My blood turned to ice in my veins. I felt like someone had just slammed me upside the head with a two-by-four. Slowly, I turned to face Darcy. My vision blurred around the edges.
“What do you mean, who’s Olive?” I asked.
She lifted her shoulders and got up from the table, picking up her bowl and spoon. “I mean, who’s Olive?”
Casually, she strode past me and my dad to dump her dishes in the sink. She ran the water for a second, then shook her hands dry and turned to face me, jutting out one hip as she leaned against the counter. I searched her eyes. She looked back at me curiously, waiting. Waiting for me to answer her. To explain to her who this person was—a person she’d hung out with on several occasions.
“Darcy, come on,” I said. “Now I know you’re screwing with me.”
“How am I screwing with you?” she asked.
“You know who Olive is!” I shouted. “We hung out with her at the bonfire and again at the Thirsty Swan! I went out for a run with her two days ago and you talked to her at the party last night before going off with Joaquin.” My voice got progressively louder as she continued to stare back at me like I was speaking in some foreign tongue.
“Wait a minute, who’s Joaquin?” my dad asked Darcy, completely oblivious to my growing panic.
She turned pleasantly pink. “He’s just this guy I—”
“Darcy!” I interrupted. “You know who Olive is!”
“God, Rory! Give it up!” Darcy blurted, clearly frustrated. “I know K
rista, I know Lauren and Bea, but I don’t remember Olive. And I think I’d remember, because that name? Ew.”
My knees gave out, and I dropped into her vacated chair. This wasn’t happening. This was not happening. First minstrel boy and now Olive? I didn’t fabricate these people. They were real. Darcy knew them. It was like she’d developed some kind of freaky selective amnesia that made her delete entire people. I gaped at her as she walked out of the room and headed for the stairs.
“I’m gonna go take a shower and then hit the beach,” she said. “Let me know if you want to come.”
“We’re going to need to talk about this Joaquin person!” my dad called after her.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said lightly. “Later.”
I waited until I heard the door slam and the water turn on before turning to my father, half expecting him to lay into me for scaring him. That would have been his normal reaction. But today he just stood there, looking at me with a concerned frown.
“Dad, there’s something seriously strange going on around here,” I said. “Darcy knows Olive. I swear to you. I met her our first morning here, and we’ve hung out with her all week. She’s the friend you let me go running with. And I was supposed to meet her for breakfast, but she never showed, and when I went to her boardinghouse, she hadn’t been home all night, and all her stuff was still there.”
“Maybe she slept over at a friend’s,” my father said. “Or maybe she went out this morning for coffee or a run. She could have forgotten about your plans. It happens.”
“Yeah, or maybe when she was walking home from the party last night, some psycho serial killer grabbed her and murdered her and buried her body on the beach somewhere!” I said, my fingers curling into fists. Why didn’t he believe me? Why was my sister losing her mind?
Or was it me? Was I the one who was going crazy? But it wasn’t like I had made Olive up. She was a real person with real stuff in her room and real feelings about her past and her mom and her future. And now she was gone.
My dad sat down diagonally from me and took one of my hands in both of his. His hands were warm and enveloped mine.
“Rory, listen, I understand why you’re upset,” he said patiently, looking me in the eye. I blinked and stared down at our hands, unaccustomed to this kind of contact, this kind of gentle treatment. “You’ve just been through a horrifying experience. Remember after your mom died? Those flashes you used to have? Maybe this is something like that. Maybe it’s just another manifestation of post-traumatic stress.”
He reached out and tucked my hair behind my ear, just like he used to do when I was little and I’d skinned my knee or fallen out of bed. I clenched my hands until my fingernails cut into the flesh of my palm. Little did he know I was having flashes and that these other things I was seeing, hearing, feeling, experiencing had nothing in common with those. But now didn’t seem like the time to bring up my little disconnects from reality. It would only prove his point—that I was losing it.
“Why don’t you go down to the beach with Darcy and try to relax?” he suggested.
My mouth was completely dry, my heart working overtime. As I sat there, my hand inside my father’s hands, I’d never felt so alone, so utterly baffled, so scared.
He didn’t believe me. He was never going to believe me. But I knew Steven Nell was out there, and it was only a matter of time before he struck.
I woke up with a start in the middle of the night, certain the sound of breaking glass had interrupted my sleep. Heart in my throat, I whipped the sheets aside and crept downstairs. The fog was thick outside every window, and all I could hear was that incessant hissing as the wet mist crept along the shingles, the rooftop, the windowpanes.
I paused outside the door to Darcy’s room, my pulse pounding in my ears, and pushed it open. Her bed was empty.
“Dad?” I called. I crossed the hall and shoved his door open. There was no one there.