Page 17 of If Anything Happens To Me

I shrugged. “I was just being protective.”

“Do you and your sister ever like the same guy? Was that what happened? You didn’t want her going with Chris because you like him?”

I glared at the detective. Could she be more wrong? “No,” I said. “I like someone else.”

“Okay,” she said, looking into my eyes as if she could read whether I was telling the truth or not.

She asked me a few more questions, but I hardly heard them. I felt too panicked, knowing time was ticking by, it was nighttime, and Eloise was out there somewhere.

But by the next morning, Eloise still hadn’t been found. Detective Tyrone asked everyone who knew Eloise to come to the police station, just outside town. Gram, Noreen, me. Our teachers. All our friends from school.

Individually, we had to go into an interview room and sit at a table across from Detective Tyrone and another police officer. We had to give our alibis—where we had been when Eloise had disappeared—so the police could check them.

The last time Eloise had been seen by anyone—by Gram and Noreen—was when she left the house that morning to catch the late school bus. Which she never caught.

Everyone had an alibi.

My friends and I had been at school, or on our way there. Same with nearly every student or teacher at the school; anyone who’d been absent that day had a good excuse. Gram and Noreen had been at doctors’ appointments all day, and our neighbors had all been at work. After school, I had hurried straight home to see if Eloise was there. Adalyn’s mother had picked up Adalyn and taken her to get her hair cut. Fitch’s mother was on a business trip. His sister was sick and she needed help, so he went home to be with her. Matt’s family had boats, and since it was October, it was time to haul them and get them ready for winter. He had been down at the dock with his dad and brother.

Chris had a paper due, and he worked on it at the library. The librarian confirmed that. He had repeatedly tried to contact my sister, but she never replied. The police examined his cell phone. It provided location data—showing that he was at the library, then he went straight home. And all his unanswered texts and calls to Eloise proved what he’d told them.

So Chris had ended up not meeting Eloise that night. If only he had, or if we had all stayed together, she might still be alive. Her killer wouldn’t have gotten to her—we could have protected her.

Detective Tyrone asked us all if we would be willing to give DNA samples. She said it was because forensic evidence was always left behind during crimes, and DNA could help identify the criminal. That scared me because at that point, I wanted so badly to believe no one had taken or hurt Eloise, that she had somehow left on her own, that no crime had occurred.

Both Chris’s and Adalyn’s parents were against them giving DNA at first. But Detective Tyrone said that it was very important, because it would let her exclude them as suspects—they would be off the list. Eventually we all let them swab our mouths, to collect saliva, and the samples were sent to the police lab.

One day later, Eloise’s body was found in the Braided Woods. And there was no DNA evidence found on her. No match.

And the case went cold.

“Birds,” Iris repeated, bringing me back to the present. I shivered, shaking away the memories of those terrible days—and that moment when we got the call from the police that Eloise’s body had been found.

I looked at Iris. I thought I saw a flicker of memory in her brown eyes. I waited for a few moments, but she didn’t say anything more.

“Did anything come up?” I asked her.

“Dead owls flying overhead,” she said, then shook her head. “But no. That’s not a real memory. Just something from my nightmare. Because dead birds can’t fly. Right?” She looked at me, but I didn’t say anything. “Oli, I think it’s real. I think there really were dead birds up above. Every time I looked, they were there.”

It sounded completely bizarre.

And something was haunting me. That blue-gray feather I’d found in Iris’s hair. It was the same color as the back and wings of the black-throated blue warbler our nature club had found the morning of Eloise’s disappearance. I thought about how Chris’s parents worked for that pharmaceutical company, and how easy it would have been for him to get the substance that had drugged my sister and Iris. Plus he had invited Eloise to go owling in the Braided Woods, the same day she had died.

Were those clues? Or just coincidences?

I wanted them to be coincidences.

But his was the name that kept swirling and shimmering through my mind.

Chris

Chris

Chris

I told myself: It couldn’t be him. I’d seen how tender he was toward Eloise. There was no way someone we knew could have murdered her. And Chris had an alibi—his phone data proved it.

But

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