Page 5 of If Anything Happens To Me

The girl did what I said. I stared at the back of her head. Her brown hair was tangled and matted with twigs, sticky with blood. When she calmed down a little, she looked up at me.

I remembered the gold charm. I dug it out of my pocket, held it toward her. “Is this yours?” I asked.

She glanced at it, shook her head. Her face was streaked with grime, and I saw that along with the cut on her head, there were scrapes on her cheek and above her eyebrow.

I crouched down beside her so I could look into her brown eyes.

“Still dizzy?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. I shouldn’t have even bothered asking, because she was so obviously not fine.

“We can’t stay here,” I told her. “You’ve made it clear you don’t want me to call the police. I don’t know why—I think that’s a mistake—but I’m not going to argue with you right now.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“There is one thing I really need to know, though. You’ve got to tell me, okay?”

She watched me with this incredible sadness in her eyes, as if, without even hearing the question yet, she already knew I wouldn’t like her answer.

“What’s your name?” I asked again.

She took another deep breath. Sitting there, she stared at me for a long time. I thought she was going to hold her breath forever, but then she exhaled hard and bent over almost double, so her head was touching her knees. She shuddered and said something in a voice so low I couldn’t understand.

“What?” I asked, leaning close to her, straining to hear.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

Had I heard right? I was about to ask her to repeat what she had said, but then she lifted her head, looked into my eyes, and spoke clearly.

“I don’t know my name,” she said, her voice rising in despair.

The girl’s answer turned my heart into a jackhammer. That plus the photograph in her mind—No Police. What did it mean? I could barely breathe. I knew that the girl-with-no-name needed help, but considering everything, I decided to hold off on calling Detective Tyrone. I had to think, but not here in this musty barn just down the lane from the Braided Woods.

“Come home with me,” I said. “We’ll figure out everything there.”

I led the girl-with-no-name out of the barn. Her nervousness was catching. Her gaze darted around, as if she felt anyone could be an enemy. I understood. It took me back to those first weeks after losing Eloise, when I would look into every face and wonder if that was the last face my sister saw. I still felt that way sometimes. So I chose a route where we were less likely to see people.

We cut through backyards, down a quiet road, onto a dirt path along the marsh. As we walked, I thought back to the start of the murder investigation, how the police had questioned everyone, even our friends.

Even me.

I thought of all the alibis, how we’d had to supply the police with details of our movements that day Eloise went missing. At first, that made me frantic, because it was obvious the police were wasting time. It seemed clear that a stranger had killed my sister, not someone we knew. I kept hammering that thought through my mind—and I kept saying it to Detective Tyrone. A stranger, maybe from our town. Someone who had spotted Eloise that last day and followed her into the woods.

At the edge of the marsh, I saw an oriole nest, shaped like a teardrop, dangling from a branch overhead. Two snowy egrets and one great blue heron fished the shallow waters. I had to harden my heart, because birds made me think of Eloise and if I thought of Eloise now, I would cry. And I never cried.

The girl beside me was pale. She kept up with me, but every so often she tripped over her own feet. Once, she grabbed my arm to steady herself, as if she was too weakened to proceed. I looked into her eyes to see if her pupils were dilating right—I knew how to check. I slowed my pace so the girl wouldn’t feel too taxed.

“The cut on your head looks bad,” I told her. “It’s full of dirt. We can wash it off at my house, but you might need stitches.”

“At least I’m waking up,” she said. “I think someone drugged me. My legs feel like rubber.”

That gave me a cold feeling—after Eloise died, the coroner discovered that she had been given a muscle relaxant and sedative. In fact, those drugs were the cause of her death. They had stopped her respiration.

That fact had been one of the reasons for that name, the one I kept pushing away.

“Who drugged you?” I asked the girl, afraid to hear her answer.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice sounding wobbly again.

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