Page 3 of If Anything Happens To Me

“Then dig me up!” she said, her voice rising to a muffled yet outraged shriek.

Here was how I know I had gone around the bend and completely lost it: I saw the dirt moving. I was staring at the fissure in the rock ledge where Eloise’s body had been found. Just like then, it was filled with leaves and branches and mud. But now the dirt was heaving, tossing, like the ground was alive. I leaned closer and saw her left hand reaching up from the depths of the crevice.

I fell to my knees, grabbing her hand with one of mine, frantically digging and scraping with the other. Her fingers were scored with cuts, the skin dirty and cracked, her fingernails torn and broken. I let go of her hand to dig deeper, my arms windmilling like mad, scooping dirt and mud, until I was looking straight into her face.

But it wasn’t Eloise’s face. It was someone else, a girl with short dark hair, there in the same grave where the murderer had left my sister. She lay perfectly still. Her forehead and cheeks were caked with dirt that shimmered in the late light, as if it was flecked with bits of real gold.

“Help me,” the girl said.

She put her arms around my neck, and I hauled her out of the ground. It took all my strength because she was covered with leaves and mud, but I did it as if she was as weightless as air. She tried to stand, but her legs buckled. She was like a baby deer walking for the first time. She faltered, all knees and elbows, got up, fell down again. She coughed, choking on debris. I crouched and brushed dirt from her eyes and mouth.

“We have to hurry,” she said, voice rasping.

“Who are you?” I cried. “Who put you here?”

“Hurry. Now,” she said, and I could tell from the panic pouring off her that we didn’t have time for questions. I lifted her to her feet. I put my arm around her shoulders and helped her take the first few steps. Then she was okay. Or at least okay enough to walk fast, and then we began to run.

As soon as we got out of the woods, I realized I had left my backpack behind, along with the strawberries and flowers. My cell phone was in my bag.

“Wait here,” I said to the girl. I felt electricity running through me. “I have to go back.”

“You can’t!” she cried.

“I need my phone. We have to call 911.”

“No police!” she said.

I stared at her. Did she have any idea what she looked like? What had she been through?

“You need an ambulance,” I told her. “And the police—”

“Didn’t you hear me?” the girl said. “I said no police. There’s a reason.”

“What is the reason?” I asked.

She gazed down at the ground, and when she looked up at me, her eyes were blank. “I don’t know,” she said.

She wasn’t making sense. I chalked that up to the fact I had just pulled her out of a hole in the ground, and her thoughts probably weren’t tracking all that well.

I was going to have to take charge here. I glanced around. My heart was racing. I felt the shock of danger, and a shiver ran down my spine. Whoever had left the girl in my sister’s grave could still be around. I had to think clearly.

We were on the village outskirts, on a lane with pretty houses, the kind you would expect to find full of nice, happy families. But one thing about having a sister murdered in your own hometown—everyone was guilty until proven innocent.

I spotted aFOR SALEsign at the end of a driveway. The yard was overgrown, and there were some newspapers on the front porch, which made me think the people had already moved out.

A red barn stood behind the house. I ran to it, discovered that the door was unlocked, and hurried the girl inside, into an old horse stall piled high with musty bales of hay. Swallows had nested in the rafters. There must have been eggs because the adult birds were swooping in and out, trying to chase us away. Farm implements like shovels, an axe, and a pitchfork leaned against the splintery wall. I made the girl sit down on a hay bale.

“Hide here. I’ll be right back,” I said.

“Don’t leave me!” she said.

“Count to a hundred, I won’t be long,” I said, closing the door behind me. I tore down the lane back to the Braided Woods. I had never run faster. When I got to the spot where Eloise and this girl had been buried, I couldn’t find my backpack.

Terror can do that.

I walked around the clearing, and there was my backpack, right where I had left it, nestled in the roots of a tall spruce tree. But as I picked it up, I saw something glint on the ground. I bent down and picked it up—a tiny gold charm, about a half inch in diameter, with an enameled white figure etched on the front: It looked like a ghost girl.

I turned the charm over in my hand, saw microscopic etching on the back, and my neck prickled: Who had dropped it? The girl I’d just found in the grave? Her attacker?Eloise, all those months ago? No way—I would have known if my sister had something like this. Besides, the police would have found it. Right?

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