PROLOGUE
It was January, and the bucolic town of Waverly was covered with snow. Fires were lit; coffee was sipped; and the library at the University of Yarrow was filled with students. Most yearned to be somewhere else, their hearts pulsing with big ideas and plans for after graduation, or at least for Friday night. On the library’s third floor, a junior named Oscar Mendez could no longer take the musty stacks, so he zipped his parka and headed outside in the late afternoon.
A few hours later, Oscar would tell the police that he had no idea where he was going when he left the library. He certainly never planned to descend into the gorge behind campus, but that’s exactly what he did, snow crunching beneath his feet as he trekked down the frozen earth toward the vast, churning river. Besides a few brave hikers and runners, Yarrow students mostly avoided the woods and the cliffs overlooking the river because of Emma McCullough’s disappearance a decade before. But Oscar didn’t believe in ghosts. And it felt good to skid down the snowy trail, the incline so steep it made him feel alive and far enough away from the gleaming gothic architecture of the university. Oscar hated it at Yarrow, he really did; he hated the smug, self-satisfied professors and the preppy classmates mingling with the alternative ones, everyone a happy, bubbling mix on the surface. But what could he do? Transfer? He didn’t have the energy. Quit? He was too smart for that.
The cathedral’s clock tower chimed four times, warning Oscar that there wasn’t long before darkness fell completely and obscured the path back to campus. He hurried farther upriver, turning around just once to take in the rocky cliffs that towered over the gorge. The cliffs were four stories tall on both sides of the river, and depending on where you were perched, it was either a straight drop into the water or onto a dirty beach made of mud and snow. The frozen ground was hard for Oscar to navigate, and he was careful not to get too close to the water’s edge. A recent downpour had made the river even more furious, and Oscar watched the white-tipped current for a long time, wondering, as always, if he was going to be all right. The sun’s final strips of light filtered through branches and illuminated a flash of silver near his feet. He bent to pick up a chunk of earth with a bracelet lodged inside.
For Emma, it read in scripted calligraphy, my love.
Oscar’s sullen mood was suddenly forgotten, his mind sharpening. Could it have belonged to her—the elusive, mysterious Emma McCullough?
Probably not, he thought, but he pocketed it anyway, his heart thudding inside his chest as he retraced his footprints and climbed toward safer ground.
PART I
ONE
Haley
One week later
Haley McCullough stared down at Susie’s dead body. She tapped her gloved fingertips against Susie’s cold, white-blue skin—tap, tap, tap, one, two, three.
The tapping was a compulsion Haley had developed to cope with the waves of sadness and obsessive thoughts about her sister, Emma. Haley mostly tapped her right index finger against her left hand and counted. Sometimes she tapped objects that felt interesting to touch—the edges of a staple, or the scratchy fabric on the old armchair where she studied, or Susie even. If she was in public, she tried to conceal her compulsions. If she was alone, she closed her eyes and soaked up the sensation of the tapping.
Haley had been doing it for nearly ten years, ever since her older sister vanished at age twenty-one, and it worked, actually. Every time fury swelled inside her, the tapping calmed her body until she could function again. Fury was the most succinct word to describe it, but it wasn’t only anger; it was a surge of regret, despair, and so many other things she didn’t dare name, followed by a quickening of her heart and a thick swirl of blood in her ears. It was where her body went every time she thought of Emma.
That morning as Haley tapped Susie’s shoulder—tap, tap, tap, one, two, three—her mind went to the clavicle and scapula that lay beneath, and she tried not to think about the things the young woman had done when she was alive, but she couldn’t always help it. Had Susie used this shoulder to pitch a ball? Haley guessed the odds were that yes, at some point she had, so she imagined Susie’s slight frame in a softball uniform, her skeleton of bones very much erect and alive, a sly smile playing on her lips as she considered her batter. Would she be wearing lipstick? No, no. Haley’s mind quickly canceled that out. But her hair: it would be in a ponytail, most likely. Haley could see it now, trailing over the delicate curve of her spine.
Tap, tap, tap. Hello, Susie.
It wasn’t Susie lying there dead that had Haley so worked up that she needed to tap; it was the phone call she’d received on her way to her Saturday-morning anatomy lab. This has to be fake, this must be a prank, she thought as Detective Hank Rappaport introduced himself. After assuring her there hadn’t been any kind of emergency, he’d asked in a raspy voice, “Could you come down to the station later this afternoon, Ms. McCullough?”
“Of course,” she’d told him, because that was the only appropriate response to a question like that. And ever since his call she’d only been able to think of Emma, her body like a live wire as she wondered why a detective was calling her in.
Susie’s toes were painted, and she was pretty, too. Maybe it was wrong to notice her cadaver’s looks, but Haley felt Susie was different. Special, even. And not just because of how much she reminded Haley of her disappeared sister, but because Susie and Haley were both in their midtwenties and each had small tattoos on their ankles. Haley sensed they’d be friends if Susie were alive, but maybe that was taking it too far. She was just so on edge lately. People had warned Haley medical school would do this to her. Every day after classes she raced down the University of Yarrow’s halls, dying to get to a bathroom so she could scrub her hands, her dry, red fingers never feeling clean enough.
“Observe the aortic arch,” their anatomy teacher, Dr. Brad Aarons, was saying, his voice echoing through the lab. (Call me Brad, he’d told them all at the start of the semester, and they did.) Twenty cadavers lay on stainless steel tables across the room, and the overhead lights were as bright as any operating room. They’d already sawed through the sternum and cracked open the rib cage, and now they were following the ascending aorta as it became the aortic arch and looped over the heart to become the descending aorta.
That first day in anatomy when Haley had been assigned to cadaver station number four, she gasped when she pulled the sheet from the body and saw the resemblance to Emma: perfectly pale skin, high cheekbones, long lashes, and a top lip with a deep cupid’s bow. She’d glanced up at Brad and raised her hand as if to protest the match, but then lowered it, feeling utterly ridiculous. What would she even say? She renamed cadaver #347 Susie to humanize her, and as the first weeks of the semester wore on, there was this part of Haley—and she knew how damaged she was to even be thinking this way—that relished the similarities. She looked for her sister everywhere. Why not here, too?
“Identify each branch,” Brad went on, changing the picture on the screen so that it showed a simulation of a gorgeous, pulsing heart. Haley loved the human body; she always had. She cut around the brachiocephalic artery, carefully moving aside tissue to expose its course, losing herself in the dissection. She didn’t look up again until Brad said, “Eyes here for a moment,” and changed the slide to an illustration of the heart, the veins and arteries curving in bright reds and blues.