Page 2 of If Anything Happens To Me

February 9

March 9

April 9

May 9

Now June 9

People might think me strange for bringing strawberries and flowers. They’d say:What does Eloise care, what good are they to her?Well, I knew she would love them, so that was why I brought them. Just like I brought apple cider, Christmas cookies, pine cones, roasted chestnuts, clementines, lemon cake, valentine hearts, and lilacs on some of the other ninths. I packed up her favorite treats, things I was sure she would like, and carried them right here, into the Braided Woods.

This was where I visited her.

Not the cemetery, with its tall oaks and weeping willows, its centuries-old gravestones. For twelve years, ever since our parents died, our grandmother took me and Eloise there to leave flowers on their graves. It is a place full of history, with some of the tombstones dating back to the 1600s and crumbling with age. While Gram tended the grass and plantings, Eloise and I would make grave rubbings of the angels and epitaphs carved into the ancient sandstone and shale, and think about the people and their lives. Believe it or not, those were happy times for us.

Now that Eloise was buried there, next to our mom and dad, I never wanted to go back. It was too hard, too final, seeing her name and the dates of her life engraved in that gray stone.

Here in the Braided Woods, where her life was stolen from her, she seemed more alive somehow. As I walked along the narrow path, the trees closing in around me, I could feel her breath in my own chest. I was following the footsteps she took that October day.

The police found little clues, as surely as if she had left a trail of breadcrumbs: a long blonde hair caught on a bayberry bush, a little fuzz from her blue fleece jacket stuck to the rough bark of an oak tree, the footprints of boots in the spongy soil.

Nature had left clues as well: a sprinkle of pollen, bits of yellow leaves that seemed to have turned to gold dust. A downy feather the color of the sea at dawn.

But they still hadn’t caught who did it.

I thought about my sister’s case all the time.Case:such an insignificant word for the most important thing on earth, my sister’s murder.

At first the detective assigned to the case would visit my grandmother regularly, to fill her in on the investigation. Once Detective Tyrone realized that Gram wasn’t exactly retaining the information, she would still stop by, just to check on us, but not say very much.

I explained to Detective Tyrone about Gram’s Alzheimer’s, and I asked her to report the case’s progress to me instead. I knew how to talk to Gram, how to get through to her, in the hit-or-miss language of the wind trying to get through the drafty walls of a beloved summer cottage. But the detective didn’t take me seriously. As much as I liked her, she seemed to be looking beyond me, as if I had nothing to offer the investigation. She was young and kind, but she gave me a sad, indulgent smile that saidyou’re just a kid, you can’t handle this.

That drove me out of my mind.Can’t handlewhat,Detective?I wanted to scream.The small details, the tiny threads of information, the dead ends, the wrong turns of your stupid investigation? Grilling our friends, wasting all that time when you should have been finding an actual killer? Because those details werenothingcompared to having to handle the fact Eloise was gone.

The whole thing made me want to jump right in and do what the police couldn’t: solve Eloise’s murder. I was constantly trying to put this huge, terrible puzzle together, and it made me realize that I wanted to become a detective when I graduated.

Eloise used to tease me that I knew a little about a lot of things.

“You go from curious to obsessed in ten seconds flat,” she’d say, and I could only shrug, because she was correct. My current and overwhelming obsession was needing to learn who had taken my sister away from me, and why.

There were no leads. Some nights, one name would shimmer through my dreams. I refused to let it come to the surface while I was awake. It would be even more unbearable to think that someone my sister had known, someone we had hung out with, could have done this to her.

I looked around the woods. That person could be here now, waiting for another girl to come along. But I was not afraid. I was not even sad. One thing for sure, I wouldn’t cry—I never cry. I am tough. If bad things happen, once you start crying, you might never stop. Other than feeling wound too tight, I was numb. I might as well have been floating, as if I had left my body, just as Eloise had left hers.

When I approached the clearing, I slung off my backpack. There was the spot up ahead, the rock crevice where hikers had found her body, buried under dirt and fallen leaves, two days after we reported her missing. This was her real grave—the place where she took her last breath and turned from a human into a ghost—nothing like that manicured area in the cemetery.

Some people might find this place creepy. I didn’t. I walked slowly to the disturbed ground—it was a narrow furrow, the earth softer than everything around it. The killer had dug leaves and dirt out of the rock ledge, placed Eloise inside. After they found her, yellow crime scene tape had surrounded the perimeter. There was still a scrap of it wedged under a stone. I felt a knife in my heart because it reminded me once again of how the investigation had dwindled away.

I looked up. A shaft of that lovely fading sunlight came through the trees’ canopy. Yep, picnic time. I was hungry for those berries. My sister would be, too. I took the basket of strawberries out of my backpack and placed them, along with the bouquet of sweet peas, on the ground.

“Hi, Eloise,” I said out loud.

Since she died, she had spoken to me through nature—the sound of the breeze, stones tossed around in the waves, the rustle of seagrasses at the beach, the call of the owls. The ospreys had returned from their winters down south, and I heard Eloise in their exuberant, high-pitched cries. I didn’t expect to hear her actual human voice, but then:

“Help,” she whispered. “Help me.”

The words were not clear, but garbled, as if coming through a tunnel. I wasn’t startled—I had lost my mind after I lost Eloise, so expecting weirdness, terribleness, cruel tricks was just part of my life now.

I had gotten pretty good at turning the worst into the normal, so I said, “I want to go back in time. I would help you. I would do anything for you.”

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