Whispering Pines

by Heidi Lang

  A singsong voice breathed his name, no louder than the wind.

  Caden froze, every nerve in his body instantly plunged in a wash of icy fear. He wanted to pull the blankets over his head and hide, like he used to do when he was little. But now that he was older, he knew blankets couldn’t save him from the things in the dark. So he lunged forward instead, his fingers grasping for the reading lamp on his desk. They hit the firm porcelain, and the lamp slid to the floor.

  Crack!

  Cursing, Caden stumbled toward the thick curtains at his window, frantically shoving them, almost ripping them down in the process. Beautiful, glorious moonlight filled the room, illuminating the fact that he was completely alone.

  It took a few more minutes before his breathing slowed, his racing heart easing back into its normal rhythm. He looked at his sad, cracked lamp and shook his head. There was no hope for it; he would just have to get another one.

  He flipped the light switch next to his howling wolf poster, squinting against the sudden brightness, and glanced at his bed. A tangle of blankets lay beside it, his comfy pillow spilled next to them on the floor. He picked those up, and then he turned and made himself check the perimeter of his room. He’d placed protective gemstones in all four corners, and three of them were exactly where they should be.

  But the fourth, the one that was supposed to sit in the corner between his closet and his shelf of horror novels, had moved. Someone or something had rolled it several inches farther into the room.

  Caden’s heart sounded unnaturally loud in his ears as he bent and picked up the rose quartz. It was surprisingly warm, and he curled his fingers around it, then gently laid it back in its corner where it belonged.

  7. RAE

  Rae woke up all at once, the way she did lately in this new place, in this new room. The light hit her window strangely, and her bed didn’t feel right, and the air smelled different. Just little things, but enough to make her feel like a pebble in a jar of marbles.

  She sat up, pushing that thought away. She would make herself fit in. Yesterday no one at school had called her names or chased her down the hallway, so she was already way ahead of where she’d been at her last school. In fact, thanks to Vivienne, she’d sat in the middle of the most crowded table at lunch and was quickly becoming friends with a handful of other girls.

  That made her think of Brandi, her first almost friend here. Rae glanced at her desk, her decoy corkboard firmly in place over her research. Then she got dressed and headed downstairs to the kitchen, where she could hear the water running and the low hum of her mom’s new favorite oldies station, Big C 103.

  Her mom stood in front of the sink wearing baggy jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, her hair pulled up in a messy bun, a dish towel clutched in one hand and a dirty dish in the other. She could have been posed like that for one minute or several hours, her brown eyes fixed on some invisible speck straight ahead.

  “And now, back to the greatest hits of the eighties, nineties, and—”

  Rae clicked the radio off. “Maybe you should save some of that water? You’ve probably destroyed a whole fishy habitat by now.”

  Her mom blinked, then blinked again, finally focusing on Rae. She smiled. “Sorry, love. Good morning. You ready for school?”

  “Mostly,” Rae said.

  Her mom nodded and began scrubbing at the dish, as if she were a show that had been temporarily set on pause. After it was spotless, she set it inside the dishwasher. Rae used to argue with her that the whole point of a dishwasher was so you wouldn’t have to wash your dishes yourself, but her mom did it anyhow. By now, Rae had given up trying to stop her.

  “Cross-country tryouts are on Saturday,” Rae said, wanting to break the silence.

  “That’s nice.” Her mom picked up another dish. Scrub, scrub, scrub, rinse, and into the dishwasher.

  “Assuming they aren’t canceled. You know, because… because of Brandi.” Rae swallowed.

  “Hmm.”

  Rae was suddenly irritated. She’d told her mom about Brandi. After all, it wasn’t very often that she made a friend. At least, lately. “You know, Brandi?” she demanded. “Our next-door neighbor?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She vanished yesterday. No one knows what happened to her.”

  “Good to make new friends.”

  Rae sighed. It was going to be one of those conversations. Sometimes Rae felt like she was her own radio station with the volume turned slightly too low. Her mom pretended to hear her without actually listening to what she said. She’d been like that ever since Rae’s dad went missing, almost like part of her had gone with him.

  “Morning!” Ava chirped, skipping down the stairs. “Mom, mind if I take the car tomorrow?” She grinned. “I’m asking preemptively. As requested.” It had been a constant fight ever since Ava got her driver’s license last year; she would ask for the car last minute and then get mad when it wasn’t available.

  “Aren’t you becoming responsible?” Their mom smiled, her attention snapping back into focus now that Ava was around, and Rae realized it wasn’t that part of her mom had left with her dad at all. It was more that her mom acted like maybe Rae had left with her dad. Like she wasn’t really there either.

  Rae scowled.

  She missed the way her family was like before. When her dad disappeared, it was as if the glue holding them together had gone too, and they were all drifting further and further apart from one another. When she found her dad again, would they be able to go back to what they’d been? Or had her family changed forever?

  “And sure, you can take the car,” their mom continued, “as long as you take your sister to her appointment tomorrow afternoon.”

  Rae’s scowl deepened. “My what?”

  “With your new psychologist.” Her mom went back to scrubbing another plate. “We talked about this.”

  “Yeah, we did! And I said I didn’t need to see a therapist anymore.”

  Her mom shrugged. “Humor me.”

  “Mom. Seriously.”

  “Go for a month, okay? Just during this transition. Please, love?”

  Rae shook her head. Therapy sessions belonged to the old Rae, the one who hadn’t known to keep her mouth shut about what she’d seen. Here she was supposed to be a new person. How could she go talk to someone if she didn’t plan on actually talking?

  “Meet at Kat’s Café tomorrow after school?” Ava asked Rae. “That way I can avoid the unwashed masses of middle schoolers.”

  “Only some of them are unwashed,” Rae grumbled. “And I don’t know where that place is.”

  “It’s just across the street from your school. You can’t miss it.” Ava glanced at their mom, but she was into her dishes again. “Tell you what. You agree to meet me there, and I’ll give you cash to pick us both up a drink and a sandwich.”

  Rae hesitated, but in the end, she did love a good mocha, and her mom almost never let her have one. “Fine, whatever.” Rae turned her back on her sister and rummaged in the cupboards for a bowl, spoon, and box of cereal. It wasn’t that long ago that Rae would have been excited to meet her sister at a café. But these days she wasn’t really speaking much to Ava. Their mom might have made them move, but it was Ava who’d dragged them so far away. All because she just had to go to WestConn University next year. As if there weren’t perfectly good universities much closer.

  Rae knew it was really because her sister had given up on their dad. She hadn’t been quite as close to him as Rae had been, so she’d written him off and gone on with her life, and now she wanted everyone else to do the same thing. It made Rae so angry. She jabbed her spoon into her cereal and took a bite.

  “Don’t you want milk with that?” Ava asked.

  Rae chewed the dry stuff and swallowed it down. “No,” she lied. “I like it this way.” She took another bite, even though it tasted like sugary sawdust.

  “If you say so. See you later. Bye, Mom!”

  “Bye, honey.”

  Rae
waited until her sister was gone and then grabbed the milk. Her mom didn’t say anything else to her as Rae poured it and ate the rest of her cereal. Instead, the kitchen filled with the sounds of Rae’s crunching and her mom’s dish washing.

  Rae finished eating as quickly as possible, silently handed her mom the bowl and spoon, and headed out to wait for the bus.

  The worst part about her mom’s lack of interest was that her dad would have been so excited to watch her try out for cross-country. Rae’s vision blurred, the trees all running together. She squeezed her eyes shut, breathing slowly through her nose. The last thing she wanted was to be crying when the bus came, but she missed him so much.

  He was the one who introduced her to running.

  Every year for Thanksgiving, Rae, her sister, and her parents would go on a sunrise hike together. They’d been doing that tradition for as long as Rae could remember, since she was small enough to be carried in a pack.

  Four years ago, when she was eight, she’d asked her dad why they only really did hikes once a year.

  We hike other times, he said.

  Like when?

  Like… tomorrow. And so the next day, he and Rae had headed out to a park to hike while Ava and her mom slept in. Her dad let her pick the trail, and afterward they’d gone for milkshakes at a nearby diner.

  You know, this was a lot of fun, he said. How about we do it again sometime? He grinned, his teeth flashing in his beard. He always let it grow in the winter. Rae’s mom hated that, but Rae liked how it made him look like a nerdy mountain man, what with his glasses and his tendency to wear too much plaid.

  Can we run the downhills? she asked.

  Soon they were running every Saturday, and sometimes once or twice during the week too, until her dad got too busy with work. And at the end of fifth grade, when she told him she was thinking of trying out for cross-country the next year, he was delighted. Before he disappeared, he’d already marked all the meets on his calendar so he could make sure he got the time off to go to them.

  Rae had taken that calendar from his office the night he didn’t come home. It was one of the only things of his she had left.

  “Hey,” Caden said.

  Rae jumped, her eyes flying open.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Apparently, I often have that effect on people.”

  Rae tried to smile.

  Caden’s eyebrows drew together, his forehead creasing. “Are you okay?”

  “Me? Yeah, totally.” She ran the back of her hand over her eyes, trying to be casual about it.

  “Because if you want to—”

  The bus rumbled to a stop in front of them, the door creaking open. Caden gave her a quick, inscrutable look and then headed on, leaving Rae to follow him.

  She paused at the top of the steps, staring out across all those seats. Everyone was looking at her, and she wasn’t sure where to sit.

  Caden shifted over, leaving space next to him.

  Rae looked at that empty seat and hesitated. Caden seemed all right, but he was the school loner. If she sat with him, would she be treated like a loner too? She already knew exactly what that felt like; she didn’t want to end up in that same place at this school too. Immediately she felt guilty for being so shallow, but—

  “Rae! Over here!” Vivienne waved at her from the middle of the bus.

  Rae hurried down the aisle and sank gratefully onto the padded bench next to Vivienne just as the bus began moving again.

  “You looked a little lost,” Vivienne said. “It was like staring at a baby deer.”

  “I felt a little lost,” Rae admitted. “Thanks for making space for me.”

  “Oh, anytime. Usually no one sits next to me because of this.” Vivienne patted her humongous backpack, wedged in between them. “But you’re small enough, I figured we could all fit.”

  “What do you carry in there?” Rae asked, fascinated by all the bulging pockets. She’d never seen a backpack so full.

  “Stuff,” Vivienne said casually. “A girl can never be too prepared.”

  “So, have you heard anything else about Brandi?” Rae asked. “Did they find her?”

  “Not yet.”

  Rae’s heart sank. That meant Brandi had been gone for at least twenty-four hours. She knew from her own research that the first forty-eight hours were the most crucial; after that, potential leads dried up as people’s memories faded, their information becoming less reliable. And after seventy-two hours, there were usually almost no leads at all.

  “Don’t look so worried,” Vivienne said. “She might turn up tomorrow, or a week from tomorrow.” She launched into the newest theories, that Brandi had decided to live in a yurt in the woods—“It’s happened before. Not with Brandi, but we’ve definitely misplaced students that way. Sometimes a yurt, sometimes a tree house, once there was a cave…”—to the theory that she’d run off with the lead singer of Seeking Samantha, a local high school band. “I know for a fact she was a huge fan.”

  “What about the sinkhole?” Rae asked, thinking of the articles she’d read and those bizarro school rules pinned up in the office.

  “Which one?” Vivienne asked.

  Rae blinked. “Is there more than one?”

  “Oh yeah. We have a couple that pop up every once in a while. You know that cave in the woods I mentioned? Supposedly there’s a whole cave system attached to it right below the town, and sometimes it gets unstable and the ground will just collapse.”

  Rae’s jaw dropped.

  Vivienne laughed. “Relax. It’s just a rumor. I mean, it’s also totally true, but no biggie.”

  “So there are caves under us?”

  “At least a few that I’ve seen.” Vivienne picked at her backpack.

  “And… and there are random sinkholes?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s indisputable fact.”

  “So there are random sinkholes, and you said yesterday that one or two students go missing every year,” Rae said slowly.

  Vivienne nodded.

  “And people still live in this town because… why?”

  Vivienne laughed. “You can’t beat the cost of living here. At least, that’s what my mom always says. Plus, our schools are really good.”

  “As long as you make it to graduation day,” Rae muttered, wondering if her own mom had done any research at all before moving here. Did she know what a strange place this was?

  “Besides, there are a ton of well-paying jobs in the area. I mean, most of them are with Green On!, but still.”

  “What is Green On!?” From yesterday’s paper, Rae knew they had some kind of science lab, but that was it.

  “It’s this super-large company devoted to coming up with renewable energy sources,” Vivienne said. “They employ, like, half the town in some way or other. My mom works for them, in fact. She’s kind of a big deal there.”

  “Oh yeah? What does she do?”

  “She heads the nuclear division.”

  “Oh,” Rae said, impressed.

  “You know, when she’s not working in one of their secret labs.” Vivienne said it so offhandedly, Rae couldn’t tell if she was joking, but it still sent shivers down her spine. Secret labs? Energy research? It reminded her too much of her dad’s project, even though this was on the other side of the country. There was no way any of this had anything to do with him.

  “So, this company…,” Rae began, right as the bus stopped and Alyssa got on.

  “Alyssa! Yoo-hoo!” Vivienne yelled.

  Alyssa grinned over at her, but the moment she saw Rae sitting there, her grin slid away, and by the time she reached them, she looked a little annoyed. “I thought you didn’t like sharing your seat?”

  “No, no.” Vivienne waved a hand. “I said my bag doesn’t like sharing. But it’s okay with Rae-Rae here. She doesn’t take up much space.”

  Rae smiled, sudden happiness filling the cold spot inside her and spilling out.

  “You can sit back here
with us,” a boy called.

  Rae craned her neck, recognizing Jeremy a few seats back. He was sitting next to another boy with pale blond hair and dark eyes, his nose long and straight. He was almost too good-looking, like he belonged in a television show. He caught her looking and smiled at her.

  Rae looked away, strangely uneasy.

  “Don’t do it,” Vivienne warned Alyssa. “You’ve been down that road before, my friend. It’s ugly and unpaved.”

  Rae laughed.

  “I think I’ll take my chances,” Alyssa said, shooting them both a look and then heading down the aisle.

  Vivienne sighed. “That girl.”

  “Well, at least you still have me,” Rae said, feeling bold.

  Vivienne grinned. “I’m glad you moved. I think you’ll like it here.”

  “I think I might,” Rae said. And for the first time in over a year, she almost forgot about her missing dad and relaxed as Vivienne chatted away, the rumble of the bus a soothing undercurrent beneath her feet.

  8. CADEN

  Caden sat on the bus with his sketchpad open on his lap and listened to Rae chatting with Vivienne Matsuoka like they’d been friends forever. Part of him was envious; what must it be like to move to a new school and make friends with one of the most popular kids so quickly? To fit in immediately?

  He didn’t care about things like that. He didn’t need friends. He was totally fine on his own.

  “Sure you are.”

  Caden glanced around. No one was there. For a second, he could have sworn he heard his brother’s voice. He started reaching for his pendant, then caught himself and clasped his hands in his lap instead. Because it was ridiculous to be afraid. His brother was gone.

  “Maybe I’m not as gone as you think. Or… as you wish.”

  Caden let himself grab his pendant this time, holding it so tightly the stone dug into the palm of his hand. He was just tired, and imagining things. He squeezed his eyes shut and desperately hoped that was true, trying not to remember the feeling he’d had last night. That his brother was in the room, watching him.

  For one trembling second, he pictured Aiden the way he’d been in that final moment: face full of triumph, dark eyes reflecting back a pulsing sickly yellow light. Caden remembered how his brother had turned toward him, holding his arms wide. He couldn’t resist gloating. I told you I’d do it. But he never should have turned his back, because he didn’t see the creatures coming up behind him.