“Patron saint of lost people and objects.”

“Is that the medal you’re wearing?”

She’d immediately noticed the saint medal hanging around his neck, just like her mother’s she’d lost somewhere.

“No, this is St. Hubert. Patron saint of hunters.” He held that medal out for her to see. A man knelt in front of a deer.

“Because you hunt people?”

“It’s not mine,” he said.

He tucked the chain back under his shirt, then swiftly finished the labyrinth path.

When he reached the center, she said, “Welcome to the promised land.”

He pulled the photo she’d shoved into his hands yesterday out of his jacket pocket and held it up to her.

“This is your sister? Your sister who was kidnapped and supposedly murdered twenty years ago?”

“Yeah, why? Wait, what do you mean ‘supposedly’?” Emilie waited for the punch line to the joke, and when it came, it just felt like a punch.

“Because she wasn’t murdered in the woods.”

“How do you know?”

“Because…when we were lost in the woods, we saw her.”

Storyteller CornerCry Wolf

Your Storyteller here again. Eventually, you’re going to start wondering why Jeremy doesn’t come out and tell Emilie everything he knows. Remember that old fable, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”? Two strikes and that kid was out. Now only imagine what would’ve happened to “The Boy Who Cried Werewolf.”

Chapter Three

Emilie wanted her mom. She’d thought she understood what grieving was—crying herself to sleep at night, barely eating one day, bingeing the next, hugging the couch pillows and trying to find the scent of her mother’s perfume—Joy from Jean Patou—lingering in the fabric. But she’d never felt it like this before, this fierce animal need for her mother that went deeper than pain or tears. Her sister might be alive? This was the best news she’d ever heard, and whenever anything good happened, she would tell her mother first. She didn’t know what to do with all this hope and despair fighting inside her heart.

So she did nothing but bend over and breathe through her hands while Jeremy drove his car, a gray Subaru Outback, to her house. She sat up when they pulled in front of the white two-story house she’d grown up in, a hundred-year-old Queen Anne with a picture-perfect front porch, stained-glass panel in the front door, and backyard sloping down to the Little Miami River, where her mother had taught her to skip rocks.

“Pretty house,” Jeremy said as he parked at the curb.

“I know. I hate it.” She didn’t get out. She was never in a hurry to go back into her empty house.

“Do you?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Until I found out I had a sister who grew up in a West Virginia trailer park. That makes me sound like a snob. I’m not. I just wish she had it as easy as I did.”

“It’s not your fault you got dealt a better hand.”

She stared at the house that had once been a haven. She’d never wanted to leave home. Her friends all wanted to go to California for college or Florida or Texas or England or anywhere but Ohio. If her mother had lived, Emilie could have stayed in this house forever without feeling like she was missing a thing. Now, it was only a fancy storage shed for her memories. But if she had a sister and her sister needed a home…

“Is she living alone in the woods? Like those off-the-grid people?”

“Out,” he said.

She got out of the car and led him to the front door. Was she actually letting a strange man—frankly, a very strange man—into her house? Not something she would usually do, even in Milton. Bad idea? Maybe, but it was worth it if there was any chance her sister was out there somewhere, and he could find her. Find her sister like he found—

She stopped with her key in the front door and turned around. Jeremy waited with his back to a porch column.

“How did you find me?” she asked. “I didn’t tell you my address, right?”

He looked at her, and his eyebrow arched so high it nearly scraped his hairline.

“Oh, right. That’s what you do.”

“It’s what I do.”

“I’m a little terrified of you, but I’m going to let you in my house anyway. If you do kill me, make it gentle. Nitrous-oxide me or something first.”

“We can stay on the porch if you want.”

“No, no. I’m going to trust you.”

“Here, let me help.” He held up his hand to shush her, then closed his eyes. Mesmerized, she watched as his lips moved as if saying a silent prayer. How long it lasted, she didn’t know, but long enough for a cool autumn breeze to sweep down the street and send orange and gold leaves skittering across her lawn.

“Jeremy?”

“Your mother’s St. Agatha medal is under the bed where she died.”

“What?”

He met her eyes. “Go and check.”

“I checked under the bed.”

“Go and check again. It could be trapped under the mattress or something. I’ll wait here. You can lock the door behind you. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

“You’re being very weird.”

“I realize that, but also, I’m right.”

What did she have to lose? Emilie opened the door and went into the house. Without even hitting the lights, she walked straight to her mother’s old home office, which had become her bedroom when they’d brought the hospital bed in for her. The mattress was bare, and the whole room reeked of Lysol and Clorox bleach.

She had checked the bed for the missing St. Agatha medal. She remembered digging through the covers for it after her mother’s body had been taken to the funeral home.

Once again, she pushed her hands down into the gaps between the sides of the bed and the mattress. Nothing. She really, really wanted that necklace to be there. Because if he could miraculously find her mom’s necklace, maybe he could find her sister.

Nothing on the rug. Nothing under the rug.