Page 91 of The Gallagher Place

Her parents staggered into the kitchen in their pajamas and robes, awoken by the shouting. When Nate explained, they agreed with him. No need to panic.

Marlowe ran from the kitchen to the coat closet, swinging the doors open. She stomped upstairs, checking the girls’ room, in the unlikely scenario Nora had been hit hard by a few sips of alcohol and had decided to go to sleep.

Henry and Liam ran down to the basement to wake up Enzo. He was a deep sleeper, but he would be useful once he was awake. He knew how to navigate a crisis.

Frank commandeered the phone, calling Nora’s parents first. It took two tries to wake them.

Nora’s parents jumped in the car as soon as they ascertained what was going on. The whole lot of them gathered up all the flashlights in the house (two good ones, and one with a dying battery) and spilled back onto the lawn.

Nate and Marlowe ventured toward the Gallagher barn, while their parents moved into the pasture and Jennifer and Damen took the road, shining their flashlights into the fringes of the woods, screaming her name. Enzo and Henry wandered out into the orchard and woods beyond, covering every possible direction. The others stayed near the house; they didn’t know the land, and someone needed to be there in case Nora came back or tried to call.

The Gallagher barn loomed dark and silent. Marlowe ducked behind Nate as he swung open its sagging doors, terrified that some monster would leap out. Some ghost or ghoul, witch or hermit—one they had dreamed up themselves, conjured somehow with their chanting around the bonfire. Or the fiendish bear, come back to get them after all. The inside of the barn was silent as a tomb, the air stale and dusty.

“Nora?” The beam of Nate’s flashlight bounced down the stone aisle. He jogged to the ladder and climbed up to the hayloft.

“What do you see?” Marlowe called up.

“Nothing. She’s not here.”

Marlowe tried to choke back the tears that were already flowing down her face, obscuring her vision, as she ran by each empty stall in the barn and checked the small office, just in case.

She and Nate ran out of the barn and into the cow field. They jogged upward, swinging their flashlights in wide arcs. Near the back fence, Nate stopped and stared into the blackness.

“It’s too dark,” he said.

Marlowe stared out beyond the fence, squinting at what she knew to be there but could not see: the swamp, its silty passageways impossible to tackle without full sunlight.

Back at the house, no one suggested that Nora was playing a prank anymore. Something had gone very wrong.

Damen Miller got back in his car to drive slowly up and down the road, farther than he could go on foot, searching for any sign ofher. Enzo announced he was going to climb to the top of the North Field, just in case Nora had gone for a midnight stroll. They had done it before, to take in the sight of the Gray House bathed in starlight or to watch the sunrise. The night was cloudy, but still the North Field offered the best view of the surrounding area.

Glory ushered Henry and Liam upstairs. Nate and his friends sat in a silent circle in the living room, staring at their feet.

“Jennifer,” Frank said, looking down at the table. “Is there any possibility she ran away?”

Nora’s mother didn’t answer; she simply stared at Frank, her face full of bewilderment. In that moment, it seemed eerie that her hair was the exact shade of blond as Nora’s, only straggly and matted in the back from sleeping. Her pupils were dilated, flickering with desperate yearning, as if she hoped she might still wake up from this nightmare.

“She didn’t run away,” Marlowe cried. “She’d never do that without telling me.”

Just past three in the morning, they called the police. Frank made the call, while Marlowe sat, drained and defeated, by the empty fireplace.

Her parents walked her up to her room to try to get some sleep, but Marlowe sat alone at the table, her drawing supplies scattered around her. There was something out there, if only she could capture it. But she’d never been able to draw the landscape in its true essence; there was no technique able to illustrate the invisible. As the night faded, her eyelids grew heavy and painful.

She woke with a jolt, just as the sun’s first light cast a glimmer on the dew-covered grass. She ran outside and scanned the lawn. The darkness had gone, but there was nothing in its place. No footprints to follow. No scrap of a clue. Nora was nowhere to be found. She was gone.

Marlowe stared at the ugly trash bin by the side of the road. Just one bin; the other was missing. She chided herself for not taking the trash out herself. It was her mother who demanded such constant cleanliness, after all.

“Marlowe, come on,” someone shouted at her.

She turned back toward the house as Glory, Frank, and Enzo emerged with Damen and Jennifer; the boys, exhausted and spooked, trailed out behind them.

“Spread out,” Glory said. “Twenty paces apart and we’ll walk in a line. That’s how a search is meant to be done.”

Marlowe ran to join the line as her family started to move across their land together, toward the smaller hayfield beyond the lawn.

Marlowe walked by a copper-colored tractor parked on the edge of the field. She inhaled the sweet smell of waving hay ready to be cut. It was, to her, the most beautiful scent, better than roses or lavender. Clean and fresh and light. After the Gallagher brothers were all gone, Frank kept the fields active. Farmers from neighboring communities came to mow at the beginning of the summer. In exchange for their work, they got to keep the hay.

The grass was tall now, as Marlowe moved through it, searching. But soon the tractors would come through with their Haybines. The large rotating spikes cutting the tall green grass down in large swaths and flattening it.

In another few weeks, the grass would dry to a golden brown, and the tractors would appear again to rake the grass into windrows and eventually bale the hay into squares to be piled atop wagons and stored away in barns. The land, with its own rhythm pulsating through seasons and generations in an endless cycle. Nora would be there to witness it, as always. The hay could not be baled without Nora; it simply didn’t make sense.

Just then, Marlowe remembered a story the Gallaghers had told her and Nora one summer evening, after the first cut, when theywere poking around the parked equipment. Tom warned them to be careful, the blades were deadly. And then Dave told them about the fawns. The does hid their newborns in the tall grass after giving birth in the spring. Entirely helpless, the tiny fawns with their delicate white spots spent their infancy hidden in small nests in the grass, until they were able to walk far enough on their own to forage in the woods with their mothers. Every year, when it came time for the first cut, a half dozen fawns were slaughtered in the field by those Haybines. “A bloody day,” they’d called it.

“You see,” Tom said, “the white spots on a fawn are meant to help them blend in with tall grass and hide from predators. Those spots resemble speckles of sunlight shining through the trees, so their natural instinct is to freeze in the face of danger and become invisible. Only, us farmers can’t see the little things either from up on a tractor. It’s a sad thing. Makes their deaths all the more inevitable.”

Marlowe squinted into the dappling sunlight and walked farther into the field, using her forearms to push the grass away from her chest. She had better eyes than those old farmers did. She would find Nora, like a fawn in the grass. She would search for the glint of those tiny white spots for as long as it took. She would never stop.