Page 51 of Persephone's Curse
“What is it?” Bernadette asked.
“She doesn’t leave. She never leaves.”
“Back door?” I asked. “Is there a camera there, too?”
“Yeah, hold on.” Clara tapped the screen a few times, concentrating so hard I could practically feel her biting her own tongue, then shook her head. “Nothing. She doesn’t leave the house.”
“Evelyn?” Bernadette said suddenly, raising her voice. “Evie?”
She stepped out of Evelyn’s room and Clara and I followed right behind her. We went through the house from top to bottom, moving like a search party, fanning out on each floor, heading back upstairs again when we didn’t find her, ending up back in her bedroom, all of us breathing harder.
“Let me see that app,” Bernadette said, and Clara handed her phone over.
We were quiet as Bernie double-checked the cameras, first the front door, then the back door.
“Did she go out a fucking window?” Bernie mumbled, mostly to herself. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“She’s not here,” Clara said slowly, puzzling it out. “But she didn’t leave…”
“Could the cameras have glitched?” I asked. “The cameras must have glitched. That’s the only solution.”
“I guess,” Clara said. “They’re pretty expensive cameras, though…”
“But she couldn’t have just disappeared,” I said.
“We looked everywhere,” Bernadette reasoned. “Winnie is right; the cameras must have glitched.”
“But then where did shego?” Clara asked. “Whereisshe?”
I sat down on the bed, holding the sides of my skull with my hands, holding myself together. Where would Evelyn go if she was betrayed by the very people who were supposed to protect her the hardest? Where would she go if she couldn’t trustus,her sisters, anymore?
“Maybe she really did go to Danielle’s?” I said finally. “Maybe? Just to… get away?”
“Aunt Bea’s?” Bernadette said.
“But she didn’t pack a bag,” I asked. “If she was going to Vermont, she would have packed a bag.”
“And she would have taken her phone,” Bernadette agreed.
I covered my face with my hands. I wanted to dig a hole in the ground and crawl into it, bury myself alive in penance for the terrible thing I’d done to my sister. I had driven her away. I had driven Henry away and now I had driven my sister away, too.
Bernadette slapped my hands down. “Get it together,” she hissed, and I saw how worried she looked, how nervous and scared, and I shook my head.
“It’s all my fault,” I said.
“It doesn’t really matter whose fault it is,” Clara said matter-of-factly. “What matters is that Evelyn is gone, we have no way to contact her, and Henry isn’t answering us. So what do we do?”
“Maybe she left something,” I said.
“Something?” Clara repeated. “Like a clue?”
“I don’t know, like… Justsomething.”
“No, that’s a good idea,” Bernadette said. “We should look for something. Anything.”
It gave us something to do.
We searched Evelyn’s room, top to bottom, then moved into the shared attic space, methodically overturning couch cushions, peering into bathroom cupboards, shining a phone flashlight into the crevices of Evelyn’s piano, eschewing all logic to look in the most unlikely of hiding places.
