All right. She would do it scared then.
Emilie got into her car, buckled her seatbelt, and drove away without another look back.
She followed Jeremy’s directions to the letter, taking Route 50 and crossing over the Ohio River on the Blennerhassett Island Bridge into West Virginia.
At first, she didn’t notice any difference between Ohio and West Virginia, but after a few miles on the Northwestern Turnpike, it started to get…odd. She couldn’t put her finger on why, only that when she drove over the Ohio River and crossed the border, she felt something shift in the air. Was it the elevation? West Virginia was a mountain state, and it felt like she was driving closer to the sky. But it was more than that. The shadows were heavier here, the sky grayer, the wind wilder. Or was she imagining it?
And the beauty…if she’d known how beautiful these mountains were, these endless rolling hills all shades of October, she would have come every year. It didn’t even look real. It was almost too beautiful to be trusted, too breathtaking to feel safe.
And she did get lost, of course. Although she was looking carefully, driving very slowly, she missed the turn-in to Rafe’s road twice. Eventually, she found the hidden entrance. The trees were thick here and overhung the road like sentinels guarding it from outsiders.
The eerie feeling, like she’d wandered into a different world, only increased when she reached an ivy-covered cabin squatting in the middle of a forest. No cars anywhere, but she tried the front door anyway. Her whole body shook with nerves when she knocked. No one answered, so she walked around to the back.
There, she found a wooden privacy fence with an arched entrance wide enough for two men to pass through side by side. She’d only meant to stick her head in and shout “Hello?” but then she’d seen what she’d seen.
Tigers. Horses. Crows. A fox. A condor. A unicorn. All carved from wood and brightly painted so it felt like she was walking into an enchanted zoo. Stacked stones formed ivy-shrouded portals. Mossy paths led to staircases that led to nowhere. A wooden footbridge fit for a cat spanned a silver pond the size of a child’s swimming pool. From a pole curved like a sickle, a crescent moon hung down, wearing a smile on its face.
Emilie went into the strange garden as if led by unseen hands and found herself standing at a statue of a girl carved out of the trunk of a long-dead tree. She stared at it for a long time, marveling at the resemblance.
She sent Jeremy a quick text saying, Okay, now I believe you.
—
The mail didn’t come to Starcross Hill, so Rafe had to drive to the nearest town of Kingwood to pick it up. Two days after Jeremy had come and gone, he went to the post office and opened his box. Almost empty. Nothing there but a single postcard from Jeremy.
The picture was of Morgantown’s riverfront—the old brick buildings perched dangerously close to the Monongahela River, nothing but a few trees and one natural disaster away from falling into the dark water. On the back, Jeremy had written “436.”
No street name was necessary. Rafe knew those numbers. They were the house number of Jeremy’s old house on Park Street.
And this wasn’t just a postcard. It was an invitation.
Accept it or not? If he went, what would happen? Another useless argument that ended in a stalemate? But if he didn’t go, he’d always wonder if he’d been too cowardly to face Jeremy. Neither sounded very good to him, but he had enough regrets not to add another to his tab.
So he drove the twenty-five miles from Kingwood up to Morgantown. Although he hadn’t lived there in years, it was still home. Cub Scouts. Boy Scouts. Eagle Scouts. Church. Trips to the hardware store on Maple with his father. If he hadn’t made himself accidentally famous by getting lost, he might still live around here. He and Jeremy had both planned on attending WVU. Jeremy could get in free, since his mother taught music there, and Rafe had heard they had a great art program. They’d imagined their futures together back then. After high school, they’d go to college, move into the dorms, and room together, of course. That was the plan. Sometimes he still wondered where he’d be if they hadn’t gotten lost, if they would’ve been able to stick to the plan. It was too late. The past was gone and there was no finding it.
Rafe drove past the school on the way to Park Street. Forty-five degrees out, and the college kids were in shorts and hoodies. Ghosts of a past life he hadn’t gotten to live.
He continued down High Street, past the coffee shops and the ridiculous bronze statue of Morgantown’s favorite native son, Don Knotts, dressed as Barney Fife, then past the Hotel Morgan, where he painted rooms every summer. Best view of the Monongahela River in the whole town.
Coming back home was never easy. He’d learned to keep his head down, to mumble his name so no one would put two and two together and ask, “Wait, are you the Ralph Howell? The kid who got lost?”
Because that’s who he would always be to this town—one of the lost boys. Lost and left behind. After they were found, Jeremy’s mother spirited him away to England, where she had family, and Rafe went back to high school alone. He’d never gotten started on his future. He hadn’t been able to picture one without Jeremy in it. Sometimes, he thought he was still waiting for his life to begin.
And maybe that’s why he hung a left and went up to 436 Park Street. Because it felt like this might be his last chance to start again.
Rafe pulled in front of the house, the Big Blue Monster, as Jeremy called it. Good name. Three stories. Sky-blue paint. Gray stone chimney. Five bedrooms for two people—Jeremy and his mother, Dr. Mary Cox, classical pianist and professor of musicology at WVU.
It was a beautiful old house, and Rafe had been dazzled by it as a kid. Even their mailbox had impressed him back then. A black pedestal box with a man riding a horse on the front and the word Letters in brass above. And he’d only ever seen windows like that in Catholic churches. He’d had to ask Dr. Cox what those odd windows were called. Lancet windows. Named for lances. Like swords. Sword windows.
The sword windows were all dark. A few years ago, someone had tried turning Jeremy’s old house into a B and B, but now the Big Blue Monster was up for sale again. A realtor’s lockbox hung on the front door. Rafe peered through a window and saw it was empty of furniture, empty of everything except for a card table covered in flyers and business cards in the music room. It looked wrong. No piano where Jeremy had practiced every day at his mother’s command. No sofa nearby where Rafe would sketch or do homework while listening.
And there was no Jeremy here either.
Maybe Rafe had been crazy to expect him to be waiting on the front porch, but he was disappointed anyway. Rafe tried to ignore all the news stories about Jeremy’s near-miraculous ability to find missing girls, but deep down he’d almost believed that he could find anyone anytime. And if Jeremy really had that power, then he’d know Rafe was there and waiting for him.
His dad had tried to warn him. Years ago, his father had said being friends with someone like Jeremy was a bad idea. They came from different worlds. Too different. Rafe was a coyote. Jeremy was a purebred poodle. You didn’t see coyotes and poodles running around together, did you? Coyotes didn’t belong in fancy houses. Poodles wouldn’t survive a night in the woods. Poodles did tricks. Coyotes survived. A cruel thing to say, but the fact was…Jeremy and his mom did own a poodle. Her name was Martha, and Rafe had loved that dog as much as she’d loved him. He’d loved this house. After school, he’d walk over every day with Jeremy to do their homework together. Dr. Cox served them scones with clotted cream and hot tea with milk. Thanks to her, he knew hot tea should be made in a kettle and teapot, never the microwave. He knew the difference between a concerto and a sonata. And he knew he’d rather be a poodle in a warm house than a coyote in the cold, dark woods.
But maybe his dad was right. After all, he wasn’t in a warm house. He was outside and alone with no Jeremy in sight.
Just in case, he rang the doorbell. No answer. Of course not. When he turned to leave, he saw someone had left a package on the porch, hidden so no one would see it from the street. A large flat rectangle wrapped in brown paper and twine. Rafe’s initials were scrawled across the paper in black Sharpie.
Jeremy had been here.
Immediately, Rafe knew it was a painting. Nothing else came in that shape. A gift? A peace offering? He thought he knew what it was. Jeremy’s mother had owned a print of Franz Marc’s The Foxes, and Rafe had been enamored of it as a kid. Two red foxes, geometric, almost cubist, filled the canvas. The artist had used the same red for both foxes, so there was no telling where one began and the other ended. He remembered Dr. Cox saying, “You could do that someday.” Jeremy had rolled his eyes and said, “Someday? He can already do better than that now.”
Rafe had never forgotten that, because a fourteen-year-old kid doesn’t forget something like that.
Even now, his own art was heavily influenced by Marc’s bright colors, his strange animals, his wild lines. With his pocketknife, he cut the twine and carefully peeled back the paper.
It wasn’t The Foxes.
It was one of Rafe’s own paintings, made years ago in art therapy. The therapist told him to draw or paint the dreams he had on the nights he went into his fugue states. This had been one of them.
An expressionist painting of Jeremy, age fourteen, sitting at his mother’s piano in this very house. An ordinary enough scene but for the red crow perched on the edge of the piano’s open lid. In the dream, the red crow would listen to the piece until it was over. Then it would fly out the window. Jeremy would then turn to him and say, “Time to go.”
But how did Jeremy get this painting? Rafe had tossed all his old therapy art years ago. And why give it back to him now?
To get his attention, obviously. It worked.
