The attic of the Vance Estate smelled of cedar shavings and dead flies. It was a smell that belonged to the past, sealed away in a vacuum, untouched by the rot and the rain that had consumed the rest of Oakhaven.
I taped the last box shut, the sound of the packing tape screeching like a dying bird in the silence.
“Done,” I whispered to the dust motes dancing in the shaft of light from the dormer window.
Downstairs, the house was empty. The furniture was covered in sheets or sold. The kitchen was scrubbed clean of fingerprints and memories. I had spent the last three days exorcising the Glass House, turning it from a mausoleum into a piece of real estate. The “For Sale” sign was already creaking in the wind at the end of the driveway.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. I should have felt relieved. Elias was dead. Julian was safe, though broken. The article was written. The narrative was neat, tidy, and tragic.
But as I turned to drag the box toward the stairs, my foot snagged on something.
I stumbled, catching myself on a support beam.
I looked down. In the shadows of the eaves, tucked far back behind a stack of old insulation rolls, was a plastic tote bin. It wasn’t one of the cardboard boxes I had brought up. It was old, the blue plastic faded to a chalky gray.
I knelt, my knees popping. I told myself to leave it. I told myself that whatever was in there didn’t matter anymore. The story was over.
But I was a journalist. I picked at scabs for a living.
I pulled the bin out. It scraped across the plywood floor, a heavy, reluctant sound.
The lid wasn’t latched. I lifted it.
Inside, it wasn’t toys or clothes. It was paperwork. Stacks of manila envelopes, receipts, and architectural blueprints. Richard’s overflow.
I sifted through it idly. Invoices for glass panes. Quotes for foundation repair. A letter from the homeowner’s association complaining about the length of the grass.
And at the bottom, a thick envelope labeled in my mother’s looping, anxious script: Evidence / P.D. Correspondence 1999.
My heart gave a single, hard thump.
This was the file she had kept when she was trying to prove the “feral boy” was real. The raw material for the police reports I had found in the library.
I sat back on my heels, opening the clasp.
Photos spilled out onto the floor.
They were 35mm prints, glossy and high-contrast. Richard must have set up trail cameras, or maybe he sat by the window with a telephoto lens, hunting for the thing that was disturbing his perfect kingdom.
I picked them up, shuffling through them like a deck of cursed tarot cards.
A blur of a deer. A raccoon raiding the trash cans. A shadow near the garden wall that might have been a dog.
And then, him.
I froze.
The photo was grainy, taken in low light, but it was unmistakably Elias. He was crouching by the rhododendrons, his face turned toward the house. He looked feral, filthy, and terrifyingly young. He was holding something—a dead robin? A stone?
I stared at the face of the boy who would grow up to die in a sawmill for me. I felt a wave of pity so strong it made my throat tight.
“I see you,” I whispered.
I went to put the photo back, to close the envelope and the bin and the house forever.
But another photo slid out from behind it.
This one was taken during the day. The light was better. The location was the edge of the Weeping Woods, where the manicured lawn met the wall of ferns.
Elias was there. He was standing just inside the treeline, half-hidden by a cedar trunk.
But he wasn’t looking at the house. He was looking down.
And he was holding someone’s hand.
I blinked, bringing the photo closer to my eyes. The attic light seemed to dim, the air growing suddenly colder.
There was a second figure.
It was a child. Smaller than Elias. Maybe nine or ten years old.
“No,” I breathed. “That’s not possible.”
I had assumed I was the only one. I had assumed I was the Princess in his game. The police reports only ever mentioned a “feral boy.” Mrs. Higgins had only spoken of the “Thorne bastard.”
I squinted at the second figure.
It was a girl.
She had dark, matted hair that hung over her face like a curtain. She was wearing a dress that was too big for her, the hem dragging in the mud.
And over the dress, she was wearing a coat.
A bright yellow raincoat.
The world tilted on its axis. The silence of the attic roared in my ears.
The raincoat.
I thought back to the night I smashed the wall. The night I found the wet raincoat hanging on the back of my bedroom door. I had assumed Elias had brought it. I had assumed he had stolen it, or found it, and left it there as a gift or a threat.
I had thought: I didn’t own a yellow raincoat.
And I was right. I didn’t.
She did.
I stared at the girl in the photo. She was gripping Elias’s hand tight, her knuckles white even in the grainy film. She wasn’t pulling away. She wasn’t a victim he was dragging into the woods.
She was standing with him. Watching the house. Watching me.
“There were two of them,” I whispered. The horror of it bloomed in my chest, cold and black.
I scrambled through the rest of the photos, my hands shaking so badly I dropped half of them.
Deer. Raccoon. Nothing.
Wait.
One more.
It was a picture of the patio. My tea set—the plastic one I used to play with—was arranged on the stones.
But I wasn’t in the picture.
Two figures were sitting at the tiny table.
Elias. And the girl in the yellow raincoat.
They were playing.
He was pouring mud from the teapot into her cup. She was holding the cup with both hands, her pinky finger extended.
Pinkies out. Just like the Princess taught me.
I had assumed he meant me. I had assumed I taught him.
But looking at the photo, seeing the way the girl mimicked the gesture, a terrifying alternative slotted into place.
I wasn’t the only Princess.
Or maybe… I wasn’t the Princess at all.
Maybe I was just the audience.
I dropped the photo. I stood up, backing away from the bin as if it contained a viper.
The journal. Elias’s journal. I tried to remember the entries.
We are hungry. We are cold.
I had read “We” as a royal we. Or as him and his delusion of me.
But what if “We” was literal?
August 15, 1999. The water is coming… If I drown, who will watch her?
Who will watch her?
Me? Or the girl in the raincoat?
My mind raced back to the recent murders. The Tea Party. The Hide and Seek.
Elias was big. Clumsy. The knots were tight, small. The glue on the teacup was precise.
And the photo I found in the attic… the photo of Elias and the girl… it was dated July 1999.
If Elias survived the flood… did she?
I thought about the Sawmill. The way Elias had screamed at me. The guests are waiting.
He had died alone. There was no girl in the Sawmill.
So where was she?
Did she die in the flood? Was she a ghost haunting the edge of the frame?
Or did she grow up?
I looked at the girl in the photo again. Her face was obscured by hair and shadow, but there was something about her posture. Something familiar.
She was holding a book. A small, hardcover book tucked under her arm.
I leaned down, picking up the photo one last time. I held it directly into the shaft of sunlight, squinting until my eyes watered.
The book cover was blue. Gold lettering.
Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
The same book I found in the cellar. The same book Mrs. Gable had quoted to me in the library.
The Sandman steals bad children.
A memory sparked. Not my memory. A conversation.
Mrs. Gable, in the archives. My daughter moved away years ago.
Mrs. Gable, who lived alone. Mrs. Gable, who knew all the folklore. Mrs. Gable, whose eyes had gleamed when I asked about the feral boy.
I looked at the girl in the raincoat. She looked small. Thin. Malnourished.
But she didn’t look lost. She looked like she belonged to the woods.
I grabbed the envelope of photos. I didn’t tape the box. I didn’t finish cleaning.
I ran for the stairs.
The game wasn’t over. I had killed the King, but the Queen—or the Princess, or the Witch—was still on the board.
And she had a twenty-year head start.
I burst out of the front door of the Glass House, the “Sold” sign mocking me as I sprinted to my car. The silence of Oakhaven wasn’t peaceful anymore. It was pregnant. It was waiting.
Elias hadn’t been working alone.
And if he wasn’t alone, then the person who had been watching me, the person who had been in my room, the person who helped stage the bodies… might not have been him.
It might have been her.
I threw the car into gear, gravel spraying as I tore down the driveway.
I needed to find Julian. I needed to tell him that we had killed the wrong monster.
Or, at the very least, we had only killed half of it.