It was a selfie. A night-time selfie, lit up by the flash.
Jeremiah had stretched out his short arm to take the picture. I saw the familiar face of that happy, innocent boy, the face that had haunted us for a decade after he went missing. He had messy hair in need of a cut. One crooked tooth in his huge smile. But I wasn’t focused on Jeremiah, because he wasn’t alone in the selfie.
No, he had his face pressed against the cheek of his best friend, who wore the same big, fearless grin that he did. They were two children off on an adventure. Hunting for the Ursulina.
Jeremiah. And Anna.
She was with him.
I recognized the background in the photograph. The two of them stood in front of the apple-red door of Keith Whalen’s barn. The night of November 14. The night Colleen had been killed.
They both saw it happen.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Anna was gone. Her bedroom door was open. My first thought was: She knew. She knew I was going to find that picture.
I rushed out of the bedroom to search for her, but my sixth sense made me turn around and go back inside. I felt an unspeakable horror in that room. I went directly to her dresser and ripped open the top drawer and threw the clothes inside onto the floor. I pulled out everything until the drawer was empty.
It was gone. I knew she always kept it there, but it was gone.
She’d taken her gun with her.
I flew down the stairs in the grip of a desperate fear. Few things have ever scared me in my life, but I was terrified. The door to the backyard was ajar. She’d left it that way, as if knowing I’d follow her sooner or later. I pushed through the screen door onto the wet grass and screamed her name into the gauzy moonlight.
“Anna!”
The frogs croaked, the insects buzzed, but I heard nothing else.
I saw the tracks of footprints leading through the grass past the gazebo, disappearing onto the cemetery path. I ran. When I reached the trees, I was blind, because the moonlight couldn’t penetrate the crown of the forest. I was crying, and I kept screaming her name.
“Anna! Where are you?”
I stumbled my way down the trail. Roots and rocks tripped me up. Branches and wet leaves slapped my face. The thunder of the frogs made me want to cover my ears. I broke free into one of the cemetery groves, where the sky opened up and the graves were bathed in silver light. It was empty except for the dead. Anna wasn’t there. I made a silent plea to the people under the headstones to help me find her, but the ghosts had nothing to say. I was alone.
I knew I could hunt for hours through the dark woods and never find her. She could be anywhere, and she wasn’t answering when I called. But I kept going, running through the maze of trails, driven on by panic. Every time a branch cracked under my feet, I flinched, because my mind was expecting a gunshot.
“Anna!”
I passed more graves silhouetted by the moon. Among the crosses and angels topping the stones, I saw a snowy owl observing me with silent grace. Somehow, I’d expected it to be there. Every crossroad I faced was marked by an owl. It made me finally grasp the truth of what I’d been trying to understand my whole life. All those years ago, the owl that had called me to rescue a child hadn’t come to me because of Jeremiah.
The child who had needed me all along was Anna.
God had rescued me for this moment.
I’d been saved for tonight. Right now.
This was why I was alive and not dead on the doorstep of my father’s house.
I kept running. I knew the path I was on. It was the path that led up and down the shallow hill where Anna and I had skied in the winter, past the diseased old beech tree we called Bartholomew, down into the hollow where Trina’s grave was waiting for us. But not just Trina. Suddenly, I knew why Anna was so reluctant to visit her mother, so unwilling to make her way into the small meadow with those silent spirits. It wasn’t Trina she was afraid to see.
Colleen Whalen was buried there, too.
The trail took me downhill. I ran with the wind pushing me faster and the moon guiding me toward the gap in the trees. I burst into the solemn meadow, and there she was. Anna was a motionless shadow standing in front of Colleen’s grave. Her back was to me. The wind swirled her hair.
I saw the pistol in her hand.
“Anna.”
She didn’t turn around.
“Anna, put down the gun.”
I made my way carefully through the monuments, not wanting to alarm her. I passed Trina and put my hand on the angel adorning her grave, and I could feel something electric, like a voice that said: Save her, Shelby. I glanced at the thickness of the forest surrounding us, and I could feel the hidden eyes of the owls. They were all watching us.
“Anna.”
We were only a few feet apart. I’d come around in front of her. Colleen’s grave was between us, just a flat stone on the earth, with the wet grass and weeds closing around it.
Tears streamed down Anna’s face along with the mist.
A flood, a deluge of tears.
“Anna, tell me what happened that night with Jeremiah.”
She tried to talk, but her throat choked off the words. She shook her head back and forth, and her whole body shivered.
“Please. Tell me.”
Finally, she got the words out, and her voice begged for mercy. “It was my idea.”
“What was?”
“To find the Ursulina.”
“And why go to Keith Whalen’s place to do that?”
“Because I was sure he was hiding it. He was the one who wrote the Halloween story. He knew so much about it. I told Jeremiah that he had to be keeping the Ursulina at his place.”
“So the two of you went over there that Saturday night.”
“Jeremiah didn’t want to go. He was scared, but I made him go. I told him to sneak out of his room and meet me in the woods. And then we took the trail past Black Lake to Mr. Whalen’s place.”
“What did you see there? Who did you see?”
“Nobody.”
“It’s okay, Anna. None of this was your fault. Tell me what you saw. Was Keith there? Did you see Will and Vince? Who was it?”
“Nobody was there,” she moaned. “Just us.”
“Anna, I don’t understand. What happened?”
She tried to tell the story through the tears. “I said we should search the barn. I said maybe he kept the Ursulina in there. I thought he would have it in a cage or something.”
“You went in the barn?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“The Ursulina wasn’t there. Nobody was there. Except I found—”
“What? What did you find?”
She tried to talk. She tried to say it. But she couldn’t. Her whole body heaved with sobs. Her eyes squeezed shut, and her face twisted with misery. Her head hung down against her neck.
“A gun. I found a gun.”
I nearly felt my legs collapse under me.
I’d been wrong. So wrong.
“Oh, no. Oh, no, no. Oh, Anna.”
“Jeremiah said we should leave it, but I said, what if we saw the Ursulina? So I had it in my hand. And we left the barn, and it was so dark, and we couldn’t see anything. We were near the big house—”
I waited. I waited for the truth.
“And there was this noise! Somebody was there! I couldn’t see who it was, but I saw someone, and I was sure, I was sure, I was sure it was the Ursulina. I just pointed the gun at it, and I wasn’t trying to fire or anything, but it went off. It went off. It was so loud. And Jeremiah was like, ‘You got it! You got it, Anna!’ So we went to look, and there was this woman lying on the ground, and all this blood. I just dropped the gun, and we ran. Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Shelby. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened.”