And maybe I should feel hurt, wounded by her statement, but I know what people say about me, about my family, and their words fall like dull raindrops on my skin, never soaking in. I know what I am—and what I’m not. And I don’t blame them for their curiosity. Sometimes I think it might only be envy they feel—a desire to be more than what they are. To escape the blandness of their ordinary lives.
I walk into the kitchen and light two candles with a match—one for Suzy and one for me. “I’ve never talked to the dead,” I admit. The truth. Although Walkers have often been able to see shadows, glimpses of ghosts wandering through the old graveyard on the far side of lake. We see flickers of the in-between, phantoms moving from one corner of the house to the other. Our eyes see what others can’t. But I don’t tell Suzy this. Proof that I might really be what they say I am.
Suzy’s eyelids flutter and she taps her fingers against her opposite forearm, narrowing her gaze like she doesn’t believe me, like she’s certain I must be hiding something—a dozen black cats in the attic, a broomstick tucked behind winter coats in the hall closet, jars filled with my victims’ hearts beneath the floorboards. But nothing so gruesome exists within this house. Only herbs and chimney soot and stories that rest inside the walls. “I’ll make you a bed on the couch,” I tell her.
The blankets and pillow from when Oliver slept here last night are still rumpled at the end.
But Suzy glances to the couch, with its sagging cushions and frayed armrests and stuffing bursting out, and she frowns. She drops her arms, and her mouth makes a little pout. “Is there a bed where I can sleep?”
“Sorry.”
Her eyes cut away and she surveys the living room. She had probably hoped I lived in one of the larger homes on the lake—the log villas with five bedrooms, game rooms in the basement, and spa bathrooms where she could take a bubble bath to soothe the constant chill. “Could I maybe…?” Her words trail away. “Could I sleep with you, in your room?”
Another twinge of sympathy shudders through me.
I don’t want to say yes, I don’t want to share my bed with a girl who surely talks about me at school, who will only stare at all the strange things in my room and then spread more stories about me back at Fir Haven High. But a part of me also wants to feel normal—an ordinary girl who can have friends over and stay up late and not worry about what Suzy will say about me back at school.
The word slips out before I can catch it. “Fine.”
I lock both doors and we climb the stairs to the loft, Fin close behind.
Suzy strides over to the wall of windows, and I divide the pillows on my bed: one for Suzy, one for me. The snow is heavier now, falling in thick waves against the glass. I wonder if the moth is out there, stalking me, waiting in the trees. The week before my grandmother passed away, a bone moth had been pinging against the windows of the house all morning, tap tap tapping; flit, flit, flitting. I thought it was going to break the glass, its delicate wings beating so frantically, its tiny head thumping against the windows. It was the first time I’d ever seen one—the kind of moth my grandmother warned about—and I watched my mom pace through the house, ringing her hands together, braiding and unbraiding her hair methodically, as if the solution to the moth were in the folds of her dark hair.
She knew death was coming—the bone moth was a sign.
And when we woke to find that Grandma had wandered down to the lake in the middle of the night, taken her last breath on the shore, autumn leaves scattered around her—sad shades of orange and golden-yellows—we knew the moth had been right. Death was coming. Just as we’d feared.
And now, one follows me.
“Why do you stay here in the winter?” Suzy asks, touching her fingertips to the window.
I pinch my eyes closed, shoving away the memory of the moth and my grandmother. “It’s my home.”
“I know, but you could leave in winter, like everyone else.”
“I like the winters,” I say. I like the quiet. The cold, unending silence. But it’s more than that. I belong here. Every Walker for generations has lived in these woods. Between these ancient pines. It’s just how it’s always been.
We don’t know how to live anywhere else.
“Your house is older than the others,” Suzy notes, still peering out the window where she can just barely see the outline of other homes along the lake.
“My great-great-grandfather built it,” I tell her. “Long before any other houses lined the shore.” Her gaze is soft, and the light from the candle she holds flickers across her cheekbones and tawny hair. “He was a gold miner,” I continue. “He made his fortune in the Black River.” But like most of the men in my family, he came and went just as swiftly as the hours fell into night. It wasn’t their fault—Walker women were known to be fickle, uncertain when it came to love. And men were only ever a passing fascination. Much like the man who was my father. Whether by bad luck or our choosing, men never stayed long in our lives.
I walk to the closet and change into black sweatpants and a thick, knobby sweater. But Suzy stays at the window, pressing her palm to the glass. “You said you found that missing boy?” she asks.
I close the closet door, catching my reflection in the closet mirror briefly—sleepy eyes and hair that needs to be brushed. “Up in the woods,” I say cautiously.
Locals know of the Wicker Woods. They speak about it in a hush, in tones never above a whisper. As if saying it aloud will draw the darkness out. Never speak of the Wicker Woods behind its back, a notation inside the spellbook warns.
“He survived out there all this time?” she asks, dropping her hand from the window.
“He got lucky,” I say. Or maybe it’s opposite of luck. To find yourself lost inside the Wicker Woods is catastrophically unlucky. One of the ill-fated, my grandmother would say if she were here. Doomed. A boy to steer clear of.
An itch trickles down my vertebrae, cold as ice, lodging itself like concrete in my chest.
“He could have ended up like that other boy,” Suzy says.
My gaze snaps to hers, her silhouette outlined against the huge windows, snow swirling against the glass. “What other boy?”
She lifts one shoulder. “The one who died.” She swivels around to face me. “The same night your boy went missing.”
He’s not my boy, I want to say. But instead I ask, “A boy died?”
Her mouth pinches flat and severe. “Yeah, the night of the storm.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know. Just overheard the other boys talking about it. They wanted to call the police, but the phones have been down.”
I step closer to her. “Who was he?”
“Not sure.” She weaves a bit of hair through her fingers. Not nervously, just out of habit. “They kept it pretty quiet, no one wanted to talk about it. But I overheard their whispers in the hall, when they thought I couldn’t hear.”
“Did they say how he died?” I ask. My lungs have tightened in my chest, the breath held still at the back of my throat.
She shakes her head, her eyebrows drawn close—wincing at the thought of someone meeting their demise way out here, in these woods, in the bitter cold. “I only heard them say that a boy was missing and another was dead.”