Page 23 of April Flowers

Mr. Marcum implied:We have to keep track of hundreds of kids. Give us a break.

Noah’s chest was on fire. Before he said anything else, he clenched his fists and stormed out of the office. Mr. Marcum said something he couldn’t hear, and he didn’t bother to turn around and ask what it was.

He had to find Avery.

But wasn’t he also looking for Lillian Earnheart?

In the front seat of his truck, his head spun. What were the chances of Lillian Earnheart and Avery disappearing on the same day? For the hundredth time, he tried to call Avery’s cell, but it went straight to voicemail, proof that she wasn’t “holed up somewhere with her phone.” Avery wasn’t the kind of kid who texted old friends. Noah had begun to question if she had any at all back in Boston. Maybe she’d been a sort of loner. Maybe that made losing her mother that much worse—because Mona was all she had.

Noah had been driving for hours. But out he went again, speeding across the island. Feeling frantic, he returned home, whipping through the rooms of the little house, swinging open doors and slamming them again as he called his niece’s name. But Avery wasn’t home.

The last thing he wanted to do was go to the police. He didn’t want Avery’s “little escapade” to get back to the juvenile detention facility. More than that, he didn’t want juvie to think of him as an ill-suited parental figure. He was all Avery had. But within an hour, tear-soaked and out of his mind, he was at the station, talking to Officer Nathan Spieler. He knew Nathan from previous experiences with at-risk youths. Noah was frequently called into the police station to talk teenagers down and to calm them before or after something had gone down with their parents. Nathan Spieler had previously called Noah a miracle worker. But Noah wasn’t working any miracles right now.

As Noah explained what had happened, Officer Spieler was solemn.

“She went back to school? Right after her mom died? Right after she ran away?” He looked incredulous like he’d never seen Noah before.

Noah felt like the stupidest man on the planet.

Officer Spieler made several notes on his phone and didn’t look at Noah when he said, “It’s true what they say. All our instincts go out the window when someone we love is involved.”

Noah still felt cursed with grief and guilt.

“I wanted things to get back to normal as quickly as possible,” Noah said, as though “normal,” were a place on a map you could drive to.

Normal was an impossibility.

Officer Spieler informed the network of Nantucket police officers about Avery’s “spontaneous departure from school.”

“Everyone’s already out looking for Lillian Earnheart,” Officer Spieler said to Noah with a rough sniff, returning his radio to his belt buckle. His eyes lit up. “Wait a minute. Correct me if I’m wrong, but…”

Noah knew what was coming. He raised both of his hands to stop it.

He couldn’t rehash the past right now.

Officer Spieler cut himself off. “Right. We have people to find. No use wasting time.”

Feeling defeated, Noah hurried back to his truck and tore out of the lot. He suspected that going to the police station had been a waste of time. Whatever Avery was up to, she had her own plan of attack, her own vision. She was an island unto herself. He still didn’t know why she’d come back to Nantucket after running away. He still didn’t know why she’d run away in the first place. If she’d decided—seemingly spontaneously—that she didn’t want to be in Nantucket anymore, she knew where the ferry boats departed. She knew where the buses left Hyannis Port. She knew how to get as far away from here as she could.

Noah nearly missed a stop sign and slammed on the brakes. The radio played an old song his mother had played when he was a boy, “The Sign” by Ace of Base. It felt demonic and circular. He turned it off as his ears rang.

But out of the corner of his eye, he saw something—or someone. He twisted his head around, following the woman with his eyes as she ambled down the road, crunching through the snow, her eyes vacant and lost.

He yanked his truck to the side and cut the engine. What was going on?

Chapter Ten

Margot crept through the side door of the house she’d been raised in. Her pulse snapped in her throat. Upon entry, her nostrils filled with the smell of the old place: dust and old furniture, carpet in need of replacing, and something rotten coming from the kitchen. When she turned on the light and illuminated the living room, she found that it looked nearly the same as it had twenty years ago, save for the use and decay that spoke of many, many nights spent alone at home. The wallpaper was peeling from the walls. The teenage girl was nowhere to be found.

For a moment, Margot believed she’d imagined the teenager. Maybe this was a case of a psychotic break.After twenty years of mental stability in Boston, twenty-four hours in Nantucket has destroyed me, she thought.

But then came the sound of the fridge opening, followed by a rustling. Margot hurried from the living room to find the teenager practically stuck in the fridge, searching.

“There’s so much rotten food in here,” the teenager grumbled.

Margot’s tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She knew she needed to tell the teenager to get out of there, get outof her mother’s fridge, and go back to where she came from. But the idea of sending the teenager back into the cold didn’t sit right with her, either. Was she a runaway? An orphan, like in the books Margot had read as a child?

“This should work for now.” From the fridge, the teenager hauled hard cheese, white toast (which her mother always kept in the fridge for reasons that had always mystified Margot), mayonnaise, and four cups of strawberry vanilla pudding. The girl dropped everything on the kitchen table and hunted through the drawers for silverware.

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