Page 27 of If Anything Happens To Me

Iris and I got back into the Jeep, and I realized that having Iris there comforted me. More weirdness: I felt closer to this girl I had just met than I did to Adalyn. Iris and I were united by a nightmare, by a person who kidnapped girls and killed them. How could Adalyn ever understand that?

Adalyn had found what she was missing. It had been so simple.

I remembered what Iris had said when we first encountered Adalyn, about where cats liked to hide. I realized then what had stood out to me. It was probably a small thing, or nothing at all.

“You found Esmeralda under the house,” I said.

“Yes,” Iris said.

“But before, you said cats like to hide underbuildings,” I said. “You didn’t say houses.”

“Right,” Iris said. “Under factories, stores, warehouses . . .” She trailed off.

“And you said alleys, not yards,” I pressed.

“Yes, they like to hide behind dumpsters,” Iris said. “Even more so if they’re strays, because they might need to forage for food.” She paused. “It makes it easier to save them—catch them. Because they congregate there, hoping for scraps.”

Matt caught the wisp of a clue, the same one I had heard.

“You live in a city,” Matt said.

Iris’s brow furrowed as if she was trying to grab the thinnest thread of memory.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.”

“New London,” Matt said, naming the nearest city to us, about ten miles away. “Let’s start there.”

We headed east.

As we drove on back roads toward New London, I saw Iris staring out the window. What was going on in her mind? Were there any sparks of recognition? We approached Ocean Beach, a little amusement park on the edge of town. I could see the roller coaster and the Tilt-A-Whirl. Eloise used to love taking the railroad around the edge of the marsh, watching great blue herons fish the shallows. Iris gazed at the rides as we passed, but I saw no reaction, making me think she hadn’t been here before.

“Do you actually remember a city?” I asked her. “A particular one?”

“It’s more like a feeling,” she said.

A feeling. I thought about my own life, the little things that mattered to me, that told me who I was and where I was from.

Black Hall, my home. Sand between my toes as I dove into Long Island Sound. The sweet and salty smell of the marshes. The taste of mocha chocolate chip at Paradise Ice Cream. The periwinkle ankle bracelets Eloise and I had made one summer, first collecting the small gray-blue shells, drilling tiny holes in them, then stringing them together on fishing line. Taylor Swift’sfolkloreplaying nonstop on my phone. Cookouts in our backyard. Going birding. Taking a boat to Dauntless Island.

Those were the thoughts and emotions that defined my life. I wondered which ones made up Iris’s. I wondered how it was possible that she had a feeling about a city and a cat, but nothing specific about her home, her parents, and even Hayley. It seemed so odd to me. But when I glanced at her in the back seat, all I could see was a girl who had lost her memory along with her sister.

When people think “city,” they might picture the tall buildings of New York, Boston, Chicago, places like that. New London is a small seaport at the mouth of the Thames River. It doesn’t have a skyline like other cities: aside from church spires and a radio tower, the eleven-story Mohican Hotel is the tallest building in town. Gram was a history buff, and when I was little, she’d tell me and Eloise facts about the area that became part of our family story.

I knew that Benedict Arnold burned New London down during the Revolutionary War. I knew that in the early 1800s, it was one of the busiest whaling ports in the world. It always made me so sad to think of the whales killed so their oil could light the lamps of cities everywhere.

And I knew that there were ghosts here. Ledge Light, the square brick lighthouse just outside the harbor, was said to be haunted by Ernie, its former lightkeeper. Ella Quinlan O’Neill was said to haunt Monte Cristo Cottage, the house where she lived with her family, including her Nobel Prize–winning son, playwright Eugene O’Neill. One time Eloise went there on a field trip and swore she saw Ella, dressed in a nightgown, hovering on the stairway.

I shivered as we drove past the cottage because now I felt haunted by Eloise. Had she become a ghost? I wished I could see her. And I wished for something else: that we would find Hayley, so we could save her life and keep her here in our earthly realm, with Iris.

“You okay, Oli?” Matt asked, as if he’d felt the chill of sadness coming off me.

“Yes,” I said. “I just want to get to her.”

And, really, who did I even mean by “her”? Hayley or Eloise? Iris’s sister or mine?

Iris looked from side to side, noticing the pink granite public library, the bank, the tattoo parlor, the comics shop, the huge redbrick train station, the little schoolhouse where Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale had taught. She was slumped in her seat, as if discouraged by the fact that she didn’t recognize anything.

I heard her sigh. “This isn’t working,” she said.

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