I didn’t stop running until the ground turned to slurry beneath my boots.
The woods behind the motel had spit me out onto the banks of the Blackwood River. The dawn was bleeding into the sky, a bruise of purple and gray that offered no warmth, only a grim visibility. I was soaked to the bone, my breath coming in ragged gasps that tasted of ozone and terror.
I wasn’t alone.
Downriver, about a hundred yards away, the morning mist was being churned up by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. No sirens. Just the silent, strobing panic of a crime scene.
I should have turned back. I should have climbed the ridge and found a road, found a phone, found a way to explain why Officer Miller was drugged in his car and why I was wandering the woods like a fugitive.
But the pull was magnetic. It was the same gravity that had drawn me to the window in the Glass House, the same sickness that had made me pick up the hammer.
I walked toward the lights.
Two old men in waders were standing by a pickup truck, talking to a deputy. Fishermen. They looked pale, their tackle boxes abandoned in the mud. One of them was shaking, a cigarette trembling between his lips.
I skirted the edge of the treeline, using the thick trunks of the cottonwoods as cover. I needed to see. I needed to know if the game had changed.
“Elara?”
The voice was sharp, exhausted.
I stepped out from behind a tree. Julian was standing at the edge of the police tape. He wasn’t wearing his hat. His hair was plastered to his skull, and his eyes were rimmed with red. He looked at me—at my mud-stained jeans, my wild hair, my shivering frame—and for a second, I saw relief. Then, the cop slid back into place.
“We found Miller,” he said, his voice flat. “He’s groggy, but alive. He said you ran.”
“He was in my room,” I said, my teeth chattering. “The killer. He left a tape.”
“I know,” Julian said. “I saw the Walkman. Forensics is bagging it now.”
He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “But what are you doing here, Elara? How did you get to the river?”
“I ran,” I said. “Through the woods.”
Julian looked at the dense forest behind me, then back at the crime scene. “You ran three miles in the dark? Toward a body that hadn’t been reported yet?”
“I didn’t know,” I whispered. “I didn’t know there was a body.”
Julian stared at me. He wanted to believe me. I could see the desperation in his face. But the evidence was piling up against my sanity.
“Stay here,” he commanded. “Do not cross the tape. Sheriff Miller is already looking for a reason to cuff you.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
Julian hesitated. He looked back toward the riverbank, where the ME was photographing a shape bound to a massive tree.
“It’s Becca Trent,” he said.
The name hit me like a stone to the stomach.
Becca Trent. The queen bee of Oakhaven High. The girl who had coined the name “Ice Queen.” The girl who had once cornered me in the locker room, held me down, and cut off a chunk of my hair while her friends laughed.
“Becca,” I breathed. “Is she…”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Go look,” a deep voice rumbled from behind Julian.
Sheriff Miller stepped into the light. He was a large man, shaped like a whiskey barrel, with a face that had hardened into permanent suspicion. He looked at me with pure loathing.
“Let her look, Thorne,” the Sheriff said. “Maybe it’ll jog her memory. Maybe she’ll remember how she knew to be at the scene before the birds were even awake.”
“She just got here, Sheriff,” Julian interjected, stepping between us.
“She’s wet,” Miller pointed out. “She’s muddy. And she’s got a history of finding these things.” He gestured toward the tree. “Go on, Ms. Vance. Take a look. It’s quite a show.”
I walked past them. My legs felt numb.
The scene was set at the base of a weeping willow that leaned precariously over the rushing water.
Becca Trent was tied to the trunk.
She was facing the tree, her arms wrapped around it as if she were hugging it. Her wrists were bound on the other side with heavy, industrial zip ties.
She was wearing a bright pink puffer coat—shockingly cheerful against the gray morning—and jeans. But the coat was torn. Feathers from the down filling were scattered across the mud like snow.
I walked around to get a side profile.
She wasn’t peaceful. Sarah Miller had looked like she was sleeping. Ms. Albright had looked like a doll.
Becca looked like she had fought for her life.
Her face was smashed against the rough bark. There was blood on the wood. Her fingernails were broken, shreds of them embedded in the tree where she had tried to claw her way free.
And around her eyes was a blindfold. A strip of dirty white cloth, tied tight.
“Hide and Seek,” I whispered.
The nausea rolled over me, hot and sudden.
“One, two, three…” I murmured, the ghost of a memory surfacing.
Flash.
Recess. Fifth grade. Becca Trent is “It.” She’s counting against the brick wall of the school.
“Ready or not, here I come!”
I am hiding behind the dumpster. It smells of rotting cafeteria food. I am small. I am invisible.
Becca finds me. She always finds me. She drags me out by my collar.
“Found you, freak,” she sneers. “You’re terrible at this game. You always want to be found.”
She pushes me into the mud. “Go away, Elara. Nobody wants to play with you.”
Flash.
I blinked, the gray river rushing back into focus.
This wasn’t a game. This was an execution.
“She’s counting,” I said, my voice trembling. “He tied her facing the tree so she would be counting.”
“She’s been dead for at least six hours,” the Coroner muttered, crouching near Becca’s feet. “Blunt force trauma to the back of the head. But the bindings… these were applied while she was struggling.”
I looked closer at the blindfold. The cloth wasn’t just dirty. It was stained with something dark in the center.
And pinned to the back of her pink coat, right between her shoulder blades, was a piece of paper.
It was protected by a plastic sandwich bag to keep it dry from the rain.
I leaned in, squinting against the gloom.
It was written in crayon. Red crayon.
SHE PEEKED.
I recoiled, stumbling back into Julian, who steadied me with a hand on my elbow.
“He knows,” I gasped. “Julian, he knows everything.”
“What does he know?” Julian asked, his voice urgent.
“He knows she hurt me,” I said. The realization was a cold weight in my chest. “Becca. She was a bully. She made my life hell.”
I looked at Julian, desperate for him to understand. “Ms. Albright… she was kind to me. So he gave her a tea party. Sarah Miller… she was innocent. So he made her a princess.”
I pointed a shaking finger at Becca’s brutalized body.
“But Becca… Becca was mean. So he hurt her. He made it hurt.”
“You’re saying this is revenge?” Sheriff Miller’s voice was right behind my ear. “On your behalf?”
I spun around. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“Didn’t you?” Miller stepped closer, his eyes hard. “Funny how everyone who dies seems to be tied to your childhood diary. And funny how you show up, covered in mud, running from the direction of the woods.”
“I was escaping!” I shouted. “He was in my room! He drugged your nephew!”
“My nephew is a light sleeper,” Miller scoffed. “And we didn’t find anyone in your room. Just a tape player.”
“A tape player with his voice on it!”
“Or yours,” Miller said darkly. “We haven’t analyzed it yet.”
He looked at Julian. “Get her out of here, Thorne. And take her to the station. I want a formal statement. And I want a DNA swab. If her skin is under those fingernails…”
“It’s not,” Julian said. “It’s red clay.”
Miller froze. “What?”
“Look at her boots,” Julian pointed to Becca’s feet.
I looked down. Becca was wearing expensive leather boots. The soles were caked with thick, reddish mud.
“It’s the same clay found on Sarah Miller,” Julian said. “From the ridge.”
He looked at me. “From your house.”
The air left my lungs.
“He took her there,” I whispered. “He took Becca to the Glass House. He kept her there. With me.”
I thought about the scratching in the walls. I thought about the candy wrapper.
Had Becca been there too? While I was smashing the wall? Was she tied up in the guest room? In the basement?
No. I would have heard her.
Unless she was already dead. Or unless…
“The sound,” I said. “The ice machine.”
Julian frowned. “What?”
“On the tape,” I said, grabbing his arm. “I heard the ice machine at the motel. But before that… in the house… I heard a scratching.”
I looked at the blindfold on Becca’s face.
“He wasn’t living in the wall alone,” I realized, the horror washing over me so intensely my vision grayed at the edges. “He had to keep them somewhere. The crawlspace… it runs the length of the house.”
“Elara,” Julian warned.
“He didn’t bring them to the house to stage them,” I said. “He brought them to the house to hide them. He was playing Hide and Seek with me. And I didn’t find them.”
“That’s enough,” Miller barked. “Thorne, put her in the car.”
Julian grabbed my arm, firm but gentle. “Come on, Elara. Don’t say another word.”
He led me away from the tree, away from Becca Trent’s broken body.
As we walked up the muddy bank toward the road, I looked back one last time.
The fog was lifting slightly. High up on the ridge, overlooking the river valley, I could see the glint of glass.
My house.
It was watching us.
And somewhere inside that glass box, or underneath it, or in the walls that held it up… Elias was waiting.
“She peeked,” I whispered.
Becca had seen him. That’s why she died. She saw the boy in the walls.
And now, everyone was going to see him. Because he was done hiding.