I look down at my phone, the black screen a void where Ted’s name won’t appear. Cooper’s right, and I hate that. The heat feels like a sweaty sleeping bag. My flip-flops have a tiny hole in the sole, and the road back home is full of gravel.
“Fine,” I say.
When he leads me to his red pickup and opens the passenger door for me, I try to forget the weight of his body, the taste of his arm as it pushed against my tongue.
* * *
Cooper flips houses now. This is all he talks about as he drives me to Ted’s. He points out past projects as we pass them—the red colonial on Walnut, the blue ranch on Pine—and I try to act impressed. He tells me how he practically lives at Rusty’s for all the materials he has him stock for him there, and he waxes poetic about how renovating houses is a metaphor for the work he’s done on himself.
“Seriously, I’ve matured so much,” he says, “in the last six years especially.”
That was when he first witnessed the power of transforming something shabby into something where a person can make a life.
“Oh, check this out,” he says, and as he slows, I look out the window, ready to nod at the next house he shows me. But he’s gesturing ahead, pointing to a man walking on the side of the road, dressed in black pants, black boots, and a black raincoat, the hood pulled up even though it’s sun, not rain, that gushes. Looking at him makes a trickle of sweat run down my leg.
“Have you met our drifter?” Cooper asks. He’s driving so slowly a squirrel could outpace us.
“Drifter?” I echo. “No.”
He points again, his finger arrow-stiff. “This guy. He showed up a few weeks ago. No one knows who he is, but he walks around all day, dressed like that. And watch, if you try to talk to him…” Cooper leans his head out the window. “Hey!” he shouts. “Who are you? What the hell are you doing here?”
The man darts into the woods like a startled deer. By the time we pass him, I can’t even see him through the trees.
“Maybe he’s homeless and you should leave him alone,” I say, but my pulse feels like somebody’s plucking it.
“Nah,” Cooper says, “he’s not homeless. I asked Peg at The Diner—because she helps out at the soup kitchen, you know? And she said no one there’s ever seen him come in. So…” He takes a left onto Ted’s road. “He’s got to have a story. All he does is walk back and forth along the edge of the woods all day.” He glances at me out of the corner of his eye. “You better watch out, Brierley. Lord knows there’s plenty of woods on your street. Hey—in fact…”
He slams his foot on the gas and we whoosh by Ted’s driveway, zoom on down the road. My heart’s in my throat as I grab the door handle. I see a flash of Astrid, wonder if I’m about to share her fate. Was she taken like this the second time? Did someone offer her a ride home, only to speed her away?
“What are you doing?” I manage.
He doesn’t answer. Just drives another few hundred yards before turning the wheel sharply and barreling straight toward the woods. My hand leaps to the ceiling of his truck. My foot slams against the floor, instinctively searching for the brake. He’s not stopping. He isn’t going to stop. I clench my teeth and squeeze my eyes shut. Wait for the impact that will break my legs, my spine.
The pickup jerks over uneven ground, but it doesn’t hit anything. Branches scrape against the truck. I open one eye, then the other, and I see that we’re driving along a path. A narrow lane has been carved out between the trees, bumpy and overgrown, but a passageway nonetheless. I can’t speak yet; my lungs are still heaving too hard. I can only watch as we slice through the woods, nothing but green forest ahead of us until we crest over a tiny hill, pull around a bend, and suddenly there’s a house.
“Here we are,” Cooper says. He lurches to a stop and turns off the engine.
Did Astrid scratch and claw? Did she kick and punch and push and bite? Or did her body betray her? Did she forget how to scream? How to fight?
“What do you think?” Cooper asks. “It’s my dream flip.”
I look at him. He’s gazing at the house through the windshield, a smile pulling at the corner of his lips. He sighs as he shakes his head, his face full of awe.
I relax my shoulders. Let out my breath.
The house is a small, two-story cabin. Its front porch sags in the middle, its windows are boarded up and shutterless, and the roof is blanketed with moss. The wood siding is covered in mold spores—and I know, even without seeing them, that the floorboards inside are damp and rotted.
“It’s owned by the town,” Cooper says, soft and reverent. “Hardly anyone knows it’s back here. I bet you didn’t either, did you?”
I shake my head.
“Exactly,” he says, “and you lived right down the street.”
But I stayed away from the woods. Even when I walked down our driveway, which skirts along the trees, I kept as far away as I could manage, turning my back to them at times, striding sideways if I had to.
I’m itchy again. It’s as if the mold spores have jumped from the cabin and latched on to my skin.
“Seems like most people who do know it’s here just think of it as ruins,” Cooper continues. “But you clear out a few of these trees, and you put in some bone-hard work—new roof, new siding, new porch, new floors—it’d be an incredible property. Some people would probably raze it and start from scratch. Build a twenty-first-century cottage in its place. Give it gas fireplaces and central air. But not me. I would respect the house’s history.”
“Which is what?” I ask. I put my hands beneath my legs to keep from scratching.
“Well, for one thing, it was built in the 1800s. For a while, it stayed within this one family—the McEwans—who passed it down from generation to generation. But according to town records, the last time anyone lived here was in the seventies. Since then it’s been empty. Waiting for me to get my act together and love it into shape.”
My fingers twitch. Something about the house feels familiar.
“Did you take me here before?” I ask. “Me and Kyla? When we were kids?”
The front door used to be blue. It’s gray right now, but I would bet my life that it used to be blue. That when it swings open, it gives a discordant, three-noted creak.
“No,” Cooper says. “Not that I remember. But it’s familiar, isn’t it?”
I nod. “I think I’ve been here before.”
Cooper shrugs. “Maybe. But you probably saw it in Cutthroat Cabin 2.”
I rip my eyes from the house to squint at him. “Huh?”
“Cutthroat Cabin 2? The movie? They filmed the exterior shots here.”
“When?”
“I dunno. Early 2000s? You must’ve seen it. I’d pull up the poster on my phone, but—you know how the reception is here.”
The name of the movie doesn’t ring a bell, and I can’t imagine I saw it. I’ve always hated horror.
“It’s the one with the woman who just got divorced,” Cooper says, “so she goes to the cabin to get away from it all, and pretty soon the walls start bleeding. She was bald for some reason, remember? So every day she put on a different wig, until the last day, when the blood starts coming from her scalp. She tries to put on a wig to stop it, but it seeps through and starts pouring out, and she’s screaming and screaming and…”