’m right here with you. Okay?” He reaches for my hand, and I take his and squeeze hard so he can feel how real I am. “You don’t have to be afraid of them. Not when we’re together.”

“Can I come home with you?” he asks me. “Just for a little bit?”

“Sure,” I tell him. “You know you can.” I turn around and look back up the hill toward the cabin. It’s a super-steep and rocky climb, and I figure it’ll probably be easier to cut through the woods and take the Aux-Arc Trail back downhill to town. So I start to move in that direction.

As we’re about to step out of the little clearing and into the thick of the trees, I pause to bend down and pick a few of the violets growing wild in the crack of the big rock. Then I duck under the crime scene tape and lay them on the spot where I wrapped my fingers around Riley Alden’s bones and pulled him out of the ground.

“I wanted something pretty to mark the spot,” I tell Lo. It’s silly, probably. But it feels important. “To show where I found him in the soil here.”

“In the dirt,” Lo tells me, and I guess I look confused, because he explains. “Soil is full of life, but dirt is empty of it. That’s the difference.” He shrugs. “That’s what Granny Pearl always says.”

We fight our way through the vines and brambles toward the trail. It’s easier in the daytime than it was in the dead of night with Sheriff and Deputy Jonah, but we’re still cut up and bleeding when we finally step out onto the AAT. We probably should have hauled ourselves back up the side of the ravine and taken the old dirt road home.

And now thunder is starting to rumble.

At least it’s downhill all the way from here to Lucifer’s Creek, so it won’t take us long to cover the ground, and worrying about the storm seems to have taken Lo’s mind off his ghosts.

We’re about halfway to town when we meet two hikers coming up. Actually, we hear them laughing and singing before we ever see them, but then two women come around a bend into view. They’re probably in their early thirties, with identical blond ponytails and matching pink baseball caps. Their names are embroidered on the front. Candy and Hannah.

They look up to offer us a friendly greeting, and I recognize them as the two women I noticed in town yesterday, soaking their feet in the creek.

We’re just about to pass each other when the thunder comes again. Sharp and angry this time.

All four of us jump.

“Dammit,” Candy tells Lo and me with a worried glance at the ominous black clouds that have rolled in out of nowhere. “It wasn’t supposed to storm today.”

“Maybe we should just head back to town,” Hannah says. She’s twisting her hair around one finger. “I know we’ve only got one night, but I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Never fear, sister dear.” Candy stops to dig a couple of ponchos out of her bag. “I came prepared.”

The two women struggle to get their ponchos on over their huge backpacks, then they look up at the sky again.

“There’s a Forest Service lean-to shelter not far from here,” Lo offers. “If you keep moving up the trail. Maybe another mile.”

“It’s not big,” I say, “but there’s room for the two of you. And it’ll keep you dry if you can make it before the rain sets in.”

“It should pass pretty quick,” Lowan tells them. “Mountain thunderstorms pop up outta nowhere this time of year, but they don’t last long.”

Candy and Hannah look relieved. They tell us thank you, and Candy nudges Hannah in the ribs. She digs a business card out of her pocket and hands it to me. It has a little thank-you poem printed on the front and there’s a tiny gold angel pinned to it.

“We had them made up for our trail angels,” Candy explains.

“We didn’t really do anything,” I protest, and I try to hand the card back, but Hannah won’t take it.

“Even a little kindness is a kindness,” she insists.

“That’s sweet,” I tell her. “Thank you.” I stick the card with the angel pin in my pocket and we wish them luck before Lo and I continue on down the trail.

We’ve only gone a few feet when Lo stops and looks back at the women who are hurrying as fast as they can in the opposite direction. “Hey!” he shouts, and Candy and Hannah pause to look over their shoulders. “Y’all stick together. Okay? Don’t let the other one out of your sight, even for a minute.” The women look at each other nervously.

“Are there bears?” Hannah asks. She’s peering into the trees now. “Sorry if that’s a stupid question.”

Candy looks a little embarrassed. “We’re kind of beginners,” she admits. “This is our first overnight hike.”

“You can’t be too careful in the woods,” I say. “Just stay close to each other, and you’ll be safe.”

The ladies nod and shout their thank-yous again, and then they vanish around another bend.

“I hope they listen,” Lo says.

“At least we tried,” I say, but I can’t help thinking we should have tried harder.

It gets darker and darker as we scurry down the trail, but the storm holds off almost long enough for us to make it home. We’ve just stepped out of the woods and onto Mud Street when the downpour comes so sudden it’s like someone split the sky wide open with a knife. We’re soaked to the bone almost before we even realize it’s raining.

“Come on!” Lo shouts as a violent streak of lightning shoots across the gray sky. He grabs my hand and pulls me toward the closest building, the Lucifer’s Creek Community Church.

We huddle together at the top of the wide stone steps where Brother Turley stood just a few hours ago, and we press ourselves back against the double doors. There’s just enough of an overhang to keep us out of the rain. I think about Candy and Hannah, and I hope they made it to the shelter without getting drenched.

I also hope I wasn’t lying when I said they’d be safe out there.

There’s a mighty rumble of thunder, and then another sound. Something I can barely make out over the pouring rain.

“That’s the Howler, Dovie,” Lo whispers in my ear. “Can you hear it?” He slips his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close to him. “Please tell me you can hear it.” His heart is pounding so hard that I’m afraid it’s about to bust through his ribs and leap right out of his chest. I imagine myself trying to grab hold of it while it flops around in the storm.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “I can hear it.” I look through the dark and the rain at the neat sidewalks and the bright shop windows of Lucifer’s Creek. My daddy’s stained glass gallery is just across the street. “But we’re safe here.” Lo shudders hard. I feel the tremor move up his whole body. “Look at me,” I say, and I take his chin and tilt it down so I can see his eyes and he can see mine. “We’re together and we’re safe. I promise.”

That strange howl comes again. Maybe it’s even fainter this time. Farther away. I can’t really tell.

And it keeps getting darker.

It seems so strange to have dusk during the day, but that’s what this sudden blackness feels like. Like night has settled way too early on Lucifer’s Creek.

“Don’t make promises like that, Dovie.” Lo shakes his head. “You’re not safe. None of us are safe.” He looks at me with wild eyes that scare me more than any phantom noise carried by the wind. “Not when the Ozark Howler is on the prowl.”

Ten

The Ozark Howler has been striking terror in these hills for centuries. Folks say he’s a monster with the body of a bear—huge and black and shaggy—but with curling horns like a ram and the glowing red eyes of a demon. The claws of a saber-toothed tiger. The razor-sharp fangs of a wolf.

“There is no Ozark Howler, Lo.” I’m trying to reassure him, but he only looks more terrified. “It’s only a mountain legend.”

“I’m scared, Dovie,” he whispers. “I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

The rain is coming even harder now, and the thunder and lightning are competing for our attention. When the wind kicks up real good, a solid wall of water gets blown into our faces. With everything going sideways, the little overhang isn’t doing much to keep us dry anymore, and I’m starting to get really worried about being electrocuted. I wish like hell we’d run a few steps farther to Daddy’s gallery, but there’s no getting there now. His cozy little shop might as well be on a different planet.

There’s an explosion of thunder so loud it makes me see stars, and that’s followed immediately by a deafening crack as lightning splits a tree maybe a hundred yards away. We both scream, and when Lo jumps in front of me to push me back toward the double doors behind us, one of them swings open.

“Hey!” I shout. “It’s unlocked!” I pull him into the deserted church and push the door closed behind us, and the storm is instantly hushed. The rain is still pounding on the roof, but it seems quiet in here compared to the chaos outside.

The church is dim in the gloom of the storm, and the stillness of the air is suffocating. There’s a light switch by the door, but when I flick it, nothing happens, and I realize the electricity must be off. Of course.

Lo is shivering, and I guide him toward the back pew and sit him down so I can wrap my arms around him. I reach up to brush his wet hair away from his forehead.

He relaxes a little in my arms, and we look around the sanctuary. There’s not much to see.

“I haven’t been in here since I was little,” I say.

“I’ve never been inside before,” Lo tells me, and he raises one eyebrow. “It’s my very first time in church.” I knew that, of course. He wouldn’t be welcome here. But it still seems odd. He’s definitely not cut from the same cloth as Brother Turley and his bunch, but Lo’s a true believer. I bet he knows more about the Bible and scripture than most regular churchgoers in this town. “Here we are.” One corner of his mouth twitches up in the beginnings of a familiar grin. “The witch and the atheist.”

“Seems like a great day to get struck by lightning,” I joke.

Lo gets up and moves down the center aisle toward the front of the church, so I get up and follow him.

It’s funny, walking down this aisle with Lo. It reminds me of when we used to play wedding and he had to be the groom and the minister.

When we reach the big cross on the wall at the very front, behind the pulpit, we stop to stare up at it.

“Why’d you quit coming here?” Lo asks me. “You and your dad.”

There’s another low rumble of thunder and a sudden flash outside the big picture window lights us up like fireworks. For a second, I see that huge cross reflected in Lo’s eyes. “Daddy just stopped believing, I think. After Mama left.”

“What about you?” Lo asks. “When did you stop believing, Dovie?”

“In God?”

Lo’s damp hair is drying in waves around his ears, and I have this urge to reach out and touch it again. “In anything,” he says, but I just shrug. “Did Nana ever come to church?”

I shake my head. “She wears that cross around her neck, but Turley and them wouldn’t have wanted her here. Half the town thinks she’s a murderer.” I can hear Lo breathing beside me. “Besides, Nana’s like you,” I whisper. “She doesn’t need this building. Or Brother Turley. Everywhere is church for her.”

We stand there for a few more seconds, dripping on the wood floor. Lo’s staring out the window into the rain now, like he’s trying to make out something lurking between the sheets of water pouring off the roof of the church. I think I see something moving out there in the storm, too. The outline of a hulking shape heading around the corner of the building toward the cemetery.

Then the sky goes blindingly bright again, and I see there’s nothing there. Nobody there. Just the graveyard gate swinging wildly back and forth in the wind.

There’s another deafening crash of thunder, and I feel Lo’s fingers go tight around mine. “Dovie.” His voice is breathless. Hushed. I turn to look at him, and now his eyes are fixed on a Bible that’s lying open on the pulpit.

Lo moves in closer to get a better look in the dim light, and he pulls me with him. He’s staring at five or six big drops of bright red that stand out like the scarlet letter against the bright white of the Bible pages. “That’s blood,” he tells me, but I’d already figured that out. “Look.” He points at more obvious splatters trailing across the wood floor, leading from the pulpit to the back door.

Lo’s flipping through the open Bible now. He stops when he comes to a passage that’s underlined in red ink. Someone has pressed so hard with the pen that it’s torn through the thin pages in a couple of places.

Lo runs his fingers over the markings, then reads aloud from the underlined section. Leviticus. Chapter four. Verse three. “If the anointed priest sins, bringing guilt on the people, he must bring to the Lord a young bull without defect as an offering to atone for the sin he has committed.”

He keeps leafing through the Bible until he comes to another underlined section, red ink bleeding out across the pages. Psalms this time. Chapter thirty-two. Verses three through five. Lo reads aloud again, like some kind of preacher in the strangest two-person church service. Our very own Mass. “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.’ And you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

It’s silent for a second. This is where the “amen” should go, but we’re both too busy thinking. “He’s feeling guilty about something,” I say.

Lowan nods and flips on through the Bible. White pages flutter like ghosts in the airless sanctuary. We’re suffocating under the weight of the mid-July heat.

And Brother Turley’s secrets.

We find one more highlighted passage, the page dog-eared to mark the spot. Proverbs. Chapter twenty-eight. Verse seventeen. “Anyone tormented by the guilt of murder will seek refuge in the grave; let no one hold them back.” Lo’s voice is clear as he reads it out loud. Melodic and rolling. Hushed, but not afraid. He would have made a good preacher. Something about him makes people want to believe in the impossible. The unseen.

He pushes the Bible toward me, then points to where someone—Turley, I guess—has scrawled a line in messy handwriting along the margin. Jesus Christ, only you can wash the blood from my hands and make me clean again.

“What’s that about?” I ask, and my words echo in the empty church.

“What if it’s him?” Lo is staring at me. “What if he’s the one?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What if it’s Turley doing the killing around here?”

“Why would Turley be murdering hikers?” I’m struggling to keep up. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why would anybody be murdering hikers, Dovie?” I guess that’s a fair question. “Don’t you see it?” Lo’s eyes are wide with the shock of revelation. “Brother Turley’s underlining his confession.”

The back door is jerked open with such sudden violence that it slams against the outside of the building with a deafening bang. Lo snatches the Bible and we both dive for cover behind the nearest pew.

It’s only a few seconds before a wail cuts through the church. It’s almost like the sound of the Howler. Partly human and partly animal. Goose bumps break out all up and down my arms.

But then the wail turns to a choked sobbing.

I peek through the pews and Turley is kneeling in front of the huge cross. He’s dripping wet and covered with mud.

Lo scoots backward, like he’s desperate to put distance between himself and the keening preacher, but he bumps into the pew behind us and it rocks back and forth.

“Shit,” I mutter, and Turley immediately goes silent.

“Who’s there?” Turley demands from the front of the sanctuary. “Is someone there?”

“Go,” Lo hisses at me, but I’m already on my feet and running. We shove open the front doors and tumble down the steps so fast that anybody watching us would think the building was surely going up in flames.

When we hit the ground and look up, Turley is looming like an avenging angel in the open doorway.

This has always been a land of spirits. These hills have been home to Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians, various exiled Christian sects, European witchcraft cults, faith healers, Native medicine men, and traditional hoodoo practitioners. Mix all those different people and ideas in with the dark places of the Ozarks—deep and mysterious holes in the mountains and dim, shadowy coves—and you have a recipe for ghosts and hauntings. But I’d wager this ground we’re standing on has never felt anything like the thrumming electricity that connects Lo and Brother Turley in this moment.

I look from Lo to the preacher and their eyes glow with identical fire.

“May a gentle God have mercy on your soul, Lowan Wilder.” Turley’s words ripple out into the graveyard and whisper through the trees, and just for a moment, something so terribly sad settles across the preacher’s face. “And on yours, Dovie Warner.”

“And on yours,” Lo tosses back. “For the wages of sin is death.”

Brother Turley’s face goes pale. His mouth opens and closes before he says, “You’re right, Lowan. I’m already condemned.” Then he looks back and forth between Lo and me. “But maybe it’s not too late for you.”

The preacher sweeps down the steps, and I think he’s coming for us. But he skirts around the spot where Lo and I are huddled together in the aftermath of the storm, then he stumbles across the strip of grass that separates town from woods. As we watch, he hurls himself onto the Aux-Arc Trail and disappears into the trees, heading up into the hills.

Lo gets up and pulls me to my feet. He’s still clutching that Bible to his chest. We stand there stunned, trying to figure out what the hell we just witnessed.

“Did he say he’s already condemned?” I ask, and Lo turns to look at me. His face is pale. It reminds me of Turley’s. Drained of blood.

“That’s what I heard,” he answers.

The rain has stopped, but water is still running down the middle of Mud Street like it’s become a river.

Daddy opens the door to his gallery and steps out on the sidewalk. “Bird!” he shouts at me. “Y’all okay?”

“Yeah,” I shout back. “Just wet and muddy.”

“Get on home and get cleaned up,” he tells me. “And check on Nana. Make sure she’s all right.”

“Heading that way,” I tell him, and I grab Lo’s hand and pull him toward our house as quick as I can move.

When we hit the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek, I look down to see that the docile blue stream has become a swirling brown torrent. The rotten-egg smell makes me want to vomit, and the rushing sound of it makes my chest tighten up.

All along Mud Street, people are stepping out of shops to check out the damage. They’re already sweeping up leaves and picking up branches. I hear them whistle long and low and look up toward the sky.

That was a bad one.

Came outta nowhere.

Ain’t had a storm like that in years.

They go silent when they see Lo and me, and their eyes burn holes in our backs as we pick our way around the puddles and through the debris. Clovers and Wilders have always been outsiders here.

When we reach our blue house in the middle of town, Nana is standing in the yard staring at Mama’s crepe myrtles. The storm has torn the blooms to shreds. Bits of pink litter the ground like dirty confetti from a party that ended a long time ago.

Lo takes Nana by one hand, and I take her by the other, and we help her back up the steps. We kick off our muddy shoes at the front door and walk her into the kitchen.

“It’s okay,” Lo tells her, as we get her settled in her chair at the table and I fix her a glass of iced tea. “Everything beautiful blooms again.”

“Sweet Lowan,” Nana says, and she pats him on the hand. “That it does.”

Lo and I spend the rest of the afternoon with Nana, helping her get the yard picked up and making dinner. We get a roast in the oven, then Lo snaps green beans while I mix up biscuit dough and Nana works on a pie. She sings us old mountain songs, but she never comes back around to the one about the white rose and the drowned girl. The one she was singing last night. The same one Granny Pearl was singing this morning.

By the time Daddy comes home from the gallery and we get the roast on the table, the violence of the storm seems like a dream. And so does that image of Brother Turley kneeling before that huge cross and crying out in pain.

Dinner is fine. Daddy talks about the big stained glass piece he’s working on for Ira. He tells Lo and me he might need both of us to help him get it hung up in the lodge. “Biggest piece I’ve ever worked on,” he says, and I can tell he’s proud of it.

Nana’s face brightens at the mention of Ira’s name, and she tells Daddy to bring him by the house soon. “Always liked that boy,” she says, and it makes me smile. Ira’s no boy anymore, not by a long shot, but I guess everything is relative. I figure he’d get a kick out of Nana describing him that way.

After dinner, Lo and I help Nana clean up and then we head upstairs to my room. I pull Riley’s newspaper photo out of my shorts pocket, and it’s ruined. I do my best to unfold it, but it comes apart in my hands. It doesn’t matter, though. That image is burned into my brain.

The trail angel card that Hannah gave me earlier is all soggy, too. But the little gold angel is fine. I take the tiny, winged cherub off to pin it to the fluttering curtains over the air conditioner, then I toss the wet card in the trash with Riley’s destroyed photo.

Lo glances around the room before he pulls Turley’s Bible out of my desk drawer where we stashed it earlier, then he takes my hand to lead me into the closet. At first, I worry that he’s seeing ghosts again, but when I look in his eyes, I can tell that’s not it.

He pulls the light string and eases the door closed behind us, then we settle on the floor. Knee-to-knee.

“Do you think it’s him?” he asks. His eyes are dark and he’s chewing on his lip.

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

Lo’s flipping through the Bible again. Running his fingers over the underlined passages of scripture. “What else could all this mean?”

I’m not president of his fan club, that’s for sure. But thinking the preacher might be a murderer is a whole other thing.

“Come on,” I say, and I drag him to his feet. I take Turley’s Bible and hide it on the shelf in my closet, under a pile of sweaters I never wear. Then I tug the string to turn off the light and push open the closet door. I lead Lo over to my bed. It’s early still—barely after eight o’clock—but Lo looks like he hasn’t slept in days. I spread back the quilts, then I strip off my socks and my shorts and climb in. “You have to rest, Lo. Just for a couple of hours.”

We used to sleep together all the time, curled up like baby rabbits, but it’s been a long time since we crawled under the covers together. It’s funny how we’ve gone back to being kids again this week.

I reach for the lamp on my bedside table, but Lo stops me with a hand on my wrist. “Leave it on,” he says. “Please?” Then slips out of his shorts and his muddy socks and I scoot over to make room for him in my little twin bed.

There’s something so comforting about the weight of the quilts. The soft light from the lamp and the hum of the air conditioner. Lo’s warm and familiar body pressed so close. He relaxes as I slip my arms around him, and I’m glad I can offer that little bit of peace.

A little bit of safety.

For just a few minutes we don’t talk about Turley or the hikers or any of that. We talk about the things we used to talk about. We talk about the wind in the pines. It’s a lonesome sound, we agree, but we love it because it sounds like home. We talk about how the peaches are ripe now. And that means pie. With homemade ice cream. How we’re longing for fall weather. The cool, damp sweetness of it. We talk about Granny Pearl’s apple cider and Nana’s pumpkin bread.

He rolls over to face me and we’re nose to nose, both of us fighting to stay awake for just a few more words. If I could only do one thing for the rest of my life, I’m pretty sure I’d pick talking to Lo.

I’m half hypnotized by the way his lashes sweep low and slow across his eyes as he blinks at me. Every time those big brown eyes drift closed, it takes him a little longer to open them again, and each time I think that’s it. He’s asleep. He won’t open his eyes this time. But he always does.

Until at last he doesn’t. And I don’t know if I’m relieved that he’s finally sleeping.

Or disappointed.

I breathe in a deep lungful of him. Burned sage and cedar. “Sweet dreams, Lo,” I whisper, and I brush his hair back so I can see his face one more time before I slip off to sleep myself.

I’m surprised when his eyes flutter open at my touch, just for a second, and he pulls me closer.

I’m even more surprised when his lips brush mine. It’s the most ethereal ghost of a kiss, and I’m not even sure if he did it on purpose, but it makes me gasp and I shiver under the quilts.

Lo’s eyes are already closed again. “I love you, Dovie,” he murmurs, and the words are more breath than sound. I feel them against my skin more than I hear them, and they almost feel like another kind of kiss.

“I love you, too, Lo,” I whisper, but I know he doesn’t hear it. His breathing is too deep and even. That’s okay, though, because I feel myself slipping under too.

I close my own eyes and stop fighting, and I finally let myself fall asleep wondering about all the other ways Lowan Wilder might kiss me.

It’s hours later when I wake up—just after two o’clock in the morning—and Lo and I are tangled up like vines. The first thing I remember is that phantom kiss. I wonder if maybe I dreamed it.

I’m not sure what pulled me out of such a sound sleep, but I think maybe I heard something. I lie as still as I can for a few seconds, listening. But there’s only Lo’s rhythmic breathing. The creaking of an old house. The scraping of tree branches against the roof.

And then there’s something else. A strangled howling so incredibly faint it’s like that kiss. I can’t be sure it happened at all.

I untwine my arms and legs from Lo’s and crawl over him as slowly and carefully as I can. He shifts in his sleep and mumbles my name, but he doesn’t wake up.

When his breathing evens out again, I pull on my shorts and tiptoe over to the window. I pull back the lace curtains with the gold angel pin and stand on my tiptoes to peer out over the top of the air conditioner into the night.

Something is moving out there in the dark. I watch a shape drift along the fringes of the light. It skirts the edges of sidewalk on the other side of Mud Street, opposite our front porch, lurking in the pools of inky blackness where drooping tree branches hang low. It walks upright, like a human, but I can’t tell who it is until he steps out into the open.

The clouds are thick and they all but block out the moon, but what little glow slips through is reflected off the blowing blond hair of the boy that creeps out of the shadows to stand in the middle of Mud Street.

He’s pale and painted all in silver—lit only by that strange, cloud-filtered moon—but I recognize him instantly.

My heart has stopped beating in my chest, but I guess a good southern girl never forgets her upbringing, because I raise my hand to wave at the ghost that’s come to haunt me.

And out in the stifling, claustrophobic stillness of an Ozarks summer night, Riley Alden waves back.

Eleven

“Dovie?” Lo’s voice is thick with sleep, but it’s loud enough in the perfect quiet that I almost jump out of my skin. I whirl around to see him sitting up in bed watching me. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. I’m not sure how my mouth is working, because my tongue has gone dry as sandpaper. “I’m—” I glance back over my shoulder. Out the window.

But Mud Street is empty. Of course. Because there’s no such thing as magic.

No such thing as heaven. Or hell.

So there’s no such thing as ghosts.

Which means Riley Alden was a trick of my sleep-fuzzy brain. A dream that played out while I was awake, standing at my window.

“It’s nothing,” I reassure him. But suddenly I feel claustrophobic inside my tiny attic room. “You wanna go sit outside?” I ask him, and Lo nods.

We find our shoes and creep down the stairs to slip out the door onto the front porch, so we can sit on the steps and stare up at the stars. But I keep sneaking glances at the spot where Riley’s ghost was standing a few minutes ago.

“What do we do now?” Lo finally asks. “About Turley?”

“Not much we can do,” I answer. “We don’t even know that it’s him, Lo. All we’ve got is a couple of underlined Bible verses.”

“You heard what he said about already being condemned.”

“That could mean anything.”

Lo sighs, long and deep. “If this goes on much longer, I won’t be able to stand it. I see ’em all the time now, Dovie. Comin’ after me like the Roman army.”

I reach for his hand and promise him that we’ll figure something out, but it occurs to me that he hasn’t seen his dead hikers at all since we came down off the mountain. And maybe Lo would say that’s because he’s been doing his part—trying to help find their killer, like they seem to want him to—but I figure it’s probably just because he’s been busy. Distracted and focused on Turley. His mind hasn’t had time to play tricks, and maybe that alone is enough to make our run-in with the preacher earlier worth it.

It’s close to three o’clock in the morning now, and Lo says he better get on up the mountain. Granny Pearl will be worried about him if she wakes up and he’s not there. I let him borrow a flashlight, and before he heads off, we make plans to meet tomorrow so we can figure out what to do next. If Turley is the one picking off hikers, there has to be a way to prove it.

And if he isn’t, we need to know that, too. So we can figure out who is.

“Be careful,” I tell him. But I’m not too worried. Out of all those skeletons I’ve pulled from the dirt these past three years, not one of them has been a local.

“I’m not scared.” Lo gives me a little smile, then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out that key I gave him. The one I clipped from the protective charm he made for me. “I got this to keep me safe.” He hooks a finger through the loop of yellow yarn and gives it a little twirl.

We say goodbye, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to sleep. I can’t stand the thought of lying in bed staring at the ceiling, so I sit outside on the steps for hours, until the sun comes up, running over everything in my mind again and again. Staring at the spot where I saw Riley Alden step out of the shadows. Eventually the smell of cooking bacon drifts out from the kitchen, and I know Nana must be up making breakfast, so I head inside. She raises an eyebrow when she sees me come in, but she doesn’t ask any questions. She just cracks another egg into the skillet for me.

“Guess I oughta get the coffee started for your daddy, too,” she says. “And throw another couple of eggs on to cook. He’s bound to be hungry when he gets home.”

“I thought he was home,” I say. I know he was in the front room watching a movie when Lo and I went upstairs after dinner last night, and it’s way too early for him to have already left to open up the gallery.

“Went out again real late last night to get some work done on that big piece for Ira,” Nana says as she pours me a glass of orange juice and slides a plate of bacon and eggs onto the table in front of me. “Door to his room was open this mornin’ and his bed hasn’t been slept in, so I ’spect he stayed at it all night again.” She shakes her head.

There’s a knock at the door and I stop with a forkful of eggs halfway to my mouth. “You gonna see who that is?” Nana asks. She has her back to me, elbow-deep in dishwater at the sink. But I’m afraid I already know who it is. It’s gotta be Brother Turley wanting to know what the hell I was doing hiding in his church yesterday, and why Lo and me stole the Good Book right off his pulpit. The knocking comes again. Louder and more insistent. “Dovie?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll get it.” I push back my chair and prepare myself for what I figure is about to happen, but when I open the door, it isn’t Turley. It’s the sheriff. And Deputy Jonah.

“Mornin’, Dovie,” Jonah says, but I glare at him and he drops his eyes to the porch.

I know what Sheriff is going to tell me before he even opens his mouth. There’s only one reason he ever comes knocking here.

“Another one,” I say.

“ ’Fraid so.” I hear the exhaustion in his voice. “Got word this mornin’.”

It’s so soon. Just two months since Riley was killed.

Only two days since we found him.

“Hannah Nelby,” Jonah says, and my heart sinks. “She was hiking the trail with her sister.”

Candy.

“A one-night out and back,” Sheriff says. “Shoulda been easy.” He rubs at the stubble along his chin. “But she woke up and stepped out of the tent at some point real early this mornin’ to relieve herself. Couldn’t have gone more than a couple of yards, but she never came back. So her sister hiked back down here at first light to raise the alarm.”

I think about that gold angel pinned to my lace curtains, and I’m furious. White-hot rage bubbles in my stomach like the potions that Granny Pearl brews up on her wood stove in her big copper pots.

Hannah should have been safe in our woods.

They all should have been safe here.

None of this makes any sense. The dead hikers are all different. Men. Women. All ages. All types and appearances. The only thing they all share is that they got separated from their group for a few minutes, lots of them in broad daylight. They were alone on the trail, or at their campsite, barely long enough to take a breath, all of them within easy shouting distance of their companions.

And then they were gone.

So Hannah Nelby will be red slash number twenty-five. Nothing to do now but mark the yellow legal pad and wait for her bones to start singing.

“We got a team from the state police on their way up,” Sheriff says, and he sighs. It’s a sound that comes from down deep in his soul somewhere. “They’ll be combin’ the area where these ladies was camped last night. In case she got herself turned around and lost somehow in the dark.” He stops and shakes his head, because we both know there’s not a chance that Hannah Nelby would have wandered very far from the safety of that tent, no matter how bad she needed to pee. “But Jonah and me’ll be back tonight to set up camp here on the front porch for the time bein’. In case they don’t find her a—” He clenches his jaw tight and throws on the brakes to stop himself, and I figure the word he was about to say was alive. Instead he sighs long and deep. “I expect you know the drill by now.”

“Dovie’ll find her,” Jonah says, and there’s something that looks more like admiration than revulsion in his eyes. “She’s got that bone magic in her.” He sounds so tired that it almost keeps me from wanting to smack him.

“It’s not magic,” I correct him. “Just somethin’ I can do.”

“Well, Dove, that’s a damn sight better than anybody else can do for ’em.” Sheriff tips his hat to me and motions for Deputy Jonah to follow him back down the steps. The two of them look defeated. Shoulders slumped. Eyes on the ground.

Maybe Lo and I aren’t the only ones the missing hikers are taking a toll on.

I turn to head inside. I need a shower. And some sleep. But before I can reach for the front door handle, I catch a glimpse of something moving behind one of the trees across the street. A flash of blond hair blowing in the wind, maybe. Then, for a split second, there’s a face half-hidden by branches and leaves. It disappears as quick as it was there, but I swear, it was Riley Alden.

I stand stock-still, but there’s no more movement. My daytime phantom has vanished.

I tell myself what I know is true.

Riley is dead. And dead is final.

I pulled his bones from the earth myself.

If I’m seeing Riley, it isn’t because his restless spirit is roaming the earth looking for help. It’s because I’m sleep-deprived and I’m letting myself get carried away, obsessed with a dead boy I’ve never even met.

That’s all there is to it.

I close my eyes for a second to reset my brain, and when I open them, I catch sight of Daddy coming down the street toward home. I watch him stop to have a short conversation with Sheriff, and even from this distance, I can see the hard line his mouth settles into. The way his shoulders tighten up.

When he reaches the front porch where I’m still standing, he trudges up the steps without a word. I might as well be one of Lo’s shadow people. He doesn’t even look at me until he starts to open the door and realizes I’m standing right in his way.

“I hear you got yourself another job,” Daddy says. He’s studying my face now, like he’s looking for something he can’t quite find there. “Sheriff’s gonna need to put you on the payroll if this keeps up.”

“They need my help,” I say, and Daddy grunts like he doesn’t care for that answer.

“It ain’t your job, Dovie.”

I shrug. “Somebody’s gotta find ’em.”

Daddy reaches up with one hand to rub his temple, like he has a headache, and I notice how bloodshot his eyes are from straining over his delicate stained glass work all night. “That’s what your Mama used to say.” He reaches around me to pull the front door open, and I don’t have any choice but to step out of his way. “Before she up and vanished.”

It takes me a second to realize what he said. Up and vanished. Not up and left like he’s always said before. Like everyone has always said.

You know her mother up and left her.

I follow Daddy inside the house to find him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a plate of breakfast Nana left for him. His hair is disheveled, and his fingernails are broken and dirty. There’s mud caked halfway up his pants legs, and his shirt sleeves are torn in at least two places that I can see.

“What happened?” I ask him, and he looks down at himself like he’s only now seeing what a mess he is.

“Spent the night working on that piece for Ira,” he tells me between bites of cold eggs. “Then stopped to help with some cleanup on the way home this mornin’. Tree limbs down from that storm yesterday. Big log jam under the bridge.” His coffee cup is empty, so I refill it for him with some fresh from the pot. “Gotta get showered and changed, then head back to open up.”

“I could go open the shop.” He looks so exhausted that I offer to help before I can even think about how tired I am myself. “If you wanna rest a bit.”

He frowns a little, so I figure he’s going to say no. Instead he digs the key out of his pocket and hands it to me. “That’d be good, Dovie. You run on and I’ll be in directly.”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Take your time.”

Daddy reaches over and picks up the newspaper. He stares at it, but I can tell he isn’t really reading. His eyes never move.

I’m still thinking about what he said about Mama vanishing.

“Why do you think she left?” I ask before I leave him at the table. “Mama.”

It’s quiet for a long few seconds, and I think he’s not going to answer. The screen door opens and closes gently behind me. Nana’s heading out to work on the flowers again, I bet. She leaves Daddy and me treading deep silence like water in a kitchen that’s flooded with memories and regrets.

Finally he says, “I don’t even know if she did leave, Dovie.” I can’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. “I hope she did.” He rubs at his beard. “But I can’t say that for sure.”

“What are you telling me?” He’s been handing me the same story since I was three years old. Mama left town. Packed up and skedaddled. No goodbye. No explanation. No forwarding address.

“I’m just talkin’ nonsense, probably.” He puts down his paper and takes a deep breath before he turns his red eyes on me. “But, truth is, she was haunted, Dovie, and I figure maybe she got tired of seein’ ghosts.” Daddy’s hand is shaking when he reaches for his coffee cup, and I notice that his forearms are covered in deep, angry scratches. Looks like he’s been out in the brambles. He pulls his sleeve down when he catches me staring. “That’s no way for anybody to live,” he goes on, “and it scares me.”

It’s weird hearing him talk about ghosts. Daddy’s as big a skeptic as I am. It’s one thing for Nana to be talking about spirits. And Lo. I’m used to that. They’re superstitious. Hill people, born and bred. Believers at heart. But not Daddy. Something that prickles like fear starts to climb up my spine. It spreads out to wrap its long fingers around my rib cage. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” I remind him.

“Maybe you’re right, Dovie,” he tells me. “And maybe you’re not. I don’t know anything for sure anymore.” Daddy squares his jaw and looks back down at his paper. “Like I said, I’m just talkin’.” And that’s my cue that this conversation is over.

I push open the screen door and step out onto the front porch with shaking legs. Nana is rocking back and forth, holding our old white cat on her lap and looking out at those muddy pink petals scattered all over the yard. “No way to save ’em,” she tells me. “But they’ll bloom again. Lucy planted the roots deep.”

“I’m goin’ in to open up the gallery,” I say, but I stop at the top of the steps and look across Mud Street to where I saw Riley Alden last night in the shine of the moon, and again this morning through the trees.

Nana’s watching me, rubbing that cross around her neck between one finger and her thumb, like it’s a good-luck charm. “You seen him, too,” she whispers like we’re grade-school besties. “I figured you must’ve.” I turn to blink at her. “He wants something from us, I reckon.” She turns her face up toward mine, and her long silver braid catches in the morning sun. “He wants something from you, Dovie.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

Nana looks disappointed in me. “You know too many haunted people to believe that,” she scolds.

“Daddy says he’s scared,” I tell her. “But he wouldn’t tell me why.”

“It ain’t ghosts that’s got your daddy scared. He’s been livin’ with them for a long time now.”

“What’s he afraid of, then?”

Nana looks back out at those storm-torn crepe myrtles. “He’s scared ’cause every day you remind him more and more of your mama. And he can’t stand that he might lose you, too.”

Twelve

It only takes a few minutes to make the short walk to the gallery on the uphill end of town, but I spend the whole time going over and over the morning’s bizarre conversations.

Nana and I are seeing the same dead boy lurking outside the house, and on top of that, out of the blue, Daddy’s telling me that he can’t say for certain if Mama ever left town.

I’m so wrapped up in my own puzzles that I don’t even notice the stares and the whispers. Not until I come to the Bite-Size diner. A new sign in the window advertises a pancake special, and a little group of locals has gathered outside among the overflowing flowerpots to beat the hikers to their tables this morning. There’s a cluster of middle-aged women and a couple of kids I know from school.

When I pass by, one of the women mutters, “She’s got another one to find now.”

I feel sick thinking about Hannah, and about poor Candy making that lonely hike back to town this morning all by herself.

Lo and I should have flat-out told them not to go out on the trail.

This is our fault.

“Drove her mama out of her mind,” someone else chimes in. “Couldn’t handle them bones calling out to her like that.”

“Nobody could,” somebody adds under their breath. “It’s the devil’s work.”

“That family is cursed,” a fourth person whispers. “All their women. Right down the line.”

I look up to find the speaker, but everyone is suddenly silent, so I can’t be sure who said that.

I give them all a good glare and keep right on walking.

“God’s punishin’ them,” someone says, and this time it isn’t a whisper. “You know the old lady murdered her husband.”

I whirl around and catch them all by surprise. “My nana isn’t a murderer.” I practically spit the words out, and the whole group takes a step backward. They aren’t used to me looking them in the eye, let alone talking back. “But somebody here is. And nobody seems to give a shit about that.”

“Ain’t no call for that kinda language,” one of the old busybodies scolds me. The tall girl standing beside her looks like she wants to die. She’s picking at a scab on her arm. I’ve sat inches away from her in our cramped trailer classrooms for a dozen years of school now, but here she is acting like she’s never laid eyes on me. “No call,” her mama repeats with a finger in my face, and the whole group of hens starts nodding and pecking like a bunch of chickens in a barnyard.

It figures that they’re more worried about me saying “shit” right out loud on the street than about somebody slitting people’s throats.

“Y’all better watch your backs,” I warn them. “Because if the hikers get smart and quit comin’, one of you might be next.”

I turn around and leave them burning holes in the back of my head with their eyeballs as I march toward the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek.

“We’ll pray for your soul, girl,” someone shouts, and I know that voice. It’s Vicky Mason. She used to cut my hair when I was little, but when I turn back again, she’s narrowing her eyes at me like I’m some kind of freak.

“You do that,” I shoot back. “And I’ll pray that your husband stops messin’ around with your sister.” The group gasps in surprise and Vicky’s whole face puckers up like I shoved a lemon in her mouth. “That’s why you were up at Pearl Wilder’s cabin back at the beginning of summer, isn’t it? You came crawlin’ up the mountain beggin’ for a potion that’d teach his cheatin’ ass a lesson.” Lo and I had sat at the big table and heard every word Vicky said to Granny Pearl as they stood at the old stove together. Here she is actin’ all holier-than-thou.

All eyes turn to stare at Vicky. Like every single one of them hasn’t gone knocking on Granny Pearl’s door at some point in their miserable lives.

“I never—” Vicky stammers, but I’m already walking away.

“It’s evil business, practicin’ magic,” one of the group hisses at me.

“Oh, I’m not practicin’,” I yell over my shoulder without looking back. “I’m already really fucking good at it.”

There’s nothing remotely magic about me. Never has been. But their horrified gasps are worth the lie.

The smell of wet hellfire worms its way into my nose and makes me gag, and I can’t help thinking they got the name of the creek, and this whole damn town, exactly right.

The water is milky blue again today, not brown with storm run-off, and it’s flowing freely underneath my feet. I guess Daddy must have gotten that log jam cleared. I think about those scratches on his arms again. The mud on his pants legs and the rips in his shirt. He does so much for this town, but most the people here wouldn’t bother to spit on him if he was on fire.

All because he got himself mixed up with the Clover women. Nana and Mama.

And me.

When I reach the gallery, I fish Daddy’s key out of the pocket of my shorts. The old lock sticks, and I have to work at it for a few seconds. Just as it finally clicks open, I feel someone staring me down again. I spin around quick, ready to give some other nosy gossip a piece of my mind, but there’s nobody on the sidewalk behind me.

Then I see Brother Turley standing in the open doorway of the Lucifer’s Creek Community Church across the street.

“Dove Warner! The time has come for baptism!” he shouts in my direction. “Ask for forgiveness, and it will be granted.”

Mrs. Danforth is sitting on a bench waiting for customers outside her tiny candle shop right next door to Daddy’s gallery. She looks up from her book to glance from Turley to me. “Amen,” she says, and she nods at me before she adds a little louder, “Amen, Brother Turley! We all need the forgiveness of the Lord.”

The preacher spins on his heels and heads back into the church, his black coat flapping out behind him like the wings of a crow.

Who the hell wears a long-sleeved coat like that in the Ozarks in mid-July anyway? It’s barely eight o’clock in the morning, and I’m already dripping sweat.

“Amen,” Mrs. Danforth mutters again, for good measure, and she goes back to her book. I turn to open the door, but my hands are shaking, so I knock the key out of the lock and I have to get down on my hands and knees to pick it up. Then I flip the cardboard sign to Open and push my way inside.

I close my eyes and breathe in the familiar smell of Daddy’s gallery. Dust and wood and paint. It’s cool and dark inside the tiny shop, and it calms me. I open my eyes and reach over to turn on the lights so I can look around at the delicate pieces of art that fill up the room. Lamps and suncatchers and window panels shine in a hundred beautiful colors. There are abstract patterns, native wildflowers, and sunsets. Those birds I love so much hang together like a colorful little flock.

When I was a kid, after we quit going to the building across the street on Sundays, this gallery was my church. My stained glass cathedral.

Something lures me toward the back room, and I click on the buzzing overhead light to check out the project Daddy’s been working on for Ira. He hasn’t even told me what it is, and my mouth falls open when I see it.

Glass shards are carefully arranged on the big table like the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle. I stare down at them, not quite believing what I’m seeing.

The Ozark Howler stares back at me.

Fur that’s black as midnight. Eyes that burn bright red to match the blood dripping from his sharply pointed fangs and his claws. His mouth is open wide, caught mid-howl. He could almost be some kind of demon bear, except for those huge, curled horns on the top of his head.

I walk around the table to take it all in, and my feet echo loud in the heavy silence of the empty shop. The Howler is huge, by far the biggest piece in the shop. The biggest stained glass piece I’ve ever seen. He takes up every bit of the table, and I can’t take my eyes off him. All that smooth, black glass pulls me in and I’m drowning. It reminds me of the inky surface of Lucifer’s Creek at night. Goose bumps pop up all over my body, and I wrap my arms tight around myself.

Then I notice something that seems odd. When we ran into Ira outside the gallery the other day, Daddy told him that he had his piece all cut and laid out. That was Saturday morning, and this is already Monday. Plus he spent all last night here working on it, but he doesn’t seem to have made any progress at all. It’s still lying here in a hundred separate pieces. He hasn’t even started the tedious process of adding the copper foil that will hold it all together.

“It’s a beauty, ain’t it?”

I jump and whirl around to see Ira leaning in the doorway that separates the shop from the workroom. I’d been so lost in looking at the Howler that I hadn’t even heard the bell over the door jingle.

“Didn’t mean to scare ya,” he says, and his familiar grin makes me feel better than I have all morning. “But ain’t it somethin’?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “It’s gorgeous.” I reach out to run my fingers over those fangs. “Kinda creepy, though.” A shudder runs down my spine. “A little too real.”

“Almost real enough to eat you up,” Ira agrees with a laugh. “Your daddy’s an artist, Dovie girl. He can breathe life into glass like nobody I’ve ever seen.”

A piece this size must be costing Ira a fortune, not that he can’t afford it. He spreads money around this town the way farmers spread manure on a field, and we all bloom brighter because of his generosity. Hell, Ira plays the mandolin, and he even pays the owner of Donny Blue’s to let his bluegrass band perform at the little pub every Saturday night, when everybody knows it’s supposed to work the other way.

“Why the Howler?” I ask.

“Don’t ask me.” Ira chuckles and runs a hand through his curly hair. “I wanted a big ol’ elk, but your daddy talked me into this guy instead. And who am I to argue with an artist?” He gives me a little shrug. “Already had him all sketched out in a notebook and everything.”

“But why?”

“Well, like Del told me, it’s our heritage.” He comes to stand beside me at the table. “Part of the fabric of these hills. Every corner of the world has its monster, and the Howler is uniquely ours. He belongs to the Ozarks, same as you and me, Dovie. That’s how your daddy sold me on him.” We’re both staring into those red eyes. Ira touches a section of the glass with one finger. “And he’s right. This right here is a piece of art my guests are never gonna see hangin’ at a Hilton in Dallas or Oklahoma City.” He looks sheepish all of a sudden, and it’s like getting a glimpse of what he must’ve been like when he and Daddy were boys. “I guess I like the idea of that. Having something really unusual. One of a kind. You know?”

“He’s very cool,” I admit, and Ira’s grin widens.

“Del around?” he asks me. “I was gonna see if he might want to make a run down to Rogers with me this evenin’. Gotta pick up a couple of new printers I ordered for the school.”

That sounds about right. We wouldn’t even have chalk for the blackboards if it weren’t for Ira.

“He’s at home,” I say. “Gettin’ some sleep.” I don’t tell Ira that Daddy spent the whole night at the gallery, but he gives me a look that tells me maybe he knows.

“He seem okay to you, Dovie?” I drop my eyes back to the table to focus on the Howler. “Seems like maybe things have been weighin’ heavy on Del lately.”

I’m ashamed to realize I don’t even know the answer to that question. Daddy and I hardly pay any attention to each other these days. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if he’d grown a second head.

“He’s tired, is all, I think.” It doesn’t sound very convincing, but it’s the best I can come up with.

Ira nods. “He’s been through a lot, your daddy, but he just keeps on goin’.” He settles on a stool and sighs. “The best people are like stained glass windows, girl. When darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed by the light that shines from deep inside ’em.” He pauses for a minute to look up at me. There’s something sad in his eyes, and it seems strange to see that expression on Ira’s face. He’s usually grinning and goofy. “Truth is, I don’t think he ever let himself grieve your mama.”

“Do you know where she went?” I ask him. “Or where she is now?” I don’t know why Mama’s been on the tip of my tongue so much lately. Normally it hurts too much to bring her up, so I go along most days trying to act like she never existed.

Ira sighs and shakes his head. “Not a clue. And if Del ever knew, he didn’t say.”

“Do you know why she left us?”

Why she left me?

It’s just us two in the shop, but Ira still lowers his voice before he answers. “I don’t think she could stand bein’ in these hills without Claire. That’s the truth of it. After she drowned, the life kinda went out of Lucy. And then she started—” He stops abruptly and stuff his hands in his pockets, then he raises one eyebrow and gives me an apologetic smile. “I always did talk too damn much. Del will tell you that.”

I’m not letting him off the hook that easy. “Then she started what?” I demand. “Come on, Ira. Please. Nobody tells me any of this stuff.”

“Shit, Dovie,” he mumbles. “This is family business. You’re like my own kid, and you know Del’s a brother to me, but I don’t wanna overstep. Why don’t you ask your dad?” When I don’t say anything, Ira sighs again, long and low. “I know it’s hard for people to talk sometimes, and I guess you gotta right to know.” He pulls Daddy’s stool up closer to the big worktable with that glass Howler spread out like a map across its surface. “Lucy started hearin’ the bones call out to her. Or however y’all say it. After she found Claire drowned in Lucifer’s Creek.”

I put both hands on the table and lean in closer to make sure I heard him right. “Mama didn’t feel the bone song till after Claire drowned?” I’d always assumed she’d heard it since she was a little girl, like me.

“That’s right. And between that and bein’ without Claire for the first time in her life, I think it was too much. Lucy was sensitive.” He stops. “I think these hills were too haunted for her. Too full of spirits and memories.”

It’s almost an echo of what Daddy said earlier this morning. I guess she just got tired of seein’ ghosts.

Ira stands up and takes another look at the Howler. “Thanks,” I say. “For tellin’ me all that.”

He nods. “I understand why it’s hard for Del to be the one that lays it all out.” Ira studies my face for a few seconds. “You’re your mama’s girl, Dovie. You always have been.” His eyes get that real sad look again. “Lucy was somethin’ else. Her and Claire both. Smart as whips. Feisty as firecrackers.” He winks at me. “Two beautiful peas in a pod.” There’s a pause, and he reaches out to run a gentle finger over the Howler again. “But you got an awful lot of your daddy in you, too.”

“Thanks,” I say. I don’t know what else to tell him. I’ve known Ira my whole life, but we’ve never really talked like this before.

“Gotta get back up to the lodge. There’s a new bunch checkin’ in this mornin’. But you tell Del I came by. All righty?”

“Yeah. Will do.”

Ira slips out of the back room, and I don’t hear the bell jingle when he leaves, either. He’s left me with too much to think about.

I spend the rest of the mornin’ staring out the front window, waiting for customers. I chat with the handful of hikers who come in like there’s nothing wrong. Not a thing to worry about. They buy smaller stuff, mostly. A couple of suncatchers and a little lamp. I fill out the forms to ship their purchases back to states like New Mexico and Florida and Maryland, and I wrestle with whether or not I should say something to them. I know I should tell them not to go back out there. But in the end I just tell them all to be careful.

Take care. Stick together. These hills can be dangerous.

Daddy comes in after lunch and thanks me for holding down the fort. I tell him that Ira was in looking for him, and he says he’ll give him a call up at the lodge. Neither one of us brings up Mama. Or ghosts. Or anything at all, really.

I’m about to step out onto Mud Street and head home when I suddenly remember Brother Turley, so I peer through the door to make sure the coast is clear.

Daddy is busy rearranging suncatchers in the window, but he pauses to frown at me. “You expectin’ someone?”

“Looking for Turley,” I admit. “He’s been tryin’ to get me to come to church.”

I don’t mention that he might have caught me and Lo hiding out in the Lord’s house yesterday.

All entering.

No breaking.

But maybe a little minor theft. I think about that Bible stashed in my closet. Turley has to have noticed it’s missing by now.

“Don’t pay him no mind,” Daddy grumbles. “Turley’s got the rest of this town in his pocket, but he’s not gonna get us.” He reaches up to hang a suncatcher to replace one I sold earlier, and I see those scratches standing out on his forearms again. “You got as much right to walk down the sidewalk as anybody that sits in that church on Sunday.”

“Yes, sir,” I tell him, but I still check one more time before I open the door and step out into the sunlight. I hear those little prosperity bells on the green ribbon jingle to mark my exit.

I don’t see Brother Turley on my way home. Or anybody else, really. It’s the hottest part of the afternoon, and most everyone is inside in the air-conditioning or at least laid up somewhere in the shade. Lucifer’s Creek might as well be an actual ghost town, instead of just a town full of ghosts.

Before I turn to head up the stone path to our house, I look across to the thick stand of trees where I saw Riley Alden’s face this morning. I know he wasn’t really there, but something pulls me across the street anyway. If Nana and I are seeing the same phantom, there has to be something to it.

I step into the middle of the trees and look around, and I was right. Of course. There’s nothing there at all. Definity no glowing specter.

Then I notice something in the soft mud. I stop moving and squat down to survey the ground around my feet.

Footprints.

The deep, wide-treaded prints of heavy boots in the dark, wet earth.

I wasn’t afraid of spirit hikers. Or Riley Alden’s spirit. Not really. At least not in the light of day. But these boot prints scare me. Because someone has definitely been lurking in the trees over here, keeping an eye on our house.

Keeping an eye on me.

And ghosts don’t wear hiking boots.

Thirteen

Inside the house, I head straight up to my room for a nap. I don’t see Nana anywhere, and I figure she must be tending to her vegetable garden out back. That’s okay, though. I’m exhausted from last night’s research expedition and then working at the gallery all morning, and I don’t really have the mental energy for a conversation.

I crank the window air conditioner all the way up before I crawl in under the quilt. My pillow still smells like Lo, and the last thing I think about before I drift off to sleep is that ghost of a kiss. His lips brushing mine in that narrow space between awake and asleep, and the even narrower space between our bodies.

When I wake up, it’s almost dark. Outside my window, the sky looks like all the light is draining out through a hole somebody poked in the bottom.

My stomach is rumbling so I crawl out of bed and head downstairs. Before I make it to the kitchen, I hear Nana singing that same old mountain song.

I will tell you a story of a pretty white rose,

It is true but oh how sad,

Of a poor, poor woman whose heart was turned to stone

But cruel she was treated by her lad.

She was found one morning in a cold, cold stream,

Where he threw his love there to drown,

With that rose between her teeth, as if she seemed to say,

I want to wear this rose in my crown.

Something about the melody makes my bones hum. Like I’ve always known the tune.

Nana finishes the last line as I step into the kitchen. She’s standing at the sink with her back to the door, her long silver braid swaying gently behind her as she scrubs at a cast iron skillet. A plate of pork chops and fried potatoes sits waiting for me on the table.

“I can heat that up for you,” she says, without turning around to look at me. “Didn’t want to wake you for dinner. Figured you needed the sleep more than the food.”

“Thanks,” I say, and Nana wipes her hands on a dish towel before she turns around to pick up my plate and pop it in the microwave. When it dings, she takes my dinner out and slides the plate back toward me across the table, then she settles in her chair with a cup of tea.

“Daddy home yet?” I ask, and she shakes her head.

“Came home to eat and went right back. Guess that piece of Ira’s is givin’ him fits.”

“It’s big,” I tell her. “I saw it today.”

“What is it?” She reaches for the sugar dish in the center of the table. “Delbert’s hardly been home long enough for me to ask him.”

“It’s the Howler,” I tell her.

She stops dumping spoonfuls of sugar into her tea to frown in my direction.

“Why on earth would Ira want a thing like that hangin’ in his nice place up there?”

“Ira said it was Daddy’s idea.” Her frown deepens. “It’s actually kinda pretty,” I say, “the way the black glass shines.”

Nana’s stirring her tea now. The clinking of her spoon against her mug is as familiar to me as the rhythm of my own name. Nana’s always stirring sugar into something.

“Ain’t nothin’ pretty about the Howler,” she tells me with a shake of her head. “Folks in these hills hear that Howler call, they know death is hot on their heels.”

“Those are just stories, Nana.”

Daddy told me once that moonshiners are the ones who helped spread the old tales back in the day. They figured, if people were scared to go up into the most remote parts of these mountains, they wouldn’t be accidentally stumbling across their illegal stills. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the growers and lab rats were the ones doing their best to keep the old legend alive more recently. They got a lot worse than moonshine hidden up there, and everybody knows it.

Nana huffs and takes a sip of tea, then she blows into the chipped mug a few times to cool it down. She’s constantly drinking hot coffee and hot tea, even in the sweltering summer heat. Like she can’t ever quite get warm.

“Every story in the world is at least partly true, Dovie.” She lifts the mug to her lips again and a whiff of lemon and honey floats across the kitchen. “You don’t know near as much as you think you do.” I take a few bites of my potatoes. Outside, Phantom is chasing bugs in the very last of the summer light. In another few minutes it’ll be completely dark.

Voices drift in through the screen door. Sheriff and Deputy Jonah are setting up camp for the night out on the front porch. I want to tell them it’s too soon—it takes a while for the bones to start singing—but they’re always out there waiting, from the very first night, just in case. They’re afraid that, once those bones are ready, if I have to wait for them to get here, I’ll lose the trail, like a bloodhound that’s gone off the scent.

Tonight, for the first time ever, I’m actually kind of glad to have them out there. Those boot prints in the mud across the street have me on edge, and the darker it gets, the more uneasy I feel.

I pick at my dinner while Nana fills glasses of iced tea for our slumber party guests. “It’s hot out there yet,” she says. “They’ll be needin’ somethin’ cool.”

“Thank ya, Miss Fern,” I hear the sheriff say.

“Mighty good of you,” Jonah adds. “Gonna be a long night.”

They won’t drink the tea, no matter how hot and sticky they get sitting and stewing out there waiting for dawn.

You know the old lady murdered her husband.

When Nana comes back to the kitchen, I hit her right in the face with a surprise question. “When did you start hearing the bone song?”

She stands at the sink with her back to me again, and I watch her take her time getting an old dishcloth wet with hot water and wringing it out so she can wipe down the countertops.

“That’s a strange question to be askin’,” she finally says. “I don’t even know if I can say, it was so long ago.”

“Ira told me today that Mama didn’t start hearing the bones until after Claire died.”

“I guess that’s right.” Nana sighs. “Ira knows the truth of things. They was all such good friends, your mama and Claire and your daddy and Ira.” She rinses the dishrag clean before hanging it over the sink to dry. “Lucy never did hear the bones before that, but after Claire’s accident, she started hearin’ it plain as I did. Like some kinda switch got turned on inside her.”

I’m doing the math in my head. Claire drowned when Lo and I were just a year old. Then we were both three when my mama left town.

So two years.

Two years between the first time she felt the bones cry out to her and the time she left these hills. That’s all she could stand it. Just two short years of reaching into the ground and pulling out skeletons and my mother was ready to throw in the towel and leave the Ozarks, and me and Daddy, behind.

I’ve been feeling the bones of the dead vibrate off my own rib cage since I was not quite four years old. Since before I was even old enough to even know what being dead really meant. That’s thirteen years I’ve put up with it so far. And the bodies have been coming way more often here lately than they did in Mama’s day.

I guess Nana knows what I’m thinking because she says, “Not everybody is made the same, Dovie. Some people can handle burdens that other people can’t. That’s just the way of things. Some bend and others break.”

I know she’s talking about Mama, but I’m thinking about Lo.

And Nana still hasn’t answered my question.

“But you always heard it?” I press her again. “Since you were little? Like me?”

Nana shakes her head. The kitchen is spotless now. Every dish except mine has been washed and the countertops are clean enough to eat right off of, but she’s still looking around for something else to do. Something to keep her hands busy. She settles for lighting a little candle that sits on the windowsill.

She strikes a match against the outside of the box, and I listen to the whoosh and sizzle of it. “I was grown with a baby girl of my own before I ever heard it.” Nana leans across the sink to coax the flickering candle to life with the kiss of the match. “You’re the only one of us who got your gift early like that.”

I snort out loud. I can’t help it. “It’s not much of a gift.”

Nana blows out the match she’s holding. “I expect it’s a gift to the families whose loved ones you bring home to rest.”

That gets me thinking about Riley again, and how there’s people somewhere missing that easy smile of his. Nana goes to get ready for bed, and I finish my dinner and wash the plate clean. Then I blow out the candle before I climb the stairs to my attic room.

I stand at the window for a long time, peering out over the top of the air conditioner toward the stand of trees on the other side of Mud Street. There’s no movement there tonight, but I’m thinking about those boot prints in the mud. It isn’t the specter of Riley Alden. I’d bet my life on that, no matter what tricks my mind tries to play on me.

Turley, probably. He’s been awful interested in what I’m up to lately, and I can’t figure why, but the idea of him standing out there in that black coat staring up at my window makes me more angry than afraid.

I head to bed and burrow down under Nana’s soft quilt, and the last thing I do before I turn off the lamp is look back up at those tinkling skeleton keys dangling from my ceiling. Old-fashioned brass keys tied together with yellow yarn. They remind me of Lo a little, the way they belong to another time. Like the Ozark Mountains do. The keys to the past, I think.

It’s been a long time since I believed in magic, but if I could let myself, I’d believe that Lo had the power to keep me safe with his charms and his spells and the way he loves me.

I wish I could do the same for him.

My eyes drift closed as the air conditioner hums in the window, and that’s all I know until someone is shaking me awake.

My eyes jerk open, but it’s too dark to see who’s got a hold of me. Cold panic explodes in my gut and spreads out to every part of my body.

“Dovie. Wake up.” The words are a desperate whisper, but I know immediately whose mouth they came out of.

“Lo?” I can smell him now. That familiar scent floods my brain, but I can’t make sense of it. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

“Shhhhh.” He puts a finger to my lips, and it makes me think about that almost/maybe kiss again. My eyes have adjusted a little and I can just make out his face in the moonlight filtering through the lace curtains. The clock on my bedside table says it’s just after eleven. I’ve been asleep less than two hours.

“How’d you get in here?” I know Sheriff and Deputy Jonah are posted up out front waiting for the overture of the bone song.

“Sneaked around back,” he says. “Door to the laundry room was unlocked.”

Of course it was. Despite the fact that Lucifer’s Creek, Arkansas, is now the murder capital of the Southern United States, nobody around here locks their doors at night.

It wouldn’t be neighborly.

I reach over and flip on the lamp and Lo recoils as if I’ve punched him. He’s crouching by my bed like he might cut and run any second.

“Jesus,” I whisper. “What the hell happened to you?” I reach out to touch his face. He’s covered in dirt from head to toe. Cut up and bleeding from scratches on his arms. But it’s his eyes that scare the living daylights out of me. They’re dead. Flat and brown and staring, without a hint of the light and warmth I always find there.

“You gotta help me, Dovie. I can’t do this anymore.” He grabs my hands and squeezes so hard I wince. “Please.”

“You know I’ll help you. Anything you need.”

“I found the murder weapon,” he hisses.

I’m wide awake now, but so confused. I wrench my hands away from him before he breaks my fingers. “Lo?”

“God, Dovie.” He’s looking around the room now, peering into every dark corner, and I figure the ghost army is assembling for inspection. “It was right there in plain sight.”

“Lo, you’ve gotta tell me what the hell you’re talking about.” I grab his face between my hands. “Look at me. I’m here. I’m real. What was in plain sight?”

“The knife Brother Turley used to gut Riley Alden.”

Fourteen

For just a second, everything goes still. I can’t hear the window air conditioner. Or the tinkling of those skeleton keys. I can’t even hear Lo’s voice. It’s like I’m in an old silent movie.

Then all the sound comes rushing back at once.

“—that’s why I went there in the first place.”

“Wait,” I tell him. “Wait. Wait. Wait. Why you went where?”

“Dammit, Dovie. I already told you. The shed.”

“What shed?”

Lo growls in frustration, but nothing is making sense to me. I hear the words, but I can’t put them together.

“Granny Pearl mentioned it tonight when she was makin’ dinner. We got to talkin’ about the old days when she was a girl, and she told me she used to sneak down to town with your nana sometimes.” He’s talking so fast, and I’m staring at his mouth, halfway trying to read his lips to catch it all. “She said there was a boy they both liked that would meet ’em there to smoke cigarettes he rolled and—”

“Meet them where, Lo?” I’m trying not to get angry, but I can’t seem to catch up. I realize he has a deep scratch running down the side of his jaw. I reach out to touch it with my finger and he flinches. “What happened tonight?”

He brushes my hand away, impatient to get on with his story.

“The shed in the churchyard. It was built for the sexton back in the day. He took care of the graves. Dug the new ones and rung the bell for the dead. But now it’s just tools and stuff. Junk, mostly.”

“And you went there? Tonight?”

“Yeah. After I—” Lo freezes like a possum that’s scurrying across the highway in front of an oncoming car. For a second he doesn’t know which side of the road to run to. “After Granny Pearl mentioned it, I couldn’t sleep. I was gonna wait for you. But I couldn’t, Dovie. They were keepin’ me awake. Tauntin’ me and tormentin’ me. And I figured if they couldn’t rest, what right did I have to sleep? So I decided if I wasn’t goin’ to bed—”

“You might as well go check out that shed.”

“I didn’t even have to go in, Dovie. I saw it right through the window. Sittin’ on the work bench in plain view of anybody walkin’ by. A big ol’ skinning knife. Sharp. And I could see blood on it.”

I sigh, and I hope I don’t sound as exasperated as I feel.

“Lots of people around here have skinning knives, Lo. Bloody ones. Daddy’s probably got three in our own shed out back.” Nana made us deer chili the other night from a kill he made and froze last season. And, like everyone else around here, he skins and field dresses them himself. You’d be hard-pressed to find a house in Lucifer’s Creek, or anywhere in Arkansas, without a bloody hunting knife of some kind or another.

Lo’s humorless laugh catches me off guard. It doesn’t sound like him at all. “Give me a break, Dovie. That man’s never skinned a deer in his life. Or cleaned a fish.” He leans in close and lowers his voice. “Riley Alden was gutted. Slit right up the belly with a skinning knife. Opened up so his organs spilled right out of him. Did you know that?”

“No,” I manage to mumble. There wasn’t enough of him left to tell that when I found him. “Where’d you hear that?”

Lo sits back on his heels and looks down at the purple rug. “Sheriff told me when he came to see me that next mornin’. Said that’s what it looked like to him, anyway.”

“Riley.” I don’t mean to whisper his name out loud, but I do. It sounds like a prayer in the dark attic.

I think I might throw up. The room is spinning. It’s more than I can stand, thinking about the beautiful boy with the sleepy blue eyes and the windswept hair dying that way. The pain and the terror of it are enough to turn me inside out.

Lo looks back up, and his eyes are more familiar now. The warmth is coming back into those deep, brown pools. He reaches for my hand, but he’s gentle this time. Careful. “And now we got Brother Turley acting all guilty. Confessin’ his blood sins in writing. And right out loud. Plus he’s got the murder weapon lying right on the counter in his very own shed. Almost like he was hopin’ someone might find it.”

“He wants us to stop him,” I whisper. It suddenly seems so obvious.

“That’s what I’m thinkin’.”

If he can’t stop himself, and his God can’t stop him, maybe Lo and I can.

“There’s another one missing,” I say. “Sheriff came and told me.” I’m afraid to mention who it is. Lo’s teetering right on the edge of a cliff already, and I don’t want him thinking that maybe we could’ve saved her. Should’ve saved her. That’s what I’ve been thinking ever since Sheriff said her name, and the guilt of that has me tied up in knots, but there’s no way to keep it from Lo. He’s gonna find out sooner or later.

I guess he’s one step ahead of me, though, because he says, “Hannah Nelby isn’t missing, Dovie. She’s dead.” Word travels fast in these parts. What we lack in high-speed internet, we make up for with the Ozarks whisper web. Lo’s voice is thick with regret and guilt and unspoken accusations against the two of us, and I flinch like he burned me with a match. “We both know that. And you’re gonna have to dig up her bones.”

He chokes on the words like they taste bitter on his tongue, and a hardness settles on his face. Something desperate and cold. It reminds me of slithering things and skittering spiders and the damp, musty smell that fills up my nose when I snatch a skull from the earth. It almost makes me want to pull away from him, for the first time ever in our lives.

It hits me hard that we’re running out of time to stop these murders and banish Lo’s demons; otherwise I’m going to lose him forever.

“You don’t know for sure that Hannah’s dead,” I argue. “She might be alive still.”

“Dovie.” Lo’s talking to me like I’m a child who isn’t understanding what he’s trying to say. “The blood on that knife was fresh. Wet still.”

That makes my stomach turn over again.

“Come on,” I tell him, and I throw back the quilt to swing my legs to the floor. I reach for my shorts and slide them on, then I find my shoes. “Let’s go see if we can get a better look at that knife.”

Lo and I tiptoe down the stairs and through the dark house. When we pass Daddy’s room, the door is open, and the light is on. His bed hasn’t been slept in. Again. So I’m not the only one running around at all hours.

We slip through the laundry room door as quietly as we can, and creep through the backyard without turning on our flashlights. Phantom follows us across the grass, but when we get to the split-rail fence, he turns around and heads back to curl up on the back steps. He doesn’t want any part of whatever we’re doing tonight, and I don’t blame him.

The trek through the woods is short, but miserable. It’s muggy and buggy and thick with a silence that feels heavy and unnatural. I’m grateful when we step out of the pressing trees and into the open just behind the church graveyard. But then I see the shed Lo’s talking about, and I feel like throwing up again.

We glance around the cemetery to make sure Turley isn’t lurking among the stones.

“Windows are all dark,” Lo tells me, and I look toward the church and the little house squatting next to it. “Maybe’s he’s in bed.”

“Maybe,” I say, but we still move fast, scurrying like roaches looking for cover once we leave the shadowy tree line and duck under the graveyard fence.

The old shed stands fifteen or twenty feet behind the church building, and it’s clear that it’s on its last legs. The white paint is peeling, the tin roof is all rusted, and the whole structure seems to lean at a sharp and ominous angle.

We creep up to the one tiny window and press our noses, and my flashlight, against the glass. And there it is, lying right out in the open exactly like Lo said. My stomach knots up when I lay eyes on it, and a cold dread settles in my gut.

Something awful is going to happen tonight.

I’m not psychic—I don’t even believe in psychics—but as soon as I see that skinning knife, I know it’s bad. Really bad.

It has a black grip and a short, wide blade with a menacing curve to it. The tip is razor sharp. I can tell just by looking at it.

What really gets my attention though, is the pool of red the whole knife is sitting in. It’s the color of rust.

“See the blood?” Lo whispers close to my ear. His breath fogs the glass and I have to use my hand to wipe it away.

“There’s no way for us to know that’s Hannah’s blood,” I say.

“We gotta steal it,” Lo tells me. “If you can get it to the sheriff and convince him to have it tested—”

“We’re no different, you and me.” The voice comes from behind us. We whirl around and I drop the flashlight. It rolls away from me and Turley reaches down fast as the strike of a cottonmouth to snatch it up.

“Shit!” I say, and Lo moves to step in front of me.

“For out of the heart come evil thoughts,” Turley preaches, “murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders.” He takes a step toward us and Lo presses me between his body and the wall of the shed. “Jesus tells us that in Matthew.” Turley looks almost sad. “But I don’t expect either one of you ever heard that verse.”

“These are what defile a person,” Lo recites in a voice so defiant and strong that it takes me by surprise, “but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

Turley’s eyes open in surprise, and he gives us a little nod. He looks impressed. I guess he didn’t realize that Lo knows his Bible every bit as well as he knows his spell book. The preacher takes another step to close the distance between us. Dressed all in black with his coat flapping behind him, he looks more like a demon than an angel of the Lord.

“Left outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying,” Turley goes on, and he studies Lo’s face for a few seconds. “See? You and me are more alike than we ever knew.” He laughs a sad laugh. “You’re the sorcerer, and I’m—” He pauses and swallows hard, like he’s in pain. “Both of us are left out, Lowan Wilder. Abandoned and hated by God.”

“Go to hell,” Lo snarls.

“I will,” Turley admits. “But what about you, Lowan?” Turley turns his gaze on me. “And what about you, Dovie Warner?”

Turley takes one more step toward us, and all of a sudden Lo takes off like a shot, grabbing me by the wrist and jerking me along behind him. We fly through the graveyard, dodging crumbling stone markers and leaving deep footprints across the resting places of the dead.

“The sins of the father shall be visited on the son!” Turley’s words roll like thunder. They slam into us with the weight of boulders rolling downhill, but we don’t stop running.

We’re moving in the direction of the dirt road that leads up in the hills, and it’s not until Lo is shoving me under the churchyard fence that I look up for a split second to see that Turley isn’t hot on our heels. He isn’t chasing us at all. He’s standing by the shed holding my flashlight, lit up by pale moonshine.

Even though he isn’t coming after us, Lo and I don’t slow down until we hit the edge of the woods. We duck into the trees and hide behind a big oak to peek out toward the church again.

Turley isn’t standing in the graveyard anymore, so I put my hands on my knees and crouch down to catch my breath.

“That was a confession, Dovie.” Lo is panting just as hard as I am. “Did you hear him? Admitting he’s going to hell? He all but said he’s a murderer. We gotta get that knife.” Lo starts toward the churchyard, but I grab him by the arm and jerk him back.

“We can’t go back there tonight,” I tell him. “He’ll be waitin’ for us. We’d be walkin’ right into a trap.”

“Goddammit!” Lo explodes in a burst of rage I’ve never seen from him before. He kicks at the huge tree, and I know by the way he growls that it has to hurt. “We’re so close, Dovie! I can feel it!”

We can’t really go back to my place either. Even if we slip in through the laundry room door to avoid the sheriff sitting vigil on our porch, I don’t wanna risk running into Daddy when we’re tiptoeing through the kitchen. With my luck, we’ll both end up sneaking into our own house right at the very same moment, him through the front and me through the back.

“Can we go up to your place?” I ask Lo. “Until we figure out what to do next?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he sounds resigned and exhausted, but not angry. I guess he got his frustration out on that tree. “Come on.” He reaches for my hand to guide me through the undergrowth.

It’s no use, though. The woods are too dark and thick to navigate without a flashlight. It’s only a matter of minutes before we abandon the safety of the trees and step out onto the road.

Even on the road, it’s really slow going. There’s enough moonlight in some places for us to see a few feet in front of us, but there are also long stretches where the trees hang overhead like a canopy, and in those spots it’s dark as a tomb. Lo and I can’t see each other at all, even though we’re walking inches apart, so we cling to each other’s hands and keep moving slowly and steadily up the narrow winding road toward the old Wilder place.

What normally takes maybe forty-five minutes of good, hard walking takes us more than twice that. We’re staggering blind, stumbling over rocks and ruts in the old road, and freezing every few minutes to listen when the snap of a twig or the rustling of leaves just off the road gets us spooked.

By the time the flickering kerosene lantern on the cabin porch comes into view, it’s two o’clock in the morning.

We’re almost to the worn-out front steps when I catch sight of an old shovel that’s leaned up against the railing. In the flickering porch light, I see a big smear of rust red across the blade, and I recoil like Turley himself was standing there with it in his hand. I tell myself to breathe. That the preacher didn’t drive up the mountain and finish Granny Pearl off with her own shovel.

That he isn’t waiting for us inside the cabin. Biding his time until we push open the front door.

“It’s okay.” Lo squeezes my hand. “Dogs got some chickens yesterday and I had to bury ’em. That’s all it is.”

The front door swings open then, and Granny Pearl comes out to look us up and down. I almost cry from relief when I see her.

“You two in trouble?” she asks. She’s wearing an old nightgown and her wispy gray curls look like smoke rising off her head. She holds a flickering candle in one hand.

“Yeah,” Lo tells her, and I admire his honesty. He always says things like they are. “But we’re figuring it out. We just need somewhere safe to sit and talk things through.”

Granny Pearl nods and leans down toward another candle that sits on top of an upturned wooden crate on the front porch. She uses the burning candle in her hand to spark the one on the crate to life. There’s something about the dancing light and the vastness of the ancient forest around us. The heavy press of the thick, humid air and the reflection of the flame in Granny Pearl’s eyes.

The pressure of Lo’s fingers at my wrist.

Before she heads inside to go back to bed, Pearl reaches into the pocket of her nightgown to hand us each a small stone with a hole in the middle. “You look out for each other,” she warns, and we promise that we will.

Lo takes the burning candle from the upturned crate and moves it to the top porch step. We settle there to sit together with that tiny protective flame between us.

I’m rolling the little rock Pearl handed me around in my palm. “It’s a holey stone,” Lo tells me. “Pun intended. It’s good luck to find a rock with a hole in it like that. The old folks used to put a bunch of ’em under their front porch or string ’em up on a wire to fight off evil spirits and nightmares.” He smiles a little, and he’s so beautiful in the shimmering candlelight that something catches in my throat. “Granny Pearl keeps a couple in her pocket at all times. In case of a spiritual emergency.”

I slip mine into my pocket, too, even though I know a rock isn’t going to protect Lo and me from Brother Turley. Not if he’s really the one who’s been doing the killing around here.

And it sure looks like he is.

“What are we gonna do?” I ask. “About Turley?” Lo’s still staring at the holey stone in his hand.

“We’re gonna do whatever it takes, Dovie.” He looks at me and his brown eyes are as bottomless as the water-filled caverns scattered across the Ozark Mountains. “Whatever we have to do to stop him.” Lo is half light, half shadow. His glowing features are silhouetted against the dark with only that candle flame pushing back the endless night that’s pressing in on us from all sides.

For a second, I don’t care about anything. I don’t care about Turley. Or Riley Alden. Or Hannah. Or any of the other hikers. All I care about is sitting here close to Lo in the stillness of this moment.

He pushes himself to his feet, then he bends down to pick up the candle. “Come on.” He reaches for me with his other hand. “Let’s go around back.”

As soon as he says that, I know what he’s wanting to see.

Who he’s wanting to see.

And I guess it’s as good a night as any to visit with the dead.

Fifteen

I take Lo’s hand and let him lead me around the side of the cabin to a little clearing that stretches out behind it. I can’t see it tonight because it’s too dark, but I know exactly where our maple tree is standing. The one we wrote our names on in blood all those years ago.

By the light of the moon and the shine of the tiny flame he’s carrying, Lo navigates his way through the tall grass to a crooked row of five stone markers that stand at the edge of the woods. Hand-chiseled headstones to mark the family plot.

Even though the clearing is overgrown, the grass around the graves is trimmed and neat. “Granny Pearl keeps them cleaned up,” he tells me. “Eighty years old and she still gets out here and pulls every single weed from this patch of earth herself.”

I couldn’t tell you who the oldest three markers are for, but I know the one next to the last is Saul, Pearl’s long-dead husband. Lo’s grandfather. He lost his footing on a muddy slope and tumbled headfirst into a deep ravine when Lo’s mama was still a baby, so Lo never knew him. Drunk as a skunk. That’s as much as I ever heard Granny Pearl say about Saul, but Lo told me that his grandfather was a violent man. Abusive and dangerous. Mean as a wild boar, and just as destructive. He set fire to the cabin once, with her and baby Claire still inside it. That’s what Granny Pearl told Lo when he asked about the stone with Saul carved into it. So nobody ever mourned him much.

The last marker on the end is for Lo’s mama, Claire, drowned all those years ago in Lucifer’s Creek. She’s the one we’ve come to visit tonight. “I wanted to sit with her a spell,” he says. “Is it weird to miss someone you can’t even remember?”

“I think your heart remembers her,” I tell him. “Even if your mind can’t.”

I know what he means, though. I only have a handful of fading memories of my mother, and I was two years older than Lo was when she left me behind.

Lo kneels down beside his mama’s tombstone and the light from his candle illuminates the words chiseled deep into the rough stone. Beloved Claire. In the hope of blessed resurrection.

He runs his hands over the letters before he stands up and leads me to an old wrought iron bench. We sit there, side by side, with the dark woods looming behind us and the Wilder dead spread out in front of us like a captive audience.

“I’m scared.” Lo breathes the words out like the long, slow exhale of a chain smoker.

“We’ll figure something out,” I promise him. “We won’t let Turley hurt us. And we won’t let him hurt anyone else anymore, either.”

“It’s not him I’m most scared of,” Lo admits. “It’s me.” His voice quivers and it’s almost more than I can take. “I got somethin’ dark inside me, Dovie.”

“What do you mean?” I reach up to stroke his cheek. That candle is still burning in his hand. “There’s nothing dark about you, Lo.”

“There is, and it’s gettin’ harder and harder to keep it under lock and key.” Lo’s staring at that flame, and I’m watching it dance in his eyes. “I can’t tell what’s real anymore. I walk around all the time hearin’ voices, not knowing if the things I’m seein’ are there or not. But they’re with me all the time now, even if I’m tryin’ hard not to show it. They don’t ever give me a second’s peace.” He’s shaking, and I slip my arm around him. “I’m afraid of the dark, Dovie. Not the outside dark. The dark I feel growing inside me every time that moon rises in the sky.”

My heart hurts. I thought maybe he wasn’t seeing his shadows so often lately, but evidently he’s been dealing with them on his own.

I don’t want Lo to hide from me. Ever. There’s no part of him I couldn’t love.

“Are they here with us now?” I ask him, and he nods, scanning the dark just beyond the tombstones.

I squint into the blackness, and for a second, I think maybe I see something. A blur of movement. The faint outline of a shape.

“I know you don’t see ’em, Dovie. Tell me the truth. I trust you.” The muscles in his jaw tense and he looks me in the eyes. “Am I losing my mind?”

It’s quiet for a few minutes, except for the wind sweeping through the trees. We’re both staring at Claire’s grave. I’m wondering how different our lives would have been, mine and Lo’s, if we’d ever had the chance to really know our mothers.

“I thought I saw Riley Alden the other night,” I admit, and Lo stares at me, eyes wide in the candlelight. “He was standin’ in the middle of Mud Street looking up at my bedroom window. Saw him again the next mornin’ too. Through the trees.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrug. “Because I knew it wasn’t real. I’d been thinkin’ about him so much, you know? My mind was playin’ tricks on me.” I hesitate, remembering those deep boot prints in the mud. “Or maybe there was somebody else out there. Turley, maybe, watchin’ the house. But my imagination made him into Riley. Turned him into a ghost.”

“Were you scared when you saw him?” I nod and Lo whispers, “Dovie. You gotta tell me when you’re afraid. You gotta let me know.”

“That’s the thing, though,” I explain. “Sometimes our minds play tricks on us when we’ve got a big enough worry weighing us down or some problem that pulls hard on our soul. Like you caring about those hikers so much and wantin’ so bad to stop the killing.” I reach for his hand, and I love the way our fingers curl perfectly together. We’re such a good fit, Lo and me. “That’s the darkness you feel. It comes from whatever’s out there leaving bodies in these hills. Not from anywhere inside you.”

He reaches over to lay his other hand on my bare knee. “You’re my best friend, Dovie. We can’t hide things from each other anymore. Otherwise, what’s the point?” He raises an eyebrow at me. “Promise?”

I promise, and we shift positions so that his arm goes around me now and I lay my head against his shoulder.

Lo reaches down to tuck a strand of stringy black hair behind my ear, and without planning to, I lean into his touch. It’s instinct. As natural as breathing. His fingers linger on my cheekbone and his eyes spark. They burn like honeyed fire, so much brighter than the candle that’s dripping and melting in his hand.

He’s watching me, lips parted, and all I can think about is how his mouth would feel on mine. I reach up to run my fingers through his wavy hair. I want to be tangled up in him.

He’s a deep ache in my bones.

In that moment, I know I’m in love with Lo the same way I’m in love with the moon. It’s something brand new between us, but also something old and eternal.

He sets the candle on the bench beside him and bends toward me in slow motion, and I realize we’ve been slowly bending toward each other our whole lives.

I could barely tell you my own name if you asked, but I know exactly what Lo will taste like.

His kiss will be earthy and sweet.

Like cinnamon.

Cloves.

Ginger tea and honeysuckle.

He’ll taste like the hills.

Like home.

Lo’s hand is on the back of my head, and he pulls me close. Fog rises from the damp ground and swirls around our ankles. Our foreheads meet and our breath mingles.

“Dovie.” My name is a magic word in his mouth, and I’m completely under his spell.

His T-shirt is worn and soft under my palms, and I feel the pounding of his heart keeping time with mine. I close my eyes and wait for the press of Lo’s lips, but a sudden sound stops us cold.

A strangled howl cuts through the night and we’re frozen, clinging to each other at the edge of the dark woods.

It sounds almost like a person, wounded and desperate, but there’s something inhuman about it, too, something older than the sky and sadder than the wind.

This is what the Ozark Mountains sound like, I think as Lo and I huddle together, afraid to move or breathe. Deep and dark. Mournful and strange and impossible to pin down.

I’m suddenly aware of how very far away we are from everything and everyone. How isolated. And how vulnerable. Just two dots and one tiny candle on a bench in the middle of a dark wilderness that spreads across northwest Arkansas like an ocean.

We wait, counting the seconds, but the howl doesn’t come again. Whatever was out there in the dark has moved on. Either that or it’s watching us. Waiting and biding its time.

Stalking us.

“Stay with me tonight,” Lo whispers. He picks up what’s left of the candle and pulls me to my feet so we can move toward the safety of the cabin, but as we start back in that direction, I notice something I hadn’t seen before.

The light from our candle illuminates a white rose that’s been carefully laid across Claire’s grave.

“Look,” I whisper, and I point the flower out to Lo who stops to stare at it. “Where did that come from?”

“It wasn’t there before,” Lo whispers, and the ground shifts sideways. I have to hang onto his arm to stop me swaying on my feet.

“Are you sure?” I ask him, but then I remember that he knelt right there. He would have seen it. That means somebody put it there, slipping though the curtain of night without us even noticing.

We were only a few feet away.

I can almost hear the words to that old song floating on the fog that’s started to creep in all around us.

I will tell you a story of a pretty white rose—

“Somebody must’ve left it when we were…” Lo trails off, but I know what he means.

When we were distracted.

Focused on each other.

The hair on my neck stands up. “Someone’s watching us, Lo.” I feel eyes on me as sure as I feel Lo’s fingers wrapped around my hand.

“Come on.” He pulls me toward the cabin, but I can’t resist looking back over my shoulder at that ghost rose, glowing bone-white in the shine of the moon. Something about it tugs on a memory I can’t quite name.

Just beyond the graves, a shadow looms in the fog.

“Lo.”

He looks over his shoulder at me, and then past me to the hulking black shape at the edge of the woods.

Thunder rumbles long and deep. Looks like another storm cell is moving through. There’s a flash of lightning and a gust of wind comes sweeping around the corner of the cabin. “Shit!” Lo lets go of my hand to shield the flame, but it’s too late. Our candle goes out.

The shape at the edge of the trees is moving in our direction now. There’s just enough light to make out the outline of something coming slow and careful across the space between us. It moves silently, like the mist that’s rolled in to fill up the clearing.

“Lo?” I whisper his name, but there’s no answer, and when I reach for his hand I can’t find him. My heart is pounding against my ribs so hard that I’m afraid my bones will crack. “Lo?” I hiss, louder this time.

But the only response I get is a bloodcurdling howl.

Sixteen

Something grabs me by the arm, and I scream.

“Dovie! Run!” Lo’s jerking me along. We stumble around the side of the cabin, and he shoves me up the steps in front of him. The door swings open and Granny Pearl appears in her nightgown with a lit candle. She barely has time to step out of the way before Lo and I are barreling through the door and slamming it behind us.

Lo hands his unlit candle to Granny Pearl and she lights it with the one she’s holding before she sets it on the table.

“Goddammit!” He’s trying to slide the rusty bolt into place to lock the door, but it hasn’t been used in decades and it won’t budge.

“Who was that?” I shout. “What was that? Was that Turley?”

Lo doesn’t have time to answer my questions.

“Get the gun!” he yells in my direction, and I grab an ancient rifle off the wall. Granny Pearl and Lo use it for hunting rabbits and deer and whatever else they can scare up to eat. I hand it to Lo, and he lifts it to his shoulder and levels it at the front door. “Get back,” he tells me, and I take Granny Pearl’s arm and pull her toward the big fireplace at the end of the cabin, away from the door and the window.

I slide one hand into my pocket to find the holey stone she gave me earlier and I worry it between my thumb and my finger. There’s a clattering at the back door and Lo whirls around to point the gun in that direction.

“Don’t be scared, Dovie Lovie.” Granny Pearl pats my hand. “That thing out there can’t hurt us. I got a protective fence around this place.” The clattering noise outside the back door comes again, and I grab her arm tighter. “The magic’s strong,” she reassures me. “It’ll hold.”

That god-awful howl cuts through the night again, and it’s like whatever is making that sound is right there in the cabin with us. It’s all I can do not to cover my ears and scream. Instead I clutch the holey stone tight in my fist.

“What the fuck is out there, Lo?” He’s standing there with that gun trained on the back door. “It’s gotta be Turley. Right? He’s trying to scare us.”

“Claire woulda been safe, too,” Granny Pearl says softly. “If she had just stayed home that night.” She looks lost and confused for a second, then her eyes are sharp and clear again. “The magic is strong,” she says again. “It’ll hold.”

We’re all waiting, but everything has suddenly gone still. There’s no more rattling at the back door. No more howling.

There’s just our breathing and the moaning of the wind outside.

“That wasn’t Turley,” Lo says. Every muscle in his body is tensed. Ready. He hasn’t lowered that gun yet. I don’t think he’s even blinked. “It was the Howler, Dovie.”

For a second, I almost believe him, but Granny Pearl speaks up.

“No, Lowan,” she tells him. Her voice sounds like mountain dulcimer music in the silence of the cabin. “The Howler is a harbinger of death. He ain’t an instrument of it.” Lo lowers the gun to listen to his grandmother, and she pulls away from me to go and lay a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You hear that howling, you know death is stalking these hills. That’s why old timers feared him so. But the Howler won’t be the one who brings it.” She peers out the front window into the blackness beyond. “Whatever was after you two, it wasn’t the Howler.”

“Turley,” I say from my spot by the fireplace. I don’t trust my legs enough to move yet. They’re still shaking. “It had to be Turley.”

“Dovie and me saw a knife,” Lo tells Granny Pearl. “A bloody skinnin’ knife in the shed out back of the church.” He glances in my direction before he goes on. “We got reason to believe Turley’s the one that’s been doing the killin’.”

Granny Pearl frowns. She moves toward the big table in the center of the room and clears a spot. “You put that gun down, Lowan. Ain’t nothin’ can harm us here. You know that.”

“Four red cedar sticks,” he tells me. “Soak ’em overight in camphor oil and put one in each corner of the property, workin’ in a clockwise direction, and you got yourself a protective fence.”

“Better than barbed wire,” Granny Pearl says proudly. She crosses to the shelf against the wall and selects a mason jar of red juniper berries to take back to the table. I watch her use her candle to light a piece of charcoal in a little cast iron cauldron, then she looks back at Lo. “Come on, then. Ask your question.”

“Divination. Probably the oldest spiritual practice that exists.” He reaches for me, and I let him take my hand to lead me toward the table. “Cultures all over the world have their own ways of seein’ the unknown.” We sit side by side on the smooth wooden bench while Granny Pearl stands opposite us. “Granny Pearl can read answers in the patterns of flying birds and scattered bones. Or tea leaves in a cup. Corn kernels tossed onto a hearth.” She raises her chin toward Lo. “The tracks that drops of water leave when they run down a windowpane.” He looks toward the little flame burning in the cauldron at the center of the table. Granny Pearl stands ready with a handful of those red juniper berries. “Even the curl of rising smoke.”

I hold my breath, waiting for something magical to happen, and I forget to be afraid.

“Go on,” Granny Pearl prompts again. “Fire’s ready.”

Lo takes a deep breath in the stillness of the hushed cabin, then he blows on the flame three times. I watch it burn bigger and brighter.

“With this breath, I give you life, little ember,” he says, and the wind moans louder outside the cabin in response. I feel goose bumps break out across my arms and the tops of my thighs. “Burn bright and let your smoke give me an answer.” All three of us lean toward the tiny fire. “Tell me true. Is Brother Turley guilty?”

Not one of us is breathing now. The first wisp of smoke curls from the cauldron and Granny Pearl squints at it like she’s a surgeon studying a patient’s X-ray. We watch it for a few seconds until it starts to rise toward the ceiling.

“Coiling clockwise,” Granny Pearl announces, and she and Lo lock eyes across the table.

“What does that mean?” I whisper.

“Smoke curling clockwise means the answer is yes,” Lo says. “It means he’s guilty.”

“What are we gonna do?” I ask him, and Lo turns to look at me.

He’s shadow and light. Half his face is licked by fire, but the other half wears a mask of darkness. It reminds me of an illustration I saw once in one of Daddy’s books. The Phantom of the Opera.

“We’re gonna go back to that shed and get that knife and we’re gonna take it to the sheriff. Tonight.”

Thunder rumbles in the distance, and another unearthly howl goes up from outside. But this time it’s just the wind.

“There’s another downpour brewin’.” Granny Lo frowns. “It’s bound to be a bad one. This is a summer of storms.” I’m not sure if she’s givin’ a weather report, or if she’s talking more figuratively. “Best wait for daylight.”

Lo shakes his head. “We can’t. That gives Turley more time to get rid of it.”

“He might be waitin’ for us.” Fear climbs down my throat, and it threatens to choke me when I think about how the preacher caught us peeking in his shed window earlier.

“We got no choice, Dovie.” Lo puts a hand on my knee as thunder rolls across the hills again.

I think about Turley. And about whatever that was out there in the dark, whether it was him or something else. I think about the storm we all know is coming.

And I nod.

Lo takes my hand and uncurls my fingers to reveal the holey stone lying in my palm.

“You believe in protective charms now?” he teases me, and one corner of his mouth twists into an almost-smile. His eyes are glowing from the flame on the table, and from the warmth of that fire that burns bright inside Lo.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “But I believe in you.”

He smiles for real then, and I know I’d face down Turley or the Howler or any other monster in these hills to save him.

“I believe in us,” he says.

Granny Pearl takes a flashlight off the hook by the door and hands it to Lo, then she looks back and forth between the two of us. She’s holding one of the candles, and her white curls glow like a halo. It’s like a picture right out of the Bible, or a stained glass window in a cathedral. Saint Pearl of the Hills, Patron Saint of the Haunted.

“Remember,” she warns us. “Divinin’ with smoke is powerful, but you gotta ask the right question, or that magic can steer you wrong.”

“We asked the right question,” Lo assures her.

“You make sure you listen to your hearts. Both of you got good ones, and you love each other deep.” Granny Pearl reaches out and touches my hand and then Lo’s, and I know she’s passing us some bit of unnamed magic. Spellin’ us without tellin’ us, is what Lo and I used to call it. “That pure heart-magic between true twin flames is rare, and it’s the strongest magic this world has.” She heads toward her bedroom, but before she opens the door she turns back to give us one last warning. “But be careful, loves. A body can end up just as haunted by the things we do for the people we hold dear as by the things we don’t.”

“We’ll be careful,” Lo promises.

“Then we’ll see each other tomorrow,” she says. “God willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”

When Granny Pearl disappears into her room and closes the door, Lo looks at me and grins. “You ready to get that son of a bitch?” I hesitate, and the grin slides off his face. His brown eyes knit together with worry, and he reaches out to tuck a wayward strand of hair behind my ear. I feel the brush of his thumb along my cheekbone, and something low in my stomach ignites and spreads out through my body like molten candle wax. Thunder shakes the tiny cabin and the copper pots hanging from the rafters above us rattle and clank with its power. Lo takes a step closer to me. “Don’t be afraid, Dovie.”

“I’m not,” I tell him, but that’s a lie.

It isn’t Brother Turley I’m fretting about, though. Or the mountain thunderstorm that’s kicking up outside. It’s not even the Howler, Ozarks harbinger of doom.

It’s the Wilder/Clover curse that has me scared to death tonight, because losing Lo like Nana lost Pearl and Mama lost Claire is the only thing in the world that would bring me to my knees.

Seventeen

Lo leans over to blow out the candle that’s sitting on the table. He picks up the rifle and uses the strap to sling it across his back before he pushes open the cabin door and we step out into the night.

It’s three o’clock in the morning, and the temperature is dropping fast. I search the sky for lightning, but there isn’t any. The air is damp. Almost chilly. I shiver hard and Lo reaches for my hand.

“We just had that big storm yesterday afternoon,” I tell him. “Now another one is moving in.”

I can’t help thinking it’s weird. Daddy would tell me it’s normal. Big storm systems get stalled-out over the Ozarks this time of year. I know that. They dump rain hard and fast.

But nothing feels normal this summer.

“Not another one,” Lo corrects me. “This is the same storm, still raging.”

We pause at the edge of the clearing and peer down the dark and twisting dirt road into inky nothingness. It’s like the world ends five feet in front of our faces. Up until an hour ago, if you’d asked me if I believed in magical protective fences made from red cedar sticks, I’d have said no—hell, I’d still say no—but standing here now, I’m reluctant to step foot off Granny Pearl’s property, because, the truth is, Turley could’ve come busting right into the cabin earlier.

But he didn’t.

Maybe that was because he somehow knew Lo was standing just inside with a rifle trained on the door.

Or maybe there was some other reason.

“Why do you think Brother Turley left the white rose on your mama’s grave?” I whisper the question as we step onto the road and the whole universe shrinks down to me and Lo and what we can see in the beam of our little flashlight.

“I don’t know,” Lo murmurs. “To scare us, I guess. To leave a little callin’ card so we’d know he was right there—close enough to kiss us or kill us—and we never even knew it.” Lo’s quiet for a minute. “Or maybe just to rattle me,” he finally says. “Everybody knows the story about Mama bein’ found with the petals of a white rose floatin’ around her body.”

I think about my mama discovering her closest friend dead like that, and my heart aches. I feel the pain of it deep in my gut, like my insides are full of sharp rocks and they’re slicing me to pieces.

“Granny Pearl told me once that Turley was real mad we didn’t have Mama’s funeral in the church,” Lo says. “He threw a hissy fit ’cause he wanted to pray over her, to cleanse her soul of wickedness, he said. But Granny Pearl wouldn’t let him.”

“Good for her,” I mutter.

“Granny said we didn’t need any preacher to put in a good word for Mama.”

We walk in silence for a long while, creeping along the dirt road as quiet as we can and picking our way across the first two bridges over Lucifer’s Creek. We’ll cross it two more times before we hit town. We’re straining our ears, listening for the snapping of twigs or the rustling of leaves, anything that might hint we aren’t alone out here.

But all we hear is thunder. It goes on almost constantly, like distant cannon fire, long and low enough to shake the ground under our feet.

We’re coming up to the creek again. I can tell by the strong smell of sulfur that’s blowing this direction on the wind. I’m keeping track of the bridges in my head. Counting them like mile markers. It’s the only way to tell where we are in the pitch dark.

This is the third of four between the Wilder cabin and town, which means we’re about halfway down. Another mile to go. We’ve just made it across the bridge when the first bolt of lightning tears the dark to pieces.

The twins are reunited. I guess it was Lightning that got himself lost this time.

I glance up at the sky, and Lo picks up his pace. His legs are longer than mine, and I have to hurry to keep up. I don’t want him to let go of my hand.

It doesn’t do us any good, though. There’s one more explosive crack of thunder before all hell breaks loose. The rain comes so fast and so hard that it’s like someone turned a firehose on us.

The dirt road is instantly a river of mud and we’re fighting for every step. We can’t see. We can’t hear each other shout. All we can do is hang on to each other’s hands and try to keep moving forward through the storm. The attack feels personal. Like it’s more than bad weather. Almost as if the Ozarks themselves have it in for us tonight.

Driving rain stings my shoulders and my face like a thousand tiny needles. I put my free hand up to shield my eyes, but it doesn’t help. Trails of lightning crisscross the sky like highways, snaking down here and there to lick at the earth with deadly tongues. One bright explosion hits closer than the others, and we jump. I stumble and fall, and Lo drags me to my feet. I wonder if that’s how we’ll die. Electrocuted on this desolate road.

Then I feel the water swirling around my ankles and I know that Thunder’s twin isn’t the only thing we have to worry about. The way this rain is coming down, a flash flood might be what takes us out.

Or a mudslide.

We’re inching down the mountain toward town, peering through curtains of driving rain trying desperately to see what’s right in front of us. Knowing that anything or anyone could be coming up right behind us and we’d never hear it. We wouldn’t hear a tank barreling down the road blowing its horn. Not in this storm.

We fight through the assault for another half hour or so. Each of us falls a half dozen times. We’re sliding down the mountain more than we’re walking down it.

There’s a barrage of short thunderclaps that sound like someone setting off Black Cat fireworks right behind my head, and a dozen streaks of lightning rip across the sky at once, turning dark to day. And that’s when I see him plain as anything. He’s standing just up ahead of us, on the other side of the last bridge across Lucifer’s Creek. His blond hair is blowing in the wind, and he’s staring down at the rushing water, so I can’t see his face.

But I don’t need to see his face.

I know it’s Riley Alden.

Then the world goes dark again. I’m standing frozen in the rain while the sky falls down around me. Lo is tugging on my hand. “Come on!” he shouts. “Dovie!” At least I think that’s what he’s yelling. I can’t hear a word of it.

I let him pull me toward the bridge, and when the lightning comes again, the ghost of Riley Alden has vanished. I scan the dark, looking for the beautiful boy from Tulsa whose bones I held in my hands.

Lo is trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear anything over the deafening roar of Lucifer’s Creek. He aims his flashlight toward the bridge, and I see the swirling water surging underneath, passing within a hair of the wooden planks. And the rain is still falling in sheets. If we don’t cross now, we won’t be able to.

I think about something Granny Pearl said earlier. Then we’ll see each other tomorrow, she told us. God willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

Lo grips my hand like a vice, and we start across the little bridge where we sat and talked just a few days ago. That first day we were reunited.

The spot is unrecognizable now. Lucifer’s Creek has become a raging monster and it wants to eat us alive. We’re inching across the slippery planks. One false step and the water wins. We’ll be swept downstream, tumbling head over feet.

Lo loses his footing and I scream his name and grab for him. My mouth is full of rain and my eyes are flooded. My heart has leaped out of my chest where it belongs and it’s pounding against the insides of my teeth. But Lo finds his balance and we make our way on across. When his feet hit ground on the other side, he pulls me to him and crushes me against his chest. “We’re okay,” he tells me over and over and over again. “We’re okay, Dovie. We’re okay.” And those words I’m somehow able to hear over the violence of the storm.

We move as fast as we can down the last part of the road toward town, and despite the fact that we’ve come to steal a murder weapon from a serial killer, I’m relieved when I see the church come into view. All I can think about is finding some shelter. I don’t know if you can drown from walking through the rain, but if you can, Lo and I are almost there.

Lo clicks off his flashlight as we crawl under the graveyard fence. Our feet sink deep in the mud, and the squelching sound of it makes me sick to my stomach. It reminds me of the sound bones make when I pull them from wet earth.

Suddenly I’m thinking about Hannah.

How long until her bones start singing?

There’s another round of thunder and lightning, and all of a sudden the rain is mixed with hail. Sharp chunks of ice fall from the sky like God’s pitching them right at us. It feels like being hit by fistfuls of gravel flung from a slingshot at close range.

Lo and I are slogging across the churchyard with our hands up to shield our faces, sinking with every step. I’m trying not to cry out from the pain of the hailstones stinging the exposed flesh on my shoulders and back.

When we finally reach the leaning shed, Lo reaches for the door, and I’m equal parts sick and relieved when he’s able to pull it open. We step inside and pull the door closed behind us. Lo covers his flashlight with his hand before he turns it on, so just the tiniest bit of light shines through, and we crouch down low to avoid the windows.

We’re dripping and gasping. Wiping rain from our eyes. Still slipping on muddy feet. Trying to catch our breath and get our bearings.

The knife is still lying there in plain sight, exactly where it was when we saw it earlier.

“He really does want us to stop him,” Lo whispers.

“Maybe,” I answer, but I’m wondering if we’ve walked into some kind of trap.

Hail is pounding the tiny shed. It sounds like someone dropping marbles on the metal roof. Rain runs in rivers down the windowpanes. It leaks through holes in the walls and seeps in under the door.

Lo takes the rifle off his shoulder to examine it with the flashlight. “Shit,” he mutters. “It’s full of mud.”

That doesn’t surprise me. We both slipped and fell again and again trying to get down the mountain. We’re so covered in mud that I can barely find a spot with skin showing through.

When he sighs and leans the rifle in the corner of the shed, I notice something lying right beside his foot. “What’s that?” I ask, and I reach over to pick it up. It’s a little plastic card, like a driver’s license. Lo hits it with the flashlight, and I almost drop it from shock.

“Holy shit.” Lo breathes out the words in a long, low whisper. “Is that—?”

“Yeah.”

It’s smudged with mud from where Lo stepped on it when we came in, but Riley Alden smiles easily up from a gym membership card.

“You told me you’d been seeing him,” Lo says.

“Saw him again tonight.” I can’t tear my eyes away from Riley’s. “In the rain. On the way down the mountain.”

“Dovie.” Lo lays his hand on my shoulder. His dark eyes burn like smoldering coals. “This is why. This is what he was leading you toward.”

My mind is spinning. Reeling and swirling like that flood water surging under the bridge at Lucifer’s Creek. I’m spiraling out in a million different directions at once. It’s a free fall, and I reach for anything that feels solid. For me, that’s always Lo, so I grab his hand and hang on.

I close my eyes, but I keep seeing Riley’s face as he stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight underneath my bedroom window. The scene flickers through my mind a million times in the span of a few seconds. I watch it over and over and over, trying to make sense of it, until the images become like a word you’ve repeated so many times that it’s become nonsense.

I’m thinking about those boot prints hidden among the trees. I was so sure it had been Turley who was watching the house. My brain playing tricks on me.

Now I don’t have any idea what to think. Nothing makes sense. I’m dizzy and shaking and I can’t remember how to breathe.

I realize this is exactly what Lo’s been experiencing for years, and my vision blurs.

“Lo?” My voice sounds desperate to my own ears. “I’m sorry,” I choke. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Lo reassures me. His hand is warm and gentle on my muddy cheek. But it’s not okay. Everything I’ve ever believed is upside down and sideways, like someone’s shaken up a box of puzzle pieces. “You don’t have to be afraid. See?” He takes the ID from me and holds it in the flashlight beam. “Riley wanted you to find this, here in Turley’s shed, so we’d know for sure that the preacher is the one who killed him.” He leans in close to look into my eyes. “Neither one of us is going to be haunted after tonight, Dovie. I promise.” He hands Riley’s ID back to me and I stick it in my pocket.

Suddenly there’s movement at the window. A face. Blue eyes and hair that glows pale blond in the moonlight. A spectral palm pressed against the pane. He’s mouthing words at me.

I scream at the top of my lungs and scramble backward. Lo launches himself across the distance between us to clamp a hand over my mouth, but he’s too late. Someone rips open the door to the shed, and I brace myself for an encounter with a beautiful dead boy.

Only, it isn’t a vengeful ghost that’s blocking the door.

It’s Brother Turley, and his eyes blaze red in the dark like the Howler’s.

Eighteen

Almost before we can react at all, Turley clicks on a flashlight and the shed fills up with light. He grabs Lo by the arm and drags him out the door into the dark. I grab his other arm, and for a few seconds, we play tug-of-war for my best friend. But the preacher has a good hundred pounds on me, and there’s no way I’m going to win. All I can do is stumble out of the shed and chase after Turley’s flashlight beam as he hauls Lo across the muddy churchyard toward the back fence.

Lo fights back. He’s kicking and clawing. Cursing up a storm. But Brother Turley is a big guy, and Lo isn’t.

I’m slipping and falling. Fighting to get on my feet again. Sinking up to my ankles with almost every step.

I’m so intent on doing battle with the mud and the dark that it takes me a minute to realize the rain and the hail have stopped falling.

“Let him go! Turley! You better let him the fuck go!” I’m screaming myself hoarse, but Brother Turley doesn’t so much as glance back in my direction.

When he hits the fence that separates the churchyard from the woods, he steps right over, dragging Lo with him like he’s a sack of laundry.

I’m still trying to catch up, but the preacher’s legs are so much longer than mine. I duck under the fence and keep going.

Turley’s pulling Lo up the dirt road now, in the direction of that little plank bridge across Lucifer’s Creek, and as soon as I hear the water, I get a sick feeling about how this is going to go down.

I scream out Lo’s name again when I come around a bend in the road and the scene comes into view. There’s enough moonlight peeking through the clouds now to make out Turley standing on the creekbank. He has Lo by the collar of his shirt, and he’s half dangling him over the raging water. That flashlight is clutched in his other hand.

The smell of hellfire fills up my nose. It’s fire and brimstone. The scent of the damned.

“Stay back, Dove Warner,” Turley yells in my direction and he pushes Lo farther over the edge of the bank. Lo’s feet kick helplessly at the water below. “If you love him, let me do this. For his sake.”

I stop cold.

“Go on, Dovie!” Lo shouts. “Get outta here!” He’s begging me, fighting with Turley, trying to push his hands away. I consider running home for help. I could get Daddy. Maybe someone else from town. But Lo will be dead before I even make it back to the church.

“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins,” Turley thunders, “and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

Lo wriggles in the preacher’s grasp and I scream again. “Lo! Stop!” Because the way his feet are fighting for traction on the slippery bank, even if he somehow gets free, there’s no way he’s not going to end up in the water.

“For we were buried therefore with him by baptism into death,” Turley goes on, “in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.”

“What about the murderers?” Lo shouts. “What about them, Turley?” He’s still clawing at the preacher’s hands. “The Bible says they will be consigned to a fiery lake of burning sulfur.” Lo glares triumphant in Turley’s face. “And this shall be their second death.”

“I’m glad you know your Bible, Lowan.” Brother Turley nods. “A foolish son is a grief to his father.”

“Proverbs,” Lo spits. “We know you’re the one who’s been killing the hikers, Turley.”

Turley growls and shakes Lo hard enough that it makes my teeth rattle inside my own skull just watching it. “Don’t!” I beg him. “Please!”

“The blood of those hikers is on our hands, Lowan Wilder. Yours and mine! We share that guilt before the Lord.”

“I’m not a killer! You are!” Lo’s struggling again. Kicking at Turley’s legs, but he might as well be a rag doll, for all Turley seems to notice.

“Don’t you see, boy?” Turley’s face is as red as those blood drops on the pages of his Bible. “God is punishing me—he’s punishing all of us—for my sins with your mother!”

“You keep my mama’s name out of your mouth!” Lo takes a swing at Turley’s head, but his arms aren’t long enough for the punch to land.

“I sinned against God and against the holiness of my own body with Claire Wilder, and then I turned my back on the product of that sin. On you, boy. Now those hikers have paid the cost of it! But you don’t have to, Lowan. Not anymore.”

Lo stops fighting. He looks confused. Totally thrown. And I don’t blame him. Whatever we expected to come out of Turley’s mouth tonight, it wasn’t that.

“What are you talking about?” he demands.

Lo’s two steps behind, but the truth of Turley’s words has already hit me like a mudslide barreling down a mountain after a rainstorm.

A foolish son is a grief to his father. Isn’t that what he said a few seconds ago?

And what did Turley shout after us when he caught Lo and me peeking in his shed earlier tonight before we went up the mountain to Granny Pearl’s?

The sins of the father shall be visited on the son!

Oh God. Don’t let me be right about this. If Turley doesn’t drown Lo in the creek, this might kill him.

Lo’s never known who his father is. Claire never said a word to anybody about it. Suddenly I’m afraid I know why.

“Claire told me the baby was mine,” Brother Turley says, and Lo flinches like the preacher hit him with a two-by-four. “She begged me to marry her. To give you a life as my son. But I couldn’t be husband to a witch.” Lo’s staring at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, dangling over Lucifer’s Creek.

“You’re a lying bastard,” Lo hisses. “You’re not my father!”

“I loved your mother, and I lived with her loss heavy on my heart for sixteen years. But I never reached out to save you—my own son—and that was my greatest sin.”

“No,” Lo argues. But the fight has gone out of him. “That’s not true.”

“I failed you. My own flesh and blood. Then God saw fit to punish me by making these hills run red with the blood of innocents. I brought death on this valley, and that is my cross to bear!”

“That’s bullshit!” It’s my turn to shout now. “God didn’t kill those hikers to punish you, Turley! You killed them! Not by your sin. You killed them with your own hands!”

“We found the bloody knife in your shed!” Lo adds. “The one you gutted Riley Alden with!”

The preacher lifts his flashlight to the sky, and the sleeve of his long, black coat slides down to reveal a pale arm marked with angry red scars and fresh scabs.

“I tried to cleanse these hills with my own blood,” he tells us. “But I failed. Leviticus says, ‘If the anointed priest sins, bringing guilt on the people, he must bring to the Lord a young bull without defect as an offering to atone for the sin he has committed.’ ”

I remember reading that passage in Turley’s Bible the other night, all underlined in angry red. It made me shiver in fear then, but it makes me mad as hell now. I won’t let the preacher turn Lo into a guilt offering to his God.

“You’ve been sneaking around, trying to scare us!” I shout. “You left that white rose on Claire’s grave tonight, but we aren’t afraid of you.”

Turley stares at me. “I haven’t set foot on Wilder land in more than seventeen years.” He shoves Lo a little farther out over the creek, and I see the panic in Lo’s eyes. “Lowan Wilder, I commit you to our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

“Dovie!” Lo is pleading with me, but I can’t think what to do. I pick up a big rock and throw it as hard as I can at Turley’s head. I hear it hit his skull with a terrible thunk. He lets go of Lo and crumples in the mud, still holding that flashlight. I scramble toward the creekbank, but I’m too late. Lo goes over the edge into the torrent.

He’s flailing in the water and struggling to stay afloat. I throw myself down in the mud and slide out until half my body is suspended over the water, but I still can’t reach him. “Dovie!” he chokes my name before he sinks beneath the surface.

The water is black as the glass of that Howler that Daddy is making for Ira.

Lo pops up again. Just out of my reach.

“Lo, please!” I’m screaming at him. “Just reach a little farther.” Our hands are almost touching. Our fingertips brush, but I can’t get hold of him.

I feel the burn of that water on my skin.

“God forgive me,” Brother Turley moans from behind me. So I know he’s not dead.

“Help us!” I’m screaming at Turley now. “Goddammit!” He’s still sprawled in the mud. “He’s your son, for God’s sake!”

Turley crawls toward me on his hands and knees, and for a second I think he’ll push me over the edge, too. Lo and I will die together. But instead he lies beside me on the muddy bank and extends his arm toward Lo. He’s so much taller than me. His reach is longer, and Lo is able to grab his hand. I hold my breath as Turley pulls him to shore and drags him up onto the riverbank.

“Lo!” I yank him away from Turley to cradle his head in my lap. I’m shielding him from the preacher with my body. Running my fingers through his hair. Begging him to breathe as he coughs and chokes.

The preacher blinks at us as Lowan vomits up what seems like gallons of water on the creekbank. I know his throat has to be on fire.

“You are my son, Lowan Wilder,” Brother Turley finally says. “We’re two sides of the same coin.” It’s obvious the hellfire’s gone out of him. He’s a shell. Nothing but bones inside a preacher’s black coat. “I brought you here to save you.”

“You brought him to the river to kill him, Turley.” I spit the words at him. “To sacrifice him for your sins.”

“No.” Turley stares at me, then he shakes his head. “I thought that’s what God wanted from me. And I wanted to do it. Needed to. But I couldn’t obey.” Turley throws his head back and wails like the Howler. Strangled and tormented. The sound of the damned. “So I brought Lowan here to commit him to God through baptism, that he might be cleansed and forgiven.” Turley looks up toward the sky again. “So he might finally know a father’s love.”

The preacher stands above us with his back to the river and raises both hands to the stormy heavens. “Forgive me, God,” he pleads. “Let no more blood be spilled in these hills on my account.”

“What makes you think God would listen to an asshole like you?” I ask him.

Turley looks down like he’s scolding me for whispering in Sunday school. “Don’t throw stones when you’re living in a glass house, Dove.” His eyes harden. “You carry the weight of generational sin on your shoulders, too.” I wrap my arms tighter around Lo as the preacher leans down until his face is inches from mine. I shrink back. His breath stinks of sulfur. The kiss of hell. “You do penance for the sins of your grandmother and your mother every time you’re called into the night to unearth a festering corpse with your bare hands.”

“If there is a God,” I tell him through clenched teeth, “I hope you rot in hell.”

Turley leans in even closer, but suddenly a shape bursts out of the trees just a few feet away. The preacher throws up his hands and takes a startled step back toward the edge of the river, and I scream and lock eyes with Riley Alden. He’s flesh and blood. Soaked to the bone, shivering, and covered in mud. And he’s leveling Granny Pearl’s old rifle square at Turley’s chest.

I wonder if either one of them knows it’s so clogged up it’d never fire.

Everything is happening so fast. There’s no time to think.

Lo sits up, confused. He’s coughing again, holding his aching ribs and looking back and forth between Riley Alden and Turley with eyes that look like muddy water. I guess he’s probably trying to decide if Riley’s ghost has come to save us or to finish us off.

But this is not a ghost.

I’m staring at a drop of red that’s running down Riley’s arm.

We lock eyes again. His are milky blue like Lucifer’s Creek on a calm day, but they are anything but sleepy now. They’re wide and staring. Frantic. “You okay?” he asks me, and I nod. This is so surreal. His voice sounds like I knew it would. “Is he okay?” Riley jerks his head toward Lo.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think so.”

Starting with Lo sneaking into my room to wake me up and tell me about that knife in Turley’s shed, nothing that’s happened tonight feels real.

I glance up at Turley and the ground he’s standing on crumbles beneath his feet. I watch it give way in slow motion. Turley looks startled. Panicked. But only for a split second. Then, without a word, he vanishes, falling backward, like a diver off a high board.

“Shit!” Riley shouts. He races to the edge of the creek, and I wonder if ghosts curse. “Where is he?”

“Goddammit!” I shout at the top of my lungs. I’m pushing myself up off the ground. “Turley!” I grab the flashlight out of the mud where he dropped it and scan the water and the creekbank as far downstream as I can see. “Do you see him? Turley!”

It’s no use, the raging black water has already sucked Brother Turley under, like it wanted to drag him directly to hell. I get to my feet and help Lo up. He leans against me, still struggling to breathe, as the three of us watch and wait.

But Turley doesn’t resurface.

“He’s gone,” Lo says, and I know he’s right. “His soul is in God’s hands now.”

“Holy shit.” The blond boy holding Granny Pearl’s mud-clogged rifle runs his other hand through his hair, and he looks frustrated enough to pull it out by the roots. “What the hell is going on in this fucking town?” he demands, but I figure Lo and I should be the ones asking the questions right now. So I throw out the obvious one.

“Who the hell are you?”

My follow-up question is going to be Whose skeleton did I pull out of the ground a few days ago? But I’m saving that one until our ghost boy answers the first one.

“I’m Xander Alden.” He pushes his stubborn rain-soaked hair out of his eyes and looks at Lo, then back at me. I take note of his faded jeans, the cowboy boots, and the old gray T-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. “I’m Riley Alden’s brother, and I need your help, Dove.”

Nineteen

“Xander Alden.” Lo repeats the name like he’s trying it out in his mouth to see how it tastes.

“You can call me Xan,” he says, and I notice the Okie twang in his voice, just slightly harsher than our Arkansas drawls. He holds out a mud-covered hand for Lo to shake, like this is some kind of business meeting. “You’re Lowan, right?”

It’s weird, these formal introductions on the bank of a flooded-out creek with a boy we thought was dead.

I stick my hand in my pocket and pull out the ID card we found in the shed. I study it for a second in the flashlight beam, rubbing the mud away with my thumb.

Xander Alden’s name is right there in black and white. I hand it to him and he stares at it for a second. “Where did you find this?” he asks me.

“Turley’s shed.”

“I saw you earlier tonight,” he explains. “When you were looking in the shed window. So after the preacher chased you off, I went in there to check things out myself. Guess I dropped my ID then.” He swallows back disgust. “When I saw that knife, I knew that was what you were looking at.”

“We saw you at the window when we came back later,” Lo says. “You were tryin’ to warn us about Turley.”

My cheeks burn remembering how I screamed when that familiar face appeared in the shed window, like I’m someone who believes in ghosts and spirits and nonsense like that.

That’s never been who I am. I know better.

“I knew the preacher was out there watching the shed,” Xander explains. “I didn’t want him catching you again. Not if he was Riley’s killer. So, when I saw him dragging you out of there, I grabbed the gun and went after him.”

“You’ve been watching our house,” I say. “Following me.” It sounds like an accusation, and I guess it is. “Why?”

“I heard you were a witch.” He’s regarding me with one raised brow and narrowed eyes. “That you know things about the dead.”

I almost snort. “I’m not a witch.”

That’s the truth, no matter how much I probably look like one, standing here wild-eyed and dripping next to this river in the dark and the rising fog.

“But you’re the one that found him.” Xander studies me for a second. “You’re the one who finds all of them.” He looks at Lo, who’s staring out at that boiling black water again. “Did that preacher murder Riley?”

“No,” Lo says. “We thought he did.”

Turns out Turley wasn’t a serial killer, he was just haunted. Same as Lo. Except what was haunting Brother Turley wasn’t worry about the murdered hikers. It was the festering guilt he’d carried inside him all these seventeen years, ever since what happened between him and Lo’s mama.

“Who did, then?”

Lo shakes his head. “We don’t have any idea who murdered your brother, or the rest of them.”

“There’s another one missing now,” Xander tells us. “Hannah Nelby.” His words are pointed, like sharp stones. “Did you know that?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I feel the blame for whatever happened to Hannah settle directly on my shoulders again. The weight of it threatens to push me deep into the mud.

“Maybe if the three of us work together we can stop it,” Xander says. “Make sure nobody else gets taken. Maybe even save that girl.”

“Hannah Nelby’s already dead and buried,” Lo tells him.

He looks frail and dizzy, like he might fall over any second. I remember that, besides almost drowning himself tonight, Lo just found out that Brother Turley was his father. That has to be a bitter pill to swallow, for a lot of reasons. I take his hand and lead him back away from the edge of the creek. If he passes out, I don’t want to have to jump in after him, and I know good and well that I would, even if it meant we both drowned.

“You don’t know that,” Xander argues. “You don’t know that for sure until your friend here finds her body.” He turns those blue eyes on me. “Right? If we don’t at least try, how many more people are going to die out here?” He looks back toward Lo. “You want that on you?”

“We had it all wrong,” Lowan says. “Every single bit of it.”

“Look,” Xander tells me. “I don’t care if you’re really magic or not. I’m just asking you guys to help me. Riley was my big brother, and nobody in this damn town gives a shit about him.” He voice has gone all thick and coarse, and I watch him chew his hurt into bite-size pieces so he can swallow it back down. “My family needs to know what happened.” He stops almost like one of us had punched him in the face. “Riley’s funeral is next week. I gotta be back in Tulsa for that. But I can come back here after. I got a tent and a campsite up the trail a ways.”

“You’re not scared?” I ask. “Stayin’ alone in the woods where your brother was murdered?”

Xander shrugs again. “If whoever came for Riley comes for me, at least right at the end I’ll know what happened to him. And that’s probably better than living the rest of my life not knowing.”

You gotta need answers real bad to say a thing like that. I know what that feels like, that kind of loss. It feels like someone crushing your bones in their fist and then boiling the dust down to make tea from your misery. When I look at Xander’s face, I see it plain, that desperate combination of grief and confusion. The anguished need to know that gnaws at you with sharp little teeth and won’t ever let you rest.

I’ve lived with a hole like that almost my entire life, but maybe I can save Xander Alden from suffering the same fate.

And maybe I can still save my best friend while I’m at it.

“Okay,” I tell Xander. “We’ll do what we can to help.”

The sun is starting to peek up over the hills. Dawn is finally coming, and I’ve never been so grateful to see daylight.

I need to get Lo somewhere dry and safe.

And we have to deal with what happened to Turley.

“Meet us this evening,” I say. “Just after dark. There’s a lean-to shelter up the trail about two miles. We can talk in private there.”

It’s also one of the places Hannah Nelby stopped off on the last day of her life, and I’m hoping to poke around there for some sign of what happened to her. I figure if we’re gonna search for answers about what happened to Riley Alden, we probably need to start with what happened more recently to Hannah.

“Okay. Thanks. I appreciate that.” The living blond boy with milky blue eyes and the Okie twang hands Lo’s mud-clogged rifle back to him. “My whole family appreciates that.” His voice sounds like an open wound. “A lot of people love Riley. He’s really—” Xander stops like someone has pulled the emergency brake on a runaway train. “Shit. He was really one-of-a-kind. He—” It’s clear he can’t figure out what to say. “He was my brother.”

“We’re gonna get to the bottom of what’s going on around here,” I promise him. “For Riley.”

And for Hannah.

For all the others.

And for Lo.

For all of us.

“What about the preacher?” Xander asks.

“Nothin’ to do about that,” Lo says. “Let him work it out with God.”

“We’ll handle it,” I tell Xan. “No sense gettin’ you involved.”

Xander thanks us again for being willing to help, then he heads back down the road toward town so he can take the Aux-Arc Trail up to his campsite.

Lo and I stand alone in the early-morning light.

“If it wasn’t Turley,” he asks me, “who was it?”

I lay my hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.”

“Do you think he was lying about not putting that rose of my mama’s grave tonight?” His face wrinkles up. “He was my father, Dovie.”

“It doesn’t matter who your father was.” I move my hand from his shoulder up to his cheek. I’m brushing away mud with my thumb. “You belong to your mama. And to Granny Pearl. Those are your people.”

“He wanted to baptize me, Dovie.” He shakes his head. “I thought he was gonna—”

“I did too,” I admit. “But try not to think about that. Okay? You’re safe now.”

“But that thing,” he says, and he reaches up to take my hand in his and pull it to his chest. “That shape that chased us into the cabin. Dovie, if Turley was tellin’ the truth—if that wasn’t him after us—then who the hell was it? What the hell was it?”

“I think Turley was lying. I think it was him out there in the dark. I think he put that rose there and he’s the one who scared us.”

“But, Dovie—”

“He wanted to kill you, Lo.” The dam breaks and my words come tumbling out in a torrent. Like the water barreling between the banks of Lucifer’s Creek. “He felt guilty about what he did with your mama, and he thought he could wash that guilt away by sacrificing you. But he couldn’t go through with that, so he settled on baptizing you instead. But you still could’ve easily ended up drowned.” Lo looks like he’s going to crumble. “If he was plotting all that, it makes sense that he was the one out there in the shadows behind the cabin.”

“Granny Pearl believes in the Howler,” Lo starts. “She believes—”

“Lo.” I can’t stand the thought of hurting him tonight—or ever—but his imagination is running away with him again. “Granny Pearl believes in a lot of things, and I know you do, too, but there’s no such thing as the Howler. And there’s no such thing as ghosts. Or heaven. Or hell. Or any of it.”

He’s shaking his head.

All around us, the woods are coming to life, transformed by the bloom of daylight. Every leaf and flower and blade of grass glistens with water droplets that reflect the colors of the sky, pinks and blues and yellows and oranges that paint the hills in watercolor shades you’ve never really seen unless you’ve seen the sunrise over the Ozark Mountains.

“What happened to you?” Lo asks me. His voice is gentle and sad, like the call of the mourning dove I can hear crying out in the woods nearby. “What killed the part of you that could’ve believed in something?”

“I’ve always been this way.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s true. I used to know a little girl with eyes as blue as the sky and hair as dark as a raven. And I know she believed in magic.” His voice is hoarse from the burn of the creek water, but he smiles a little.

I don’t tell him that the little girl he remembers stopped believing because she didn’t have a choice. She put her faith in magic back then—poured her whole broken heart into secret words and spells, lucky stones, balls of wax, water collected from puddles after a summer storm, ribbons washed in rainwater and left to dry under a full moon, shiny dimes and buttons from the forgotten dresses her mama left hanging in the closet—and magic let her down.

“The only magic we get is the magic we make with each other,” I tell him. “And that’s okay. That’s enough.”

Lo slips a hand into my pocket and pulls out the holey stone Granny Pearl gave me. He fishes his out of his own pocket and holds them in his palm together.

“There were times last night that you believed, Dovie. I could see it in your eyes.”

“It was a really strange night, Lo. But nothing happened last night that changed my mind about what’s real and what isn’t. Even Granny Pearl’s smoke ritual turned out to be wrong,” I remind him. “It told you Turley was the one doing the killing, and he wasn’t.”

“No.” Lo shakes his head. “The ritual wasn’t wrong. I was wrong. I asked the wrong question. I asked if Turley was guilty, and he was. The smoke told it true. You have to—”

“I’m in love with you.” Lo stops with his mouth open and stares at me. “I’ve been in love with you since the day I was born.”

“Dovie.” He breathes my name into the bright pink dawn. “I think I’ve been in love with you since before we were born.”

My knees go a little bit weak.

“See? That’s magic. Let’s just agree on that for right now. Okay?” I fold his fingers around both stones, and he slips the tiny river rocks back into his pocket.

Lo leans toward me, and I wonder if maybe this is finally it. Is he finally going to kiss me for real?

Do I want him to?

Maybe what we have already is magic enough.

Lo’s forehead is pressed to mine, and there’s barely enough room for the morning breeze to slip between our bodies. His face is streaked with mud, and he looks like he’s been to hell and back tonight—because he has—but he’s still so heartbreakingly beautiful I can barely breathe.

He presses his lips against my forehead.

My cheekbone.

Then he pulls back and I see his eyes drop to my mouth. He’s hesitating.

“I don’t know if we should do this,” he admits. His voice is rough and deep.

We’re both breathless. Caught in the tide of each other’s eyes.

“It’s okay,” I tell him, because of course the timing is all wrong. I let go of his hand so I can take a step backward. “I didn’t mean to—”

“No. Dovie. Stop.” He’s still holding that rifle, but his free hand goes to the back of my neck, and he pulls me toward him again so that we’re closer than before. “I wanna kiss you right now. So bad.” His words in my ear make me shiver. “I’ve wanted to kiss you forever. But what if we mess things up?” he asks me. “How are we supposed to know what kind of love this is?”

He’s nuzzling my cheek with his nose and his breath is warm on my neck. I think my spine has melted. All my bones are turned to liquid.

“What if there’s one kind of love for you and me?” I whisper. “And what if that’s just plain love? What if that’s all we need to know?”

I feel him smile against my cheek.

“I like that,” he says. “Just plain love.”

The beauty of the rain-soaked dawn and the warmth of Lo’s breath on my cheek have been a reprieve from the horrors of last night, but now I’m thinking about all of it again. We still need to get back to town. We have to say what happened to Turley. My stomach turns when I think about that part of it. If the townspeople mistrusted us before, they’re really going to despise us now.

We start back down the muddy road toward the church. We’re going over what we’re going to say to people—trying to figure out a plan—and we settle on the truth. That’s all there really is. But every step toward town makes me more and more uneasy. The dread settles in my stomach like a concrete block.

When we come to the fence at the back of the graveyard, we stop and look toward the church. I half expect to see Brother Turley standing on the back steps, dripping creek water and radiating righteous vengeance.

But he isn’t there.

Because he’s dead.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s get this over with.” I duck under the fence, but Lo doesn’t follow me. He’s staring at the stone markers. “What is it?” I ask him, but I’m afraid I know the answer.

“They’re waiting for me,” he whispers. “All of them.”

Twenty

I turn to follow his eyes, and I almost wish his demons actually existed. That I could see them. Because then at least they could be dealt with. Satisfied and banished. Exorcized. Or laid to rest.

Imaginary phantoms keep haunting you until you finally become a ghost yourself.

Lo is still standing on the other side of the fence, so I’m in the churchyard and he’s in the woods.

I’m part of the town.

And he’s part of the hills.

I hate even that little bit of separation between us.

The church bell starts to ring. Slow and mournful. The sound of it is jarring. Too loud and too close. It’s Tuesday morning, just after sunrise. The bells shouldn’t be ringing.

“They’ve found him,” Lo says, and I know he’s right.

They’ve already pulled Turley’s body from the creek and they’re probably wailing and praying over him as we speak. Suddenly, I’m furious at Turley all over again for putting Lo and me in this position. But I realize now what we need to do.

“Go home, Lo,” I tell him. “Go on home to Granny Pearl and get some sleep. There’s no reason for us to tell these people anything. They’re already out for our blood and they’re not gonna believe a word we say anyway.” He tears his eyes away from his ghosts to look at me. “It’s not like we pushed him. Turley fell in when the creekbank crumbled.” It’s the same thing people say must’ve happened to Lo’s mama. “We don’t owe anyone an explanation.”

Lo considers that for a few seconds. “Are you sure?” He’s chewing on his lip again, and I watch his eyes drift back to the tombstones and the dead hikers he sees hiding behind them.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Turley’s already dead. We didn’t cause it, and we can’t change it. So what does it matter? Let them think whatever they want about what happened to him. You go on home and get some rest. We’ll meet back up with Xander Alden at the hiking shelter just after nightfall.”

“What do I tell Granny Pearl?” Lo asks. “She’s gonna wanna know what happened.”

“Tell Granny Pearl the truth,” I say. “Tell her the creek rose.”

•   •   •

I watch as Lo sneaks around the back of the church and darts across the strip of grass that separates the town of Lucifer’s Creek from the hills. I don’t move until he disappears into the trees and I know he’s on the Aux-Arc Trail heading up the mountain toward home. He’ll have to get off the trail and cut across the ravine where the crime-scene tape marks Riley’s grave, but it’s better than going back up the dirt road and trying to cross Lucifer’s Creek at the dangerous spot where we watched Turley drown.

Where we watched his father drown.

Those church bells are still ringing, but I also hear voices now. Frantic and loud. I take a deep breath and brace myself for whatever I’m about to walk into, then I make my way through the cemetery toward the gate.

When I hit Mud Street, I see crowds gathered along both sides of Lucifer’s Creek, and another group scattered across the bridge. They’re pointing at something in the water. Some of them are visibly crying. Some are on their knees praying. Thankfully everyone is too worked up to pay me any notice.

I hang at the back of the bunch and try to peer between people’s shoulders and backs. Someone up front moves and I get a good glimpse of the creek. It’s still running high and violent. There’s a bunch of debris hung up under the bridge. Sticks and limbs. Leaves.

A pale shape wearing a long, black coat.

I see Turley’s curled fingers sticking up out of the foaming water, and suddenly I don’t want to see any more. I stumble backward into something solid.

I turn around and blink up at Daddy. He looks exhausted, and I remember he wasn’t home when we tiptoed out through the back door at eleven o’clock last night, after Lo sneaked in to wake me up. I figure he’s been at the gallery all this time. The commotion over Turley probably pulled him out of the shop. He looks me up and down and his mouth settles into a tight line behind his bushy salt-and-pepper beard. I’d almost forgotten I’m covered in mud. After everything that happened last night, I must look more like a wild animal than a human being.

“Where you comin’ from?” he asks me.

“The cabin.” At least it’s a half-truth. We were at the Wilder cabin at one point last night. “Sneaked out and spent the night up there with Lo to escape my security detail.” I jerk my head toward where Sheriff and Deputy Jonah are standing at the edge of the creek staring at Brother Turley’s body the way storm watchers stand and look at the sky. Like they’re just waiting to see what might happen next. “It was a muddy hike down this mornin’.”

Daddy nods like he only halfway heard me.

“This is a bad business,” he says. “Turley dyin’ like this. It’s likely to put people on edge. Get their backs up even more. You and Lowan lay low today.”

“Lo and I didn’t have anything to do with this,” I protest. “Turley gettin’ himself drowned isn’t our fault.”

“Whoa, Bird.” He holds up his hands like he thinks I might take a swing at him. “I didn’t say it was. I said it’s gonna make folks angry. Get ’em all worked up. Sometimes any excuse is a good enough excuse if somebody wants to go after somebody else.” Daddy tugs on his beard a little. It’s something he does when he’s thinking about a new stained glass piece. Or when he’s worried. “You just watch your back. We don’t want any trouble.”

“It’s too late for that,” I say. “We already got plenty of trouble.”

Daddy gives me another long look, and I wonder if he can tell there are things I’m not telling him. If he can, he doesn’t push me on it.

Maybe I wish he would.

“I gotta head back to the shop,” he tells me. Then he reaches out and wipes mud from my cheek. “Get on home and get cleaned up. No sense standin’ here all mornin’ watchin’ this circus. Nothin’ any of us can do for Turley now.”

Daddy leaves me standing at the edge of the crowd and he heads back toward his stained glass gallery. I take one more look toward the creek, and I catch another glimpse of Brother Turley’s lifeless body, baptized to death in a river of sulfur.

I’m trying to figure out where to go and what to do. The little bridge over the creek is crowded with gawkers, and I don’t want to risk drawing attention to myself by walking right through the middle of that mess.

I decide to duck into the narrow alley between Mrs. Danforth’s candle shop and Daddy’s gallery. It’s quiet and dark, with an entrance that’s almost hidden by overgrown ivy that clings to the sides of the buildings. There’s even a rusting folding chair so Mrs. Danforth can sneak out for a smoke break without the good people of Lucifer’s Creek catching on to her nicotine habit.

I collapse into the chair and lean my head back against the rough bricks of the building behind me. I try closing my burning, blurry eyes, but every time I do, moments from last night flash and flicker like scenes from a horror movie projected on the insides of my eyelids.

I can’t stand replaying it all again and again on an endless loop, so I open my eyes and stare at the coffee can full of cigarette butts at my feet.

Every single part of me hurts. I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus. Or beaten with a baseball bat.

And those damn church death bells are still ringing.

“You want some company?” I look up to see Ira standing a few feet away. He gives me a slightly lopsided smile. “Saw you come down this way, and I thought maybe I’d join you for a minute.” He looks a little embarrassed. “I’m trying to get away from that mob scene out there.”

I don’t really feel like talking, but I also don’t own the alley. And Ira’s easy company. So I just shrug.

He starts in my direction. “I was supposed to meet Turley this morning to talk about some new robes he was wantin’ for the choir.” Ira gives his head a little shake. “I guess you never know when your number’s gonna be up.”

“You don’t even go to church,” I tell him, and now Ira shrugs.

“I don’t read much either, but I bought them library books, didn’t I? We gotta take care of our own around here. Ain’t nobody else gonna do it.” He grabs a nearby five-gallon bucket and turns it upside down to sit on before he gives me a long look. “Jesus, girl. What the hell happened to you?”

“Slipped a couple of times comin’ down the mountain this mornin’.” I’m picking at the dried mud under my fingernails. “Everything was a mess from all that rain.”

“Comin’ back from Granny Pearl’s?” I nod, and Ira laughs a little. “Now there’s a tough old bird. That lady is older than the hills and still sharp as a tack. Me and your daddy used to have a lot of fun up at the old Wilder place back in the day.”

“You used to hang out at the cabin?” In all these years I’ve been visiting Granny Pearl and Lo, Daddy’s never mentioned that to me.

“Oh, yeah. Me and Del was always runnin’ the woods together. We’d go out huntin’ till the sun come up, then we’d head on up to the cabin and Pearl’d fix us breakfast. Closest thing to family I ever really had.” He swallows back the emotion that lodges in his throat, and I remember Daddy telling me once that Ira grew up mostly on his own. His mama and daddy were too busy trying to keep themselves fed to pay much attention to him. Ira reaches up to take off his hat and give his red curls a shake. He reminds me of a golden retriever. “And lots of times your mama’d be there, too. She and Claire were inseparable. Like twins, practically. Only, they didn’t look a bit alike. Your mama with her dark hair and blue eyes and Claire with that snow-white hair and eyes black as coal.”

They were photographic negatives of each other. That’s what I always think when I see pictures of my mama and Claire together.

He smiles to himself, and it’s the kind of smile that you can tell is tied to a very specific memory. “God.” Ira whistles long and low. “Both of them beautiful mountain flowers.” He grins at me again. “It was always me and your daddy together and your mama and Claire together. Then it was the four of us always together.” He pauses. “Until your mama and daddy got married and Claire had the baby. And—” Ira looks down toward the scattered cigarette butts on the ground like he’s counting them. I guess Mrs. Danforth misses the coffee can sometimes.

“And what?” I prompt him.

“And nothin’, really.” He shrugs. “Things just changed. Like they do. And life goes on.” He smiles again. “But those were good years. Mighty good years.”

“Did Claire ever tell any of you who Lo’s daddy was?” I hadn’t planned to ask that question. It’s Lo’s business—not mine—but Ira likes to talk, and I have questions nobody else is volunteering answers to. “Because somebody told us it might’ve been Brother Turley.”

“Aww, fuck.” Ira stands up and leans against the wall on the opposite side of the alley. “Excuse my language.” He runs a hand over his face and sighs deep. “Shit. I mean, yeah. That was what I figured at the time. We knew she’d been runnin’ around with him some. But they were keepin’ it off everybody’s radar. He wanted it that way. For obvious reasons.”

Ira reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handkerchief to wipe the back of his neck. The morning is heating up fast, and the closeness of the space between the buildings makes this alley feel like an oven. The air can’t move. We’re suffocating.

“Jesus,” Ira complains. “I’m sweatin’ like a whore in church.” He uses the damp handkerchief to mop his forehead. “Who the hell told Lowan that?”

“I don’t know,” I lie. “Just somethin’ he heard somewhere, I think.”

“Damn.” Ira shakes his head. “Poor kid. And now the whole town is standing out there trying to fish Turley’s body out of a swollen creek.” He pauses for a second. “That’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” I say, because Ira has no idea.

“I expect Lucy was the only one who knew for sure if it was Turley who got Claire pregnant. And she took that secret with her when she run off.”

My mama took a lot of things with her when she run off.

Ira makes his way toward the entrance of the alley and I watch as he peeks out to take in the scene on Mud Street. “The show’s still goin’ on,” he says, “but I’m gonna head on into the gallery.” He gives me a wink. “I gotta see a man about a Howler.” His eyes turn serious. “You tell Lowan I said if Turley was his father, he can be proud of the man.”

“Ira—” He holds up a hand to stop me.

“Now, I know what you and Del thought of him. And you know I’ve never been a churchgoer myself. Turley and me, we’d butt heads over that from time to time. Sure. But he did a lot of damn good for this town.”

“You really believe that?” I’ve never known Ira to say a word against anyone, but praising Turley doesn’t sit right with me.

“Sure. His people were moonshiners, back years ago. Outlaws, when this valley was still mostly wild. I think they hung his granddaddy down in Rogers.” Ira shrugs. “And I figure Turley grew up feeling the guilt of that. Trying to make up for the wrong they done.” Something strange crosses Ira’s face and he shakes his head. “He gave people something bigger to believe in. And that’s mighty important. We all need that.”

“I guess.”

“Turley and me and your daddy, we’re the same in some ways, Dovie. All of us just tryin’ to do our best for the folks who call these hills home.” He nods. “And I gotta think that counts for something.”

“Thanks, Ira,” I tell him. “It’ll mean a lot to Lowan to hear you said that.”

“I didn’t do anything but run my mouth.”

“At least you’re willing to talk about things.”

Ira shrugs and gives me a little grin. “Everybody knows talkin’ is my best talent.”

After he leaves, I spend another fifteen minutes sitting in that oven of an alley before I’ve had all I can take. I gotta get home to shower and sleep so I’ll have the strength to drag myself back up the Aux-Arc Trail for my meeting with Lo and Xander Alden tonight.

I leave most of the skin on my thighs behind when I peel myself up off Mrs. Danforth’s metal folding chair, then I pause at the entrance to the alley to lean out and take a look around before I step out onto Mud Street.

Sheriff and Deputy Jonah are standing on top of the bridge with a long pole of some kind. I watch for a few minutes as they poke at Brother Turley’s body, trying to get it free from the debris-jam that’s got him pinned. When they finally do, they push him over toward the side of the creek, and I hold my breath while the county coroner, a wild-looking man named June Bug Wilson, pulls him up on the bank and gets him situated on a stretcher.

Someone in the crowd starts to sing.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound—

By the third line, the whole crowd is singing like a church choir on Easter Sunday, just in time for Brother Turley’s body to get carried off the creekbank and loaded into the back of a waiting ambulance with those church bells tolling steady and doleful in the background.

They’ll be taking him down to Rogers, I guess. We don’t have a morgue or a funeral home in Lucifer’s Creek, which is odd, considering how many bodies we get. If somebody opened one up, it’d be the boomingest business in town.

With nothing else to see, the crowd starts to break up. Some people wander home. Some people head over to the church for more praying. I slink out of the alley and make a beeline for the bridge so I can get home before anyone catches sight of me.

But I’m not quite fast enough and someone shouts at me. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, Dove!” The angry voice belongs to the woman who I know for a fact paid seven dollars for a healing charm from Granny Pearl last winter. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”

A chorus of amens goes up from the people still gathered around the creek.

Some of them clap.

All of them glare at me.

Daddy was right. They’re out for blood now, and I’m not magic—not by a long shot—but they don’t seem to care who the blood belongs to.

I finally make it to our blue house, and Nana is in the yard patiently trimming Mama’s crepe myrtles, trying to get them to bloom again after the storm stripped them naked.

“You look like somethin’ the cat drug in, Dovie girl,” she tells me. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “I just need a shower and a nap.”

I trudge up the steps to the front porch.

“There’s breakfast keepin’ warm on the stove,” Nana says as I reach to open the screen door, and I look back over my shoulder to tell her thank you, but I stop when I see what’s tucked into her long silver braid.

It’s a single rose. Ghostly white. Twin to the one that somebody left on Claire’s lonely grave last night.

She starts to sing.

I will tell you a story, of a pretty white rose—

My body is humming now. Vibrating the same as when bones start calling.

“Where’d you get that?” I ask her. “The flower in your hair.”

Nana stops singing and she reaches up to touch the ghostly rose with gentle fingers. “Found it this morning layin’ in the dirt here.” She points to a spot under the crepe myrtle bushes. “Pretty as you please.”

“Where’d it come from?” I ask, and Nana smiles.

“I reckon it’s a gift from your mama.”

Twenty-One

I stare at Nana for a second. “What do you mean?”

“White roses were Lucy’s favorite,” she tells me. Nana’s gone back to her trimming and pruning work. I’m almost hypnotized watching her fingers move. “It’s a little message. Somethin’ to let us know she’s still here.”

I’m so confused. “Are you saying she’s here for real?”

Nana gives her head a sad shake. “Here in spirit.”

“You think she’s dead?”

“She’s been gone a long time, Dovie girl.”

“Wait.” I feel like I’m trying to walk through quicksand. “You mean gone like gone? Or gone like dead?”

“Lucy passed on years ago. A mama’s heart knows.”

“I don’t understand.” I can’t tell if I’m more confused or angry now. “Why haven’t you ever told me that before?”

“I wasn’t certain before. I only suspected it.” Nana plucks a damaged flower from the bush and looks at it for a second before she lets it fall to the ground. “And now I know.” She studies the bit of pink lying at her feet, like she wishes she could put it back where she found it.

All my life I’ve been told my mama took off. Now suddenly Daddy’s telling me he doesn’t know if she ever really left town and Nana’s telling me she’s dead.

I’m too exhausted and too close to falling apart to have this conversation right now. I don’t know what to believe anymore, but I do know someone left a white rose on Claire’s grave last night, and then one here in our yard, too. I refuse to believe we’re being visited by the ghost of a woman who’s never been anything other than a ghost to me, so that leaves the drowned preacher as a suspect. I’m trying to work out if Turley had time to leave both flowers. It’s the only answer I can come up with.

But I don’t understand what he was trying to accomplish.

Nana’s gone back to singing, and I can’t stand to hear that song, so I head into the house and straight to the shower. When I’ve scrubbed myself clean, I crawl into bed and hope for oblivion to come and claim me.

I sleep all day, until Nana yells up the stairs to ask me if I want dinner. I pull on clothes and stumble in to sit at the table and force down chicken and mashed potatoes. Daddy’s at the gallery, and that white rose is still tucked into Nana’s braid, but she doesn’t say another word about it.

I have questions I want to ask—need to ask—about my mama, but my mind is so full of the meeting Lo and I have planned with Xander Alden tonight that I can’t even think. My brain is fuzzy from sleeping all day and confused from waking up at supper time, and there’s too much of last night left swirling around in my head. So I settle for eating in silence and staring at that white rose in Nana’s braid as she stands at the sink washing dishes.

As soon as I get some food in my stomach, I grab a flashlight and set out for the trail. It’s not quite dark yet, but the sun is low and I stick to the shadows as I move along Mud Street. I’m not looking for a fight with any of Turley’s flock tonight.

I reach the dividing line between town and woods at the exact moment the sky reaches the dividing line between day and night. Daddy’s gallery on one side of the street. The preacher-less church on the other.

The last of the light dying on the hills.

Dark falling fast behind me.

I look up toward Moonlight Crag Lodge sitting high on its mountain perch. I figure those huge glass windows see everything that happens down here in the valley, and I wonder if they know who has been killing hikers in these hills. The sight of Ira’s lodge eases my mind a little. It’s such a familiar glow in the distance. Like a second orbiting moon. It’s the one thing that seems normal around here lately. A literal bright spot in the blackness. Kind of like Ira himself.

When I’ve soaked up all the light I can, I take a breath, just like I’m jumping into a cold swimming pool, then I click on my flashlight and step onto the Aux-Arc Trail.

I’m immediately enveloped by trees. It’s like someone has draped a hot, wet blanket over my head. It’s hard to see. Harder to breathe.

The ground is soaked from the storm that blew through last night. I’m dodging deep puddles and mud holes, trying to stay clear of the worst of it. The water is running high and fast in the places where the trail crosses Lucifer’s Creek, but nothing like it was at that spot on the dirt road where Lo almost lost his life.

Where Turley did lose his.

It seems to take forever to drag myself up the trail, but finally I come to the place where I broke off into the woods to find Riley. A strip of yellow Sheriff’s Department tape tied around a scraggly pine tree marks the spot. It should only be another half mile or so up to the trail shelter where Lo, Xander, and I agreed to meet.

It takes me longer than it should to slog that distance uphill in the mud and the dark, and by the time I make it to the little three-sided lean-to, someone is already there. I see the glow of their flashlight when I come around the last bend. For just a second, I hesitate. It could be anybody up there waiting for me.

Anybody except Brother Turley, I guess. He’s probably down at the funeral home in Rogers by now.

Fear slithers through my veins like a snake.

I don’t like feeling afraid. These are my hills. I’ve been walking these woods by myself since I was a little girl. Nana used to tell me that the Ozarks were my backyard, and that’s how I’ve always thought of these mountains.

I refuse to be afraid in my own backyard.

I stop for a second to catch my breath so I can “hello the house.” It’s an Ozarks custom left over from the old days, when you were likely to get shot walking up to someone’s cabin unannounced. “Hey!” I shout. “It’s Dove Warner! Who’s up there?”

The light up at the shelter zigzags in the dark, like someone is trying to find me in its beam. “Dove? It’s me! Xan!”

“Yeah!” I shout back. “Coming!”

The trail shelter is basically an empty log cabin that only has three walls, so it’s open on one side. It sits up off the ground a couple of feet, and when I get close enough to light him up with my flashlight, I see Xander Alden sitting on the steps eating a granola bar. I climb up to sit beside him.

The shelter smells like warm, damp wood, and Xander smells like campfire smoke. He’s wearing the same faded jeans and muddy cowboy boots as last night, but he’s traded his gray T-shirt for a red plaid button-up that makes him look like the love interest in a rodeo movie.

“Hungry?” He offers me a bite, but I shake my head. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually come.”

“We said we would, didn’t we?” It strikes me as weird that Lo isn’t here yet. We said just after dark, and it’s not like him to be late. “You can believe something if we tell it to you.”

“Okay,” he says. “Fair enough.” Xander finishes off the granola bar and shoves the wrapper in his pocket.

It’s quiet for a second. Neither one of us has any idea what to say. Finally I ask, “So Riley was your brother?”

“Yeah,” Xander says. “I’m seventeen, and he was twenty-one.” He tips his head back to look up at the sky. “Jesus. It’s so weird to say was.” He stops and bites at his bottom lip so hard I’m afraid he’ll draw blood. “Riley was going to be a senior at the University of Tulsa this year. Everything was just starting to open up for him, you know?”

“That sucks,” I tell him. “I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah.” Xander is looking up at the way the moonlight is shining through the tops of the trees. “You ever miss someone so much it gives you a physical pain?”

“Yeah,” I tell him.

I’m thinking of my mom, how the ache of wanting her is as much a part of every day as getting dressed or brushing my teeth. How it never goes away, not even when I’m laughing or having a good time. It’s always there, like a stone in my pocket. Some days it’s a pebble. Some days it’s a big rock. Tonight it feels as huge as this mountain we’re sitting on.

And now I don’t even know if she’s alive or dead.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, though. When you get right down to it, gone is gone.

“I could tell you’d lost someone,” Xander says. “I saw it in your eyes last night, when I was talking about Riley.” He gives me a little smile, and it reminds me of his lost brother in that newspaper photo. I never knew Riley Alden, but in that moment, I miss him.

All of a sudden, I feel like a fraud. “Listen, Xander,” I start. “I need you to understand somethin’.”

“Call me Xan,” he says. “That’s what my friends call me.”

I don’t bother telling him we’re not friends yet, or that I’m not really looking to make a new friend. We just need to get to the bottom of what’s going on here so these killings will stop. Then he can go back to his family with some peace of mind and Lo can get on with his life and nobody else will have to die.

That’s it. That’s all I care about.

“The thing is, I’m not magic. And I’m not a witch. I wanna be honest with you about that. I don’t have any special way of knowing what happened to Riley. Not any more than you do.”

Xan arches one eyebrow. “That’s not what I heard.”

“Who the hell have you been talkin’ to?” I ask him, and I’m fully aware of how exasperated I sound. Xan just shrugs. “Come on. If you want help from me, I want truth from you.”

“Okay,” he sighs. “That deputy told me. He said you could hear the bones of the dead talking to you.”

“Deputy Jonah?” Xan nods and I roll my eyes. “He’s an idiot. You can’t listen to a thing he says.”

“Okay. So maybe he’s an idiot.” Xan’s jaw tightens. “But he’s the only one in town who’s told me shit. The sheriff said there wasn’t any information. Told me to go on home and let them handle it. Except they aren’t handling it, as far as I can tell. They’re sitting on their asses, like they did when he was missing.” Xan’s voice is stretched and sharp, like a barbed-wire fence strung tight. “Nobody else in town has said anything useful. But that Deputy Jonah pulled me aside and told me about you. ‘Talk to Dove Warner. She’s the human cadaver dog of Lucifer’s Creek.’ Those were his exact words.”

“So you figured you’d stalk me first?”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.” Xan sighs and his shoulders slump, then he reaches up to push his sweat-damp hair out of his face. “But that deputy basically said you were a witch—and I don’t really believe in that stuff—like at all—but I wanted to know who I was getting involved with. You know? For all I knew, you were part of some hillbilly death cult.”

“Jesus,” I mutter, and I roll my eyes so hard I can almost see the inside of my skull.

“What about your friend? Is he a witch?”

“Lo’s a mountain healer. Yarb doctors, they used to call them. They use local plants to cure people.”

“No shit?” Xan is studying me, maybe trying to figure out if I’m telling him the truth. “That’s kind of cool.”

“He and his granny practice hill magic, too. Power doctors, they used to call those people, the ones that cured with potions and charms and spells.”

And where the hell is Lo? I’m starting to get worried about him.

It’s quiet for a few seconds, except for the hooting of an owl, and I reach down to flick away a spider that’s climbing up my shin.

“So, Dove Warner who is not a witch, can you really hear bones talking to you? Is that part true? Because Jonah seemed pretty damn sure about that.”

“They don’t talk to me,” I tell him. “I call it singing, but really it’s a kind of a tug, a sort of vibration that leads me to where they are. But it’s not magic. It’s just a talent the women in my family have. Like how some people have a knack for learning foreign languages or some people can hear a song once, then sit down and play it on the piano with no sheet music.”

He laughs out loud at that. “I know plenty of people who speak Spanish or play an instrument.” Xan is wiping his sweaty palms on his shorts. “But I don’t know anyone who can find buried bones.”

“Divining,” I explain. “That’s the term for it. It means to find something using intuition, or some kind of second sight. Most times, people do it with fresh groundwater. If you need a well dug or something, a diviner can tell you the exact spot to dig. People call ’em water witches, or at least they did in the old days, but it’s not really witching. It’s just a skill some people have.”

Xan looks more than a little skeptical, and I don’t blame him, but I’m also kind of pissed. I’m not used to having to explain myself to strangers.

“How many bodies have you found out here?” he asks. “Besides Riley.” I can tell he thinks the answer is going to be maybe two or three.

“Thirty-seven total,” I tell him. “Starting when I was four years old. But twenty-four of those have been in just the last three years or so, since the hikers started disappearing.”

Xan’s mouth falls open and he stares at me. “Twenty-four hikers murdered in the last three years?” I nod. “Jesus Christ!” He explodes up off the steps. “What the fuck? Why isn’t anybody doing anything? Why are they still letting people come out here?” He shines his light right in my face, and I have to throw up my hands to keep from being blinded. “Goddammit! Riley wouldn’t have come out here if he’d known that! None of them would’ve!”

He’s right, of course. We’re laying a trap for the hikers that make their way down the AAT. We let them stop in town for waffles and an evening of bluegrass music at Donny Blue’s, and hopefully they drop some cash shopping for folk art and antiques on Mud Street, then we send them marching out into the woods, knowing full well that some of them won’t make it home.

But who cares, we’ve already charged their credit cards, right?

It’s like a lifeguard knowing there’s a great white swimming right offshore, but not bothering to warn people to stay out of the water because if the swimmers stop coming, he’s out of a job.

“I’m sorry, Xan. For what happened to Riley. I’m really, really sorry.” He sinks back down to sit on the steps beside me like all his bones have dissolved, and I hear him breathing in uneven gulps. Then all of a sudden he’s sobbing. Huge, wracking sobs that make him cough and choke. Like Lightning wailing for his lost twin. I don’t have any idea what to do, so I keep my eyes on the ground and stay quiet until he’s still again.

“My brother was a good guy,” he sputters. “A really good guy.” His head is in his hands, and he’s wiping at his nose. I have this urge to put my arm around him or something. “He didn’t deserve whatever happened to him.”

I remember Lo telling me how the sheriff said Riley was gutted—split all the way up the middle—his insides spilled out on the ground.

Nobody deserves that.

I hope Xan never has to know that detail.

“I thought you were his ghost,” I admit. “I mean, not really. But kind of. I’d seen Riley’s picture in the paper, and then there you were outside my window and hiding in the trees.” I should stop, because I feel like I’m rambling. But I keep talking. “You look so much like him. You know?”

“If somebody hurt me, Riley would never stop trying to find them. Never.” Xan takes a deep, shaky breath. “I know that for damn sure.”

“Then we won’t give up either.” I put my hand on his arm. “We all need this to end.”

Xan takes his hand and lays it over mine. His skin is warm and soft. Definitely alive. His blue eyes flash in the blackness. I can’t believe I didn’t realize he was real.

“Can you show me where you found him?” His voice is soft and low, thick with tears and ragged with grief, flavored with that Oklahoma twang. “I need to see the spot myself.”

“Yeah. I can do that. It’s not far from here. We can go now if you want to.”

“What about your friend? Wasn’t he going to meet us here?”

“Something must have come up,” I say. “Lo’s never late like this.”

Worry creeps back in. Maybe he’s sick. Or maybe Granny Pearl is. Or maybe something happened to him on the way home this morning. He was so worked up. I’m kicking myself. I should never have let him out of my sight. I’ll have to go up to the cabin first thing tomorrow to check on him. I’m not gonna rest easy until I know he’s all right.

Xan and I stand up to start down the trail, but my flashlight beam catches something shiny lying on the shelter floor. I bend down to scoop it up, and it’s a little gold angel pin.

“What’s that?” Xan asks, and I hold it up to the light so he can see.

“A trail angel,” I tell him. “Hannah Nelby had a bunch of ’em. She and her sister were giving them out to people they met on their hike. It proves they stopped here that day, before they made camp up the trail somewhere.”

We scour the shelter looking for any clues, but there are no other signs of Hannah, so I stick the little angel in my pocket and pick our way down the trail in silence until we get to the place where we need to step off into the woods. “This is it,” I say, and I see Riley swallow hard when he notices that yellow Sheriff’s Department tape tied around the skinny pine tree as a marker. “Through here.” I’m searching for the best path in, trying to find the spot where Sheriff hacked through the tangle the other night.

Xan touches my shoulder. “I want to go by myself, if that’s okay.” He looks apologetic. “No offense.”

“It’s gonna be hard movin’ through the woods,” I warn him. “You’re gonna get all cut up.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“Okay.” I point into the trees and tell him how to get to the clearing. “There’s a big rock there. I found Riley around on the other side of that boulder.” I pause, trying to figure out what else to say. “It’s real pretty there. Pine trees all circled around. And there are wild violets growing.”

“Thanks, Dove. That means a lot.”

“Let’s meet up again tomorrow afternoon,” I say. “Come on down to my house. Knock on the door this time. Don’t hide in the trees.” Xan tilts his head to the side and grins, and in that moment he looks so much like that picture of his brother that it just about kills me. “I’ll come up and get Lo first thing in the morning. Take him back down to town with me. Maybe with the three of us there, we can come up with a real plan.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He gives his head a little shake. “I shouldn’t leave you out here by yourself. I’ll walk you home and come back.”

“It’s fine,” I tell him. “I’ve been walking this trail my whole life, and it’s a quick hike back to town. Besides, the locals have always been safe here.”

Xan gives me a funny look. “That’s weird, don’t you think? No locals murdered. Just the hikers.” He pauses like he’s waiting for me to catch on. “Gotta be somebody local doing the killing. Right?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Probably.” I think we’d all pretty much figured that out already, whether we’ve wanted to admit it or not. The angel of death roaming these hills is one of our own. It may not have been Brother Turley, but odds are, when we pull that mask off, it’s gonna reveal a familiar face.

Xan and I stand there for a few seconds. It’s awkward saying goodbye to someone you’ve barely learned how to say hello to.

“Goodnight, Dove the not-witch,” Xan finally tells me. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Xan the not-ghost.”

He gives me a tiny smile before he pushes into the woods, and I start down the trail toward Lucifer’s Creek.

I’m getting close to town when I hear something moving through the brush off to one side. I stop, and the sounds stops too. But as soon as I start moving, it starts up again. Something is out there following me. Something big.

I pick up my pace a little. I can see the shop windows of Mud Street glowing at the end of the trail now, so I know I’m almost home.

Almost safe.

That’s when a shape steps out of the trees right in front of me. I scream and drop my flashlight. Something reaches for me, and I take a huge step back. But then I catch the reflection of moonlight on salt-and-pepper hair.

“Dovie? Is that you?”

“Daddy?” I bend down to grab my flashlight and shine it toward the shape that’s blocking the path. I see the beard that goes with the hair, so I know for sure it’s him. “What are you doing out here?”

“Walking,” he says. “I finally finished Ira’s Howler tonight. Needed to stretch my legs.”

“In the woods? In the dark?”

“Yeah,” he answers. “In the woods. In the dark. Same as you.” He clicks on his own flashlight and gives me a good looking-over. “Come on.” Daddy puts a hand on my shoulder and steers me down the trail toward town. “Let’s go home, Bird. It ain’t safe out here.”

“I’m not scared,” I tell him.

Daddy stops walking to pin me down with his eyes, and he squeezes my shoulder tight enough to make me wince. “Well, you should be,” he warns me, and he scans the shadowy woods beyond the reach of our flashlight beams. “Everyone in Lucifer’s Creek should be afraid of the dark.”

Twenty-Two

I try a couple of times on the way home to find out more about what Daddy was doing wandering around the hills in the dark, but he tells me that it’s a free country and people are allowed to go hiking any old time they want to, which he points out that I clearly know, because I was also traipsing around in the goddamn dark.

We don’t see anyone on Mud Street. There are lights on inside the church building, though, and the notes of a slightly off-key hymn drift out the open windows into the night, mingling with the noxious smell of sulfur. The stench is strong enough to burn my nostrils. Even Daddy covers his mouth and his nose against it when we cross Lucifer’s Creek.

I fight the urge to pause for a second at the top of the bridge and glance down at the spot where I saw Turley’s body. It’s strange to think that Lo and Xan and I are the only ones who know what happened to him.

I’m so lost thinking about everything that I don’t realize we’re home until we’re turning up the stone path to our front porch.

And I don’t realize the front window is broken until I hear Daddy say, “Fern? You okay? What the hell happened?”

I look up to see Nana standing on the front porch in her nightgown, surrounded by shattered glass.

“Rock came through the window,” she says, and she points to a stone about the size of my fist lying on the floor inside the living room. “Didn’t see who flung it.”

“Goddammit,” Daddy mutters. His jaw is tight and his shoulders are tense. “Where was the sheriff? I thought he was supposed to be camping out on our front porch waitin’ for my daughter to do his damn job for him.”

“Came by earlier,” Nana explains. “Said they was gonna be tied up tonight, dealing with Brother Turley.” She turns to look at me. “Told me we should call ’em up at the office, if you start feelin’ them bones, Dovie.”

“Why would somebody throw a rock in our window?” I feel like all I do lately is try to wade through layers of confusion. The townspeople have never liked us, but nobody’s ever come after us before.

Daddy looks at me. “I told you this mornin’. When people are angry, they lash out. Even if it don’t make no sense.”

“This is about the preacher,” Nana says.

“Our front window didn’t do anything to Turley,” I tell her. “And neither did we.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Daddy says. “People don’t understand us, same as they don’t understand Lowan and Granny Pearl. They don’t understand what you can do.” He kicks at the shards of glass with his boot. “They didn’t understand it when your mama did it.” He jerks his head toward Nana. “Or when Fern did it.”

“Not understanding someone isn’t good enough reason to go around throwing rocks,” I argue.

“No,” Daddy admits. “But bein’ afraid of someone is. At least in their minds.” He looks back and forth from Nana to me. “And people here fear the Clover women.”

“My last name is Warner,” I remind him. Like he doesn’t know that.

“May be,” he says. “But you’re a Clover through and through, and everybody in this town knows it.”

Daddy goes inside to get the broom, and we work to get the glass swept up while Nana sits in her rocker humming that white rose song under her breath and staring out at those bare crepe myrtle bushes. That melody sets my teeth on edge, but I try to focus on the task at hand. Once the mess is taken care of, we tape a big piece of black plastic over the window.

“I’m gonna go in and get showered,” Daddy tells us. “Maybe get some sleep. If either of you hear anything tonight, you come let me know.” He rubs at his forehead. “I gotta head up to the lodge tomorrow mornin’, Dovie. Need to hang that Howler of Ira’s. Thought we might swing by Pearl’s and pick up Lowan. It’s a big piece. It’ll take all three of us.”

“Yeah. Sure,” I tell him. “Night.”

Daddy looks at that black plastic and then back at me. “It ain’t your fault people are scared, Bird.”

“I know that,” I tell him, but I suddenly feel like crying.

“If they weren’t afraid of you—and Lowan—they’d be afraid of somethin’ else. People ain’t happy unless they got somethin’ to fear.”

When he goes inside, Nana reaches for my hand. “You go on to bed, sugar pie.” Her fingers feel cold and bony in mine. “I’m gonna wait up just a little bit.”

“What are you waiting up for, Nana?” I give her hand a gentle squeeze. She seems frail tonight. Like she’s partly made of fog.

“Hopin’ to catch a glimpse of my girl.” She speaks the words around a lump in her throat, and I kneel down by the rocker.

“You mean Mama?”

“I saw her ghost walkin’ a few nights ago. That’s how I know for sure she’s passed over.”

“Nana—”

“I told you, Dovie girl, some things have to be believed to be seen.”

“You know the boy from Tulsa?” I ask. “The dead one from the newspaper article?”

“Seen him, too,” Nana says. “More than once.”

“That wasn’t his ghost you saw. He has a brother. Looks just like him. And he’s been hangin’ around tryin’ to figure out what happened to Riley.” I give her knee a little pat. “Sometimes our eyes lie to us.”

“You don’t know what you don’t know, Dovie.” Nana takes her other hand and lays it against my cheek. “I seen your mama with my own two eyes, standing right there by them crepe myrtle bushes.”

“I wish I did believe,” I tell her. “I’d love to see Mama, even if she was just a ghost.”

“She left us that white rose as a sign.” Nana gives me a little smile. “Maybe she’ll be back.”

“Maybe,” I tell her, and I kiss her forehead before I stand up to go inside. Something stops me, though. “Nana, what happened between you and Pearl Wilder?” The question has been on the tip of my tongue so many times over the years, but I’ve seen how deep that pain goes, for both of them, so I’ve never been brave enough to bring it up.

But tonight is a strange night.

“That’s an old story, Dovie girl. I don’t expect you wanna hear it.”

“I do,” I tell her, because I do want to hear it, and I think maybe she wants to tell it. Finally.

“I didn’t set out to kill your granddaddy.” Nana takes a long, steadying breath and settles a little deeper into her rocking chair. “You know that.”

I nod. I’ve heard that story my whole life. Nana borrowed some poison for the rats that were takin’ over the garden. She meant to sprinkle it around to kill them. But she’d put it in a sugar tin. It was all she had to carry it in. My granddaddy found it hidden in the back of the pantry and made himself some tea. He was dead before Nana came downstairs to breakfast.

My mama was a little girl then, and Nana was never charged. It was an accident. Careless, definitely. Suspicious, maybe. But nobody could prove murder.

“That poison was meant for Saul,” Nana tells me. “I put it in that sugar tin to give to him.”

“Wait.” I lean in closer. Maybe I didn’t hear her right. “Granny Pearl’s husband?”

Nana nods and her face goes harder than I’ve ever seen it. “That man was mean as a snake. He was gonna kill Pearl. We both knew that. Her and baby Claire, too, probably. He came close. More than once. She was always coverin’ up the bruises. So I came up with that plan. I’d borrow the poison for the rats. Then I’d bring it up the mountain in that sugar tin, and I’d leave it on the table for Saul.”

“Holy shit.” I can’t believe I’m hearing this.

“It was all we could think to do,” she says. “And we had to do somethin’. There was no other way, back then. No help for a woman like Pearl way up here. Not up in these mountains.” Nana shrugs. “So I got the poison. And I put it in the sugar tin. For Saul.”

“Only, Granddad found it and got in it first.”

Nana nods again. “And then Saul got himself drunk and fell off a mountain anyway.” She frowns. “But Pearl and I, we never could get past it. Couldn’t forgive ourselves for what we planned to do. Or for what happened.” She wipes at a tear that slides down her wrinkled cheek, and it hits me hard that she’s crying for the loss of her best friend, not the loss of her husband. “Tore us apart. We couldn’t ever speak about that. So we couldn’t speak about anything ever again.”

I remember something Granny Pearl told me and Lo. A body can end up just as haunted by the things we do for the people we hold dear as by the things we don’t.

“Do you blame me, Dovie?” Nana looks up at me with worried eyes, but I shake my head.

“No,” I tell her. “I’d probably have done the same thing.”

I kiss her cheek again before I head inside and leave Nana rocking on the front porch humming that song about the white rose.

I get the mud washed off and find something to eat, then I dig Hannah’s lost-and-found trail angel out of my pocket and pin it to my lace curtains, alongside the one she and Candy gave to Lo and me. Two identical angels.

Sisters. Like Hannah and Candy.

Or twin flames, maybe, like me and Lo.

“I’m sorry, Hannah.” I whisper the apology out loud, but it sounds empty and hollow, even to my ears.

I crawl into bed and drift off to the tinkling of Lo’s skeleton key charm. The last thing I think before I sink into blackness is that I hope he still has the key I cut off and gave back to him.

And I hope it really does keep him safe.

I sleep like the dead. At least for a few hours. It’s after midnight when a strange sound wakes me up, like someone is tapping on the outside of my attic window. I get out of bed and make my way across the creaky floor to peer over the vibrating air conditioner. I’m half expecting to see my mama levitating out there.

But it’s not a specter of any kind. It’s Lo, down on the ground in the front yard. He’s tossing tiny little pebbles up at my window like we’re in some kind of romantic comedy.

I pull on a pair of shorts and tiptoe down the stairs. I’m so relieved to see him that I don’t even care he’s waking me up for the second night in a row.

“You okay?” I whisper as I push the screen door open and creep out onto the porch. “I was worried when you didn’t show tonight.”

Nana’s rocking chair is empty. She must have given up waiting on Mama.

“I fell asleep,” he says. “I’m sorry, Dovie. I let you down. I should’ve been there. I—”

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You haven’t slept in days. Your body was bound to give out eventually.”

He’s standing in front of me, silhouetted against the light from the moon. Every time I see him, there’s less of him to see. He’s vanishing bit by bit right in front of my eyes. Like a magic trick.

“The stars are out tonight.” I sit down on the top step and wait for him to come to me. “Remember how we used to try to count them?”

“Until Granny Pearl told us it was bad luck,” he reminds me as he settles himself on the steps. “Never count your stars or you’ll die before you reach one hundred.”

“I forgot about that part,” I admit.

It feels good sitting together, looking up at the sky over the tops of the hills. We’ve passed so many long, hot summer nights like this. Just the two of us up late after everyone in the whole world has gone to sleep. Except now Lo’s eyes are sunken and his cheeks are hollow. His T-shirt and shorts hang on his body like he borrowed them from someone else. If I introduced this version of Lo to the old version of him, the two of them wouldn’t even recognize each other.

“Dovie, would you still love me if I told you something terrible?”

“What could you tell me that would be terrible?” I ask him. I already know about the darkness that follows him every step he takes. I can’t imagine anything worse than that.

“If I did, though, if I told you something really terrible, could you ever hate me?”

“Lo, I could never hate you. Not ever in this lifetime or the next. Not in a hundred million years. Our souls are all bound up together. That would be like hating myself.”

He’s quiet for a minute, scratching at a bugbite on his knee. “I hate myself,” he finally says. It’s barely a whisper, and at first I’m not sure he even said it out loud. Maybe he thought it, and I heard it somehow. Sometimes it seems like that between us. “I wish whatever is killing the hikers would take me instead.”

I feel like someone’s blown up a balloon inside my chest and it’s hard to breathe around the sharpness of that pain.

“Don’t wish that.” I slip my hand into his and lean my head on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t survive losing you, Lo.”

“You think that, Dovie.” He rubs at his temple, like he’s trying to erase some image that’s stuck in his brain. “But you’d be okay.”

I don’t have to wonder what it would be like to lose him. I know for a fact it’d be hell. He was gone for two months and I had no idea where he was, and the hurt of that was so different from the old hurt of missing my mama. It was new and fresh. Sharp enough to make me cry out from the sting of it, like having my lungs pierced by a hot needle. Nothing in the world felt good or right without Lo to share it with. There was no point in any of it.

But seeing him like this is almost worse. I still miss him, even though he’s sitting right beside me.

“The things I’ve done,” he whispers, “you’d be better off without me.”

“What happened to Turley isn’t your fault. And what happened to those hikers isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you’ve done wrong.”

Lo turns toward me, and the only thing I recognize about him is the dark brown color of his eyes. This is the face of a total stranger.

“You don’t know the things I’ve done, Dovie.”

“Then tell me.” I reach up and brush my fingers through his loose waves. At least the softness of his hair feels familiar. “There’s no part of you I couldn’t love. I promise.”

“No.” Lo lurches to his feet and glances around the yard. His eyes land in one of the shadowy corners. “Please.” His hands are in his hair, and his voice sounds desperate, like the wind when it howls around the outside of the house at night. “Stay the fuck away from me.” He’s backed up the steps and across the porch to press himself against the screen door. “I can’t help you! I tried!”

I’m watching him completely unravel.

I move to where he is, and I take his face in my hands. “I know you’re scared,” I whisper, “but I’m here with you. You’re not alone.” He looks down at me, and just for a second, there’s a flash of Lo in those brown eyes. He’s trying to fight his way back to me. “Do you have the skeleton key I gave you?”

“Yeah.” His eyes are darting back and forth between my face and whatever he sees out there in the darkest corner of the yard. “I keep it in my pocket all the time.”

I reach into his pocket to find it, but there’s nothing there. I try the other pocket, but it’s empty too.

“I must’ve lost it,” he says, and his voice splinters. His breathing is coming in sharp gasps now, and he flattens himself against the screen door. “Don’t let ’em get me, Dovie. Please. Don’t let ’em take me away. I wanna stay with you.”

“Hey. Hey!” I tilt his face down toward mine. “You’re not going anywhere, and I’m not going anywhere. It’s okay. You don’t need a magic key to keep you safe, Lo. I’m right here. And we’re magic together, right? We’re stronger than whatever is out there in the dark.”

“Yeah,” he says, like he’s trying to convince himself. I’m rubbing his hands like he’s got frostbite and his breathing is finally evening out a little bit. “We’re magic. You and me.” I see his muscles relax. “Stronger than the dark.”

“Dovie? Everything okay?” I look over my shoulder and Xan is standing on the sidewalk watching me and Lo.

Shit.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “We’re good.”

“What happened to your window?” Xan is pointing at the piece of black plastic Daddy and I put up.

“Nothing,” I say. Lo is staring at the plastic now too. “Somebody chucked a rock through the window.”

“Damn,” Xan says. “That doesn’t sound like nothing.”

“They hate you because of me, Dovie.” Lo’s voice is like a slow-moving river, deep enough and sad enough to drown in. He reaches up to touch my cheek before he glances at the broken window again. “That’s my fault.”

Xan is watching us, and I can tell he’s trying to figure out what Lo and I are to each other. It almost makes me laugh, because good luck with that, buddy.

“Why would somebody want to break your window?” Xan asks me.

“What’re you doing here?” I ask him in return.

We weren’t supposed to meet up again until tomorrow.

“Oh. Sorry. I just—” Xan shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Look. If I’m interrupting something, or whatever, I can—”

“No,” Lo tells him, and he squeezes my hand to let me know he’s okay. “It’s good you’re here.”

I notice Xan is all cut to ribbons. There are holes in his shirt, and deep scratches spread out across his forearms like spiderwebs. “You find the burial spot?” I ask him.

“Yeah. Right by the big rock with flowers, exactly like you said.” Xan lowers himself to the bottom step and Lo and I go back to sit side by side on the top one again. “You were right, Dove. It felt peaceful.”

“I’m glad you went,” Lo tells him. “It’s important.”

“Did you guys know there’s a cabin up at the top of that ravine? More like a shack, really. There was a kerosene lantern burning out front. Maybe we need to head up that way when it gets light. Ask some questions.”

Lo and I look at each other. “That’s my place,” Lo tells him. “Me and my granny live there together.

“Oh,” Xan says. “Shit.” He looks embarrassed. “Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to be obnoxious.”

“It’s okay,” Lo says. “We know it’s a shack.” He actually smiles a little. “But neither one of us saw or heard a thing.”

Xan’s face falls, like that was his one idea, and we’ve already shot it down.

“Okay,” he says. “So what do we do first, then? I’ve already talked to Riley’s friends and some people in town, but nobody’s given me anything real to go on. I don’t have a clue where to start.”

“Me either,” I admit. I’ve never tried to solve a murder before.

“Nana have any bay leaves?” Lo asks me. His eyes are liquid fire, and it makes me so happy I almost kiss him for real right then. I thought maybe that flame inside him had been put out for good, but every time I think that, he manages to rekindle it for himself.

“Probably,” I tell him. “In the pantry.”

“We need three of them,” Lo says. “And matches.”

Xan wrinkles up his forehead like he’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on. “Are we cooking something?”

“It’s for a ceremony,” Lo tells him. “We need to set our intentions. So we start off on the right foot.” He looks at me. “We got hung up on Turley. We gotta start over clean.”

“Okay,” Xan tells us. He clearly isn’t sure what to make of this, but he seems to be okay with it.

I stand up to go get the stuff Lo needs. “Three bay leaves and some matches,” I say, and I pull open the screen door as gently as I can.

“And a black marker,” he whispers as I slip inside the dark house.

It only takes me a second to find the bay leaves and the matches in the kitchen. I hold my breath when the pantry door creaks loud enough to wake up Brother Turley down at the funeral home in Rogers, but I don’t hear Daddy or Nana stirring.

The black marker causes me some trouble. I dig through the kitchen drawers, but the best I can find is a broken pencil. I know Lo well enough to know that his list of spell requirements is always precise. If I don’t come up with a black marker, things are going to fall apart, and I don’t want that.

I remember then that Daddy keeps black markers in his desk in the corner of the living room. He uses them when he’s drawing out stained glass patterns. I tiptoe in that direction to see if I can find one.

Voices float in through the screen door. Lo and Xan are talking in whispers. I can’t make out the words, but Lo’s honeysuckle Ozarks drawl and Xan’s Oklahoma twang blend like overlapping music when one radio station starts to fade out and another one starts to come into range. I wonder what my magic mountain boy and the sad-eyed boy from Tulsa are saying to each other.

I make my way across the living room floor, avoiding the specific boards that I know are the creakiest, then I slide open Daddy’s top desk drawer to see if I can find the marker Lo needs. I don’t see any at first, but then I spot one. It’s shoved way at the back. When I grab it, I catch sight of something shiny. I reach for the tiny object and hold it up to the moonlight coming through the window that isn’t covered by black plastic.

It’s a little gold angel pin.

Triplet to the twins upstairs.

Twenty-Three

I’m stuck for a second, trying to work out why Daddy would have one of Hannah’s pins shoved in the back of his desk drawer. She must have stopped in the gallery while she and Candy were in town. Maybe Daddy helped her with something or gave them some advice, and she gave him the little angel pin as a thank-you. Just like she did Lo and me.

I take the black marker and creep back to the front porch. When I ease the screen door closed, Lo and Xan turn to look in my direction. “Got it,” I say, and I hand Lo the things he needs to make magic.

He unscrews the little jar and gives us each a bay leaf. “Think about what we’re tryin’ to do together,” Lo tells Xan and me. “Then come up with one word that sums up what you want. We’ll write our words on the bay leaves and set ’em on fire. The smoke releases our intentions.”

“Cool,” Xan says. I know he probably thinks this is crazy, but I appreciate him going along with it. I don’t put any stock in Lo’s spells and ceremonies, but if he draws some kind of personal strength from it, that’s good enough for me.

“It’s a manifesting ceremony,” Lo explains. “And it’s powerful.”

“Did Granny Pearl teach you this?” I ask him, but Lo shakes his head.

“Bay leaves aren’t part of the Ozarks tradition, but their use in magic goes all the way back to ancient Greece and the Oracle at Delphi.”

Lo lays his bay leaf on the front porch and leans down with the black marker in his hand. Xan and I both watch as he writes the word Peace in his familiar curling script. “Peace for everyone,” he tells us. “For the victims who’ve been killed, and for the hikers who will come to these hills after this is all over.” He looks at Xan. “For Riley, and for you and your family.” Lo turns to find my eyes. We hold each other hostage for a few seconds before he adds in a low, breathy whisper, “For you and me, Dovie.”

Lo hands the marker to Xan, and he hesitates for a few seconds. I see him thinking really seriously about his word, then he pushes his blond hair aside and leans down to write Justice.

“You have to speak it out loud,” Lo tells him. “Send it out to the universe with your words, and then with the smoke.”

“Justice for Riley,” Xan says simply. His voice resonates with loss, and it makes me ache. “For all of them.”

Then it’s my turn. I already know my word, so I lean down to print Truth in block letters. “I want to know the truth about what’s happening here, no matter how ugly it is.” When I look up, Xan is watching me.

“Truth. That’s a good word.” He nods. “Riley would like that.”

With the moon hanging in the sky as a witness and a choir of cicadas singing in the dark, something about this moment feels sacred. I figure it’s more divine and closer to what people say God is supposed to be than any church service I ever attended as a kid. I may not believe in religion or magic, but concepts like peace, justice, and truth have solid weight. They’re ideas I can get behind.

“Okay,” Lo says. He takes a match from the box I gave him and strikes it with one graceful movement. The three of us put our marked leaves in a pile on the cement step and Lo touches them with the match. I hear them sizzle and pop a little as they start to glow, then Lo bends lower to blow on the tiny ember. He breathes it into life with his own inner flame. This is baptism by fire.

Maybe it’s the redemption Turley wanted for him.

For all of us.

Xan and Lo and I watch the little wisps of smoke rise into the dark. The smell has a pungent bite to it, but it’s soothing, too. I inhale it into my lungs and let it out again.

It’s over in a few seconds, and we look around our tiny circle. Nobody seems sure what to do next, and we’re all worn down to the bone. Xan yawns and Lo is rubbing at his eyes.

“I gotta help my daddy with somethin’ in the morning,” I tell them. “But let’s meet up here tomorrow evening to go over everything we know. Maybe if we lay it all out together, dates and locations and all of it, something will click.”

I can tell Xan likes the idea of having an actual plan. As he leaves the yard, he turns back to give us a wave, and in the pale moonshine, he’s the ghost of his dead brother again.

When he’s gone, I hear Lo let out a long breath. “You okay?” I ask him.

“I am for tonight, I think.” He picks up the box of matches and strikes another one into flame. There’s a scratch and a whoosh and then a sizzle as we watch it burn together. He’s punch-me-in-the-gut beautiful with that orange glow reflected in his brown eyes and those cherry-wood waves falling across his forehead.

“Daddy wants you to help us hang Ira’s new stained glass piece tomorrow, if you’re up for that. We can get you on the way up the mountain.” I look away from his face, out toward the moon and the trees. “Or you could stay here tonight, if you want.”

“I guess I could stay,” he tells me. “If that’s all right.” His voice sounds like water over river stones. Rippling and melodic. The sound of it could lull me to sleep.

“Might as well,” I say, and I see one corner of his lip twitch like he’s trying not to smile. My stomach flip-flops.

Lo’s spent the night with me a zillion nights. I don’t know why I suddenly feel so weird about it now.

“I’m gonna go take a shower, if that’s okay,” he says, and I nod.

“You know where the towels are. I’ll meet you upstairs when you’re finished.”

Lo gets up and sneaks into the house, and I start to gather up the matches and the bay leaves and the marker.

“Hey, Dovie?”

I look up and Xan is back. He’s moving up the stone path to the front porch, and he has this expression on his face like there’s something he wants to tell me.

“Hey,” I say. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he comes to sit beside me on the top step. “I just remembered something important. Something one of Riley’s buddies mentioned to me back in May. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but maybe there’s something to it.”

“Okay.”

“This friend, Dustin, saw somebody strange on the trail just before Riley went missing. The guy was acting really odd. Kind of freaked them all out. Dustin said he mentioned it to the sheriff at the time, but he didn’t seem too interested.” Xan rolls his eyes. “Go figure.”

“Did Riley’s friend say what this mystery guy looked like?” This could be our first actual clue.

“He didn’t get a real close look at him,” Xan says. “The guy was moving through the woods, off-trail, keeping his head down. Had a big, bushy beard, salt-and-pepper gray, and hair that matched. That’s all Dustin could really tell me. Might be something worth looking into, though.”

My brain stalls and sputters the way our old truck does when I start it up. Riley’s friend must’ve been mistaken. There’s only one person that matches that description in Lucifer’s Creek.

“Dovie?” Xan says. He’s studying me, and I feel exposed. “Can I tell you something, Dovie who is not a witch?” I nod, even though I’m not paying any attention. He pauses for a second. “I think you’re really beautiful.”

“What?” I think at first I misheard him, but his cheeks are bright pink and he’s looking down at his cowboy boots like he kind of wishes he could snatch the words back.

Xan looks up at me and cocks his head to one side. “You’re a dark-haired, blue-eyed mountain wildflower, Dovie Warner.” He scoots a little closer to me on the step and a tiny tingle spreads up my spine and out along my shoulder blades. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“You mean there aren’t any girls in Tulsa who go around digging up skeletons?” I’m aiming for light and teasing, but it comes out more biting and sarcastic than I mean it to. I’m not good at flirting, if that’s even what this is supposed to be. I have absolutely zero experience.

And zero desire.

Xan laughs anyway. It’s an easy sound, and it moves through the muggy night like a cool breeze. I’m suddenly glad that I was the one who made him laugh in the middle of all his misery. If I can’t help him solve the riddle of Riley’s death, at least I will have given him that.

He looks at me for a long second, then he leans in slow and closes his eyes. I realize what’s about to happen just before I feel his lips on mine, soft and gentle and very warm and alive. I’m so surprised and it’s over so fast that I don’t even know for sure if I kissed him back or if I just sat there.

“Night, Dovie,” Xan says, and he pushes himself up off the step. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

“Okay,” I say. Then I add, “The sheriff will be camped out on the front porch. So sneak around back.” Xan nods and starts down the path toward Mud Street, and I feel myself start to smile.

When he vanishes into the dark, I get up and head inside. I push the front door closed, and I think about locking it. But then I decide there’s no point. If whatever is out there in the dark wants me, a flimsy lock won’t make a bit of difference.

I hear the water still running in the shower, so I tiptoe back into the living room and ease open Daddy’s desk drawer again, then I reach inside and find that little gold angel. I’m thinking about how Daddy and I ran smack into each other on the trail tonight, both of us out wandering in the dark.

And about how he’s been gone so many nights lately.

How he came home the other morning—the morning after Hannah Nelby vanished—all torn up from brambles. Holes in his clothes and deep scratches all up and down his arms.

There has to be an explanation for those things, and for the tiny gold trail angel in my hand.

And for what Xan said about the mysterious man with the bushy salt-and-pepper beard who was seen near the trail the day Riley vanished.

I close my palm around the angel and make my way up the stairs as silently as I can. When I get to my room, I pin that third angel to the curtain with the other two.

A complete holy trinity.

One angel for me.

One for Lo.

One for the blue-eyed brothers from Tulsa.

It’s just after one o’clock in the morning, but I don’t care. I have something I have to do. I kneel down and dig through my trash can until I find the business card that Hannah gave me with the angel pin. Both her and Candy’s names are printed on the back, along with their phone numbers, email addresses, and social media accounts.

I take the card and slip back downstairs. The water is still running in the shower. Granny Pearl and Lo have a rigged-up cold-water shower at the cabin, so whenever he showers here, Lo tends to take his time enjoying it. I hear Daddy snoring behind his closed bedroom door, and the light is out in Nana’s room.

I go into the kitchen and take the phone, stretching the cord tight to sit down in the corner. There’s no cell service up way out here in the middle of nowhere, so we all still talk on the phone like it’s the eighties.

I pick up the receiver and dial the number on the trail angel card. Candy’s probably asleep, and I don’t even know what I’m going to say. I’ve just about convinced myself to hang up when someone answers.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” I say. “Is this Candy? My name’s Dove Warner. I’m calling from Lucifer’s Creek, and I’m so sorry for waking you up.”

“Did they find her?” The voice on the other end of the phone is equal parts panicked and hopeful. “Did they find Hannah?”

“No. I’m sorry. I just—I was hoping I could ask you a question.”

She pauses. “Who is this again?”

“My name’s Dove. We met on the Aux-Arc Trail that day. Right before the storm. My friend and I told you about the hiking shelter.”

“We gave you a trail angel card.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s how I got your phone number.”

Candy is quiet for a second. “They’re never going to find her, are they?” Her breath hitches, and I hate myself for waking her up and putting her through this.

“There are people up here looking. We’re not going to give up,” I promise. “We’ll find her.”

Or what’s left of her.

Candy sniffles hard. “What’s your question?”

“Did you see anyone that day? Besides my friend and me? Was there anyone else out on the trail? Or off in the woods, maybe? Anybody you noticed?”

“Yeah,” Candy says. “I already told the sheriff this, but there was one guy. That evening, when the sun was going down, we noticed him off in the trees. He was just kind of standing there looking at us. Creeped us out.” She stops. “I wish we’d gone back to town before the rain started.” She lets out a heavy breath. “No. Actually I wish we’d never gone up into those mountains at all.”

“Did you get a look at him? The guy in the woods. Can you describe him to me?”

“Yeah,” Candy says. “I can tell you exactly what he looked like because we actually met him earlier. It was the guy from the stained glass shop.”

Twenty-Four

“Are you still there?”

“Yeah. I’m here.” The words get hung up in my mouth and come out twisted. My brain and my tongue are refusing to work together. “I just—are you sure it was the same guy?”

“Positive. We talked to him that morning when we bought a little suncatcher. A stained glass hummingbird. And I happened to mention that my compass wasn’t working, so this guy pulled one out of his own pocket and gave it to me. We thought that was really generous, so we gave him one of those little cards with a pin.” Candy pauses. “He seemed really nice, you know? We thought he was a trail angel. God. It kills me, thinking about that.” Her voice is soaked in regret. “So I recognized him right off when we saw him in the woods that evening. But he seemed—I don’t know—different than he did earlier. His face was harder. Kind of scary.” She hesitates, and it’s clear she doesn’t like reliving her sister’s last hours. “You still need to know what he looked like?”

“No,” I tell her. “That’s okay. Sorry again for waking you up.” I give her my phone number, and I tell her to call me if she thinks of anything else that might be important.

It’s quiet for a few seconds.

“You didn’t wake me up,” Candy finally says. “I haven’t slept a night since Hannah was taken. I don’t know if I’ll ever sleep again.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her before I say goodbye. “I’m really sorry this happened to Hannah. And to you.”

I don’t tell her that she’s wrong. She will sleep again. Her body will shut itself off eventually, but her brain never will, so when she finally does sleep, she’ll still see her sister’s face.

I put the phone back on the little table where it goes, then I sneak back upstairs to stand at the window. I’m listening to the tinkling of Lo’s magic keys swinging from the ceiling, and I can’t stop staring at those three gold angels on my curtains. I keep going over and over and over everything I know now.

Two separate people have reported seeing Daddy in the woods just before a hiker disappeared. How many more would say the same thing if we asked them?

“God, that felt good.” Lo is leaning against the door frame. His hair is wet from the shower and it curls around his ears. Little beads of water are shining on his face and his neck. He comes in and closes the door behind him. “You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I lie. “Just tired.”

I don’t like being dishonest with Lo. It gives me a miserable feeling in the pit of my stomach, but I’m not ready to put my worry into words yet. Saying it out loud would give it more weight than it deserves. My daddy is a good man. I know that. There has to be an explanation for all the weird stuff.

I just need to find out what it is.

Lo spreads the quilt back on my bed and climbs in. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get some sleep.”

I take one more look at the moon hanging over the hills, then I cross the floor and crawl in next to him. Lo’s arms go around me, and he pulls me close. We’re spooned up together like when we were little, and it’s weird how much the same, and how totally different, this feels. He nuzzles my neck with his nose. His breath is warm and his hair is damp against my shoulder. When he whispers, “I love you, Dovie,” my whole body turns to warm honey. I’ve never wanted anything the way I want him.

“I love you, too, Lo.”

But my mind is so full of questions about what Daddy was doing in the woods.

And I’m thinking about that kiss with Xan. He caught me off guard. Unprepared.

But it was nice.

My first kiss.

I should tell Lo about that, but it’s all too much for tonight.

I guess Lo can sense how I’m feeling, because he presses his lips to the back of my head and whispers goodnight before he reaches across my body to turn off the lamp on my bedside table.

It’s the smell of bacon cooking that wakes me up the next morning. I shake Lo awake and we pull on our shoes and head down to the kitchen.

Daddy is at the table and Nana is at the stove. There are already plates set out for me and for Lo, so I guess we weren’t quite as sneaky last night as we thought.

We slide into the chairs opposite Daddy, and Nana comes over to scrape scrambled eggs onto our plates before she brings us strips of crispy bacon to go with them.

“You want coffee, Lowan?” Daddy asks without looking up from the newspaper he’s reading.

“Yes, sir. Thank you,” Lo answers, and Daddy slides the coffee pot across the table toward him.

“Dovie tell you we’re hanging a piece up at the lodge this morning? Was planning on picking you up on the way.” Daddy raises one eyebrow at me across the table. “But I see you’re already here.”

“Yes, sir,” Lo answers again. “Came down last night. Dovie told me we had some work to do this mornin’.”

“Figured he might as well stay,” I add, and Daddy grunts before he goes back to reading his paper.

Nana sits down next to Daddy with her own plate. She’s dumping spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee, but Lo is drinking his black. Like Daddy.

“I’ll never understand why Ira would want the Ozark Howler hangin’ in that pretty lodge,” Nana says, and she clicks her tongue. “Howler’s an omen of death in these hills.”

“The Howler’s a hunter,” Daddy tells her, “and that’s what city people come to these mountains for. To go huntin’.” He forks scrambled eggs into his mouth. “Makes perfect sense to me.”

We finish our breakfast and stack our plates by the sink for Nana, then Daddy, Lo, and me head out to pile into the old pickup, Daddy and me up front and Lowan in the back to make sure the glass doesn’t get bounced around too much.

It takes a few good cranks of the ignition to bring the truck to life, then we’re rumbling down Mud Street. People turn and stare at us as we roll by. We’re like the setup for a bad joke—a witch, a cursed girl, and a stained glass artist walk into a bar—or drive by in a noisy old Ford.

I wonder if whoever tossed that rock through our front window is standing out there watching us. I want to stick my head out the window and scream that they’re all cowards, but instead I stare straight ahead.

We follow Mud Street across the bridge over Lucifer’s Creek, then just before the street ends at the edge of town, we take the dirt road branching off to the left. Daddy’s strong hands grip the steering wheel, and I’m trying not to stare at the scratches up and down his forearms.

The road curves around behind the church and the graveyard, then it narrows and starts up into the hills. It’s only a few minutes before we’re crossing Lucifer’s Creek again, this time at the spot where Brother Turley fell to his death right in front of our eyes the other night.

I glance back at Lo bumping along in the bed of the pickup, and we exchange a look through the back windshield as Daddy eases the truck across the makeshift plank bridge. The water is behaving itself again today, flowing milky blue and serene. You couldn’t even drown a cat in it. The sulfur smell is stronger than ever, though. If the truck had air-conditioning, I’d roll the windows up. But the AC gave up the ghost a long time ago, along with the radio and, based on our jostling, the suspension system.

We pass the ancient money tree with all those dangling bits of green cloth blooming like strange leaves, and then it’s not long before we’re passing the Wilder cabin. Daddy slows down to a crawl so we can wave at Granny Pearl, who’s standing on the front porch. “Headin’ up to the lodge,” Lo shouts at her from the back of the truck where he’s trying his best to hold the wrapped-up Howler steady.

We wind around and follow the switchbacks up and up as the road gets steeper and steeper. Daddy gears down, but the old truck groans and grumbles so much that I’m worried we’ll have to get out and push it.

Finally the road levels off and we see the Moonlight Crag Lodge sign stretching overhead to welcome us. We drive under the sign and Daddy finds a parking spot in the gravel lot behind the building, where the employees park.

Lo hops out to help him unload the Howler, but I’m stuck staring up at the lodge. I spend so much time looking up at it from town that I forget sometimes how huge it really is when you’re standing in its shadow.

“Dovie.” Daddy’s got the tailgate down and he and Lo are gently sliding the carefully wrapped glass out of the truck bed. He’s got it packed in about a hundred layers of cardboard, bubblewrap, and blankets to survive the rough drive up the mountain. “Get the door for us. This thing is heavy.”

I hurry up the steps and pull the chain to raise the big rolling door on the loading dock. It takes me four or five good yanks to get the door all the way up so that Daddy and Lo can get the Howler inside. They lay it on the floor in the maintenance shop, and Daddy pulls out a box knife to strip off the packaging and padding.

Lo and I both gasp when Daddy pulls off the last layer of tissue paper to reveal the Ozark Howler brought to life in black glass.

It looks even bigger than it did when I saw it all laid out on the worktable in the back room of the gallery. Overwhelming and ominous. I kneel down to run my finger over the curling horns on top of its head. The fearsome claws.

“Watch that,” Daddy scolds. “Fingerprints.”

I look up at Lo, but he’s backed away from the Howler like he’s afraid it might get up off the floor and rip his throat out.

Daddy gets out a pair of gloves and slips them on, then he tosses another pair to Lo, and Lo somehow catches them without ever taking his eyes off the Howler.

“Ready?” Daddy asks, and Lo nods and slides his gloves on, but he doesn’t move until I get up and go give him a little nudge. Then he steps back toward the Howler and, on the count of three, they gingerly lift it off the ground. “Get the doors, Dovie. Movin’ him out to the main lobby.”

It takes us forever to make our way out of the maintenance areas at the back of the building, down the first-floor hallway, and finally to the big lobby in the front. I’ve always loved this place, with its thick, luxurious carpets and dark wood and huge stone fireplaces. The leather couches and the soft light of Daddy’s stained glass lamps make the huge space inviting and cozy. There are vases of wildflowers everywhere. A regal-looking mountain lion presides over one corner, and a dozen geese are suspended in flight from the high ceilings.

And, of course, those three-story, floor-to-ceiling windows at the front practically bring the mountains right inside. It’s like that view—the trees and the grass and the panorama looking out over the crag and across to the hills on the other side of the valley—was painted just for Ira and his guests. It really must be the most beautiful place in all of Arkansas.

In the whole world, maybe.

Daddy points up toward a beam that runs from one wall to the other over our heads. Ira’s guys have already hung the chains from the beam; now it’s our job to hang the Howler. Two ladders sit in the middle of the big room, one under each of the chains.

Hanging a piece this big is a delicate operation. Daddy goes over all the logistics. He’ll take one side of the Howler and climb one of the ladders, while I take the other side of the piece up the other ladder. Lo will be on the ground helping to lift the glass off the floor and keep it from swinging. Then once we’ve got it clear, Lo will come up the ladder behind me to help lift my side so I can fasten it to the chains when we get to the top of the ladder.

I’ve hung glass with Daddy lots of times before, but nothing this big or this heavy. The height doesn’t scare me, but I’m always nervous about dropping a piece. Especially one that took as long to make as this one.

Once we’re all into position, Daddy gives me a pair of gloves and we start to inch up the ladders one step at a time, staying even with each other as we gently lift the Howler off the floor with Lo’s help.

“Slow and steady,” Daddy reminds us. “Don’t let it swing.”

The higher we climb, the more weight we’re holding, and the more I’m struggling to keep my side even with Daddy’s. My arms ache and my shoulders burn. I’m grateful when the Howler is completely off the ground and Lo can come up to help me. He uses his gloved hands to support my half of the Howler from below me on the ladder, and that makes it a lot easier to keep climbing.

It seems like it takes hours to reach the top of the ladder, and I’m so relieved when Daddy and I each get our sides attached to the swinging chains suspended from the beam. “Got it,” he says, and we all climb back down to the ground.

The three of us stand between the ladders and look up toward the beast we’ve hung. With the light from those windows hitting it, those glowing red eyes look wild and alive. It’s beautiful. And terrible.

When I glance over at Lo, his face is pale. “I don’t like it, Dovie,” he whispers. “It scares me.”

“Would you look at that?” None of us heard Ira come up behind us, but there he is. With those tousled red curls and his dancing blue eyes, and that enormous grin on his face, he looks like a kid who’s come downstairs to a brand-new bike on Christmas morning. “You’re amazing, Del! She’s beautiful!” He’s clapping Daddy on the back, whistling long and low. “It’s a showstopper.” The guests scattered around the lobby are already murmuring their approval and snapping pics of it on their phones.

Daddy nods, but he’s staring at that Howler, like Lo and me. It’s as though he didn’t quite see it himself, until it was hung.

“That’s what this place needed,” Ira says. “The finishing touch.”

“Um, Mr. Langdon?” A guy with ironed jeans and a too-new-looking pair of hunting boots is trying to get Ira’s attention. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“I already got you on the schedule for tonight.” Ira gives the man a friendly wink. “We’re huntin’ hogs. Razorbacks.”

Ira takes the newbies out himself sometimes. Can’t turn a damn city boy loose in the hills with a gun, he always says. And now that I’m looking at this guy, I know he’s right. It wouldn’t be safe for anyone. He’s too nervous. Too jumpy.

He’d probably blow somebody’s head off.

“That’s the thing.” The man blinks a couple of times. “I don’t wanna go. I changed my mind.”

Ira looks concerned. “Everything okay?”

The man shakes his head. “I can’t do it. I been thinkin’ about it, and I’m just not ready. I can’t.” The poor guy looks like he’s about to have a panic attack. “This was a mistake.” He’s rubbing his sweaty palms on his jeans. “I’ve never even held a gun before.”

“Whoa, now. Why don’t you go relax?” Ira hits him with a trademark smile. Warm and genuine. “Ask the bartender for a little top-shelf whiskey to settle your nerves.” He pats the panicky guest on the back. “I bet you’ll feel different come sundown.”

“You think so?” The man sounds skeptical.

“You came all this way to try your hand at huntin’, didn’t you?” Daddy says, and the guest stares at him. “You’re in real good hands here.” He jerks his head in Ira’s direction. “Me and this guy used to run these hills all the time trackin’ hogs. Folks around these parts used to call him the Ghost of the Ozarks.”

“See?” Ira beams at Daddy before he turns back to his guest. “What’d I tell ya? Nothin’ to worry about.”

“Yeah.” The man pulls himself up a little taller. “Okay. I’ll see you tonight, then.” The guy gives Ira a grateful smile before he walks away looking embarrassed.

“Thanks for that, Del.” Ira rolls his eyes. “Sometimes these city guys come up here with big ideas about being some mighty hunter, and then all of a sudden they got cold feet. They’re feelin’ bad for shootin’ Bambi’s mama or what have you.” He gives Daddy a long look. “You wanna come with us tonight, Del? Been a long time since you and me was in the woods together.”

Daddy looks like he wants to say yes, but he shakes his head. “I got stuff to do tonight.”

Ira nods. “Another night, then.” He slaps me and Lo on the back and he looks up at the Howler again. “Thanks for helpin’ get ’er hung, you two.” He looks back at Daddy. “Y’all go on down and get you some lunch in the restaurant. On me.”

When Ira leaves, we head on down to the restaurant. The three of us order bison cheeseburgers and sweet potato fries with truffle oil, and we eat them on the deck as we look out at Moonlight Crag, the bare rock outcropping that juts out over the valley, giving the lodge its name. We catch sight of the nervous hunter at the bar, and he raises his glass of whiskey to us.

Daddy finishes up his lunch faster than Lo and I do, and he tells us he’s gonna take a walk before we head down the mountain. “Meet me at the truck in twenty minutes,” he tells us.

I’m picking at my fries, and Lo tells me he’s gonna head inside to use the bathroom. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Daddy making his way out toward the edge of the crag. He stands there, with his hands shoved in his pockets, looking down at Lucifer’s Creek below him. His shoulders are slumped, and he looks old and tired.

And lonely.

When the waiter comes back to take our plates, I get up and take the steps leading from the overlook deck down to the grass, then I move out to the crag where Daddy’s standing.

“Hey,” I say, and Daddy glances back over his shoulder.

“Hey, Bird.”

“What’re you doing out here?” I ask him, and Daddy shrugs and looks back out at the view.

“Thinkin’ about your mama, I guess.” He sighs and I see his shoulders sag a little more. “This is where I asked her to marry me. Right here on the crag. We’d come up here camping, the four of us. Me and Ira and Lucy and Claire.” He looks back at me again. “Course, the lodge wasn’t here then. Nothin’ was here. Ira was camping full time, livin’ rough in a cave down under the bluff.” He jerks his head toward the woods and smiles. “The four of us had a lot of fun there. Called it our hideaway.” Daddy laughs a little, then he looks back over his shoulder at the lodge and gives his head a little shake. “Can you imagine goin’ from livin’ in a cave to livin’ in this place?” He turns to take in the valley again. “Prettiest spot in Arkansas. It was beautiful up here that night I proposed to your mama. Stars out everywhere you looked. Close enough to touch.”

Daddy hardly ever talks to me about Mama, so I figure I better take advantage of this opportunity. “Why’d you say that the other day?” I ask him. “About not knowing if she ever left Lucifer’s Creek.”

“Dovie, there are things we’ve never talked about, but you’re getting to be grown, and I guess it’s time I told you the truth.”

“What haven’t you told me?”

“I tried to find your mama in those years right after she left us. Contacted everyone she ever knew—put out feelers all over the country—talked to every sheriff’s department from here to Maine and all the way out to California—and there was never a goddamn sign of her. She didn’t take nothin’ but her wallet. No clothes. No photos. Nothin’.” He shakes his head. “Nobody leaves town like that.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s dead,” I argue.

Daddy’s quiet for a long time. He’s staring down into the valley. The silence goes on so long I decide he’s finished with the conversation. He’s gonna clam up now.

But then he takes a long, slow breath and blows it out.

“Truth is, I seen her, Bird. Just once. A little while back. But it was enough to convince me she was gone.”

“You saw Mama?”

“I saw her ghost.”

Frustration bubbles up inside me and turns to anger. Why does everyone keep telling me things that I know full well aren’t so?

They’re worse than lies. They’re flat-out impossible.

“Daddy. No. That’s not—”

“Now, listen.” His voice is sharp. “I’m only gonna tell this once. I know that sounds wild, and that’s why I didn’t say nothin’ to you at the time. I didn’t tell Fern or anyone. But it’s the truth, Dovie. I was comin’ home late one night, a few months back, and I saw Lucy plain as anything, standing next to those flowers of hers. The ones she planted in the yard.”

“I don’t believe that,” I tell him, and Daddy shrugs. “I’m not tryin’ to be disrespectful or anything. I just don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I can’t make you believe me. I wouldn’t have believed it either. I only saw her for a second, but it was enough to convince me she was gone.” His voice softens and he looks back over his shoulder at me. “You ever hear of anybody seein’ the ghost of a living person?”

I think about Lo, and how I see his ghost every time I look at him these days.

“Are you sayin’ somebody from Lucifer’s Creek killed her?” I’ve never even considered the possibility of that before. In my mind, I’ve always pictured my mama strolling by the Seine in Paris or raking in crisp twenty-dollar bills as a tarot card reader down in New Orleans.

I’ve never pictured her as a pile of bones buried somewhere in these dark hills. But Daddy nods. “I do.”

The grief of losing her hits me fresh, and I suddenly want to drop to my knees and sob like Xan sobbed for Riley the other day at the trail shelter.

I don’t ever remember crying for my mama like that.

“Why?” It feels like my insides are all twisted up. “Why would anybody hurt Mama?”

“I don’t know, Bird. I’m hopin’ if I can find her, maybe I can figure out the answer to that.”

“If you can find her?”

“I been out lookin’ for her lately. Tryin’ to find her bones.” He gives me a sad look. “I don’t have any gift for that, like you do. But I keep on lookin’.”

“That’s why you’ve been out nights wanderin’ the hills, isn’t it?”

He nods. “Been out combin’ through the woods most nights since I seen her.”

That explains why I ran into him the other night. It explains the scratches on his arms, and why he was seen on the night Riley disappeared and again on the night Hannah vanished.

It explains everything, and I’m almost dizzy with relief.

Daddy’s not a murderer.

He’s been walking these hills searching for his love.

“What are you gonna do if you find her?” I ask him.

“I’m gonna mark the spot with a white rose for love and remembrance. That was your mama’s favorite flower.” He kicks at a loose rock and sends it rolling off the edge of the crag into the deep valley below us. “Then I’m gonna bring her home to rest.”

“Nana thinks Mama left a white rose in the yard the other night.”

“Maybe she did, Bird. I know it sounds impossible, but the older I get, the less I know. I’m not gonna say what is or isn’t possible. Not anymore. That ain’t my job.” He gives me a pointed look. “And it ain’t yours either.”

Twenty-Five

Daddy clams up after that, and I can’t get any more out of him. He sends me back into the lodge to look for Lo, and I find him standing underneath that Howler staring up at it.

“The Howler’s a harbinger of death, Dovie. We shouldn’t have hung it here.”

“Come on,” I tell him, and I try not to look into the Howler’s glowing red eyes. “Daddy’s waiting in the truck.”

The ride back down the mountain is bumpy and quiet. I’m sandwiched in between Daddy and Lo, and none of us says much. Daddy offers to drop Lo off at his place, but he says he’s got something to do in town, so he’ll just go home with me.

Neither of us tells Daddy that the thing Lo has to do in Lucifer’s Creek involves meeting the brother of a dead boy so the three of us can solve the riddle of who’s slaughtering hikers around here.

When we get home, Daddy parks the truck under the carport, then he tells us he’s heading in to open the gallery for the day. “Most likely won’t be home until late,” he says, and I know that means he’s going hunting tonight, same as Ira and the nervous man in the lobby.

Only, he’s huntin’ for Mama. Not hogs.

Lo and I spend the afternoon helping Nana weed the garden and gather ripe peaches off the trees along the back of our property so she can bake a pie. Phantom follows us out to the peach trees, but the poor old cat gets so worn out chasing grasshoppers in the miserable heat that Lo has to scoop him up and carry him back to the house.

After dinner, Sheriff and Deputy Jonah come to set up camp on the front porch. Nana hands them ice-cold glasses of sweet tea to dump out when she’s not looking, and they apologize for missing last night. “We were dealing with a situation,” Sheriff explains, and I know the situation was a dead preacher who somehow got himself jammed up under the Lucifer’s Creek bridge like a fallen log. “You let us know, Dovie, if them bones wake you up tonight. We’ll be ready.”

When it starts to get dark, Lo and I move out to the back steps to wait for Xan. We’ve only been out there a few minutes when he emerges out of the trees at the back edge of our yard, like he was already there watching and waiting for us.

“Hey, Dovie,” he says, and he gives me a shy smile. He’s got on jeans and cowboy boots paired with a faded T-shirt, John Deere green, and he looks like he stepped out of the pages of a Future Farmers of America brochure. Suddenly I’m feeling more than a little awkward, remembering that sneak-attack kiss last night and how it made my spine tingle.

Maybe I’m feeling guilty, too.

I turn to look at Lo and he’s watching me with a funny expression. I wonder if he can see that kiss on my face somehow, but I don’t have time to think about that right now. We’ve got more important things to focus on.

The three of us head inside through the laundry room, and when we come to the kitchen, Nana looks up from the seed catalogs she has spread across the table.

If she’s surprised to see three of us, instead of the usual two, she doesn’t show it.

“Nana, this is Xander Alden,” I tell her. “Remember? I told you he was in town tryin’ to find out what happened to his brother.”

“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” Xan says.

Nana nods, but she hasn’t taken her eyes off Xan’s face. “I sure hope you find the peace you come here lookin’ for,” she tells him. Then she turns her focus to Lo. She reaches a thin arm out to him, and he takes her hand and kneels beside her chair. She puts a hand on his head. “And I hope you find the peace you need, sweet Lowan Wilder.”

“Me too, Nana,” Lo says.

The three of us make our way up the attic stairs to sit in a tight circle on the rug. We turn off the overhead light but leave the lamp beside my bed burning. It’s dim and quiet in the room, just the humming air conditioner and the tinkling of Lo’s skeleton key charm overhead.

We start by recalling our words from last night. Peace for Lo. Justice for Xan. Truth for me. We say the words out loud, breathing them into the quiet attic like an incantation spoken over an ancient campfire. Then we spend the next few hours going back over all the timelines we know. I get out that yellow pad with the twenty-four red slash marks, and Xan and Lo watch with solemn faces as I make a new one for Hannah Nelby, even though I haven’t found her yet. Because we know it’s only a matter of time.

Lo and I jot down as much information as we can for each mark on that page, going back three years since hikers first started showing up dead in droves. We circle spots of the map where we know victims disappeared off the trail and the places where I found their remains.

Maybe if we can find some link…

It’s a little after ten o’clock when I feel the beginnings of a familiar pull. I put down the legal pad in the middle of a sentence and move to the window to stand at the air conditioner and stare out into the dark.

“Dovie?” Xan whispers. “You okay?”

“Shhhh,” Lo tells him. “Let her be for a minute.” He gets up and moves across the room to stand beside me, but he doesn’t say a word.

“It’s Hannah,” I whisper. “I feel her.”

“Holy shit,” Xan says from behind me. “Are you serious?”

Lo shushes him again.

I close my eyes and let that humming energy fill me up. Hannah washes over me like a tidal wave. Her song is disjointed and confused. It swirls and loops in circles that never go anywhere. I feel her misery so strong it makes me whimper, and I reach for Lo’s hand.

“I’m here,” he whispers. “I got you.”

I turn around to look at Xan, and he’s staring at me wide-eyed. I’m wondering if he thinks I’m beautiful now, or if he thinks I’m terrifying, but then he locks eyes with me. “I’m here, too,” he tells me. “We’ve got you.”

“Should we go down and tell the sheriff?” Lo asks me, and I study the faces of the two boys who are waiting for instructions from me, my magic mountain man with eyes like polished river stones and this blue-eyed cowboy who showed up out of nowhere.

They’re the only ones I want with me tonight. I can’t stand the thought of sharing what’s about to happen with anyone outside our sacred circle of three.

“Let’s go find her ourselves,” I whisper. “We can tell the sheriff where she is after, and he can go up and do what he needs to do. I want you two with me for this.”

Lo looks at me like he’s not sure, but Xan gets up off the floor and comes to stand on the other side of me. “I’m in.” He looks at Lo, and there’s a challenge in his squared jaw and his tilted chin. “You up for it?”

Something skitters behind Lo’s eyes. He’s afraid. I can tell. Lo’s heard about plenty of these recovery missions after the fact, but he’s never been with me for one. I turn back to the window. Hannah Nelby is a magnet pulling on the deepest part of my soul. My rib cage is vibrating and my feet itch to get moving.

“Please, Lo,” I whisper. “I need you tonight.”

“You got me, Dovie,” he answers. “You know that.”

I trade my shorts for jeans and pull my dark hair back in a stringy ponytail, then we gather up a couple of flashlights and creep down the stairs without breathing. We don’t dare turn on the lights or whisper a word to each other until we crawl over the split-rail fence and duck into the woods behind the house.

“Which way, Dovie?” Lo’s hand is warm on my shoulder. It’s sweltering tonight, probably the hottest night we’ve had this summer. Sweat is already running down my back, and we’ve only gone a hundred yards. It won’t be long before my tank top is soaked through.

I stand there swatting at bugs and breathing in the thick air, letting Hannah Nelby rattle my bones. She’s calling me up the AAT, in the same direction Riley pulled me, so we make our way toward that end of town, staying off Mud Street and sticking to the safety of the woods. Xan coughs and gags against the fumes as we scramble across a fallen log over Lucifer’s Creek.

We emerge from the woods behind the graveyard. The church is dark and the mourning bells are silent. I have this wild urge to break in and swing on the rope. Someone should ring the death bell for Hannah Nelby tonight.

The three of us skirt around the church to cross the strip of grass at the end of town. The last thing I see before the woods swallow us whole is the glow of Moonlight Crag Lodge perched on top of the mountain.

“Who owns that place?” Xan asks us. “The big one up there.”

“Ira Langdon,” I tell him. “He’s like an uncle to me.”

To all of us in Lucifer’s Creek, really.

“Rich guy, huh?” Xan says.

“He is now,” I tell him. “He didn’t start out that way.”

“Ira’s a good guy,” Lo says. “He takes care of folks around here. The kinda people nobody else gives a damn about.”

Talking about Ira makes me think about Daddy, too. He’s out there somewhere, walking these hills looking for a different set of bones.

It scares me to think he might find my mama one day.

And it scares me just as bad to think that maybe he never will.

Suddenly it feels crowded in these mountains, with all of us out here on our own secret missions. I have this thought that we should turn back. That something terrible is going to happen tonight. But Hannah Nelby won’t let me give up. She reaches down inside me to wrap her fingers around my guts and pull hard. “The bones are singing loud,” I tell Lo and Xan as we start to climb. “I feel her so strong.”

Those agitated, confused, looping circles.

The same jumbled notes again and again and again. Like someone who can only hum the same two bars of a melody.

My legs are vibrating like tightened piano strings.

Hannah plays me like a fiddle, drawing her sorrow across my spine like a bow. She’s plucking my tendons and strumming my muscles. Leading me right to her.

“Does it hurt?” Xan asks me. He and Lo are trudging along behind me as we climb higher into the Ozarks. “Whatever it is you feel.”

“Not really,” I tell him, as I pause to knock down a spiderweb that’s stretched across the trail in front of us. “It’s just a funny feeling way down deep inside me. Like something crawling under my skin, or an itch I can’t scratch. The closer I get to Hannah, the stronger I feel it.”

We’re moving again, and my tank top is sticking to me like a second skin. My ponytail is plastered to my neck and the woods feel so close I can barely breathe. I’m dreading stepping off the trail into the thick of the forest.

We climb up and up, past the trail shelter where Xan and I met the other night, the same one where Hannah Nelby stopped on the last day of her life. We slog another mile or so.

It must be getting close to midnight. I figure we’ve been hiking for about two hours now. Suddenly I feel a slight change in direction. Whatever is leading me toward Hannah is pulling me off to one side now, and I know it’s time to leave the trail and plunge into the woods. I stop and stare off into the dark.

“This is it,” I tell them, and I gasp out loud when I feel a violent shudder run through me from my toes to the top of my head. “She’s close.” I breathe the words into the humid night. “Not far off the trail here.” I pull the ponytail holder out of my damp hair and give my head a shake.

“You’re shivering,” Xan says, and his eyes find mine. He lays a hand on my chest, just above my heart. His palm feels like hot metal against my bare skin. “Jesus,” he whispers. “I can feel it, Dovie.” His hands move to my shoulders, then they’re sliding down my bare arms to wrap around my fingertips. “Your whole body is humming.”

“Can I feel, Dovie?” Lo is staring at me like I’m someone he doesn’t quite recognize.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Sure.” Xan lets go of me and takes a step back, and I take Lo’s palm and lay it against my cheek. His eyes open wide, and he slides his hand down to the curve of my neck. “Feel that?” I whisper, and he nods.

Lo and I stare at each other for a second, then he pulls me close and crushes me against his body. One hand is pressed against my back and the other is tangled in my hair. “I’m sorry, Dovie,” he whispers. His lips are moving against my neck. “I’m so fucking sorry.” He plants the words like fevered kisses against my skin.

Hannah pulls on me so hard just then. She’s impatient, and I feel her move through me like an electrical current. My breath comes in a rush, and I shudder. Lo gasps and pulls back like I bit him.

“Lo?” I say. “Are you okay?”

“I can’t— I don’t—” I take a step toward him and reach for his hand, but as soon as our fingers touch, he jerks away like I’m venomous.

“It’s okay,” I reassure him. “You’re safe.”

“No. Dovie.” He’s still backing away, shaking his head. “Oh God. No.” He’s looking over his shoulder now, and then off to the side. “Jesus Christ.” His eyes dart around the blackness. “They’re here. They’re everywhere.”

“What the hell?” Xan is looking back and forth between me and Lo.

The bones are pulling so hard on me now. Every part of me is vibrating with an intensity that’s impossible to ignore.

“Lo. We need to go. The bones are—”

“Stop it!” Lo puts his hands over his ears and squats down close to the ground. “Shut up! Shut up!”

“Hey. Watch it.” Xan steps between Lo and me. “You got no cause to yell at her like that.”

“He’s not yelling at me.” I’m trying to explain, but Lo is coming unglued.

“Get away! Stop!” He’s swatting at the air. Batting at invisible hands. “Leave me alone!” Lo jerks his head up toward my face all of a sudden, and a look of pure terror settles in his familiar eyes. “Don’t you touch her!” he screams at someone, or something, that Xan and I can’t see. “Leave her alone!”

Lo launches himself in my direction, but Xan steps in front of him and shoves him hard. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lo goes stumbling backward. He loses his balance and lands in the dirt at the edge of the trail.

He’s on his feet again instantly. “Lo!” I shout. “Wait! It’s okay!” But he’s shaking so hard now.

“I’m sorry, Dovie,” he mutters. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Then he turns and takes off into the dark, leaving his flashlight lying on the ground where he fell.

“What the hell?” Xan shouts.

“Lo!” I start after him, but Xan grabs me by the wrist.

“Dovie. What’s going on?” I’m torn between my need to make sure Lo’s okay, like always, and my need to find Hannah Nelby’s bones before their singing shakes my ribs apart. I know I must look completely wild and frantic. “Take it easy, okay? Take a breath.” Xan tucks my hair behind my ear and I fight to get myself under control.

“It’s not his fault,” I say. “Lo wasn’t yelling at me.”

“Who was he yelling at, then?”

“He sees spirits,” I explain. “The ghosts of the dead hikers. He says they’ve been stalking him. That they want him to make the murders stop.”

“You believe that?” Xan is looking at me with no judgment in his eyes, like he just wants to know what my take on it is.

“No,” I admit. “But Lo does, and that’s all that matters. If he believes in them, they’re as real as you or me. At least for him.”

“Damn,” Xan says. “That’s intense.”

Everything feels intense right now. Hannah’s thrumming misery is tugging me hard toward her, and it’s like someone pulling my insides out with their bare hands.

Then there’s Lo. I can feel his terror so clear, too, and my fear for him threatens to sweep me down the mountainside with the sudden ferocity of a flash flood.

But there’s also the heat of Xan’s hand on my cheek. The concern in his eyes.

“I should go after him,” I say. “He shouldn’t be alone.”

“Lowan’s a big boy,” he tells me. “Let him take care of himself tonight. Let’s focus on taking care of Hannah.” He’s stroking my cheekbone with his thumb now, but I’m still staring out into the dark searching for any sign of Lo. “And let’s take care of you. Okay?”

I nod and pull my hair back into a tight ponytail again before we start into the thick undergrowth. Xan and I fight the brambles and the vines and the clawing thorns for ten or fifteen feet before we come to a downed tree.

“This is it,” I whisper. “I knew she wasn’t far off.” I drop to my knees and put my palms on the ground. I feel the vibration of the bone song rattling inside me like the last breath of a dying man. “We found you, Hannah Nelby.”

Xan holds the flashlight as I sweep aside the leaves and start to dig with my bare hands. Hannah’s buried shallower than the others. It only takes a few minutes of digging before my fingers make contact with something soft. I brush the dirt away and the greenish-purple skin of an arm becomes visible. Then a hand. And fingers with white bone exposed at the tips where the bugs have been feeding.

The fresher bodies are always the worst to find.

“Oh shit.” Xan gags and pulls his T-shirt over his mouth and nose. His face has gone completely pale and his eyes are wide as the full moon over the mountain. “Jesus, Dovie. Is that—?”

“Yeah.” I sit back on my heels and use the back of my arm to wipe the dripping sweat from my forehead. I don’t want to touch anything. My hands smell like death.

Xan blinks at me. “You found her, Dovie.”

“We found her,” I tell him.

“We should go down and get the sheriff,” Xan says, and I know he’s right.

“We’ll be back,” I tell Hannah. “I promise.”

Before I get up, I notice something sticking out of the ground near her arm. I pull it loose, and it’s a pink baseball cap. I remember the identical ones Hannah and Candy were wearing when we met them on the trail that last day of Hannah’s life. I knock the dirt off, and the name Hannah is embroidered on the front.

I lay the hat on top of the grave as a kind of temporary marker, then I start to get up out of the dirt, but Xan stops me. “Wait,” he says. “What’s that?”

“What?”

“There’s something under her hand.”

I brush away more dirt and come up with something small and metal. I hold it in my palm and Xan hits it with the flashlight. “Looks like an old key,” he says, but I’ve already realized exactly what it is.

It’s an old-fashioned skeleton key with a tiny bit of yellow yarn still attached.

I stare at it like I’m expecting it to change into something else.

Please let it become something else. Anything else.

“You good?” Xan asks.

I slip the skeleton key into my pocket and nod because I don’t trust myself to talk.

I manage to get to my feet and Xan leads me the short distance back through the thick woods. We find the trail, and before we start our descent toward town, Xan strips off his green T-shirt and ties it around a tree to mark the spot for the sheriff. We’ve left Lo’s abandoned flashlight back at the burial site, so we’re down to just one now. Xan hands it to me and I go first with him following right at my heels.

We don’t talk much. I’m constantly looking and listening for Lo. He’s my best friend. More than my best friend. He’s my only friend. So he’s my responsibility. I should’ve gone after him. I shouldn’t have let him wander off alone in that state, and now that skeleton key is burning a hole in my pocket.

Xan gives me space and quiet, but I can hear him breathing right behind me, and every so often he touches my back and asks if I’m doing okay.

When we stop for a minute to wipe the sweat from our faces, I notice him staring at me.

“Did I scare you tonight?” I ask. I figure he must be revolted. Everyone is. “I know it’s awful, seeing that. And I know I look like—”

“You were beautiful tonight, Dovie.” I’m staring at him like he’s lost his mind. I’m filthy. Covered in dirt and sweat. I smell like a corpse and my hair is plastered to my face. “No. Really.” He reaches out to brush some dirt off my cheek, and I wonder if there was really anything there, or if he just wanted to touch me. “I don’t know how to explain it. You were on fire. Lit up with this purpose and energy.” He tilts his head to study me. “I really didn’t believe it—not until I saw you do it—and it blew my mind to see you go right to her like that. Then to see you be so gentle.” His voice catches in his throat. “And I know you must’ve been like that with Riley, too. It helps, knowing someone took that kind of care with him.”

“Thanks,” I say, and suddenly I can’t come up with any more words.

“You’re wrong, Dovie.” Xan puts his hands on my shoulders and pulls me toward him. “That’s magic.”

“No.” My voice is firm and I shake my head, even though I know I probably look and sound like a stubborn toddler. “I told you it’s not magic. There’s no such thing as magic.”

Magic is a lie people tell themselves. Same as religion. If you tell yourself the lie over and over, you might start to believe it, but that doesn’t make it real.

“Okay,” Xan concedes. “I won’t argue with you about your own ability. Maybe finding those bones isn’t magic.” He runs his hands over my back and pulls me even closer. “But you’re magic, Dovie. I know that for a fact.” I don’t know how to respond to that. My palms are on his bare chest, and his skin is too warm. His mouth too close to mine. “I’m gonna kiss you again, Dovie who is not a witch. That okay with you?”

It seems to happen in slow motion, but I still barely have time to nod before he presses his lips against mine. He’s more insistent than last time, but still gentle, and this time I lean in and open my mouth for him. I feel his tongue against mine, moving against the ridges of my teeth. It doesn’t last long, but it takes a few seconds for the sweetness of it to fade and for everything else to come rushing back.

I don’t understand how it can feel so desperately wrong to kiss somebody who isn’t Lo, but also so right to kiss Xan. It’s one more thing that doesn’t make any sense.

We start moving down the trail again. We’re more than halfway to town. Xan is breathing behind me, and the steady sound of him in my ear is a comfort. So is the occasional pressure of his fingers against the small of my back.

“Not much farther,” he says. I’m starting to love that Oklahoma twang of his.

It couldn’t be more than five seconds later when I realize I don’t hear him breathing anymore. I stop, and there’s nothing.

No hand at my back.

No question spoken into the dark.

No breath on my neck.

My heart skids to a stop and my knees go weak.

I turn around slow and shine my light into the blackness, but there’s nothing there. No Xan. No sign of him. No proof that he ever existed at all.

“Xan?” I whisper his name to the night, but I know he’s gone. Vanished. Just like all those dead hikers. The hair stands up on the back of my neck, and I fight back the urge to scream. These mountains are full of people I know tonight, but I’ve never been more alone.

Somewhere in the distance a strangled howl rises in the night like mountain fog. It bounces off the trees and echoes off the rock faces until it seems to come from everywhere all around me. When that howl finally fades, it comes again, one more time. Closer than before.

It hits me then that the only thing worse than knowing you’re alone on the Aux-Arc Trail in the middle of the night is knowing that you’re not.

Twenty-Six

I whip around and start moving fast down the trail. It’s fear that’s got me scurrying through the dark like a terrified animal, but not fear for myself. It’s fear for Xan. I refuse to pull his putrefying corpse out of the ground. I will not wrap my fingers around his bones and yank them from some shallow grave.

He is not going to die in these hills.

I’m picking up speed, practically running now. Dodging mud puddles. Jumping over downed branches. My feet skid on some loose rock and I go flying face-first in the unknown. I manage to hang on to my flashlight, but I get up out of the dirt with a bloody nose and rocks embedded in my palms.

I hardly even feel it.

Two or three times on the way down the mountain, I have the unmistakable feeling that I’m being watched. One of those times, when I glance over my shoulder, I could swear I catch sight of a black shape.

Red glowing eyes.

Curled horns and dripping fangs.

But there’s nothing to do but keep moving. Fast. And faster. Slipping. Sliding. Skidding. Closer and closer to Lucifer’s Creek.

When I see the lights of the shop windows, I break into a dead run as another bloodcurdling howl shreds the thick stillness of the summer night. I burst out of the woods, sprint across the strip of grass at the edge of town, and fly down a deserted Mud Street toward home.

It only takes me a minute to reach our house, and I tear up the front steps right past Jonah the Deputy. “Dovie?” he shouts after me. “Thought you was upstairs. Where you been?”

I jerk open the screen door with a bang and run into the kitchen. Nana is sitting at the table listening to the radio. “Where’s Daddy?” I say, and I slam the flashlight down on the kitchen counter. “I need him. Now.”

“He ain’t here, sugar pie. Ain’t been here all night,” she tells me.

“Shit!” I growl in frustration.

“Dovie?” Jonah the Deputy is standing in the kitchen doorway eyeing me like I’m a rogue bear on a rampage. “Where’s the fire?”

I whirl around to face him. “Where’s Sheriff?” I demand.

“Takin’ a break,” Jonah reports. “Down at Donny Blue’s. Said he’d be back in an hour.” He blinks at me. “You got blood on your face.”

Jonah’s worse than useless, and I can’t wait an hour.

I shove him out of the way and bang back out the screen door. “Somebody’s been callin’ for you!” Nana shouts after me. “Phone’s rung a dozen times tonight, but she won’t talk to me.” I don’t have time to stop and chat now, though. I hit the front porch and skitter down the steps, then I’m flying down the stone path to the street and turning toward the downhill end of town, in the opposite direction of the church and Daddy’s stained glass shop.

I hurry past the tiny one-room library that Ira built us last year and Sutton’s Grocery, where my mama and daddy bumped shoulders and fell in love, and the collection of little trailers where none of my classmates speak to me.

My side aches and my legs are cramping, but I push myself faster when I get close enough to the far end of town to hear the fiddle music pouring out the open windows of Donny Blue’s.

I pound up the steps to the little bar and shove open the heavy door. Everyone inside turns to look at me.

The band stops playing and the dancers stop dancing and the building goes quiet. It isn’t Ira’s group on stage tonight. His bluegrass bunch plays Saturdays. This is Thursday, and I don’t recognize these guys.

“Dove? Somethin’ wrong?” I scan the crowd until I find the sheriff. He’s stood up from his spot at a corner table, and I watch him down the last of his beer before he starts moving my direction. “Time to go up the mountain?”

I shake my head. “I already found Hannah Nelby for you.”

A shocked murmur spreads through the pub, and Sheriff grabs me by the arm to haul me out of the building. “Pick it back up, boys,” he shouts over his shoulder as we step outside, and the country swing band starts to play again. But nobody’s dancing now.

He pulls me around the side of the building to the little gravel parking lot. “What’s goin’ on?” he demands once we’re away from all the listening ears. “What do you mean you already found her?”

“We sneaked out this evening when I started feeling the bone song,” I explain. “Went up the mountain to find her on our own.”

“Goddammit, Dove. That ain’t the agreement.” He yanks off his hat to run a hand through his greasy hair. “That ain’t how this is supposed to work.”

“You’re the one that needs my help to do your job,” I remind him. “I don’t need yours.”

“Shit!” Sheriff turns and kicks a concrete parking stop hard enough to probably break a toe. “Who the hell is we? You and the Wilder boy?”

I nod. “And somebody else. Xander Alden.”

“Dammit.” He smashes his hat back on his head. “I told that kid to go home and let us handle it.”

“Well, he didn’t.” I give him my best glare. “Because you aren’t. You don’t even have any suspects.”

“You don’t know what we got, Dovie. You think I’m tellin’ everything we know? We got thousands of acres to search and a mountain of witness reports to comb through. Some of ’em are credible, and some of ’em ain’t. But none of ’em amount to nothin’. They’re talkin’ about people just vanishin’ outta thin air and—”

“And you don’t have a fucking clue.”

“Is that why you three ran off into the hills alone tonight to play detective?” Sheriff demands. “ ’Cause you don’t think I been doin’ my job?”

I’m so angry now I could spit. “We weren’t playing anything. I found Hannah Nelby. Without your help. And you said yourself that’s a damn sight better than you’d be able to do without mine.”

“So you come runnin’ down here to get me and take me back up to where them bones are layin’?”

“And to tell you that Xan’s missing,” I say.

“What do you mean missing?”

“He vanished.” I grit my teeth to keep from crying, more from frustration than anything else. “Something took him.” I stop to correct myself. “Someone took him.”

“Aw, Jesus fucking Christ.” Sheriff looks like he wants to kill me. “Where’s the Wilder kid at?”

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“You’re tellin’ me I got two missing kids up in those hills right now?” Sheriff marches back toward the front of the bar and grabs the door to yank it open. The music gets louder and the crowd goes quiet again, watching and listening.

“Where’re you goin’?” I shout.

“I’m goin’ to pay my tab, then I’m gonna radio Jonah to meet me at the sheriff’s office and we’re gonna go up and see about Hannah Nelby. At least she’s only been dead a couple of days. Maybe we can get a definite cause of death for this one.” He sighs and rubs at the bridge of his nose like he has a headache. “At first light, we’ll get a team up there, see if we can find the boys.” He glares at me. “You go on home. And you stay there. Hear?”

He’s about to disappear inside the bar when some kind of alarm gets triggered in my brain. I chase after him and grab him by the arm before he can get the door closed behind him. He outweighs me by a good two hundred pounds, but I haul his ass back outside. “What do you mean this one?”

“Huh?”

“You said maybe we could get a cause of death for this one,” I shout, and he nods.

“A lot of times we can’t. There ain’t enough of ’em left to tell. Like with Riley Alden.” He shrugs. “We got no clue what killed that kid.”

That’s not true.

“I heard he was gutted,” I say.

Split up the middle.

All of his insides spilled out on the ground.

Sheriff gives me a funny look. “We ain’t even got the report back yet from the medical examiner. That’ll take weeks. But I don’t expect it’ll say for sure one way or the other, even when we do. Too much decomp and tissue damage.” He shakes his head. “Only way somebody could say for sure right now is if they’re the one that gutted him.”

He shakes me off his arm and heads back inside the pub to settle his tab, and I have to grab the porch railing to keep from going down hard. Everything is swirling into blackness. The ground shifts and tilts under my feet like I’m walking through a fun house at the county fair.

I remember Lo sneaking into my bedroom to wake me up a few nights ago, covered with dirt and scratches. His skin torn and bleeding. That was the night he told me about the knife. The night Turley drowned.

But, before all that, when I told him Hannah Nelby had vanished, he told me she was already dead.

My knees give out and I collapse to the sidewalk. I sit there on the ground. I’m shaking too hard to get up.

What if that’s why he’s so plagued by the imaginary spirits of the murdered hikers? Because he’s the one that’s been killing them?

I remember that bloody shovel I saw up at the cabin.

A wail rises up in my throat and I have to clamp both hands over my mouth to keep it trapped inside. I gag. My skin still smells like rotting flesh.

Please not Lo. Don’t let it be Lo.

It can’t be Lo.

He’s gentle and tender and soft.

He says my name and makes it magic.

A terrible thought comes to me then. The only thought that makes sense.

What if he doesn’t even know he’s doing it?

I push myself up to my hands and knees and somehow get back on my feet again so I can stumble on home.

When I make it back to our little blue house, I start up the stone path toward the front porch. At least Jonah is gone. He must’ve gotten that call from the sheriff already. I trust them to go up and take care of Hannah.

But I don’t trust them to find Xan.

I wouldn’t even trust those two to find a missing dog.

I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know who to go to for help. Lo is who I go to. Always. He’s the one I want when things are too hard. Or too scary. He’s the one who makes things right.

This isn’t like Daddy having that angel pin, or him being seen in the woods. That might’ve looked bad, but it could be explained away.

This is something of Lo’s ending up in the dirt with a body.

This is Lo telling me something with his own mouth that only a murderer could know.

I’m climbing the steps to the porch when something moves off to the side of my vision. A blur of movement. Indistinct and out of focus. I spin around fast, hoping it’ll be Xan and praying it won’t be Lo. I’m not ready to face him yet. I have to think all this through.

But it’s not either one of them. A beautiful dark-haired woman in a white sundress stands in the yard, next to Mama’s crepe myrtles. She has features that look exactly like mine.

And she’s holding a white rose in her hand.

Twenty-Seven

“Dovie?”

At first I think the voice is coming from the woman in white, so I whisper back to her. “Mama?”

“It’s Lo, Dovie.”

I glance to my left, and he’s crawling out from under the bushes where he’s been hiding. When I look back to my right, the woman in white is still there.

“Mama.” I breathe the word again. It’s like a ghost of a word in my mouth. A ghost of a name for a ghost mother.

Dark hair falls around her shoulders like cascading shadows, and her eyes blaze blue with an otherworldly light. She’s pale and shimmering and I’m scared to breathe. If I do, she’ll disappear.

Lo comes to stand beside me. I feel his hand in mine. “You see her,” he whispers, and I nod.

“I see her.”

Mama kneels down and puts that white rose on the ground under the naked crepe myrtle bushes. She smiles at me, and I see her lips form my name.

Dove.

But all I hear is the mountain wind singing through the tops of the trees.

And then she’s gone. I watch her blow away like a cloud.

Lo squeezes my hand, and I turn to face him. I slip my free hand into my pocket and find that skeleton key. I pull it out and clutch it tight in my fist.

Then, for the first time in my life, I let go of Lo’s hand and back away from him.

I look him up and down in the light coming from the front porch. He’s dirty and disheveled. Scratched up and sweating. I’m staring at his feet. Beat-up tennis shoes he’s been wearing for years. But there’s something splattered across the white rubber toe. Something reddish-brown that makes my stomach turn.

“I’m sorry I took off tonight,” he tells me. “I should’ve stayed with you.”

“There’s blood on your shoe,” I say, and he looks down at it like I said his laces were untied.

“Yeah. I know. It’s been there a while. I been tryin’ to scrub it off.” He takes a step toward me, and I take a step back.

We stare at each other under the light of a grinning Ozarks moon. Lo holds out his hand to me, but I don’t take it. I take another step back and tighten my fingers around the secret I’m holding in my fist.

It’s quiet for a few long seconds before he says, “You found the key. Didn’t you?” He might as well have hauled off and punched me in the face. That’s how surprised I am. “I put it in the ground with Hannah for you to find, Dovie.” He pauses and runs a hand through his tangled hair. “I wanted you to know about me, and I knew I’d never be able to tell you.”

I open my hand and we both stare at the skeleton key in my palm. He gave me that skeleton key to keep me safe. Then I gave it back to him. And now he’s given it back to me.

The spell has come full circle.

But neither of us is safe.

I should feel something. I should feel afraid. I should feel angry. I should feel horrified and betrayed and disgusted and shocked.

But I don’t feel anything. I don’t think anything.

I’m not anything.

I’ve just stopped existing.

“Xan’s missing,” I tell him, and Lo stares at me. “Did you take him?” I swallow something bitter and burning that rises in the back of my throat. “Did you hurt him?” I pull myself up to stand a little straighter and look my best friend in the eye. “Did you kill him, Lo?”

Lo shakes his head. He’s so pale. More ghostly than my mother, who’s been dead for fourteen years, I guess. If the wind kicks up again, he might blow away, too.

“I never killed anyone, Dovie. I swear.”

“Don’t lie to me, Lo.” I close my fingers around that old key so tight that the metal cuts into my skin. I slip it back into my pocket. “You tell me the truth. We don’t lie to each other. Not you and me.”

“I’m not lying, Dovie. I’ve never lied. I just haven’t told the truth. I couldn’t. I was so afraid to say it. That’s why I left that key when I put Hannah in the ground.” I sway on my feet when he says that—when I put Hannah in the ground—because that’s a confession, as sure as it’s anything. Right up until that moment, I still partly believed there was another answer. I have to fight hard to keep from passing out. “I wanted you to find it and know,” he goes on. “So I wouldn’t have to tell you.”

“Wouldn’t have to tell me what?” I grit my teeth. I want him to say it out loud. I need him to speak the words or I won’t be able to believe it. Not until he says it to my face. “What were you so afraid to say to me, Lo?” All I want in the world is to grab him and hold him and stroke his hair and tell him it’s going to be okay. But I can’t. I can barely stand to look at him. “I promise, Lo. I’ll do everything I can to help you. But you have to tell me the truth. Right here. Right now. All of it.”

He looks over his shoulder, back toward the darkened corners of the yard where the shadows are the thickest. “It was the Howler, Dovie. I swear to God.” I can’t listen to any more nonsense. “Granny Pearl said the Howler’s a harbinger. An announcer of death come stalking. But he’s more than that, Dovie. He’s been leaving me bodies to bury.”

“What?” All the air leaves my lungs with that one word.

“Three years, Dovie.” Lo crumples to his knees in the grass. “Three years I’ve been wakin’ up at night to find bodies spread out in the moonlight, waiting for me. Left in the woods—in the shadows—just beyond where the lantern light reaches from the front porch. I hear that howl go up, and I know what I’m gonna find when I go out lookin’.” He shudders hard. “I found Riley Alden laid out on a rock like an offering. Guts wet and slidin’ out in the rain.”

“Lo. Stop.” I was wrong. I don’t want the truth. I can’t hear this from his mouth. It’s too much.

“Hannah Nelby was shot clean through with an arrow. Right through the throat.” He grimaces. “Almost took her head clean off.”

“Stop it.” My stomach turns. “There’s no Howler. He’s a myth, Lo. He doesn’t exist.”

“There has to be.” He chokes hard. “If there isn’t, who’s been leavin’ those hikers up at the cabin?”

I kneel down in front of him, and I take his hands in mine. I’m crying now. Tears streaming down my face. “I think maybe you’re the Howler, Lo. I don’t think you know it. I don’t think you’re aware of it. But I think it must be you.” He’s shaking his head. There are tears on his cheeks now, too.

“No. Dovie. No. I promise.”

“I don’t think it’s your fault, Lo.” I lay my hand on his cheek, and he starts to sob. His breath comes in hitches and gasps and gulps. “I think you must be sick. You need help. I know you. I know your heart. And I know you’d never hurt anyone, but—”

“You’re wrong.” He grabs my hands and squeezes so tight. “You’re wrong about so much, Dovie.” He looks back toward Mama’s crepe myrtles. “You saw your mama tonight. Her spirit.”

I can’t even think about Mama right now. I can’t process it. It’s too much. Too strange. Too terrible. Too wonderful. Too everything. On top of all the rest of it. I have to shut that off. For now. I’ll figure it out later.

“If you can believe in ghosts, you can believe in the Howler,” Lo says. He takes a deep, shaky breath. “You can believe in me, Dovie.” He reaches up to wipe the tears off my cheek, and I think I might die from the ache that opens up somewhere deep in my chest. “You have to believe in me.”

Inside the house, the phone starts to ring. But I ignore it.

“Why would you bury people you didn’t kill, Lo?” All those bodies. All those years. It doesn’t make any sense. “Why would you keep that secret?”

The phone goes silent.

He tilts his head to the side and stares at me like he can’t believe I even have to ask that. “You know what people here think of us, Dovie. Of me. Of Granny Pearl. The whole Wilder clan. Of anyone different than them.” He leans in closer. “Of you.” Lo shakes his head. “If I’d come down out of those hills sayin’ somethin’ was leavin’ bodies up there in the woods—right on my doorstep, practically—how long before they would have come for me? How long before they’d have come up the mountain with pitchforks and torches, like the old days, to set fire to the cabin, and me and Granny Pearl inside it?” He reaches out to stroke my hair. “How long before they would’ve come after you?”

He’s right about all of that. I look toward the black plastic covering the window, and I think about that rock. They’ve always been waiting. Looking for an excuse to turn on us.

“So you kept burying the bodies?”

I think about that shovel again, and I almost throw up.

Dogs got some chickens yesterday and I had to bury ’em.

Lo nods. “I knew you’d find them. Get them home to their people.” He chokes back another sob. “That’s why they’ve been haunting me, Dovie. They know I’ve been part of it. And they been wanting me to stop it.”

“So you left me that key.”

He nods. “So I left you that key. So you’d know and you’d help me put an end to this.”

I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what to do.

“Is Xan dead?” My voice quivers and my stomach is in knots.

“I don’t know,” Lo says. “Maybe not yet. Maybe we can find him.”

“How?”

“We’re gonna have to hunt the Howler.”

Inside the house, the phone starts to ring again. It’s two o’clock in the morning. Who the hell is calling right now?

I can’t make myself get up. I can’t let go of Lo. Can’t take my eyes off him. If I do, he’ll vanish like Mama.

The phone rings.

And rings.

And rings.

And rings.

And rings.

Finally it stops, and Nana pushes open the screen door to step onto the front porch. She squints out into the front yard at me and Lo.

“Dovie? That you?”

“Yeah, Nana. It’s me.”

“Phone for you, girl. I told you it’s been ringin’ off the hook all night.” Nana shakes her head. “Nobody ever calls here.”

She heads back inside and I push myself up out of the grass and move toward the front porch, with Lo following behind me.

In the kitchen, Nana has two mugs of tea ready. She hands one to Lo and settles him at the table. Then she puts the other one in my hand and points me toward the phone before she heads back to her bedroom.

I pick the receiver up off the counter and try to steady my voice before I speak. “Hello?”

“Is this Dove?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen. I’m sorry. I know it’s the middle of the night. It’s Candy. Hannah’s sister.”

“Oh.” My heart squeezes.

“That sheriff just called me,” she says. Her voice is stretched so tight it’s about to snap. I can tell she’s trying to keep it together. “He thinks maybe they found Hannah.” She stops. “Found her body.”

“Is that why you’re calling?”

“No,” she tells me. “Actually, I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all night. I had this question. I wanted—” Her voice cracks and splinters into a choked sob. “But now I really have to know.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m really sorry.”

There’s a long pause.

“Do you think it was that redheaded guy? That’s what I wanted to ask. Why I’ve been calling.”

“I don’t— What redheaded guy?”

“The one I told you about. The one we met in the stained glass shop.”

My stomach drops, and the room starts to spin.

“You met a redhead in the stained glass gallery?”

“Yeah. There were two men in there. One of them, the one with the beard, he sold us the suncatcher. But the redhead is the one who gave us the compass. So we gave him that trail angel card. Like I told you. Remember?”

I have to grab the kitchen counter to steady myself. My legs are shaking so hard I doubt their ability to hold me up.

“And he’s the one you saw later that night?” I’m having trouble making my mouth work. My brain has stalled out. “In the woods? The redhead?”

“Yeah.” Candy hesitates again. “Is he the one who killed my sister? I need to know.”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” she says, and I can hear that she’s crying hard now.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her again.

“I’m sorry, too,” she says. “I’m sorry we ever went to Lucifer’s Creek.”

The line goes dead and I’m left holding the phone while my mind spins faster and faster.

“Dovie?” Lo says. “What was that about?”

“I think I know who the Ozark Howler is.” I put the receiver back and move to the table. “It’s Ira,” I whisper, and I feel my heart twist up, right along with my stomach. “It’s Ira Langdon.”

“Ira?” Lo shakes his head. “No, Dovie. It wouldn’t be Ira. He’s—”

The screen door opens and closes and I hear Daddy’s boots in the hallway. When he comes into the kitchen, he looks me and Lo over before he moves toward the microwave to heat up the plate Nana’s left in there for him. I want to tell him that I saw Mama tonight.

That I believe him.

And Nana.

That we’ve all seen her now. I want to tell him that I know he’s right about what he said. About Mama being dead. That once these hiker murders are over and done with, we’ll go into the hills together, him and me, and we’ll find Mama’s bones and bring her home to rest.

But I don’t tell him any of that. That’s a long conversation for another night. Right now I need to ask him about something different. Because Xan is still out there somewhere, and if he’s alive now, he won’t be much longer.

“Daddy. I found somethin’ in your desk. A little gold angel pin.”

He stops pouring himself a glass of milk to look at me. “What’re you doin’ diggin’ around in my desk?”

“Nothin’. Lookin’ for a marker.” I wait for him to put the milk back in the fridge. “Where’d you get it? That gold angel.”

Daddy sighs. The microwave dings and he takes the plate out. Fried chicken and green beans. My mouth is suddenly watering and my stomach rumbles, but that’s something else that will have to wait.

“It’s Ira’s,” he tells me. “He dropped it in the gallery the other day, and I didn’t get a chance to give it back to him. Shoulda taken it up the mountain with us this mornin’. Didn’t think about it.”

“You and Ira used to go huntin’ together all the time? Right?” I’ve heard him talk about it my whole life. “You mentioned it to that guy at the lodge.”

Daddy nods. “I was never half the hunter Ira was, though.”

“You called Ira the Ghost of the Ozarks.”

“That’s right.” Daddy takes a bite of chicken and washes it down with a swallow of cold milk while my mind races. “There wasn’t an animal he couldn’t sneak up on. They never heard him comin’.” He reaches for the salt. “Like a shadow stalkin’ these hills.”

I think about the times I’ve looked up to find Ira Langdon standing right beside me, and I never heard him coming.

In the gallery. The little bells over the door never jingled.

And in the alley that morning Turley drowned. He was just suddenly there.

Someone snatched Xan from two feet behind me and I never heard a thing.

Hannah Nelby was taken right outside their tent, and Candy never heard so much as a twig break.

“You okay?” Daddy asks me, and he turns to look at Lo, who’s still shaking and pale.

“Yeah. You in for the night?” I ask him, but Daddy shakes his head. “Gonna go back out soon as I eat. Just for a few hours.” He stops to look out the kitchen window at the moon hanging low over the tops of the trees. “Something feels strange about tonight.”

“Yeah,” I admit. “It does.”

He looks back and forth from me to Lo.

“You stayin’ with us again tonight, Lowan?”

“No,” I answer for him. “I’m actually goin’ up to Granny Pearl’s with him. Thought we’d take the truck, if that’s okay. Save us the walk in the dark.”

Daddy nods. “Keys are under the seat.” He takes his plate and heads toward the living room so he can watch a little television while he eats, but before he leaves the kitchen, he looks at both of us and says, “You two need somethin’, you got some problem or somethin’, you let me know. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “We will.”

I should ask for his help right here and now, but I don’t. I can’t think how to tell him we believe his childhood best friend is a serial killer.

Lo and I were wrong when we thought it was Turley. I was wrong when I thought it could be Daddy. I was wrong again when I knew for sure it was Lo.

I’m not saying anything to anyone else until we know for damn sure that Ira Langdon is the angel of death.

“Come on,” I whisper, and I grab Lo’s arm and pull him toward the front door. “We’re gonna go up to the lodge and have a look around.”

“You believe me, Dovie?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I reach out to run my hand through his wild, beautiful hair. “I don’t believe you killed anybody, Lo.”

When I look into his eyes, though, I know it might not make much difference. At least not for him. The things Lo’s done and the things he’s seen—those midnight trips into the dark forest carrying bloody bodies to plant in the damp earth—I’m not sure that’s a thing that he can survive.

That’s a terrible truth.

When we step out onto the front porch, Deputy Jonah is coming up the stone path. “Dovie,” he says when he sees me, and he looks like he’s afraid I’m gonna eat him alive. “Lowan. Guess you ain’t missin’ no more, huh?”

“What are you doin’ back here?” I ask him.

“Sheriff sent me to check on you,” he tells me. “We’re gettin’ ready to head up to where you found Hannah Nelby. Sheriff wanted me to make sure you were still here. Told me to tell you to stay put. His orders.”

“We’re not goin’ anywhere,” I lie. “Just comin’ out for some air. If you think that’s okay with the sheriff.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Jonah tells me, and a nervous grin slides across his face. “I don’t think he’d mind that at all.” He gives me a little wink. “Not that I’ve gotta tell him everything, anyway.” He turns on his heels to head back down the path.

“Hey, Jonah,” I say, and he turns back to look at me with this terrified look on his face. He clearly thought he was gonna get away, but now he’s not so sure. “Is there anything you can tell us about these murders? Any little thing that seemed odd or weird to you?” He chews on his lip and brushes a bug away from his cheek. “Smart guy like you, I figured maybe you’d noticed something that Sheriff might’ve missed.”

He blushes. “I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff with anybody.”

“But I’m the one who finds the bodies, remember? I’m not just anybody. I’m part of the team. Right?” I give him a big smile. If Jonah thinks I’m magic, let me prove it to him. “I could maybe teach you how I do it. A guy with a talent like that, you’d be sheriff before you turn twenty-five. Runnin’ this whole damn county.”

“Shit. Really?”

I shrug. “I said maybe.”

Jonah looks over his shoulder, then he lowers his voice and says, “There are two things I been thinking are weird—like you said—for a while now. First, we’ve had six tracking dogs die. Six.” He holds up that many fingers, just to make sure I know how many six is. “They come in with the search and rescue teams, and their handlers send ’em off to do their thing. And then we find ’em dead. Nobody wants to bring their dogs up here no more.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“Somethin’ little.” He shrugs. “All these murders, and ain’t nobody ever been taken on a Saturday night.” Jonah laughs. “Ain’t that funny? Not a single Saturday night. Sheriff says even a serial killer must need a night off.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and grins at us. “Guess that’s a lucky thing, huh?”

“Why is it lucky?” I ask him, and he looks at me like I’m not very bright.

“Ira Langdon and his bluegrass band go on down at Donny Blue’s every Saturday evenin’. Sheriff and me are big fans. Them boys can sure play. It’d be a cryin’ shame to have to miss that show.”

Twenty-Eight

As soon as Jonah heads back down Mud Street in the direction of the sheriff’s office, I grab Lo and drag him to the truck. We climb inside and I crank the engine to life. It coughs and sputters, but finally evens out.

“It’s Ira,” I say.

“Why would Ira be killin’ people, Dovie? He’s been so good to all of us. To this whole town.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.” I’m frustrated that he suddenly expects me to have all the answers.

We’re bumping down Mud Street now, avoiding potholes and tryin’ to keep from waking the whole town up. I never realized in the daytime how loud this damn truck is.

“And why would he be leavin’ the bodies for me to bury? Why not just bury ’em himself?”

That’s the question that’s burning in the pit of my stomach right now, too. Why torture Lo? Why make him part of this? If it really is Ira, I hate him for what he did to those hikers. To Riley. And to Hannah. To all of them. It’s evil. Pure evil.

But I swear to God I’ll kill him with my bare hands and put him in his own shallow grave for the way he’s destroyed Lo.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. But we’re gonna figure it out. Tonight.”

We’re making our way up the mountain now. Clouds have rolled in to block out the moon, and it’s so dark that, even with the headlights on bright, I can only see a few feet ahead of us. We hit a deep rut and the truck bounces hard. “Goddammit,” I mutter as we bottom out and skid sideways toward the trees. Lo grabs for the handle above the door. The “oh shit” handle is what Daddy calls it.

“You gotta slow down, Dovie,” he tells me, and I know he’s right. The truck is a piece of junk. It’s older than me with four bald tires. It can’t take any more jolts like that. But Xan is out there somewhere, and I cannot stand the thought of his bones starting to sing.

So I don’t slow down.

It’s almost three o’clock in the morning when we drive under the sign welcoming us to Moonlight Crag Lodge. I turn off the headlights and we creep toward the parking lot like pirates, but driving blind in the dark I hit another huge rut and the truck drops hard. There’s an ominous pop, and by the time we roll into the gravel lot, Lo and I both know by the way the truck is limping that we’ve blown a tire.

But that’s something we’ll have to deal with later.

The lodge looks quiet. Daddy’s stained glass lamps still glow in the huge lobby, but the lights are off in the guest cabins scattered around the main building and in the restaurant. All the windows are dark. Ira lives at the top of the lodge. He has the whole fourth floor for his private quarters, and there’s no sign of life up there, either.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s see if we can find a way in.”

We climb out of the truck and shut the doors as gently as we can, then we keep low and close to the shadows as we sprint toward the building.

Lo and I flatten ourselves against the outside of the lodge as I reach for a maintenance entrance door, but it’s locked. I don’t know why I thought we’d just be able to waltz right in.

“Look,” Lo says, and he points to two huge black barrels sitting out on the loading dock. The word Antifreeze is printed across them in big block letters.

“The dogs,” I whisper, and Lo nods. “Fucking Ira.” I can’t believe it. I’ve always been so won over by those red curls and the laugh lines around his blue eyes, and by the way he spreads his money around so generous and easy. Like he’s the damn tooth fairy.

The whole town has been completely fooled by him.

We make our way around the building, trying every door we come to. But none of them open.

“What are we gonna do?” Lo asks, and I’m getting pretty tired of him firing questions at me I don’t have any answers for.

“Keep trying, I guess.”

We’re creeping around the building toward the deck where we ate bison burgers yesterday when Lo grabs my shirt and jerks me down hard toward the ground. “What the—” His hand flies up to cover my mouth and he points up with his other hand.

We peek over the edge of the deck to see Ira and the guy from the lobby, the one who didn’t want to hunt, sitting at one of the tables smoking cigars. There’s a bottle of something and a couple of glasses between them. They’re talking in voices so low that I have to hold my breath to be able to hear them.

“I didn’t think I’d have the nerve, I really didn’t,” the other guy says, and Ira claps him on his back. “God. What a feeling.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You still gotta finish it,” Ira says, and he pours the guy a drink and slides it across the table to him. “You did the hunt.” Ira downs whatever is in his own glass. “You gonna have the balls to take it all the way?”

The guy throws back his drink and Ira pours him another. “After the fortune I paid you, I’d better.” The two of them laugh low and quiet, and the sound of it makes my skin crawl. “They never even heard you comin,’ ” the stranger says, and a slow, creeping horror starts to settle in my bones, the way the damp from the air is settling on my skin. “Where’re you keepin’ him?”

Ira takes a long drink. “I got him hidden away.”

“They told me you were the best,” the guy says. “And they were right.”

“To the hunt,” Ira says, and he raises his glass in a toast.

“To the kill,” the other guy adds, and Ira nods before they clink glasses.

We watch while they finish their cigars and stub them out in an ashtray before they head back inside the lodge, then Lo and I sink down to sit on our knees in the grass at the edge of the deck.

“They’re not huntin’ hogs,” Lo whispers. “Are they?” I shake my head.

My stomach lurches and my body goes ice cold in the oppressive summer heat, but I’m focused on one thing. “Xan’s alive,” I tell Lo. “At least for tonight.”

“Where, though? Jesus, Dovie. He could be anywhere.”

I’m trying to think. There’s something at the edge of my brain. Some connection that’s just out of my grasp. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” I ball up my fists in frustration.

I’ve got him hidden away. I’m racking my brain, trying to figure out why that sounds familiar.

Suddenly that conversation with Daddy on the crag comes rushing back to me. I turn to Lo and he’s watching me with huge, frightened eyes.

“I think I know where he might be. There’s a cave down under the bluff. Daddy said they used to hang out there before Ira built the lodge. Ira was livin’ there at one point. They called it their hideaway.”

I pull the flashlight out of my pocket and glance around before I dart across the perfectly manicured lawn toward Moonlight Crag with Lo hot on my heels. We cross the exposed rock at a run and head on toward the woods beyond. Once we hit the trees, we have to slow down, but I don’t dare click on my flashlight until we’re far enough into the thick of it that no one from the lodge would be able to see the light.

We’re picking our way through the brambles and briars in the dark. Tripping over rocks and getting our feet caught in vines. The forest is fighting us every step of the way. It’s twisting and overgrown. Treacherous and claustrophobic. If Ira really does keep the hikers down here somewhere before he kills them, then he doesn’t need any guards or boobytraps. The woods will do the job for him.

Suddenly Lo grabs my arm and jerks me backward, hard. “Watch out!” he hisses, and I look down to see that my toes are hanging over the rocky edge of a steep drop-off. I gasp and Lo pulls me against his chest. I let myself melt into him, just for a few minutes. “Thanks,” I whisper, and he presses his lips to the top of my head.

I pull away from him to shine my light over the edge of the bluff. “There’s gotta be a way down there,” I say, but it takes us a good half hour of hunting through the brush to find a steep, rocky path leading downhill.

We slip and slide and skid our way to the bottom, until suddenly we’re standing at the mouth of a cave. The entrance is almost hidden by undergrowth. If you weren’t specifically looking for it, you’d probably hike right by it and never know it was there.

Lo and I are both frozen, peering into the darkness of that yawning mouth in the mountain. If we go in there, there’s no telling what’s waiting for us.

I realize that I’m hearing the sound of water from somewhere. I shine the light around until I find the spot where it’s trickling out of the rocks. The spring water splashes into a little pool, then trickles into a rocky stream bed barely as wide across as my foot. From there it heads on down the mountain.

“Smell that?” Lo asks me, and I nod. Sulfur burns my nose and stings my eyes. “That’s the headspring for Lucifer’s Creek. This is where it starts.” He shakes his head and turns his attention back to the dark mouth of the cave. “There’s something bad here, Dovie. Something evil lives in this place.”

“We have to go in,” I tell him. “Xan could be in there.”

Lo nods. “This is what we came to do.” He looks back over his shoulder into the blackness. “It’s what they want me to do.”

I take the light and push aside the overgrowth to step inside the cave. My skin starts to crawl and I’m instantly choking and gagging on the overwhelming smell of sulfur, but Lo takes my hand and squeezes hard. “Stronger than the dark,” he whispers.

The inside of the cave is small and wet. And empty.

Somehow I feel empty too. Like my body is a deserted grave. That crushing silence almost makes me miss the bone song.

Nothing sings here.

With each step, I feel the press of something heavy. A wave of despair comes washing over me. I’m suddenly swimming in misery, and a voice rises up to jeer at me from somewhere in my own mind.

Your fault, Dovie.

Your fault your mama left.

Your fault Riley is dead.

And Hannah.

Your fault Xan is going to die.

And probably Lo, too.

A simmering rage starts to bubble in my stomach, and I fight it back down.

“You feel that, Dovie?” Lo whispers, and I nod. His face is twisted in anguish. I wonder what he’s thinking about, but I don’t have time to ask. We need to find Xan and get out of here before Ira comes to check on his prisoner.

There’s a path leading back farther. It’s narrow and we have to go single file. Me inching forward with the light. Lo right behind me with his hand on my shoulder. The farther we go, the heavier the weight of despair settles on me, and the stronger the rotten-egg stench of sulfur gets. Like we’re slowly making our way straight to hell.

The walls of the cave are slimy. I feel things scurrying over my feet. Crawling up my legs. I shudder hard and knock them away, but I never get all of them. There are way too many. Something scratches and squeaks at us from a crevice and I bite my tongue against the urge to scream.

Finally the passage opens up into another cavern, bigger than the first. I bend down to flick a crawling spider off my shin, then I shine my light around to check it out. “Xan?” I whisper his name to the bugs and the rats, but I look right over him on the first pass with the light. I don’t see him until Lo grabs my wrist and points.

“Wait. Dovie. Look.”

Xan is lying on his side against the cave wall. He’s hog-tied with his hands and feet bound behind him, and his mouth is taped shut. But his eyes are open. They’re huge and wide and terrified and blinking in the blinding glare of the flashlight beam.

“Xan! It’s me. It’s Dovie.” I hurry over to him and kneel down to pull the tape off his mouth.

“We gotta get out of here,” he says, and he’s sucking in great gulps of air. “We gotta get the fuck out of here. Before they come back.”

“Shit,” I say. “I don’t have anything to cut the ropes with.” Another tsunami of agony slams into me, and it’s so overwhelming that I’m almost incapacitated.

Your fault, Dovie.

No. The misery gives way to a swelling anger. Resentment. This is their fault. Xan’s and Lo’s. Not mine. I ball my hands into tight fists and grit my teeth, fighting to not get swept up in my own rage.

The terror in Xan’s eyes is the only thing that gets me moving again. Lo and I work at the knots for a few minutes, but it’s no good. We can’t get them undone, and there’s no way we can get Xan out of here hog-tied like this. “Dammit.” I’m on the verge of crying from frustration and Xan looks like he’s about to have a full-on panic attack.

“Wait.” Lo takes the flashlight and shines it toward a pile of rocks. He grabs a sharp, jagged one and saws at the ropes holding Xan hostage. Xan keeps begging him to hurry, and I keep touching Xan’s face and his hair. I’m telling him it’s okay. To be patient. That we’re going to get him out of here.

Lo finally gets Xan’s feet free, and it only takes a few more minutes to get his hands. “Come on.” Lo grabs Xan’s hand and pulls him up off the ground, and then the three of us are making our way back down the narrow passage. Lo is leading the way, and Xan is behind me. “I thought I was going to die tonight, Dovie,” he whispers. “I thought I was going to die like Riley.”

“Nobody is going to die tonight,” I promise him, and I repeat it again, louder this time so Lo can hear it too. “None of us are going to die. Not tonight.”

We finally make it back to the mouth of the cave, and we step out into the night air to suck in lungfuls of oxygen. I’m trying to shake off that misery that settled on me in the cave, like I could feel the whole weight of the mountain sitting right on top of my rib cage.

“You found me.” Xan hugs me tight. “I knew you were magic.” He puts his hand on my chin and pulls my mouth toward his for another kiss. There’s something urgent in it this time. Something feverish and frantic. Something needy and greedy.

Something grateful.

When I pull away, Lo is studying the water coming out of the rocks. He’s working so hard not to look at us that it kills me.

“Old timers around here used to say, if you drank too much water from Lucifer’s Creek, you’d go mad,” he tells us. “Blind with rage. Or sick with worry.” Lo shifts his focus from the water to me. “My granddaddy used to bathe in it, even though it burned. That’s what Nana told me. She said it’s how the meanness got in him.”

“How are we gonna get out of here?” I ask. “The truck has a blown tire, and it’s not like Ira’s gonna let us in to use the phone to call for help.”

“Couldn’t we follow the road down?” Xan asks. “How long would it take to walk back to town?”

“Hours. Besides,” I argue. “It’s too risky. If Ira finds out you’re gone and comes after us, we’d be too exposed. We gotta stick to the woods.”

“How are we gonna know where we’re going?” Panic is creeping back into Xan’s voice. He’s realizing that we may have cut his ropes off, but he’s a long way from safe.

“We’re gonna follow the creek,” Lo announces. “We’re gonna follow Lucifer’s Creek all the way down the mountain to town.”

That makes me almost as scared as walking right down the middle of the dirt road for Ira and everyone to see, but I can’t say exactly why. So I keep my mouth shut. Lo knows these hills even better than I do. If he thinks we should follow the water, we should follow the water.

The three of us start down the rocky slope, keeping the tiny creek on our right. We have to move carefully. The woods don’t want us getting home tonight. They do their best to keep us trapped on the mountain. They claw and bite and scratch at us with thorny hands. But we keep moving down. Following Lucifer’s Creek. The farther we go, the more the stream widens out. That sulfur smell hangs thick in the air, and it makes it hard to breathe.

We fill Xan in on everything we know, keeping our voices to occasional whispers so we can hear if someone is out there stalking us.

Not that we’d ever hear the Ghost of the Ozarks.

The only part we leave out of the story is how Lo buried the bodies. What matters right now is what Ira did. Lo will be dealing with what he did for the rest of his life. He doesn’t need to lay it all out again tonight.

It’s too unspeakable. So we don’t speak it.

Xan can’t tell us anything at all. All he remembers is being behind me on the trail, then being in the cave with two guys. “The redhead and the other one,” he tells us. When we tell him we think people were paying Ira to take them hunting for human beings in these hills, Xan stops and stares at us. I see his brain stutter and stall. He can’t wrap his head around it. “That’s what happened to Riley?” he asks, and his voice splinters when he says his brother’s name.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think so.”

“That’s what happened to all of them?”

“Yeah.” Lo answers him this time. “We’re pretty sure that’s what happened to all of them.”

“Jesus,” Xan whispers. He still hasn’t moved. I don’t think he can. “You see that kind of stuff in horror movies. But real life? What the fuck is wrong with people?”

“There’s darkness in all of us,” Lo tells him. “Most of us keep it at bay.”

Just then a horrible, strangled howl tears through the valley. Loud enough to shake the leaves on the trees.

“What the hell was that?” Xan whispers.

“It’s the Howler,” Lo tells us, and he takes my hand to pull me next to him. “He’s here.”

Terror rips into my flesh with its sharp teeth. “You mean Ira?”

Lo puts a finger to his lips and shakes his head.

There’s a snuffling sound behind us, the grunts of a big animal, and we turn around slow to stare into the night. There’s a shape there in the darkness. I can just barely make it out, but it’s huge. Bigger than any bear you’d find in these hills.

It breathes and paws at the ground. I still can’t quite see it, but I can smell it. The odor is thick and pungent and musky. Lo and Xan and I don’t breathe. We don’t blink. My heart isn’t beating anymore.

The thing in the shadows pauses for a moment to drink from Lucifer’s Creek in long, loud gulps. When it’s had its fill, it throws back its head and howls again.

And then it’s gone, tearing off into the dark forest.

“What was that?” Xan whispers. I can feel him trembling beside me.

“That was the Ozark Howler,” Lo tells him. “The harbinger of death.” He looks at me. “Someone is going to die tonight.”

“We gotta get home,” I say. “We have to get out of these woods.”

We turn around and start following Lucifer’s Creek again, moving as fast as we possibly can. The slope gets steeper. We’re working our way downhill, trying not to fall as we scramble down a rocky path.

We slip and slide and skid our way to the bottom, until suddenly we’re standing at the mouth of a cave. The entrance is almost hidden by undergrowth. If you weren’t specifically looking for it, you’d probably hike right by it and never know it was there.

Lo and Xan and I are frozen, peering into the darkness of that yawning mouth in the mountain. If we go in there, there’s no telling what’s waiting for us.

I realize that I’m hearing the sound of water from somewhere. I shine the light around until I find the spot where it’s trickling out of the rocks. The spring water splashes into a little pool, then trickles into a rocky stream bed barely as wide across as my foot. From there it heads on down the mountain.

“Smell that?” Lo asks me, and I nod. Sulfur burns my nose and stings my eyes. “That’s the headspring for Lucifer’s Creek. This is where it starts.”

Twenty-Nine

Nana told me once that if you try to follow it from start to finish, you’ll never reach the end of Lucifer’s Creek. You’ll just keep walking and walking forever, doubling back, and retracing your steps—somehow finding yourself at the beginning again and starting all over—until you’re lost in the Ozarks for all eternity.

“No,” Xan says. “No. That can’t be right.”

“It’s right,” I tell them. “We’re back where we started.”

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Xan runs a hand through his hair and tugs at the blond waves. “What the hell is this place? This can’t be happening. None of this can be happening.”

“All of it’s happening,” I tell him. “It’s all real.” My mother’s ghost. Ira hunting people for sport. The Ozark Howler. I look at Lo. “All of it.”

“What do we do?” Xan asks us. “How do we get out of here?”

“If we try to follow the creek back down again,” I warn them, “we’re just gonna end up right back here.”

“We gotta go up to the lodge,” Lo tells us. “Try to get some help up there.” He nods at us. “It’s the only thing we can do.”

“No way.” Xan’s eyes are brimming with pure terror. “Those guys are up there.”

“There are other people up there, too, though. Lots of ’em. They can’t all be killers,” I say. “Can they? Some of them have to be regular guests.”

“We stick together and we get help,” Lo says. “Then we get out. That’s the plan.”

“Okay,” Xan says. “We get help, and we get out.” He nods and mutters the words under his breath one more time. “Get help and get out.”

The three of us start to haul ourselves, and each other, back up the steep, rocky slope toward the top of the bluff. We fight our way back through the woods until we’re standing at the edge of Moonlight Crag. The pale outcropping glows in the tiny bit of moon glow that slips through the thick clouds. If we cross it, we’ll be lit up in a spotlight to anyone who’s watching, but there’s no way to get to the lodge and raise the alarm without making our way across that rock.

“We’ll head for the nearest one of the guest cabins.” I point. “That one there. We’ll bang on the door. See if we can wake someone up who’ll help us. Or at least let us in to use the phone and call my house.”

Xan swallows hard and follows my finger with his gaze. He’s eyeing the cozy-looking little cabin with suspicion. “How do we know whoever is in there isn’t in on it?”

“We don’t,” Lo says. “We’re gonna have to take a chance if we want to get out of this alive. Trust that most people have good in ’em.”

I point to the other cabins that sit up closer to the main lodge. “See those up there? They’re a lot bigger, right? Nicer? Those are the ones with top-of-the-line everything. I’ve been in them. These down here, close to the woods, they’re the basic ones. A lot cheaper.”

Xan nods. “You probably have to pay the big bucks to be here hunting people, huh?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” I say.

That’s what I’m hoping.

I click off the flashlight and step out onto the rock of Moonlight Crag, and Lo and Xan follow me. We duck down low and move fast, but before we make it to the cabin, someone steps out of the trees.

Ira Langdon is leveling an automatic rifle at us. And for the first time in my memory, he isn’t smiling.

We skid to a stop at the edge of the glowing rock. Nobody says a word. The only sound is ragged breathing. Then Lo puts his body between me and the barrel of Ira’s gun.

“You don’t want to hurt us, Ira,” Lo tells him. “You’ve known Dovie’s daddy your whole life. And you’ve been like an uncle to her.”

“You’re right about that, son,” Ira tells him. “I don’t want to. But you ain’t leavin’ me much choice.”

“We just wanna get home,” I tell him. My voice is nice and easy. “We don’t wanna cause you any trouble, Ira. Please.”

“I’m a good guy, Dovie,” Ira says. “You know that. And I love you like my own. But I can’t let you walk away from here tonight. There ain’t no way.”

I laugh out loud. “You’re not a good guy, Ira.” If he’s going to kill us anyway, there’s no sense in groveling. “We know what you’ve been doing up here,” I tell him. “We know you’re the one who’s been killing the hikers.”

“No,” Ira says, and he takes a step closer to us. I hear Xan suck in his breath. “That’s not true. I haven’t killed a single hiker. Not one. Not ever. That’s God’s honest truth.”

“You’ve just taken money from the psychos of the world to let them come up here and hunt people, with you as their personal guide,” I say. “Is that it?”

“You snatch them off the trail,” Xan finishes for me. “Hold ’em till your clients are ready. Then you release the game and let it run.” Xan looks more defiant and angry than afraid now, and I know that righteous fury is for Riley. “That how it works?”

Ira shrugs, then he turns to look at Lo. “They left out part of it, didn’t they, Lowan?”

Lo looks sick. Hollowed out and empty and miserable and lost. I can see right through him. He’s worse than a ghost. My mama looked peaceful and beautiful. Most of the skeletons I’ve dug out of the ground have looked better than Lo does right now.

I’ve never wanted anyone dead before. Not ever. But I want Ira Langdon dead right now. I want to kill him with my bare hands, the way he killed the parts of Lo that were most Lo.

Ira takes a step toward us, and the business end of that rifle is way too close for comfort. The three of us hang on to each other and take a big step backward, trying to put some distance between our bodies and Ira’s bullets.

Not that it’s gonna matter. If he fires that thing, he’ll blow us all clean off the mountain.

We’re standing in the center of Moonlight Crag now. The clouds have blown off, and the valley is laid out below us. When I look over my shoulder, I can see the lights in the houses. One of them is ours. I wonder if Nana is awake.

If Daddy is home again from the woods yet.

“Why?” Lo asks. His voice sounds like it’s coming from inside that cave where we found Xan hog-tied and gagged. He sounds far away. Like he’s already gone. “Why did you leave them for me to bury?”

Xan turns to stare at Lo, and he looks like he might throw up. “You buried them?” His voice is raw, torn open and bleeding from heartbreak. “Did you bury Riley?” Lo doesn’t look at him. His deep, brown eyes are trained on Ira. “Jesus Christ, Lowan. You buried all of them and left them for Dovie to dig up? How could you do that to her?”

“Why bring me into this?” Lo asks again. “What did I do to you, Ira?”

“You weren’t mine,” Ira tells him. “You weren’t my blood, Lowan. And you shoulda been.”

“What are you talking about?” Lo’s voice sounds a little stronger now. A little more familiar. “What the hell does that mean?”

“There were four of us,” Ira says, and he looks at me. “Like I told you, Dovie. Your mama and daddy.” His eyes move back toward Lo. “And your mama and me.”

“You were in love with Claire,” I say, and Ira nods.

“She was in love with me, too. But I was poor as dirt. Poorer than the Wilders even, and they never had so much as a pot to piss in.” Something hard settles behind Ira’s eyes. “Claire wanted more. She wanted a life where she didn’t have to scratch and claw for every scrap of food that went in her mouth.” Ira shakes his head. “Jesus. She wanted a life with indoor plumbing and electricity.” He almost laughs. “Little luxuries like that.”

“So she picked the preacher instead,” I say.

“She saw what your mama had, Dovie. She looked at Lucy living down there in town with Del. In that sweet little house on Mud Street, and she picked Turley. She picked the possibility of that over love.” Ira stops. “Over me.”

“Only Turley didn’t want her,” Lo says. “When he found out she was pregnant, he didn’t want her. Didn’t want us. Is that right?”

That fits with what Turley told us before he drowned in Lucifer’s Creek.

She begged me to marry her. To give you a life as my son. But I couldn’t.

Ira smirks then. “She came to see me that night when you were a baby, Lowan. Not even a year old. Told me she was sorry. That she loved me. She was wrong, she said. Turley had cut her loose. Didn’t want anything to do with her. Now she had a little one. On her own. Wanted me to take her back.” He glares at Lo. “Wanted me to take you both. Claire cried buckets. But I couldn’t. Not after what she did. I wasn’t gonna raise no other man’s son as my own.”

“She came to tell you what night?” I ask him.

“The night he killed her.” Lo’s voice is so steady now. “My mama was the first one of your victims, wasn’t she? Those hikers, they were all your victims too, whether you killed ’em or not. You know that just as well as we do.”

Ira flinches, and the raw pain that flickers across his eyes is enough to tell me that, even if Lo was just guessing, he got it right. Claire Wilder didn’t drown in Lucifer’s Creek by accident. Ira Langdon drowned her there because she had the nerve to break his heart.

I think of my mama ghostly and glowing in our front yard, and a terrible realization comes to me.

“You killed my mama, too. Didn’t you?”

“Holy shit,” Xan whispers. “What the fuck is happening?” I don’t blame him for not being able to keep up. For me and Lo, these are the stories that have been stitched into the quilt of our lives, patched together in pieces, and told and retold over the years. But for Xan, it’s all brand new.

I know as soon as I say it that I have to be right. Everything has to be connected.

“Do you know Daddy’s been out lookin’ for her?” I say. “He’s been walkin’ the hills lookin’ for her bones. He’s out there somewhere tonight.”

“He ain’t gonna find ’er,” Ira says, and his voice is thick with sorrow. And regret, maybe.

Grief.

“Why’d you kill Lucy?” Lo asks.

“She came to see me. Said she knew a secret. Somethin’ she was gonna tell me. Somethin’ big. And I guessed I knew what that was gonna be.”

“She knew you killed my mama,” Lo says.

“There weren’t any other secrets. Not between Del and Lucy and Claire and me.”

“So you killed her,” Xan whispers. Even he’s catching on now. “You told us you never killed anyone.”

“I said I never killed any of the hikers,” Ira corrects him. “Don’t make me out to be a liar, boy. I’m a lot of things, but I don’t tell lies.”

He says it so seriously that I have the urge to laugh.

The sky is starting to turn gold. Morning is coming. It won’t be long before the sun creeps up over the mountains. People will wake up. People who might be able to help us, if we can just keep Ira talking a little longer.

“Where is she? Let me tell Daddy where she is. Let him rest finally. Let them both rest.”

“You ain’t gonna tell nobody anything, Dovie girl.” His voice is thick with anguish, but his jaw is set tight. “I’m real sorry about that, breaks my goddamn heart, but that’s the way it is. None of you are gettin’ off this rock. I worked too hard and built too much. I swore to God I wasn’t ever gonna be poor like that again.”

“God doesn’t have a thing to do with this, Ira,” Lo tells him. “Let’s leave him out of this business.”

“That’s why you worked so hard to build the lodge and bring in big hunting clients. Because you couldn’t stand the thought of being so miserably poor anymore. Not after you lost Claire because of it. Not after she humiliated you like that.”

“How’d you make the leap to hunting people?” Xan asks him. “How does that happen?”

“The first one came to me,” Ira protests. “I didn’t go lookin’. And I said no. Didn’t want nothin’ to do with it. I was disgusted.” He hesitates. “But people with money like that, they aren’t used to hearin’ the word no.” That makes me wonder how often anybody’s said no to Ira Langdon in the last few years. Not many, I figure. Now that he’s the one holding the purse strings. “And the money he was offerin’ up…Just to go huntin’, you know…” He shakes his head. “It was a lot. More than I’d ever even thought about. So I took it.” He shrugs. “Then, word gets around. In those circles. People who are interested in certain things, they know who to talk to, the right questions to ask.”

“You’re a monster,” I tell him, and I think about that encounter with that snarling creature on the banks of Lucifer’s Creek. When it comes down to it, I’m way more terrified of Ira. “You are the Ozark Howler.”

“I done a lot of good around here, Dovie.” His voice cracks, and my heart splinters into shards of jagged rock. “Helped a lot of people. Made this town into somethin’.”

“You think that makes it okay?” Lowan asks him. “That doesn’t absolve you of anything, Ira. You can’t kill a bunch of people and erase that wrong from the world by buyin’ a couple of library books and fixin’ some sidewalks. That’s not how it works.”

“I done the best I could to balance things out. To take care of people.” Ira looks up toward the light that’s creeping across the sky, then back at the cabins behind us, and I know we’re out of time. This is where he ends it.

Suddenly, Xan rushes at him. He puts his head down and runs straight at him like a football player making a tackle. I brace myself for the blast of that rifle, but Ira’s too surprised to shoot. Instead, he swings the gun hard and brings it across the side of Xan’s head with a sickening crack. Xan crumples like a rag doll and I scream.

“Shit.” Ira glances behind him at the cabins again. “Goddammit,” he mutters. “Goddammit, Dovie.” He’s marching toward me and Lo now. His jaw is set, and that rifle is aimed straight at my heart.

We’re so close to the edge of the crag. Just a few feet behind where Lo and I are standing, the ground drops away to nothing. It’s at least one hundred and fifty feet straight down to the rocks on the valley floor. That’s when I know what Ira has planned for us. He isn’t going to shoot us. He can’t afford to wake up the whole damn lodge. He’s going to make us jump to our deaths. Then he’ll drag unconscious Xan to the edge and throw him over, too.

Sure enough, he says, “You first, Dovie. You can jump, or I can shoot you and you’ll still go over.”

“No, Dovie.” Lowan grabs my hand. “If he wants us dead, make him kill us.”

Light is coming fast now, but shadows still cling to the tree line. The night is refusing to let go of Moonlight Crag. Suddenly the dark places are full of movement. Something is creeping out of the forest. I feel Lo stop breathing next to me as they step into view. “Dovie,” he whispers. “Do you see them?”

“Yeah,” I whisper. “I see them, Lo. I see all of them.”

Lo’s ghosts—all those murdered hikers—they’re marching toward us like a phantom army. There are so many of them. Their bodies are just shadows, wisps of black smoke already fading in the coming dawn, but for a second, I see their faces clear before they disappear completely.

Emberlynn Kemper.

Riley Alden.

Hannah Nelby.

All of them.

Ira can’t stand it. He looks back over his shoulder to see what we’re staring at. I hear him suck in a breath, and that’s when Lo lunges for the barrel of the gun. He grabs at it, quick as lightning, but Ira spins back around and shoves him hard.

For just the shortest part of a second, I see Lo’s eyes. They’re wide. But they’re peaceful. He isn’t afraid.

And then he’s gone.

He disappears over the edge of Moonlight Crag, and he takes my whole heart with him.

“Lo!” His name comes out all strangled—part scream, part sob—twisted like the howl that echoes over the valley just as he vanishes.

He told us that someone would die tonight.

A rifle blast explodes in the early morning fog that’s rising up fast from below us to take the place of the dark. I hear it bounce off the trees and rattle off the rock. My body goes rigid, but I don’t feel the bullet.

I look at Ira, and his eyes are huge. His mouth opens and closes. A red stain spreads across his chest. He lunges toward me, but he misses and stumbles, and then he’s gone too. Just like Lo. Over the edge of Moonlight Crag.

Daddy is standing at the edge of the swirling fog. He’s holding his old rifle at his shoulder, like he’s afraid Ira might come crawling back up over the rock. He holds out his other hand to me, but I can’t move.

“It’s over, Dovie,” he tells me. “You’re safe. It’s all over.”

Thirty

I turn and drop to my knees at the edge of the cliff. “Lo!” His name is a wail. The cry of the wind under the leading edge of a thunderstorm. “Lo!”

Daddy’s hand is at my back. He has me by the shirt and he’s pulling me back from the edge of Moonlight Crag. “He’s gone, baby.”

“No.” I’m sobbing, clawing at Daddy’s arms. Lo can’t be gone. If he were dead, I would be too. My heart would stop if Lo’s did.

“Dovie?” At first, I think the voice is Lo’s and my heart leaps. I try to break away from Daddy, but he holds me tight. “What happened?”

I realize then that the voice is Xan’s. He’s sitting up at the edge of the crag. His head is bleeding and he looks so confused. Daddy lets me go, and I crawl to him on my hands and knees.

I run my hands over his head and he winces, but he seems okay.

“Is Lowan—” I nod but I can’t say it out loud. I feel like I’m falling over the edge of Moonlight Crag myself. Only, I never hit the ground. I keep falling and falling and falling and falling. “Oh God, Dovie.” Xan’s hands are on my cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

“Dovie?” Another voice cuts through the fog. This one is farther away. But I’d know it anywhere.

I scramble back to the edge of the crag before Daddy can pull me away again. The rising sun is hitting the rock face below me now, and I see him. Lo is clinging to a narrow ledge about fifteen feet below me. His arms are wrapped around a skinny tree growing out of the side of the cliff, and he’s hanging on for dear life.

Daddy appears beside me at the edge of the drop-off. “Jesus Christ,” he says, and then he yells at Lo to hang on, that he’s running to the maintenance shop for some rope.

I’m sobbing from joy now, and Lo yells up at me not to cry. That he’s okay. That we’re okay.

Daddy is back in under two minutes. He throws down the rope and Lo ties it around his chest, under his arms. Daddy tells him to knot it twice. Make sure it’ll hold. People are coming out of the cabins now. Men and women. They gather around the crag and murmur to each other in confused tones. Daddy yells for some of them to help him haul Lo up, and four or five men step up to grab the rope. Together they pull Lo back from the edge of death, but I don’t let myself breathe again until I have him in my arms.

We drop to our knees together on top of the crag, with all of Arkansas spread out below. I lean forward, gasping, as hot tears slide down my face. I kiss Lo’s forehead. Then the corner of his mouth. My hands are on his burning cheeks. I can’t quit touching him. I’m falling over the edge again, but this time it feels good. “I love you,” I whisper, and he whispers it back. Then my mouth is on his.

His hands are warm against the skin of my neck. Then tangled in my hair. He’s kissing me back now, with muffled little sounds that let me know he’s crying, too. Lo kisses me so hard that he shudders. He grips the tops of my shoulders, pulling me closer to him, but I can’t get as close as I want to. I taste his salty lips, his tongue, the warm inside of his mouth. The sharpness of his teeth. We’re soft and tender, then fierce again. He moans like he’s in pain, and I know why. This is so good it hurts. I don’t know any more what’s him and what’s me. Maybe there’s not any difference.

This is the day we stop pretending we’re just one thing to each other. I love him in every kind of way there is to love someone. There’s no one word for it. No definition that fits. It’s just me and Lo.

It’s always been us.

That’s all there is.

He pulls back to draw in a ragged breath, and we press our foreheads together. “Do you believe now?” he asks me. “Do you believe in magic?” I’m breathless, and he presses each word to my lips like a kiss. Then he’s nuzzling my neck and I’m wrapping my arms so tight around him.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “I believe in all of it.” I kiss him one more time. Long and slow and sweet, but less frenzied now. “I believe in us.” Lo grins at me. “I believe in magic.”

Xan is watching Lo and me. I want to tell him I’m sorry. I want him to know that he’s beautiful, and he made me curious. A little excited. That he showed me something different. Something special that I hadn’t seen before. But it was always going to be Lo.

It’s always been Lo.

We’re Clover and Wilder blood. Meant to break the curse.

Xan smiles, like maybe he understands that. I hope he does.

More people are gathering on the crag now. Guests from the cabins. Employees from the restaurant and the maintenance shop. The housekeeping staff and the gardeners.

I hear a siren and the sheriff’s car tears into the parking lot, sending gravel flying in all directions. I wonder who called him.

Daddy says he was out walkin’ the hills when the sky started to get bright. He hadn’t intended to stay out all night, but time got away from him. He knew he was close to the lodge, so he figured he’d stop in and get Ira to drive him back down to town.

Then he saw our truck in the parking lot.

And he heard my voice out on the crag.

So he grabbed the rifle from under the seat of the truck. I didn’t even know it was there.

Daddy got to the rock just in time to see Ira shove Lo over the edge.

He got there just in time to kill his best friend to save his daughter.

Xan and Lo and I tell Sheriff everything we know, except the part about Lo burying the bodies. We all three leave that out, even though we never discussed it. The only one besides us who knew about that was Ira, and he can take it to his grave as far as I’m concerned. Let the horrible truth of that die with him. Lo’s been hurt enough. The scars are deep and permanent.

The reluctant hunter is standing toward the back of the crowd with a disinterested look on his face. I lean in close to Deputy Jonah to point him out. I tell Jonah not to look at him. Not to give away that he knows. This is Jonah’s chance to be a hero. And maybe he deserves it.

When all the questions have been answered, Sheriff orders everyone to go on back to their cabins and their jobs. He tells them to stay put. That he’ll be around to speak to all of them directly. There’s a team from the state police on the way, he explains them. Nobody leaves Moonlight Crag until they’re cleared to go.

“Delbert,” Sheriff says to Daddy, “Jonah’s gonna drive you and Dovie and the Wilder boy on down to town. I got statements from all of you, and I know where to find you when I need you. I expect you need some rest.” He looks at me and sighs, like he could use some rest, too. “We found Hannah Nelby, Dovie. Right where you said. You done good.” He looks at Lo. “Both of you done real good last night.”

An ambulance shows up to take Xan down to Rogers to get checked out at the hospital. His head is still bleeding a little. He says he’s fine—that he doesn’t need to go to the hospital—but Sheriff insists. “You gotta get looked over. Your mom and dad are on their way from Tulsa. They’re gonna meet you there.”

I take his hands to tell him goodbye. “It’s gonna be a rough trip down the mountain in the back of that thing,” I warn him.

Xan shrugs and his hair falls across his blue eyes. I reach up to push it back so I can see them one more time. “I don’t think there’s any way to get off this mountain that doesn’t hurt,” he tells me, and I figure he’s right. “Goodbye, Dovie, who is not a witch.”

“Goodbye, Xander, who is not a ghost.” I stretch up on my tiptoes and press my lips to his. It’s a quick kiss, but I want Xan to have that to take with him. “I’m glad you’re real,” I whisper as he climbs into the back of the ambulance, and Lo wraps me up in his arms again as they pull away.

When Jonah the Deputy drops Daddy and Lo and me off at the house, he smiles at me. “See you around, Dovie,” he says, and I nod.

“See you around, Jonah.”

Daddy heads inside to take a shower. I hear him in the kitchen filling Nana in on everything. She’s stirring sugar in her tea. I hear the clinking of her spoon, as familiar as her voice.

Lo and I pause on the porch, and when I look to Mama’s crepe myrtles, that single white rose is still lying there where she knelt to lay it on the ground last night.

“She didn’t leave you after all, Dovie,” Lo tells me. “She never left you.”

“Your mama didn’t leave you either,” I say. “Both of them wanted to stay with us.” I take Lo’s hand and lead him across the yard to Mama’s crepe myrtles. “I should have believed you all along,” I tell him. “About the hikers. About the Howler. About the magic. About all of it.”

“You believed as soon as you could, Dovie.”

We kneel in the dirt together and pick up the white rose.

Nana’s voice is drifting out the kitchen window.

I will tell you a story of a pretty white rose,

It is true but oh how sad,

Of a poor young woman whose heart was pure as gold,

But cruel she was treated by her lad.

A memory comes rushing back to me as I’m sitting there with my knees in the dirt. My mama singing that song to me. We’re kneeling right here together. Planting crepe myrtles in the soft earth. And she’s singing that song. For just a moment, I hear Mama’s voice instead of Nana’s.

She was found one morning in a cold, cold stream,

Where he threw his love there to drown,

With that rose between her teeth, as if she seemed to say,

I want to wear this rose in my crown.

It was about Claire. It was always a song about Lo’s mama.

An idea blooms in my head all of a sudden, just like someone planted it there. “What if she’s here?” I ask Lo. “My mama. What if that’s why we’ve all seen her right here? What if that’s why she left the roses here. To mark the spot?”

I start to dig. I’m pulling the dirt away with my bare hands, and Lo is helping me. We’ve never had our hands in the earth together like this. It’s the first time. And something about it feels important.

We dig pretty deep, but there’s nothing. No bones. I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved. How would I feel knowing I’d been sitting on that front porch all these years, yearning for my mama, and she’d been right here the whole time?

I’m about to give up when my fingers hit something hard. It isn’t a skull or a collarbone, though. It’s a little metal box. I free it from the dirt and try to open it, but it’s locked.

“Come on,” Lo says. “Let’s take it inside. Maybe we can get it open.”

Upstairs, Lo settles on my bed and I sit on the floor with the box. I’m halfway scared to open it, but I try anyway. First with the sharp end of a pair of scissors. Then with a wire coat hanger. Like I know how to pick a lock.

Then the air conditioner kicks on and I hear those wild keys tinkling overhead. Lo and I both look up at them at the exact same moment.

“You said you found one of the keys in our yard?” Lo nods. He’s stretched out on my bed and his eyes look soft and sleepy. “You know which one?” He shakes his head, and I get up off the floor and pull a chair over the window so I can climb on top of it and take down the homemade chime.

I try each key knotted to the piece of yarn. All eight of them. None of them work.

“Try the one in your pocket.” Lo’s voice is scratchy with exhaustion.

I dig out the key I found in Hannah’s grave. The one I cut off to give back to Lo. Key number nine. His clue to me.

“By knot of nine, what is done is mine.” I whisper the words to the old Witch’s Ladder chant out loud, and I see the curve of a smile on Lo’s lips.

I slip it into the keyhole and the lock releases. “Lo,” I whisper, but he’s asleep. His face is relaxed, and for the first time in years, I see the Lo I used to know. I wish I could believe he’d never be haunted again. I don’t think he’ll see the ghosts of those murdered hikers anymore, but he’ll always carry darkness within him. That’s just a hard truth.

He’ll always carry light with him, too, though. I remind myself of that. Lo’s flame burns so bright. That darkness will never be able to gobble him up, no matter how big and dark it gets.

I look back at the little box and open the lid. Inside is a crumbling white rose—dry as paper—and underneath that is a little diary.

I lean back against the bed and listen to Lo’s soft breathing as I start to read.

Epilogue

Daddy finds my mama’s bones when they go to recover Ira’s body from the bottom of Moonlight Crag. He brings her home and we bury her at the back of our property, tucked in among the peach trees and the wild honeysuckle.

We have a little ceremony for her that next Sunday. Daddy reads a poem. “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” by William Wordsworth. The last stanza makes me shiver.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

It’s supposed to just be me and Daddy and Nana and Lo and Granny Pearl. The whole town comes to gather with us, though. There’s no new preacher down at the community church yet, so they come to seek God in our back garden. They leave flowers on Mama’s grave and take our hands. They murmur about how they were afraid of the wrong thing. How sometimes evil carries a Bible and sometimes evil grins, but that doesn’t make it any less evil.

Someone rings the funeral bells down at the church for Mama.

Nobody rang them for Ira.

We’re standing at my mama’s graveside after the memorial ceremony. Lo is holding my hand and the sun is warm on our heads.

“Do you think Ira was born with that evil in him?” he asks me. “Or did somethin’ get inside him when he was livin’ in that cave?”

It’s something I’ve been wondering about, too. We both felt something bad in that hole in the mountain. Something dark and ancient and deadly.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Some of both, maybe.”

Lo nods like that makes sense. “Brother Turley used to baptize his flock in water that came outta those rocks. He’d stand right in the middle of Lucifer’s Creek on Sundays.” I shiver, thinking about how the preacher dangled Lo over that raging torrent of sulfur. His Bible is still stashed on a shelf in my closet, and I remind myself to get rid of it. I don’t want it near me. “Maybe him and my granddaddy—”

“Maybe,” I say.

Or maybe Turley was just wracked with guilt.

And Saul was a plain mean drunk.

Maybe Ira was nothing but a greedy killer.

There are some mysteries we’ll never have answers to.

When Nana comes to stand beside me and take my hand, we stare down at the fresh mound of earth at our feet, and I take that moment to ask her a question that’s been on my mind. “How come I never felt her bones? All those bodies singing to me, but never my own mama.”

Nana lays a cool hand on my cheek. Her silver braid shines in the sun and she smiles at me. She’s holding a white rose in her hand. “Your mama was at peace, Dovie girl. She was hurtin’ so bad after Claire died. Couldn’t stand bein’ separated from her like that. Much as she loved you, she knew you’d be all right with Del and me.” She hands her rose to Lo, and he kneels down to lay it on Mama’s grave. “I expect she was glad not to be missin’ Claire no more. And she didn’t want you finding her like that. Just bones. She wouldn’t have done that to you. Or me. That’s the truth of it. She wasn’t grievin’ in her death.”

I think about Nana feelin’ those bones. How that talent came to her as an adult, after she lost Pearl.

And how Mama’s ability came to her as a woman, too. After she lost Claire.

Then there’s me. The music of the bones started humming in my own body when I was just a little girl. Way back when I lost my mama.

“It’s grief,” I realize. “That’s what connects us to them. To the dead. It’s loss. It’s sorrow. It’s grief.”

“Clover women mourn deep,” Nana tells me. “We always have.”

I look across the yard to where Granny Pearl is sitting in a lawn chair in the shade. As I watch, a couple of girls I know from school walk up to her. They giggle together, then one of them leans down low to whisper in Granny Pearl’s ear. Pearl gives the two of them a little knowing nod, then she pulls a tiny bag from her pocket and puts it in the girl’s palm. The girl takes it and blushes. Her friend looks over her shoulder and smiles at me before they walk back to where their mamas are gossiping under the branches of a peach tree.

“Go talk to her,” I tell Nana. “It’s time.”

Pearl looks up and I see her catch Nana’s eyes. Then Nana starts across the grass in her direction.

Later that afternoon, Lo and I hike up the Aux-Arc Trail together. It’s still in the woods. Peaceful and calm. For the first time in years, nothing that walks here walks in fear.

We leave the trail and fight through the ripping thorns to the spot where Lo buried Riley Alden. The spot where I unburied him. We’re bleeding from scratches up and down our arms by the time we settle on the thick, soft grass by the rock where the mountain violets grow. But sometimes you have to bleed.

Sometimes it’s the only way to heal.

We pause to catch our breath and pay our respects to Riley, then we pull ourselves up the steep ravine to the Wilder cabin. Granny Pearl isn’t home yet. She was still sitting on the front porch talking to Nana when Lo and I left the house. Daddy said he’d drive her up the mountain later this evening.

I sit with Lo on the bench beside his mother’s grave, in the clearing behind the cabin. The light is starting to fade. The sky is turning deep purple over the hills. A mourning dove cries in the trees, and Lo leans down to kiss me. I feel his lips against mine. They’re soft and warm and tender. So gentle that it might be the kiss of the mountain breeze. He tastes like honey from the tea we had earlier. Sweet. It makes me hungry, and I pull him closer.

This is familiar now. We know exactly how we fit together in this new way. His hands tangled in my hair. Mine on his chest. The pressure of his lips against my neck. I tilt my head back and open up for him. I breathe his name into the Ozarks. Eyes closed. Mouths open. Fingers searching. This is one more way we have each other memorized.

One more way for us to know each other.

When he pulls away to breathe, Lo whispers that he loves me.

We glance toward the tree line as darkness sweeps down from the hills, and we gasp in unison when we see them. A dark-haired woman and a woman with hair as white as frost walk hand-in-hand through the tall grass. We can’t see their faces, but they glow ghostly and pale under the mountain moon. Just before they reach the shadows, they turn toward each other.

I hear Lo’s breath hitch when he sees them. “Dovie,” he whispers.

“I see them,” I whisper back. “I see them.”

Three generations of Clovers and Wilders reunited.

A curse broken.

A circle completed.

There are things I read in my mother’s diary. Things I haven’t shared with Lo yet. I haven’t been keeping them from him. I’ve just been letting him breathe a little. Waiting for him to be ready. Because it won’t be easy to hear what I need to tell him.

I know that Ira was Lo’s father. Not Turley. Claire said it was Turley because she was desperate for a better life for her baby. Ira didn’t have anything. And maybe she sensed that evil lurking in him, even way back then. So she lied.

It didn’t do her any good, though. Turley wouldn’t have her or her baby.

Mama wrote the truth in her diary, then she buried that metal box under the crepe myrtles before she left our house to reveal the secret that she knew. But Ira never gave her the chance to tell him he was a father.

And she never made it back home.

She was leaving that diary for me. Maybe she knew that. Or maybe she just felt it somehow.

I know for sure that’s why she started coming back home to visit.

Why she revealed herself to Daddy. And to Nana. And eventually to me.

Because she wanted me to find that box and put a stop to what Ira was doing.

“Dovie. Look.” Lo points to his mama’s grave and a single white rose lies across it. “Did you know white roses were the first roses that existed?” he asks me. “The story goes that the pure white roses were tainted with the blood of Aphrodite when she cut herself on the thorns. That’s what turned ’em red.”

“There are things I need to tell you,” I say. “Things I read in Mama’s diary.”

“Okay.” Lo’s eyes are dark and deep tonight. He reaches up to run his thumb over my cheekbone. “I don’t have a diary,” he admits. “I’ve never written anything about you.”

“We don’t need to write about each other on paper,” I tell him. “Our secrets are written on each other’s bones.”

Acknowledgments

This book is a love letter to the Ozark Mountains and the state I called home for a big and important chunk of my life. The wild and beautiful Arkansas Ozarks are steeped in folklore, mystery, and magic. One of the things I loved most about living there was the idea that, in those ancient hills just outside my sleepy college town, anything could happen. To the University of the Ozarks, the institution that really made me who I am, and to the people I met on that campus over the many years I studied and then later worked, taught, and directed there…friends and colleagues and so many theatre students who became family…this book is for every single one of you.

Aside from my STAGES theatre kids, who I will always mention because they are the reason I chose to write for young adults, I especially want to shout out a group of awesome U of O theatre students. India, Grace (and Martin!), Jena, Kalea, and Erin—y’all have been the best cheerleaders on this journey. Thanks for being some of my forever people.

I also have a long list of writer friends to thank for their camaraderie and commiseration. Jenni Howell, Tracy Truels, Alyssa Villaire, Casie Bazay, S.E. Reed, Vanessa Montalban, Catren Lamb, Valerie Lawson, Brenda Maier, Tiffany Thomason, Kim Ventrella, Alysha Rameera, Scarlett St. Clair, Gaye Sanders, Tammi Sauer, Doug Solter…you are all the best. Sarah Blomfield and Lela Fox, I’m including you here, too!

Of course a huge thank-you and lots of love to my whole extended family…but especially to my mother, Anna Myers; my sister, Anna-Maria Lane; and my son, Paul Sain. Also my cousin Becky Kephart and the VERY cool Kit Nease, who are so gracious to welcome us into their home on every trip we make back to Oklahoma. And my nieces and nephews, who are all storytellers in their own way already. Grace, Will, Elizabeth, Sam, Ceci, and Isaac, I’m so proud of you!

Thank you to my agent, Pete Knapp, who I thank my lucky stars for pretty much every day I wake up and get to be a writer, and to the rest of the dream team at Park & Fine Literary and Media, particularly Stuti Telidevara and Danielle Barthel, who keep things running without a hitch, and Abigail Koons, Kathryn Toolan, and Ben Kaslow-Zieve in the foreign rights department.

And, of course, the biggest thank-you to my editor, Rūta Rimas, who is absolutely the best. I couldn’t ask for a better partner in bringing these twisty, magical stories to life. You make this all so much easier. Thanks for responding to my first draft of this book with the note, “Holy howler, does this draft absolutely slap.”

Thanks also to everyone else at Penguin Young Readers, including Jennifer Klonsky, Simone Roberts-Payne, Natalie Vielkind, Felicity Vallence, Kaitlin Kneafsey, Shannon Spann, James Akinaka, Abigail Powers, and Kristie Radwilowicz, who once again made my wildest cover dreams come true with her exquisite creation.

Thanks so much to Berni Vann at CAA, my film and television agent, Philippa Milnes-Smith, Eleanor Lawlor at The Soho Agency, and the wonderful team at Electric Monkey/Farshore Books in the UK, particularly Sarah Levison, Lindsey Heaven, Lucy Courtenay, Olivia Adams, and Rory Codd. Thank you for helping me take these spooky, watery books around the world!

And, lastly, like all my stories, this one is for you, Wes.

About the Author

Ginny Myers Sain is the New York Times bestselling author of Dark and Shallow Lies, Secrets So Deep, and One Last Breath. She lives in Florida and has spent the past twenty years working closely with teens as a director and acting instructor in a program designed for high school students seriously intent on pursuing a career in the professional theatre. Having grown up in deeply rural America, she is interested in telling stories about resilient kids who come of age in remote settings.

Follow her on Twitter @stageandpage and on Instagram @ginnymyerssain or find her on her website at ginnymyerssain.com.

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