Ashley turned back to Becky. “How long has she been here?”
“Literally the whole time,” the girl said, folding her arms. “Just ignore me.”
Ashley blinked. She immediately retraced everything she’d said since storming into the station. Had she been so tired she hadn’t seen someone sitting there? “You’ve just been eavesdropping?”
“It’s not eavesdropping when you’re yelling.” The girl put down the magazine. “A person randomly disappearing into the woods sounds like a ghost, though.”
“It wasn’t a ghost.” Ashley straightened her posture and fixed the girl with a cool glare. “Ghosts aren’t real.”
“Okay.”
“If it was a ghost, that would mean Tristan’s…”
Dead, she thought.
“Dead?” The girl asked. “Maybe. I think my dads did an episode with a lady who saw ghosts of people who were alive, though.”
“Ashley,” Becky said quietly, “ghosts aren’t real. She’s just trying to promote their show. If you wait for Paris to come in, we can do an official report.”
Ashley kept staring at the girl. This was the daughter Alejo had been discussing with her mother at the grocery store. “Is that why you’re here? Just waiting for people to come in so you can make them watch your show?”
The girl scoffed. Her black hair was gathered up in a sleek, short ponytail, eyes murky with the half-lidded stare of a person who hadn’t slept well.
“No,” the girl said. “The show sucks.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Same reason as you. I’m here to see the sheriff.” The girl inspected her nails. “And I’m first in line.”
“What do you need him for?”
“I’m here to report a hate crime.” She flashed a tight-lipped smile. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, right?”
Ashley pursed her lips. She’d only heard a bit of John and Paul’s conversation the night before, but she was sure they were the guilty party. Outside the front window, the sky was gray as marble. The rest of Snakebite was probably waking up. She would have to explain what she’d seen to Bug and Fran. To her mother.
They wouldn’t believe her, either.
“Can we talk outside for a second?” Ashley asked.
The girl eyed her suspiciously. “I’m good. Don’t wanna lose my spot in line. I’ve already waited two hours for someone to take my statement.”
Ashley turned to Becky, who pointedly avoided eye contact. “You can’t just write down what happened and let her leave?”
“She said she wanted to talk to Paris,” Becky said.
The girl shook her head. “No, I said I wanted to report a crime. I’m totally happy to let you help me.”
Becky offered a thin smile. “Of course. Logan Woodley, right?”
“Ortiz-Woodley,” the girl clarified. “It’s hyphenated.”
Logan Ortiz-Woodley. Ashley chewed on the name while Becky took Logan’s information down. Ortiz was a Snakebite name—relatives of Gracia Carrillo, she thought—but Logan wasn’t a Snakebite kid. She was an outsider. She didn’t know the woods or the lake or the rolling hills. She wasn’t burdened with the years of history this town was built on. When Becky promised that Paris would be in touch soon, Ashley wondered if Logan knew the boy who’d done it was the sheriff’s son. She wondered if Logan knew that this report would amount to a “stern talking-to” for John and nothing else. She wondered if Logan understood how things worked in Snakebite at all.
Logan, apparently satisfied, turned to Ashley and arched a brow. “That was shockingly easy. You have my attention.”
Ashley motioned to the door.
They stepped out into the pale morning. The wind was sweet with the scent of lake water, cool and gentle as linen. Ashley inhaled the summer air and felt a little clearer. A little more present. The foggy haze of the night before slowly began to burn away.
“Just so you know, I don’t actually know if ghosts are real.” Logan fidgeted, placing a hand on her hip and then down again at her side. Her eyes were sunken with exhaustion, trained on the lakefront highway that stretched beyond the parking lot. “I don’t know if that’s what you were gonna ask. But yeah.”
“The thing I saw last night wasn’t a hallucination,” Ashley said.
“You think it was something paranormal?”
“I don’t know. Have you ever seen anything paranormal?”
Logan grimaced. “No. Never.”
“Oh.”
“But you don’t want it to be paranormal,” Logan said. “You wanna find this Tristan dude, right? Alive?”
Ashley nodded.
Logan mulled over it for a moment. Her expression was difficult to read, both pensive and worried. She rubbed her palm over the back of her neck, eyes trained on the pavement.
“The F-word wasn’t the only thing on my dads’ door last night.” Logan closed her eyes and exhaled. “It said you killed him, too.”
Ashley sucked in a breath. John and Paul were the ones who’d done the graffiti. Writing you killed him meant John and Paul thought Tristan was dead. Anger boiled up in Ashley’s chest. All the searches, all the vigils, all the times they said we’ll find him soon … they didn’t believe any of it. It was all for show.
Logan cleared her throat. “Do people think my dads hurt someone?”
“I don’t know who put that on—”
“I’m not saying you know anything,” Logan said, hands raised in surrender. “I’m asking about what it said. Do people think my dads hurt that guy, or is this how you guys greet all gays?”
Ashley blinked, briefly staggered by how casually Logan said it. “I don’t really have an opinion.”
“Oh my god. I’m not asking your opinion. I’m asking if everyone in this town thinks my dads killed someone.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
Logan exhaled. “Why?”
“Tristan went missing in January. A week after your dad got here.” Ashley cleared her throat. “You have to admit, it’s kinda…”
“I don’t have to admit anything,” Logan said. “Where did people see him last?”
Ashley closed her eyes. “I was the last one who saw him. He was over at my place. And then he disappeared.”
“Oh.” Logan’s eyes widened. “Were you two—”
“Dating. Yeah.”
“Yikes.”
It was the most inappropriate reaction to the disappearance that Ashley had heard so far. And somehow, it was the most refreshing. Logan bundled her arms into her sweater sleeves and crossed her arms. “You’ve been looking for him?”
“Yeah,” Ashley said. “It’s weird, but it’s like I still feel him here. I have these flashes of him, like he’s right next to me. And then last night…”
Logan pressed her fingers to her lips, considering. Warm wind buffeted along the highway, warmer than it should be this early in the morning. Beads of sweat pricked at the back of Ashley’s neck. After a moment, Logan exhaled.
“You want help finding him?”
Ashley paused. “Why would you help me?”
“Because if we find him, he’s not dead. And everyone will know my dads didn’t do anything.”
Ashley nodded. “That makes sense.”
“It doesn’t have to be a whole thing,” Logan said. “Let’s just go to where you saw him last night.”
Ashley’s eyes widened. “Now?”
“Why not?” Logan asked. Her half-smile was unsettlingly amused. “I help you, you help me. And once we find your boyfriend, my dads can finish the show and leave.”
Ashley extended a hand. She wasn’t sure if this was the kind of arrangement where you shook hands, but it felt right. The wind that slipped between them was soft as a whisper.
Logan took her hand and shook.
“Temporary partners,” Logan said.
Ashley smiled. “Sounds good to me.”
11
The Piano-String Woods
Logan sat
in the passenger’s seat of Ashley’s truck in the gravel driveway of Barton Ranch.
Sunlight glinted from the perfectly square windows of the ranch house, framed by pristine white siding and gray trim. The walkway to the black front door was lined with hedges, each one packed with blooming white flowers. Beyond the house were stretches of pasture that looked as if they went on forever. The horizon was a patchwork of green and gold. It looked like the kind of place she’d see on HGTV, pretty and sprawling and nondescript. At least there was no picket fence.
She tried to shake off the weight of her night. The last few hours were a blur—the nightmare, the slur on her fathers’ door, the police station, and now this. Now she was waiting for Princess Snakebite herself to emerge from her quaint ranch house in clean clothes so they could investigate her missing boyfriend.
Logan couldn’t make it up if she’d tried.
Finally, Ashley stepped out of the house in a baseball cap and a faded yellow T-shirt that read BARTON LUMBER. She looked a thousand times more awake than the girl Logan had met in the police station an hour ago, but shadows still circled her bright blue eyes. She was putting on a happy face, but there was only so much it could cover.
Ashley climbed into the driver’s seat. “Ready?”
Logan threw on her sunglasses. “Is this your dad’s truck?”
“Nope,” Ashley chimed. “She’s all mine.”
“This is the car that you drive?”
Ashley scoffed. “Tell me the last time you hauled something in a Tesla.” Her voice was more rural when she said Tesla, like the word itself was a rusty tool she’d pulled from her belt for the first time in years.
“You’re so full of shit. I’d never drive a Tesla.”
“Should you tell your dads where we’re going?” Ashley asked.
“They won’t care.” Logan eyed the ranch house. “Did you tell your parents where we’re going?”
Ashley grimaced.
“Cool. A secret mission.” Logan smiled. “Let’s do it.”
They pulled away from Barton Ranch and followed the dusty highway until the single-story houses of Snakebite fell away and only golden hills and divots of gravel remained. The landscape was miles from Logan’s visions of the northwest. She’d spent years imagining emerald forests and misty mountain ranges and lonely, tree-tunneled roads. Instead, she got hills that looked like clenched knuckles, rolling one after the other into nowhere.
That was where she was now: nowhere.
Ashley yanked the truck across the two-lane highway without warning, veering onto a road that followed the lakeshore. The Ford thumped from pavement to gravel, momentarily upheaving the clothes and textbooks from the back seat. Logan gripped the dashboard and closed her eyes to keep from puking, but Ashley was unfazed. She commanded the truck as though she were a cowboy breaking an unruly steed, one hand firmly on the reins, leaning into each bump and skip with ease.
“So, the spot is a ways past the turnout,” Ashley said. She flipped her visor down and plucked a pair of pink sunglasses from its grasp. “I hope you have walking shoes.”
Logan inspected her strappy leather sandals under the glove box. “I’ll be fine. Anything’s a walking shoe if you believe in yourself.”
“Ha,” Ashley huffed, humorless.
The truck skipped over a pothole and Logan’s sunglasses toppled to the floor of the truck. Ashley smiled at her smugly, as if she thought handling bumps in the road was something only girls from Snakebite could do. The Ashley Barton who drove the Ford was different from the one Logan had met at the police station. She was unbothered, casually slouched in her seat, T-shirt shifted carelessly above her belly button. The sun-kissed skin of her stomach was dappled with light brown freckles.
Logan stared for a moment too long.
She sat back up and focused on the road ahead. She was gay, but not thirst-after-straight-horse-girl gay.
After half an hour, the gravel road spilled into a makeshift turnout at the edge of the woods. Lake water pulsed at the shore to their left. Darkness gathered in the junipers ahead of them where the trees huddled too close to see between. Something about the quiet made Logan feel ill.
“This is where you guys go for fun?” Logan asked.
“Not here,” Ashley said, hopping out of the truck. “Follow me.”
Logan did. The nausea she’d felt in the truck only deepened as they crossed the tree line. It wasn’t fear so much as unease. The woods were quieter than they should have been. But maybe this was how woods always were—she wasn’t a frequenter of the great outdoors. A gentle clawing dread rummaged in her gut, warning her that something waited here.
Ashley strode along, touching each trunk as though the bark held secrets. Her lemon-blond ponytail, tucked through the gap in her baseball cap, bobbed between her shoulder blades with each step. Logan couldn’t help imagining her in a granola bar commercial.
When Logan and her fathers lived on the road, they’d spent nights between towns parked on highway shoulders along woods like this. Bugs and passing cars were bad, but the isolation was worse. In the woods, there was no exit. People who died weren’t found for months, if at all. She’d imagined the branches like misshapen fingers beckoning her into the dark, waiting to snatch her away. Maybe it was the woods that had snatched Tristan Granger.
“Here,” Ashley said suddenly. “This is where we were.”
Logan walked down to the water where the dirt dissolved into dust and rock. The shore formed an alcove just large enough to swim in without being seen from the lake proper. A few feet away, half submerged in water, a black bikini top was snagged on a rock. It swayed along the incoming waves like a solemn flag.
“Cute,” Logan said. She hooked her toe under a strap and picked it up. “Yours?”
Ashley flushed. She snatched the bikini top away and flicked the water out before tying it to her purse strap. “It’s not mine, it’s my friend’s.”
“Your friend had a good night,” Logan said. “Better than you, I guess.”
Ashley turned to face the lake. She stepped up to the water line and closed her eyes, one hand on her hip, the other clasping the bikini top as if she were channeling it for clues. Logan was tempted to stand in the same pose and see if any visions of missing boyfriends came to her, but she wasn’t feeling quite that mean. Not today, at least.
“What are we looking for?” Logan asked.
Ashley marched up the bank, back toward the trees. “I was by the fire when I saw him. He went into the trees.”
“You followed him?”
Ashley didn’t answer. She kept walking, disappearing into the trees. Logan half jogged to catch up. The woods were quieter the deeper they went. They reached a clearing where the trees fell away and the lake was only a distant line of blue beyond the branches. A battered cabin stood a few feet ahead of them. There was a sound under the silence. Logan closed her eyes to hear it better.
The woods weren’t quiet. Not completely.
Music drifted between the trees. It was a piano song trickling through the quiet somewhere nearby. The sun filtered through the bare branches, dousing the world in lonely magic. The piano played a ghost song, haunting and strained; unbearably sad, but beautiful.
“You guys have a lot of pianos in the woods?” she asked. Her laugh was breathy, uneasy, because joking about the ghost song was easier than trying to wrap her head around it. It was the kind of thing her dads would investigate on TV. But Brandon and Alejo weren’t here now. Whatever this was, it was real.
“I know where it’s coming from,” Ashley said. She moved toward the cabin. She was too casual about all of it, like it was normal to dive headfirst into the paranormal. Because that was what the piano in the woods had to be—paranormal. As far as Logan could tell, no one lived out here. Aside from the crumbling cabin, the woods were empty.
Logan moved in front of her, hands raised to slow her down. “You want to go toward the ghost piano?”
“It’s not a ghost pia
no.” Ashley scooted around her. “But get your, uh … stuff ready. I don’t know who’d be playing it.”
Logan froze. “Wait, what stuff?”
“Like from the show. The thing that finds ghosts.”
Logan blinked.
“You’re supposed to be the ghost hunter,” Ashley snapped.
“Why would I have gear on me? We didn’t even stop at the motel.”
“I thought you guys just carried that stuff with you.” Ashley grimaced. “You don’t have anything on you?”
“I don’t even know if the stuff my dads use is real.” Logan laughed. “Besides, I was only on the show one time. I barely know how to use it.”
Ashley rolled her eyes. A warm breeze sifted through the junipers and the sunlight through the branches was thick as gold. The piano music continued, soft and sweet and lilting on the wind. Ashley looked at Logan, then turned toward the cabin. Logan’s heart skipped a beat. There was something familiar about it, just like there was something familiar about the trees. It was just beyond her reach, a hair fainter than memory.
“It’s coming from in here,” Ashley said. Her voice was so soft it sounded like she was in a trance. “I’ll show you.”
They hiked to the front of the building. Cabin was a generous word. The structure was completely broken down, wooden planks that once stood upright now bent as though the sky had pressed its palm to the roof and slanted the whole thing. The windows were smashed, fractals of broken glass sticking jagged from the rotten frames. Pillows of moss coated the corners of the roof.
“Do you smell that?” Ashley asked.
Logan closed her eyes. There was a distinct smell coming from the cabin, like spiced cider and wood smoke. It was a smell she remembered, though she couldn’t place it. It conjured up memories of laughter she couldn’t quite hear. She tasted blackberries on her tongue. The bones of a memory were scattered before her, but she couldn’t bring them to life. It was suffocating, this familiarity.
“You’ve been here before?” Logan asked.
“Yeah…” Ashley trailed off. “We come here sometimes to hang out. I’ve never been here during the day, though. It’s … different.”
The Dead and the Dark Page 7
