Page 39 of You Belong Here

The sirens swept past the house, continuing on. The neighbors next door stood outside, watching the lights turn down College Lane.

In the wake of the vehicles, the leaves were spiraling in the wind, cascading into the yard, sweeping across the street.

Delilah walked down the porch steps barefoot. “Is it a fire?” she asked, straining to see over the row of houses.

But there was no smoke in the sky. And no scent carried on the wind.

She kept walking down the sidewalk, drawn closer.

Lockdown was a drill our children had endured since elementary school. It was a term our generation had come to dread on the most visceral level—and we were only a few blocks from campus.

I held her by the elbow. “Get back in the house,” I said.

She stared at me with open vulnerability. “I have friends there, Mom,” she said, voice cracking.

And she had no phone. No way to contact them. To know that they were safe.

It was a feeling I knew well.

“Stay here with your dad,” I said, catching his eye over her shoulder. “Please stay in the house. I’ll go find out what’s going on.”

I was out the door in my final pair of clean clothes a few moments later.

As I drove along the perimeter of campus, I saw a cluster of onlookers on the other side of College Lane, standing across the street.

At the access road we’d taken to the campus police yesterday, orange cones were set up across the entrance, blocking the route. Behind them, an empty police vehicle was positioned sideways, like a barricade.

I idled in my car, lowered the window. I couldn’t see anything past the first curve in the lane. There was another access road on the other side of campus, but when I drove past, that, too, was blocked off—this one with two police vehicles.

I couldn’t see any activity on the campus itself.

I frowned, then texted Maggie—it felt too early to ring her, but I wondered if her husband had been called in as a volunteer for the fire department. Do you know what’s happening on campus?

I stared at my phone, waiting for a response—nothing.

I circled back toward the main gates, where Delilah and I had entered campus on foot during orientation. The gates were closed, as expected, but the two footpaths were occupied by a security golf cart positioned in each opening.

They weren’t just trying to keep students in place here—they were trying to keep everyone else out. I wasn’t the only parent who had apparently seen the alert and driven over in a panic.

A black SUV was pulled up directly at the gate, driver’s-side door hanging open, like whoever was inside had gotten out in a rush. I parked my car directly behind theirs, despite the Tow Zone signs.

Violet was standing on the sidewalk just outside the gates in a pair of sweats, like she’d been in bed when she got the alert. A man from security, wearing an orange vest and a navy baseball cap, was standing directly in her path, shaking his head.

“Dill, please, ” she said. Dill—this must’ve been Beverly’s son who worked nights. It must’ve been an all hands on deck situation.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wharton,” he said, hands out like he was holding her back. “I can’t.”

Violet threw up her hands in frustration, the angles of her diamond rings catching the morning light, throwing off a prism of colors. “The kids are stuck in the dorms with no idea what’s going on. Let me take him home. That has to be safer, right?”

“It’s a lockdown. No one in, no one out,” he said, as if repeating his orders.

She spun around in disgust. “You can’t keep them prisoners!” she yelled back over her shoulder. “They have rights!”

Then she froze, noticing me standing at the curb. Her hand went to her chest, and she quickly pivoted my way. “Beckett, is everything…” She trailed off, looking toward campus again—seeming to put things together: The police. The lockdown. My daughter.

I shook my head quickly. “We found her. She’s safe at my parents’ place.”

Violet grabbed both of my arms at once, like we were closer than we really were. But fear could do that to people, bridging a divide, pulling them together in understanding. “Oh, thank God, ” she said.

“Bryce?” I asked.

She shook her head, too. “He’s fine. But the kids don’t know what’s happening. He said the power’s been out all night. And then this lockdown alert…” I felt a tremble in her hands before she dropped them.

But I’d felt that same fear, and Delilah wasn’t even on campus anymore.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” I asked.

“No one’s saying anything.” She threw another look at Dill, who was doing his best to ignore us. “But I’m going to wait right here until someone comes to talk to me.”

Luckily I knew other ways in.

I backtracked past the access road and drove another half mile to a gravel parking lot that served as the trailhead.

There was only one other car—a rusted silver sedan.

From here, if I took the fork to the left, the loop would brush against the far side of campus property, where I could cross over to their trails, bringing me back to the access road from the other side.

The morning felt crisp, gusts of wind starting to blow the leaves from the trees.

When I reached the farthest point of the loop, I veered off into the brush. I knew I’d eventually intersect with a campus hiking path.

I hadn’t gone far when I started to notice a commotion through the trees.

A cluster of vehicles was clogging the access road we’d driven up yesterday. The red of a fire truck mixed in with white emergency vehicles. There were a few construction vehicles in the area, too. I must’ve been close to the location of the student center renovation.

I couldn’t see anyone clearly, but I could hear them moving—calling out to one another, issuing directives.

I needed to get closer.

Just ahead, a girl was crouched low to the ground. Her dark hair was parted down the middle, long and untamed. I froze in my path, one foot planted in front.

We stared at each other silently, not moving. I felt her assessing me: friend or foe; one of them or one of us .

She looked vaguely familiar, with angular, striking features.

I’d seen her before—somewhere in town. The deli, I thought.

One of the girls working there who looked like sisters.

Maybe Delilah’s age; maybe not. Seeing her with hair down and face bare of makeup, wearing leggings and an oversize T-shirt, I changed my mind: definitely younger.

She was clearly shaken.

“I remember you,” I whispered. “From the deli.”

She nodded slightly, eyes sliding up and down my body as if she was trying to place me. There’d been a name on one of the girl’s aprons. “Carly, right?”

She nodded again.

“What’s going on here, Carly?”

She turned back toward the access road, hair moving over her shoulders. “I don’t know. No one knows.” Her throat moved as she swallowed, and she dropped her voice even lower. “There’s someone in the pit.”

Her words sent a chill through my body. I leaned to the side, trying to see through the trees. But all I could see were the vehicles. Somewhere beyond that must’ve been the empty construction site. The pit.

“Someone in the pit,” I repeated, trying to make it solid, real.

“My sister found them. She was out looking for her friend.”

“Your sister?” I pictured the other girl in the deli. The chipping white nail polish as she rang me up at the register.

“Sierra,” she said.

The name I’d so often heard from Delilah. No wonder Amanda with campus police couldn’t find any record of her. She wasn’t someone from the school; she was from the town.

“Was she looking for Delilah?” I asked.

Carly whipped her head around.

How close I had come in the deli, brushing up against her friends, without even knowing it. Cliff had told me Delilah spent a lot of time off campus; I’d seen the photo on her Instagram account from the entrance of town and assumed she’d been out there alone. But maybe she hadn’t been.

“I’m Delilah’s mother,” I said. “I was looking for her, too. She’s okay. She was lost, but she’s home with me now.”

She stared back at me openmouthed, like this was what she’d been looking for. “The cops wouldn’t tell Sierra anything,” she said. “No one would tell her who it is. They’re with her again now, at the house.”

“She couldn’t tell?”

Carly shook her head. “Only that it’s a girl. She was lying face down.” She held her arms out to the sides, as if reenacting it.

A girl—someone like Delilah.

Just then, a radio crackled, like an officer was patrolling the woods, back and forth, looking for evidence. Looking for us.

I pictured students running through the night.

The red mask I’d found at Cryer’s Quarry, on the other side of downtown.

Kids racing from campus into the woods. Someone sprinting toward the old student center pit, not paying attention, not noticing the way the ground suddenly opened up below, in a yawning chasm.

I waited until the footsteps retreated once more before reaching a hand down for Carly. “It’s time to get out of here,” I said.

I had no idea how long Carly had been alone in the woods, watching, wondering—imagining all the horrors that had led a girl to the bottom of a construction pit in the middle of the night.

“I’m going to follow you home, just to make sure you get there safely,” I told her.

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t object, either.

It seemed like she was in a trance, like Delilah had been when I’d startled her in the basement.

I hoped that if anyone had found Delilah wandering the woods like this, they would’ve done the same—leading her back, making sure she arrived safely home.

I waited until I was alone inside my car before calling the number Violet had given me yesterday.

“Are you still there?” I asked when she picked up.

“In my car,” she said, “waiting. Not that they seem to care.”

“I found out,” I said. A reminder, then, that I was still one of them. “There’s a girl in the pit of the student center.”

“A girl?” she repeated, like a question.

But then I corrected myself. “A body. They found a body.”