Page 15 of If Anything Happens To Me

Adalyn, Fitch, Matt, and I got to work. We documented every species. Adalyn took pictures on her phone. Fitch kept an ongoing list in his tablet, making meticulous notes of all his observations. Matt prepared the bands to gently press around the birds’ legs. His delight was obvious, the way he beamed at me when I pointed out a late migrant, a very unusual bird for our area: a Louisiana water thrush.

Matt stood beside me as I carefully removed a male black-throated blue warbler from the netting. The four-inch beauty rippled and felt impossibly delicate. I held him steady while Matt wrapped a narrow band around his leg and documented the number. In the future, if another birder found the warbler, it would be possible to track where he had been, and the distance traveled.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Matt asked softly. “Holding life in your hands?”

I nodded, momentarily unable to speak.

Chris and Eloise came over then. Chris checked the warbler for any signs of injury or disease, for lice or other parasites, for general health. The bird’s head and back were bright blue, fading to blue-gray closer to the tail and in the wings. He sported a black mask and had a white breast. After Chris recorded the description, we let him fly away. Matt and I glanced at each other, exhilarated from holding the bird, contributing to research, and, especially, standing so close together.

The six of us traded back and forth, partnering for different birds, taking turns holding and recording. When it was time to pack up and go, my sister and I walked a little way off the trail to look up at a roosting great horned owl. Owls were Eloise’s favorite. She and I had come here one night last month to hear a male and female calling to each other from pines on opposite sides of the clearing—a duetting pair. By winter they would mate, and by January the female would be sitting on eggs.

“What were you and Chris whispering about?” I asked Eloise.

“Wouldn’t you love to know?” she asked, with a sweetly wicked glint in her eyes.

“I would.”

“He asked me if I’d come back here with him tonight,” she said. “To hear the owls calling.”

So that’s why she’d said “definitely.”

“I don’t think you should do it,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked.

I was silent; I couldn’t answer that. It was just a cold feeling that rippled through me, that something could happen to her. It was the month of Halloween, and maybe that’s what made things feel scary, as if the woods we loved could turn dangerous, as if malevolent spirits might come drifting down from the treetops.

“I’ll be safe with Chris,” Eloise said. “You and I came here at night, and we were fine.”

“That was September,” I said.

“You sound so superstitious,” she said, and I could tell she was impatient, annoyed at me for not wanting her to go out on a school night with the boy she liked. “Are you jealous?” she asked.

“Why would I be?”

“Because Chris asked me and Matt didn’t ask you?”

“Of course not,” I said, my face flushing. But what if she was right?

“Sometimes I think you don’t even like Chris,” Eloise went on. “Or trust him. You think he’s too handsome and popular to want to go out with me.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “It’s just that you’re my little sister, and I’m protective of you.”

“Well, I don’t need you to be,” she said, sounding upset.

I gave her a hug to let her know I loved and trusted her. But I still had that uneasy feeling. In a way she was right; I wasn’t sure about Chris. For one thing, I thought she was jumping in too fast with him. My crush on Matt had lasted forever, and in a weird way, that made it more exciting. Whatever was happening between us had been simmering a long time. But her question did linger in my mind: Was I jealous about Chris asking her to go owling that night when Matt hadn’t asked me?

The terrible thing was that my premonition was right.

The day of that birding excursion was the last time I saw my sister.

That afternoon, when she wasn’t on the school bus home, I texted and called her over and over, but got no answer. I texted everyone—our nature group, Eloise’s friends from her grade—to ask if she was with them. She wasn’t.

And, it turned out, she hadn’t shown up at school that day at all.

She hadn’t even been on the late bus that morning.

That’s when I knew something terrible had happened. When I got home, I ran into the house, but Eloise wasn’t there. Neither Gram nor Noreen had seen or heard from her since she’d left to catch the bus that morning.

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