Page 21 of If Anything Happens To Me

“Found her?”

“Buried,” I said, and again that closed-throat, stinging-eyes feeling came over me. “In the same place as Eloise.”

“Whoa,” he said, looking in the rearview mirror at Iris. “Buried?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Why? Who did it?” Matt asked.

“That’s what we need to find out,” I said. “It must be the same person who killed Eloise. He kidnapped Iris and Hayley—her sister. And he still has Hayley.”

“Okay, you need to start at the beginning,” Matt said, a hint of disbelief in his voice. “This is bizarre. Where is your sister now?” he asked Iris, glancing in the rearview mirror. “Shouldn’t we call the police so they can go get her?”

“Iris can’t remember where her sister is,” I said. I explained the whole traumatic reaction thing, and the fact that little bursts of memory were starting to come back to her. “We thought that if we started in the place where I found Iris, and drove around from there, she might see things that turn out to be clues.”

Again, I saw Matt looking in the rearview mirror at Iris. He glanced at me, concern in his eyes. He was here with me: I felt it in my heart. I stared at his hand and wanted so badly for him to reach across the front seat and hold mine.

“You have a gash in your head,” he said over his shoulder to Iris. I saw what he saw—the Band-Aids had come off, and the dried blood looked scary. “A head injury isn’t anything to fool around with—it might be part of why you can’t remember. We should take you to the ER.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Iris said. “They’d call the police.”

“The person who took her said he’d kill Hayley if the police got involved,” I explained.

Matt drove in silence for a minute, taking that in, as I had, probably wondering whether to override Iris and—now—me. “Well, if we don’t go to the ER,” he said eventually, “we should have Chris or Fitch check her out.”

High school kids obviously weren’t doctors, but the strange thing was, Matt had a point. They were both at the top of our class, into science and medicine. But I didn’t want to see Chris.

It was too hard, for two major reasons. We had barely spoken since Eloise died. I’d see him in the hall at school, and he’d turn away. Or I’d turn away. Of course he reminded me of her, of what she had wished would happen with him.

But also, mostly, I couldn’t stop thinking that he might be her killer. Was that the reason he was avoidingme? Because he knew he was guilty and couldn’t look me in the eye?

“Let’s call just Fitch,” I said. “Not Chris.”

“Who’s Fitch?” Iris asked.

“Another friend,” Matt said. “He’s our age, but he’s basically a doctor-in-training.”

I nodded. Fitch had known since sixth grade that he wanted to be a doctor. His sister, Abigail, who was a year behind us in school, had a rare disease, and he wanted to find a cure. Their parents were divorced and their mom was a famous neurologist who traveled all over the country to give talks.

“Really?” Iris asked, sounding skeptical.

“Remember what happened with Tuck?” Matt said to me, and I told Iris the story.

Last September, three weeks before Eloise went missing, our nature group went up Mount Crawford for the hawk migration. Tuck Barlow, a friend of Adalyn’s who’d tagged along, tripped and fell. He hit his head, said he was okay, but Fitch made him stay still while he looked into his eyes to see if his pupils were dilating properly. That was how I’d learned to do that, too.

“Fitch could see that Tuck had a concussion,” Matt explained to Iris now. “We got Tuck straight to the ER, and the doctor said he had a pretty bad head injury. He seriously could have died if he wasn’t treated.” He glanced back at Iris again. “Fitch could take a look at you. Just in case.”

“Oli already checked my pupils,” Iris said. “When she first found me.”

“Still,” Matt said. “Let me at least call him to look at your cut.”

“Please, Iris?” I asked. “It wouldn’t hurt.” What I really wished was that she would let us take her to a clinic, somewhere she could have tests, but I knew that was not going to happen. Seeing Fitch would be something of a compromise.

“Okay,” she said, sounding reluctant. “But I know I’m fine.”

You didn’t even know your own name, I wanted to say. But I didn’t because Matt was already calling Fitch on the Jeep’s Bluetooth.

You have reached 203 . . . The automated voicemail picked up.

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