Page 32 of You Belong Here

The school was a different beast in the afternoon.

It seemed like half the student body was outside, playing Frisbee or set up on blankets with their laptops propped open.

It was jarring—all these people moving forward with their day.

Like they didn’t realize how close they were to the precipice of a tragedy.

Trevor’s Mazda still had that new-car smell, though I recognized the car from earlier in the summer, at Delilah’s graduation. But I guessed that’s what was possible when a car wasn’t used on the daily to transport groups of teenagers.

The campus police were headquartered at the divide between the upper and lower sections, in a low brick building tucked at the edge of the property.

I directed Trevor up the same access road I’d taken earlier in the day, past the construction vehicles idle at the old pit for the student center.

Like everything here was best kept out of sight.

We were early, but we didn’t wait. Trevor pulled open one of the glass doors at the entrance, then held it for me to enter first.

Though the outside looked exactly the same as it had long ago, the inside had gotten a rehab, just like Beckett Hall.

White paint brightened up the walls, and there appeared to be a faux wood tile—a modern light gray—through the lobby, where a floating semicircle reception desk was positioned in the middle.

There was no one behind the desk, but Cliff stood beside it like he’d been waiting. He wore khakis and a blazer with bright white sneakers. They reminded me of Delilah’s.

“Beckett,” he said, eyes sliding from me to Trevor. He seemed surprised by the presence of a second person.

“This is Delilah’s father, Trevor,” I said as they shook hands.

“Cliff Simmons, one of the deans.” Trevor was both taller and broader, and I noticed Cliff straightening his posture. His eyes then slid to me. “Let me show you to the meeting room.”

When he led us to the small room with an oval table and a television screen on the back wall, there were three other people already in the room.

An older Black man in uniform stood first, chair legs scratching against the floor. “Paul Signs,” he said, walking around the table to shake our hands. “I’m the head of the campus police. And this is Amanda Christianson, one of our patrollers. She’s been out talking to some of the students today.”

Amanda appeared younger than I was, with tanned skin and brown hair that fell in waves, similar to Delilah’s. Amanda wore jeans and a white T-shirt, like she’d been called in from somewhere else. She seemed like she’d blend right in with the students; maybe that was the point.

Paul gestured to the man at the other end of the table. “We’ve asked our partner at the Wyatt Valley Police Department to join us to make sure we’re covering everything. We believe in open communication. We all want the same thing here.”

“Thank you,” Trevor said. And then I froze. Fred Mayhew reached out to shake my hand, mouth a tight line, no indication of the history between us.

“We want you to know,” Cliff cut in, “that we’re all taking this very seriously.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised that Mayhew would be called in. In a small town, there were probably only so many detectives. But I wished I had prepared Trevor more for this moment. There’s a cop here who thinks I’m a liar.

“We have no reason to suspect she’s anything but fine,” Paul continued, “but we’re going to exhaust every possibility until we get eyes on her.”

He gestured for us to take a seat at the table, then cleared his throat as he opened his laptop. The television on the wall behind him flickered to life, mirroring his screen.

“In the spirit of transparency, we wanted to share the footage we’ve managed to spot her in. This is from the camera at the front of Beckett Hall.”

The time stamp at the bottom of the screen said 11:56.

Just before midnight, like Cliff had confirmed earlier.

The camera must’ve been positioned over the door, pointing down, so that you could see only the concrete pad positioned in front of the arched entrance.

It was so dark—everything in shades of black and gray.

And then someone entered the frame. My heart leaped, seeing her.

Proof that she was here. I felt the thread between us pulling tighter.

The footage was grainy, choppy. It was more of a time lapse of static images than a video feed.

She was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, so I couldn’t see her face.

She seemed to be carrying a backpack, but it was impossible to tell if it was her school bag or something else.

The video feed jerked forward, and suddenly her arm was reaching for the scanner.

And then I saw it: a cursive D for Delilah, hand-painted in neon gel on the back of her phone.

Trevor reached out and grabbed my hand under the table. I felt either his pulse or mine in the tight grip.

In the next frame, her head turned, like she was looking over her shoulder for one frozen moment. And in the next, she was gone, the footage eerily empty.

It had all happened so fast. Here and gone. “Again, please,” I said, wanting to hang on to her, find something else in the gaps.

Paul scrolled backward through the frames—her image jerky and haunting in reverse—then played it forward again. This time I took my phone out, recording it for myself.

The other member of the campus police—Amanda—frowned at me. There were probably rules against this, but I dared her to object.

“Did anyone else go in after her?” I asked, placing my phone on the table again. I imagined someone chasing her. I imagined her trying to hide—

“We didn’t see anyone else,” Paul said, though I noticed his careful choice of words. “She doesn’t appear to come back out through the front door. Unfortunately, we don’t have eyes on the back of the building.”

“Have you—” Trevor began.

But Amanda was already nodding, hand held up to halt the question.

Her nails, I noticed, were a shiny, deep red.

“We’ve already searched the building, top to bottom, room by room.

Had a team do a full sweep before you arrived, just to rule out the possibility that she’d fallen asleep or had some medical episode and was still inside.

No one’s there.” She spread her hands open as if revealing a magic trick— poof, vanished .

“And you didn’t see her on any other cameras after?” Trevor asked. But my mind was elsewhere, tracing her path in my memory. Out the back door —where would she go next?

Paul leaned back in his chair so that the springs squeaked. “We have cameras at the front entrance of most buildings, including the dorms. We haven’t been able to identify her entering any of the dorms after, but that doesn’t mean she’s not there.”

“Also,” Amanda said, “a lot of the kids were wearing hoods or hats. It was a windy one last night.” She dragged the locket pendant of her necklace across the chain, back and forth.

My gaze darted around the table, trying to catch anyone’s eye. The first howling of the year, Maggie had told me. “Were there a lot of students out?” I asked, also careful in how I chose my words.

“There are always students out on Friday night,” Amanda responded in a noticeable nonanswer.

I turned to Cliff, raised an eyebrow—he knew what I meant. Were they out with purpose, running through the woods, trying not to get caught.

Cliff breathed in. “We can tell you that no one else entered the building after her. The building is locked from both sides. You’d need an ID to scan, and hers was the only one used.”

He was evading the question. They all were. There were others out in the night, I was sure of it. But there had to be privacy rules they were concerned about. I tried to think where else she could’ve gone other than out the back, into the woods—

“Did you check the tunnels?” I asked.

I felt Trevor slowly turn to look at me.

Cliff set his jaw like I was breaking some unspoken rule. “Yes,” he said slowly. “They were locked, but we checked as part of the building security sweep. As I told you earlier, they don’t all connect anymore.”

No exit. That’s what he meant. I felt my throat tightening, a sense of claustrophobia settling in this small office space.

The room fell quiet then, as if they could all sense the history here—between me and Cliff, or me and this place. It felt like there was something else in the room with us. The sound of a lock clicking; the scent of smoke—

Amanda cleared her throat. “We’ve started interviewing students,” she said, like she was trying to move the conversation along, get the meeting back on track.

“I heard there were some power surges at her dorm last night,” I said.

“Where’d you hear that?” Amanda asked, like this was news to her.

“Lenny. At the dorm.”

She frowned. “Must’ve been an easy fix. He didn’t mention it in his statement.”

This was the first I was hearing of any statements.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Mr. Leonard said it was business as usual there. No calls came in from the dorm. He didn’t see her. He only saw you.”

I flinched, realizing they had probably also tracked my movements while they were looking for her. “Do you have cameras on the woods?” I asked, keeping my voice steady and calm.

She crossed her arms, leaning back. “We do, near the edges of the trails, at the blue-light emergency phones all around campus. Our crew has been checking the footage from last night.” She shook her head. “They haven’t spotted her.”

Which didn’t mean they hadn’t spotted others . It also didn’t mean Delilah hadn’t slipped into the woods from a different way, out of camera view, like how I’d seen Bryce emerge from an unmarked path in the woods this morning.