Missing by Savannah Brown

Author:Savannah Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

17

SATURDAY, JUNE 5

Saturday morning, a mighty fog has draped itself over the island, the view from my dorm window all but swallowed up by the haze, the railing of the balcony giving way to a descent into gray nothingness. Everyone’s kind of giddy about it, the halls already bounding with activity.

Friday was odd. Peyton made no effort, really, to clear the air from the night before, but today she’s back to her normal self, acting as though nothing had happened.

I wake up thinking of Lenore, of Mary Anne and her anger, of Archie, of Baby Blue.

Ellis wants to meet up at ten in the morning to try and talk to Lenore—Sylvia will be on the mainland, so he can leave without questions from her. I delight in the fact that I’ve clearly riled something in him, that he’s excited to proceed, to be thrust out of what was once his comfort zone into the full unyielding current of the investigation.

Lenore’s house is apparently near Ellis’s side of town, so I walk over the neck and toward the Willowwood and linger outside for about five minutes.

“Everything go OK?” I ask when Ellis emerges.

“Yeah, all good. Peyton’s working the front desk and she asked where I was going. I said I had to get flowers. Which isn’t a lie because Mom did actually ask, so I should still do that.”

“We can go afterward.”

“How is this supposed to work?” Ellis asks once we approach Lenore’s street, Rockglenn. “Is this like a good cop, bad cop kind of thing?”

“Why, change of heart? You wanna be bad cop?” I say, laughing a little at the thought of soft-spoken Ellis slapping his hands down on an interrogation table.

“D-definitely not.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll do the talking. I need you to listen for important information that I might miss as someone who’s not from here.”

“OK.” Ellis nods vigorously. “That makes sense. B-b-but what if she doesn’t want to talk about it at all? Then what do we do next?”

“We’ll get there when we get there,” I say, trance-like. I turn to meet his gaze; there’s a mayfly on his shoulder. I peel it off by its wings. “Those fuckers only have a life span of five minutes, did you know that? And each one dedicates its impossibly short life to being as irritating as possible.” Just like you, I imagine Peyton saying. I strip away the thought.

“Mona, what if she’s not even home?”

“You’re right. Let’s leave.”

Ellis turns to me with a wry smile. I plow into him with my shoulder.

“Is that what you want me to say?” I ask.

“No.”

“Then what do these anxiety-ridden questions even accomplish, huh?”

“Force of habit.”

“Break it. We’ll get there when we get there. If she doesn’t want to talk, we’ll figure something out. If she’s not here, we’ll come back.”

“Oh. I think this is it,” Ellis says.

It’s a small house that evokes the aesthetic of a barn—bright red with a sloped roof and an ill-fitting conservatory addition, framed with thin white netting. It looks like it might crumple under a strong breeze.

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