Prologue
Cale
Yorkshire, England
The police officer regards me solemnly, and then turns to Mum and Dad. “It’s better if your son waits outside.”
I stare between the uniformed cops and my parents, feet rooted to the living room carpet. They’ve come with news about Mirrie, and I want to hear it. My sister’s been missing for two days. No one’s seen her since she left her job at the supermarket in the next village over on Wednesday evening.
Mum comes over to me, her eyes watery and strained. “Do as the officer says, sweetheart.” She barely looks at me as she puts her hands on my shoulders and steers me out into the hallway. I look desperately to Dad, but he’s too focused on the cops to notice what’s happening to me. His face is gray and slack, his dark brown eyes as droopy as a hound dog’s.
None of us have slept since Mirrie didn’t come home, and we’ve barely eaten. We just want Mirrie.
“Just for a few minutes, lad,” the other officer, a woman, says. Her lips are pressed tightly together, and when I meet her eyes they slide away from me. A cold lump of dread fills my belly, and Mum shuts the door in my face.
I press my ear against the wood, but their voices are muffled. As fast as I can, I run out back through the kitchen door and step quickly and quietly through the flower beds until I’m crouched beneath the open living room window.
The female officer is speaking. “…body found up on Red Hill. We believe it’s your daughter.”
There’s a long, animal cry. It takes a moment for me to realize that it’s Dad.
Mum talks over the sound, shrill and defiant. “But it can’t be Mirrie! Why would you think it’s her?”
Exactly, I think fiercely. You don’t know her. We know her. My big sister is fourteen years old and she’s got the longest, softest black hair that you’ve ever seen. She lets me watch Pinky and the Brain and South Park even though she thinks they’re dumb and she’d rather switch the channel to music videos. She makes the best carrot cake I’ve ever tasted, even better than Mum’s. And she wouldn’t have gone up on Red Hill. Not alone at night in November when it’s dark and cold.
“There was a red anorak at the scene, matching the one you described.”
“What about the rest of her clothes?” Mum asks, ready to do battle over details and prove that Mirrie’s fine, Mirrie’s just late, Mirrie’s not the body on Red Hill, which is four miles from here and on the opposite side of the village to her bus stop.
There’s a pause. The male police officer says, “There were no other clothes found at the scene.”
My father speaks for the first time today, his voice thick and confused. “She was…naked?”
It’s not Mirrie, Dad, I think impatiently. Just some other poor girl. Mirrie wouldn’t get naked in the woods. Not in the summer, and especially not in November. It doesn’t make sense to me, but it must mean something to Dad, because he starts to sob.
“Not my little girl. Not Mirrie.”
“There was this as well,” the female officer says, and I hear the crinkle of a plastic bag.
There’s a short silence, and then Mum starts to cry brokenly. I grip the knees of my jeans, wanting to leap up and see for myself what the officers have shown her.
“George, look. The pony. The tennis racket. The ballet shoes.”
I stuff my fist in my mouth and bite down hard. The theater masks. The oak leaf. The squirrel. I know what’s in the bag. It’s Mirrie’s silver charm bracelet. All her favorite things.
“How…” Mum begins, but then she’s crying too hard to speak. I slump against the dahlias, tears running down my face.
Mum takes a shuddering breath. “How did she…did she suffer?”
The male officer clears his throat. He speaks gently, as if what he has to say might be easier to hear that way. “It appears that she was strangled. The anorak cords were wrapped around her throat. We’ll need you to come down to the station to formally identify her.”
“And she’d been…this monster had…”
There’s a short silence, and then the officer says, “She seems to have been sexually assaulted.”
But assault is when you hurt someone, and sex is something grown-ups do with what’s between their legs. I don’t understand. Whoever killed her, did they hurt Mirrie between her legs? Did they use what’s between their legs to hurt her? Is that why they took all her clothes off? But why would someone do that? And if they had to do that, why couldn’t they have let Mirrie come home afterwards?
I throw myself away from the window and run back to the kitchen door. The light’s funny, and my head feels funny too, as if it might float right off my shoulders. I hear a roar of pain and anger. It goes on and on and I can’t escape it. Because it’s me. I’m howling and I don’t think I’ll ever stop. I run into the kitchen to grab a knife from the block as Mum and Dad hurry in. I don’t even recognize them. There’s a cloud of grief so thick around them that if I go to them I think I’ll suffocate.
“Cale!”
I turn and run blindly out across the garden and jump over the wall into the fields. Mum and Dad call after me, but their voices are snatched away by the wind and the sound of my pounding feet. This monster has done this to us, and I’m going to find him and make him pay.
I run and run, across the farm and into the neighboring fields toward Red Hill. He might still be there, whoever did this, and it will have been a he. Only men do horrible things like fight wars and beat each other up outside pubs and kick you in the calf when you’re trying to change into your sports kit. Girls don’t do that. Girls are nice, like Mirrie.
At the last stile before Red Hill, I skid to a stop, breathing hard. The path slopes up toward a heavy sky, wooded thickly with bare gray trees. There are police cars up ahead and people in uniforms standing in clusters. He won’t be here, not where they might catch him.
But he could be nearby.
I start to walk around Red Hill, still clutching the knife in my fist. It’s eight inches long, and very sharp and with a point. Cattle have churned up the muddy fields and I slip more than once, but I don’t let go of the knife. I walk and walk, my mind full of the awful pictures that the police have put in my head. I go all the way to the next village and around the back roads. I see some people, but they’re just farmers, and I’d know the monster who killed my sister right away, wouldn’t I?
But I can’t find him. I can’t find him anywhere. He did this to Mirrie, and now he’s gone.
I scream in frustration and throw my knife. It buries itself three inches deep in the trunk of a chestnut tree. I stare at it for a moment, sniffling, and I feel a little better. Blinking away my tears, I go and yank it out of the wood and step back a few paces. I throw the knife again, but it bounces off the trunk. It takes me a few goes to get the spin right, and then it sticks point-first into the wood.
I throw the knife again, walk forward to pull it from the tree trunk, then step back and throw it again. Over and over. For a while I imagine the tree is the man who hurt Mirrie, that I’m hurling the knife at his chest and he’s screaming and begging for mercy. I don’t give it to him. Not one little shred.