His eyes squint nearly closed, mulling over the question. “Perhaps. Who’s to say where a bottomless lake might end.” He pushes up from the rocking chair and walks to one of the front windows, looking out at the frozen lake, a cluster of empty summer homes, and a boys’ camp across the way. “But you can’t always blame the Wicker Woods,” he adds, “for the bad things that happen.”
I push my hands into my pockets and look past him through the window, at an ocean of spiky green trees for as far as I can see. And beyond, the snow capped mountains poking up into the dark clouds. A place that is rugged and wild. Where bad things happen.
A boy goes missing.
A boy dies.
Who’s to blame?
The morning sun breaks through the clouds, and for a brief moment it passes through every window in Mr. Perkins’s home—illuminating every dark corner, every dust mote tumbling across the wood floor, the stacks of books lining the walls, the old picture frames hanging from bent nails, the cobwebs sagging between the rafters like silky ribbons.
I had hoped for something in coming here, but I’m not sure what. Answers to the wrong questions, answers that Mr. Perkins doesn’t have. If my grandmother was alive, I would go to her and she would draw me into her broad arms and hum a melody only she knew until I drifted off to sleep. And in my dreams, she would whisper answers to all the things I needed to know. When I woke, my heart would feel clear and raw and new, a feeling like being untethered. A dizziness that made you want to laugh.
But she is gone and my mom is not here and all I have is Mr. Perkins.
I am alone.
“Thanks,” I tell him, my voice solemn. I walk through clouds of heat to the front door and pull it open. I feel weighted and worthless and adrift. A Walker who doesn’t know what she should do next. Who to trust.
Before I can escape out into the cold, Mr. Perkins clears his throat, now standing behind me. “A moth follows you,” he says.
My eyes lift to see a white bone moth skimming along the porch roof.
My heart stills in my chest—afraid to move.
“I’ve seen it many times now,” I say softly, the cold cutting through me. The truth I can’t avoid.
“And you know what it means?” he asks from the doorway.
My jaw clenches, and when I open my mouth to speak, I feel the stiff edge along each word. “Death is coming.”
Mr. Perkins’s hands begin to tremble again. “It means you don’t have much time.”
I swallow and look back at him, his expression grim, as if I were the one who was closer to death, not him. A sharp chill settled in the air between us.
“Be careful,” he says at last, turning his gaze to the fireplace—nothing else to be said. That could be said. My fate already decided.
Death is coming for me.
I watch the moth wheel away into the forest beyond Mr. Perkins’s home, vanishing into the rays of sunlight peeking through the dense trees. “Leave me alone,” I hiss up at it, but it’s already gone.
Death lingers. Death is already here.
OLIVER
The pocket watch is gone from my coat.
Nora found it. She knows.
I stand at the window, my heart caving in, and I know nothing will be the same now. She fled the house. Escaped into the dull morning light. And I lied to her. Told her I didn’t know how Max died, didn’t remember. But I had his watch in my pocket.
And she’ll never trust me again.
The wolf is gone too, and when I walk downstairs, Suzy is still passed out on the couch, snoring softly, muttering to herself. I leave through the front door, because I don’t belong here. Not now. Maybe I never did—only fooled myself into believing it. Fooled myself into thinking I could sleep in her home, in the loft, the scent of her pillows like jasmine and rainwater, the feeling of her hand in mine. That I could stay and my memories wouldn’t find me. I could stay and the dark would be kept at bay. Always the dark. Knocking at my skull, finding a way in.
Nora’s footprints pass through the trees, a trail in the snow. But I don’t follow.
I walk around the lake, every step heavy, each inhale a pain in my chest. I should have told her the truth—but the truth is gray and pockmarked, no clear lines separating it from the lies, gaps still marring my memory of that night. My mind an untrustworthy thing.
But the watch was in my coat when I woke in the woods.
And it can only mean one thing.
I reach the boys’ camp and pass the mess hall—everyone already inside for breakfast. They won’t return to their cabins until after dinner, when they will sneak cigarettes and eat the candy bars they keep hidden under their mattresses, where the counselors won’t find them. But the counselors are lazy. They’ve barely taken notice of my return and then immediate disappearance again. I’ve spent only one day in my bunk since I returned from the woods, and not once did a counselor come to speak to me, to haul me off to the main office where the camp director could ask me questions about where I’ve been. About where I was the night a boy died. They’ve stopped caring.
Or maybe the other boys told them a story, a lie. Said I ran away again. Said I made it down the mountain.
The fresh layer of snowfall from last night dusts the landscape, and I make tracks through the trees until I come to cabin number fourteen, and slip inside.
The room is as unremarkable as it was the last time I was here. But this time I’ve come looking for something: a memory maybe, something to explain the black spots in my mind.
Something to make all the pieces fit together.
The cabin smells of damp earth, and I walk to the bunks, willing my mind to remember the rest, to remember what happened that night. The cemetery. Jasper and Rhett and Lin. And Max was there too—he was there and we were all drinking. We were laughing about something, our laughter ringing in my ears. A bell that won’t stop.
I climb the wood ladder and lie on my bunk. Lin’s bunk below mine. And on the opposite wall, Jasper’s and Rhett’s. Four boys to a cabin.
But where did Max sleep? Not here with us—somewhere else.
In a different cabin?
I roll onto my back and squeeze my eyes closed. Why does my brain refuse to remember? What is it blotting out? The truth about what happened. About what I did.
A hole is widening in my chest: the place where I have ruined everything. Where I lied to her. Where I have nothing left to lose.
Nothing to go back to.
No one to trust. No one who trusts me.
I open my eyes and peer up at the low ceiling—at all the little knife marks, the divots and slashes that form words and images and meaningless symbols. The face of a rabbit etched into the wood stares back at me. Several trees carved along the lowest, sloping part of the ceiling, crude lines for every branch, create a tiny forest. Every cussword you can think of has been slashed into the boards. Permanently preserved. Boys’ names crisscross the wood beams, a way to mark their time here—a reminder that a hundred boys have slept in this bunk before me.
But a name catches my eye, carved where the ceiling meets the wall, nearly hidden. Each letter is cut deeply, as if in anger. A night when he couldn’t sleep. When the trees felt too close. The air too cold. His home too far away.
The letters spell: MAX CAULFIELD.
Max slept here. In this cabin. In this bunk.