Jeanie, he thought. I’ve got to get Jeanie.
He shoved himself away from his desk, grabbed the doorknob, and twisted, but it didn’t budge. He tried again. The knob didn’t give, not even a little. He veered around, his eyes fixed on his chair. If he couldn’t go through the door, he’d smash the window, then work his way back inside to get his daughter. But his approach toward the chair was cut short. The door flew open again, rattling against the adjacent wall.
Lucas spun around. He hesitated at the now familiar sight of Audra Snow’s old furniture. It was as though the mere motion of the door opening and closing had transported him. The place was the same, but time had reversed itself by over thirty years.
He rushed past Audra’s old living room without giving himself a chance to think. Because if he did think, he’d have to consider how any of what was happening was possible. The people in the orchard. The laughter. The voices. The table. The furniture that had been stacked even after the house alarm had been installed.
Every conclusion seemed insurmountable. Every answer was nothing short of unreal.
That was when it dawned on him, a realization so unbalanced it stopped him short of Jeanie’s bedroom door. Jeffrey Halcomb had asked Lucas to move into this house knowing full well what was inside, what would happen. Halcomb had never intended to grant Lucas the interview he had promised, and Echo’s motives had never been to help Lucas with his book. She’d given him the photographs to keep him where he was, to root him to Pier Pointe.
Because there was something here.
Something no logic-minded person would ever consider real.
Something he himself had cast aside as weird fiction while, perhaps, Jeanie had taken the notion far more seriously.
I don’t want to go to Uncle Mark’s.
I want to stay here.
He tore open Jeanie’s door, and at first he didn’t see her. For a flash of a moment, he was sure his life was over, certain that his body was going to give in beneath the sheer weight of his fear.
“Jeanie?!” He bolted into the room. That was when he saw her, his little girl kneeling inside her closet as if in prayer. A square of black paper rested beside her knees. She didn’t turn to look at him. Jeanie, who was always quick to snap her head around and give him a disapproving glare, didn’t seem to even know he was there.
“Jeanie,” he said, choking on her name. Jeanie’s failure to respond only heightened his anxiety. He stumbled toward the closet, caught himself on the jamb, his mouth going dry at what he saw. There, covering the wall, were pictures of Jeffrey Halcomb and his family. Jeff, outlined in yellow highlighter to give him an angelic, ethereal glow. Jeff’s photo framed with squiggles of black Sharpie and silver paint pen—swirls and curls and hearts and childish sentimentality. Jeff winked at him from a small wallet-sized portrait Lucas hadn’t seen before.
You’re too late, it said. I can love your kid better than you ever could.
Something inside him shifted. His apprehension began to dwindle beneath the smolder of anger—the same impatient ire that had consumed him not more than a few hours before.
“Jeanie.” Lucas took a single step forward. He extended his arm, grabbed her shoulder. It woke her from her daze. She turned her head, and for a brief moment, her eyes were far away.
“Jeanie . . .” The uttering of her name lifted a veil from her face. That distant, almost glazed-over stare melted away, leaving his daughter alert, startled. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “What is this?” His gaze settled on what he could only imagine to be a makeshift Halcomb shrine.
He could read her expression. She had seen something. While he was downstairs, hearing the laughter of dozens of people, seeing the shadow of Jeffrey Halcomb standing in the corner of the living room, something had happened to Jeanie as well. But rather than figuring out what that was, he caught her by the arm and pulled her up. The sheet of paper crumpled beneath one of her feet, the silver pen too light to read.
Suddenly, she tore her arm away from him as if revolted by his touch. “No!” she screamed. “Leave me alone! I have to finish this, I have to do what I said!”
“What are you talking about?” He reached for her again, but Jeanie shoved him away. “Stop.” He nearly barked the word. “We’re getting out of this house. Now.”
He grabbed her, wrenched her toward the door, but somehow she stayed in place. Eighty-five pounds of little girl, and he couldn’t budge her from where she stood. Her feet were cemented to the floor.
“Jeanie, stop screwing around! We need to go!” He pulled her forward again, but she was rooted in place. She was made of stone, and he had suddenly lost all his strength. “I’m serious, Virginia.”
Jeanie shook her head at him. There was something wrong with his kid. He watched her narrow her eyes and slowly cant her head to the side. She didn’t have to say the words for him to read her questioning expression.
Virginia . . . ? Who’s Virginia?
“This is crazy . . .” he said. “Don’t be weak.” He didn’t reach out again. But he couldn’t just leave her there, no matter how inexplicably angry he suddenly felt. The girl who was standing in front of him looked like his child, but it wasn’t Jeanie—not anymore. And he wasn’t sure he even cared. Fuck it, he thought. Let her mother deal with her. But he couldn’t just leave her.
“Jeanie,” he said, trying to reel in his agitation. “I don’t care what you promised to whom, you understand? Let’s go.”
She didn’t move.
Goddammit!
He reached toward her again, but he didn’t make contact. Just before his fingers grabbed hold of her arm, a rush of air hit him square in the chest. It was like a bottled hurricane, uncorked, pointed directly at him. He was nearly knocked off his feet as he stumbled backward, away from the closet and out of Jeanie’s room. The small of his back cracked hard against the upstairs railing. It was the only thing that kept him from flying head over feet to the red bricks of the ground floor. The wooden banister shuddered against the sudden impact. His legs folded beneath him like broken twigs.
The anger was gone, leaving nothing but panic.
But despite his rapid-fire pulse, his attention never wavered from his daughter. He was zeroed in on her as he sank to the floor. Her expression was a tense mélange of anger and despair. She opened her mouth to say something, but only the first few words managed to escape her throat.
“You’re a liar. You don’t love—”
Before she could finish, the bedroom door swung inward, slamming hard enough to rattle its frame.
Lucas leaped up. He threw himself at the door, fully expecting it to stay shut, fused to the jamb like his study door had been. But it fell open and he fell with it, back into Jeanie’s room.
Except it was no longer Jeanie’s room, but a place Lucas had never seen before. Ugly. Plain. A bouquet of pine branches sat atop a bedside table. A simple bed was covered in a brown blanket.
“Jeanie?!” He spun around where he stood, searching, as though she could hide from him in a room so small. But she was gone.
Her stuff. Her room. His daughter.
Vanished.
A scream clambered up his throat.
Echo. Where was she? Where the fuck was she?
He staggered down the hall to where Echo should have been, shoved open the door in search of his temporary babysitter, but all he found was a vacant air mattress among stacks of boxes he had yet to unpack. He stepped inside, Caroline’s careful handwriting printed across brown cardboard: LOU’S BOOKS. Suddenly, he ached for her. All he wanted was to hear his wife’s voice, to cement himself in some sort of reality, any sort of reality that reminded him of how the world worked. His yearning was felt in little more than a blink of a second, nothing but a quick flash of nostalgia devoid of the facts. The fights. The affair. The imminent divorce. Too short to give him any shred of relief from the disappearance of his only child.