Page 6 of If Anything Happens To Me

We passed a shingled house with white shutters next to the creek that fed into the marsh. I heard the screen door squeak open, and a woman stood aside to let a black cat dash into the yard. I pulled the girl into a shadow, until the woman went back inside. The cat strutted toward us.

“Oh!” the girl exclaimed, sounding happy. It was the first time I’d seen her smile. She bent down and held her hand out to the cat.

“Hey, there,” she said. “Beautiful kitty.”

She scratched the cat under its chin. Doing this appeared to relax her. The cat leaned into her hand, basking in the affection. The smile didn’t leave the girl’s face until the cat stretched and stepped away. She watched it stride out of sight. Then the worried look returned to her eyes, and we started walking again.

We made it to Hubbard’s Point, the cozy little beach community where my grandmother lived—where Eloise and I had lived since our parents died.

It was only June, so most of the summer cottages were unoccupied, waiting for the July influx of vacationing families. But we lived here year-round. It felt so special, to have this beautiful place to enjoy before the crowds arrived.

When I saw my house, I grabbed the girl’s hand to pull her along. We had a garden that my grandmother had planted long before I was born. The narrow stretch of earth was full of late-spring flowers—purple, yellow, and pink blossoms on tall stems surrounded by spiky leaves. They had bloomed most brightly a week or two earlier, and now they were drooping, nearly dead. The girl stopped short and stared at them.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get inside.”

“What are they called?” she asked, as if the faded flowers were hypnotizing her. I ignored her question and tugged at her hand.

The spell cast by the garden seemed to be broken, and she came with me.

Our house was small, but it was perfect. Some of our neighbors had a lot of money. You could tell by their cars, their boats, their expensive beach toys. My grandparents had built our place when they were young, so it had been there forever and hardly changed at all. Others had bought cottages like ours and torn them down to put up houses that were bigger and fancier. It was typical of my grandmother’s sense of humor that she called our little place “The Palace.” And it was, to me: enchanted, magical, fortified not by walls but by the love inside.

Usually, I would have been proud to bring a friend over, show her around and introduce her to my grandmother and her home health aide, Noreen. But this was a different situation. I didn’t want Gram to see a girl bleeding and caked with dirt, and I was afraid that if Noreen caught sight of the girl, she would feel duty bound to call for help.

So I hustled the girl across the porch, through the hallway, and upstairs. I heard the TV going—Noreen and Gram were watching a cooking show—so I felt reassured they hadn’t heard us come in.

I steered the nameless girl into Eloise’s room. That action didn’t take much thought—I didn’t ponder all the things that would hit me like a ton of bricks just a few minutes later.

“Can I take a shower?” the girl asked.

“You’ll wash away evidence,” I said.

“Evidence . . .” she said as if she had never heard the word before.

Ever since Eloise’s death, I’d been obsessively reading books and watching shows about crime and detective work. I made the girl sit on the edge of the bed. I used my phone to take photographs of all her injuries. Then I ran downstairs to the kitchen and came back with a few Ziploc bags. I plucked dead leaves and a dull gray feather out of the girl’s hair, and put these items in one bag.

What kind of bird had the feather come from? It looked like pewter, but when I held it to the light, I saw that it was tinged with blue, but not as bright as those on bluebirds and blue jays. At first, I dismissed it, figuring it had just drifted into the leaves in the crevice from a bird up above. But then my heart clenched. The feather was the color . . . the color of the sea at dawn.

I took a nail file from Eloise’s dresser and ran it under the girl’s dirty fingernails, then dropped the file and the scrapings into another Ziploc bag. I stared at the dirt: Were those glints of gold dust? They sparked something deep in my memory that I couldn’t quite get to.

“What are you going to do with those?” the girl asked, glaring at the bags.

“Give them to the police,” I said. Then, in response to the glowering look in her eyes, I added, “When the time comes.”

“The time will never come,” she said.

“What are these gold specks?” I asked, holding up the baggie to the light. I peered at them, trying to read their message.

“Who knows?” she asked. “It doesn’t matter. No one else is going to see them.”

“Aren’t you curious?” I asked, and I realized I was asking myself that more than the girl. “It might help you remember what happened. Or where you came from, who you are.”

“I’m trying to remember,” she said. “But one thing is for sure—you are not handing that ‘evidence’ to the police. Now I’m wondering if I can even trust you.”

Arguing with her, or trying to reassure her, seemed futile. But that didn’t matter. This was between me and Eloise. I knew I would stick the Ziploc bags into my backpack when I got downstairs. I went into Eloise’s bathroom and turned on the shower. I stood there with my hand under the stream, waiting for it to get hot. Our house is old and we get our water from a well, so neither the temperature nor the pressure is reliable.

“Come on,” I called to the girl, gesturing for her. “The hot water doesn’t last long—you have about seven minutes.”

The girl slipped off her filthy jeans and shirt. Still in her underwear, she came into the steamy bathroom, and I handed her a travel-sized bottle of Molton Brown shampoo. She probably had no idea how special that was; Eloise and I had stocked up on tiny hotel bottles during the last vacation we’d taken with Gram, before the Alzheimer’s got so bad, at an amazing seaside hotel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

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