“We looked everywhere,” Camilla had insisted. She was no longer talking to Kris. “The entire town looked for her. In the woods. On the lake. We went door-to-door, checking every single house, praying that she’d wandered into someone’s yard and was found. I even started to hope she had been taken. How fucking awful is that? I remember there was a man named Charles … Charles something who took a girl from her front yard in Yates Center a few months before, but the police bungled the case and he went free. And I started thinking maybe Charles What’s His Name was passing through town and stopped at the Pig Stand for a bite and he snatched up Poppy. I wanted that to be true. Because at least it meant she could still be alive. She could still be somewhere close, where we could find her. But she wasn’t anywhere. She was just gone. How do you look away for one second and a little girl just disappears? How the hell does that happen?”
There on the bench at the corner of Center and Ash, occasional morning traffic cruising slowly by, Kris buried her face in her hands and wept. She wept for Camilla and Jesse Azuara. She wept for Poppy, still missing after four painful years. She wept for the other girls, for Ruby and Sarah and Megan. And she wept for the question she had forced herself to ask Camilla, the one she could not take back:
“Do you know … what happened … to the others?”
Camilla had nodded. Yes.
“We didn’t know anything about them when we first moved here. No one said a word, and why would they? But when Poppy … Well, that’s when we started to hear about the other girls. Everybody said there was no connection. But the way people looked at us, it was like we reminded them of something they had tried hard to forget.”
Camilla’s voice had dropped to a whisper so faint, Kris had to lean halfway over the table to hear it.
“Ruby Millan was the first. She was missing for over a week. She was there when her parents went to bed but in the morning, she was just … gone. Everyone assumed she had been kidnapped. It was the ’80s, you know, faces on milk cartons and that movie, Adam, on the TV. Everyone was terrified their child would be the next to be snatched. Maybe that’s why they didn’t really bother searching the woods. It wasn’t until a hiker took a wrong turn off the trail leading through Blanton’s Pass that Ruby was finally found. She was—”
Camilla had swallowed hard, her throat trying to prevent the words from escaping.
“She was curled up in a hollow tree and she was looking out like … like she expected to be found. People said she still had a smile on her face.”
A shudder had rocked Kris’s body. She had tried not to picture the scene, but her mind was determined to form the image. A little girl’s corpse, cheeks pressing against taut, sunken skin, eyes wide and staring from lidless sockets, lips pulled tight over baby teeth in a frozen grin.
“The police,” Camilla had continued, “they assumed she had been dumped, but there was no sign of trauma. No wounds. No bruising.”
At that point, Kris had begun to regret her question. Shame flooded through her. She started to say, “You don’t have to—”
But the story poured from Camilla, just as sweat pours from flesh when a fever breaks. “It was like Ruby crawled into the hole in that tree and just stayed there until she died.”
The tree, Kris had realized in that moment. A hollow tree. Like the oak tree where you played. The Wishing Tree.
Kris had wanted to vomit. Her mouth had suddenly filled with saliva. Her skin had gone slick and flushed. She took deep breaths in and out through her nose, in and out, in and out, trying to keep control of her body.
“Sarah Bell was Albert Bell’s granddaughter,” Camilla had explained. “Do you know Albert Bell? He cuts grass here in town. You’ve probably seen him in his coveralls, with his edger, cleaning up the weeds along Center. He’s been out there every day since he retired. He does it all on his own. Nobody asks him to do it. Nobody pays him.” She said it as if Albert’s dedication to the town should have been a factor in his granddaughter’s fate. “When Sarah went missing, the woods was the first place they checked. A few people in the search party went straight to that oak tree—”
Your tree, her shadow voice purred.
“—but she wasn’t there. It wasn’t until someone spotted a glittery purple bow dangling from the top of a milkweed plant that they realized they were looking in the wrong spot. They hadn’t gone far enough. They should have kept going until they hit the wildflower field just before you get to the lake. You know that spot? Near where you can see the roof of that house poking out of the lake?”
Oh yeah, you know, the shadow at the back of her mind taunted. Don’t you, Kris? Don’t you know?
We used to pretend that was a mermaid’s house, she remembered telling Sadie on an afternoon that felt like an eternity ago.
“There was a shallow hole dug in the middle of the field,” Camilla explained. “You would have missed it unless you walked straight through the flowers. It was a hole about five feet long, about the size of a child.”
Camilla had leaned in closer, her eyes wild, as the story poured out of her.
“It was a grave,” she whispered sharply. “And they said it looked like Sarah dug it herself. There was a sharp stick nearby that she had used to start it, and a flat rock she used to dig it deeper. They said she had dirt under her nails and her fingertips were bloody and raw like she’d used her hands to do the rest. They found her there, just lying in that hole with her eyes closed like she had crawled in and gone to sleep. But she wasn’t asleep. They said the bees had gotten to her. They were starting to make a hive in her … in her mouth …”
Camilla’s throat had gone dry. She took a long sip of her tea before continuing.
“And a few years before Poppy, there was Megan Adamson.”
At this point, Kris had cut her off. She could not bear to hear any more.
“I know about Megan,” she had said.
Megan Adamson, her body found at the bottom of the sandstone chasm known as Blanton’s Pass, where jagged rocks rose up from the earth like shark’s teeth.
The place where Kris had shown Sadie how to wedge a stick between the narrow canyon walls to keep it from devouring you.
Now, at 10:56 in the morning, on a wooden bench in a small town in nowhere Kansas, Kris covered her face with her hands and wished she could forget everything Camilla had told her.
She had played in every one of those places. She could still see herself climbing over the jagged stones. Ducking into the hollow of the oak tree. Counting the bees as they hovered over the blooms in the wildflower field.
She could have been any one of those girls.
Kris felt fingers lightly touch her shoulder, and she flinched.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” It was an elderly woman’s voice. Kris could feel her palsied hand twitching slightly.
Kris did not uncover her eyes. She spoke into her hands, “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” the old woman asked.
“I’m fine. Please. I just need a minute.”
“Okay. Okay, honey. You take all the time you need.”
For several minutes, Kris focused on the sound of her own breaths, slow and steady and cool in her lungs.
When she uncovered her eyes, the old woman had moved on.