Page 40 of You Belong Here

Not Delilah. That’s all I could think as I followed Carly away from downtown.

Another student running through the dark? How close might Delilah have come, entering Beckett Hall in the middle of the night. I couldn’t stop imagining the alternate series of events that might’ve sent her veering on the path to the right, skirting the edge of campus, thinking she could hide—

What would I tell her when I got back home? I needed the name. Needed to know it wasn’t one of her friends. The uncertainty, I knew, would send her spiraling. And she’d already been through so much.

Carly turned into a quaint neighborhood about a mile away, where the landscape began to rise from the valley. The homes were all older here, in shades of yellow and blue and gray, clearly built by the same developer.

She pulled up the driveway of a butter yellow ranch home on a small wooded lot.

There was another car in the driveway—belonging to a parent, I was hoping—and a Wyatt Valley Police Department vehicle parked at the curb, currently unoccupied.

Inside, I imagined, someone was questioning her sister, Sierra. Asking her to repeat again and again what she saw. Why she was out there. What her intentions were. Twisting things until she started to question things herself. Tell me again, from the beginning—

Carly paused on the front porch, like she was listening through the storm door, before finally slipping inside.

Word was starting to spread. There were cars parked all along the old Fraternity Row—which was as close as onlookers could legally park.

I could see people gathered on the other side, watching campus. A police car was visible at the border, like a warning for people to keep back.

There was a media van now, too, idling nearby. It felt like we were on the brink of something.

The school must’ve issued the lockdown in order to go room by room, taking a head count.

I parked abruptly in front of Cliff’s rental house, hoping to find him home. Hoping that word had started to spread through the proper channels.

As I approached the front of the house, I could see that the door was slightly ajar.

I remained on the porch but cautiously pushed the door open a little farther, trying not to draw attention to myself.

The first thing I saw was a young boy sitting on the bottom step of the staircase, hunched over an iPad, blue headphones over blond hair.

And then I heard the voices.

“I told you, I can’t take him right now.” The sound was coming from the side of the foyer, where I knew Cliff’s office was located. “Look at what’s going on!”

“I have a twelve-hour shift at the hospital,” a woman responded. “What am I supposed to do?”

My gaze drifted back to the boy. It seemed like he was fully invested in the cartoon playing on his screen. I was glad he wasn’t hearing his parents arguing about him.

“Can’t you get your parents to watch him?” Cliff asked.

“Can’t you get a babysitter?”

“Jane, please, ” he said, clearly exasperated. “You see what’s happening out there.”

“But you’re stuck at home right now anyway,” she said. “And I can’t bring him to the hospital.”

“I’m stuck at home because there’s a lockdown. I’m getting calls every few seconds.”

“This job isn’t worth what they pay you,” she said.

“Yes, it is. You can thank me when he goes there for free.”

Like me, I thought.

Then I heard footsteps crossing the room. A door swinging open. I backed away from the entrance as her voice grew closer.

“We moved back here for you, ” she said, “and for what? This isn’t the first time. You barely take him on the days you have.”

“There was a fire, Jane, it wasn’t safe—” There was a waver in his voice, an uncertain emotion rising to the surface. Fear.

But Jane wasn’t listening anymore. The front door flung open, resounding off the inner wall before she emerged in pale blue scrubs with her son by the hand.

She was prettier than I expected, petite with curly brown hair, almond-shaped eyes, and freckles that made her seem ageless. She pulled up abruptly, noticing me on the top step, then huffed and kept moving, like I was only one more thing to be exasperated by right now.

She lifted the boy up on her hip, and he wrapped his free arm around her neck, peering back over her shoulder with wide eyes.

Cliff appeared in the doorway, a few steps behind. “I’ll come by tonight—”

The words died in his mouth as soon as he saw me there, motionless on his steps.

His hand tightened on the open door. “What are you doing here?”

I climbed the final step, joining him on the porch as he watched Jane buckle his son into the back of a small SUV. I decided to go with the obvious. “They found a body on campus?”

His eyes darkened, his gaze sliding up and down the street. I understood now that this was supposed to be the quiet part. This was why there were guards at every entrance point on campus. This was what they didn’t want people to know.

“We can’t make a statement yet. You can’t say anything to anyone.” He pulled the door open wider in welcome. Or, more likely, in a need to keep this quiet and contained.

“Who is it?” I asked, stepping inside. I shuddered, imagining all those parents receiving the same text alert and imagining the worst. I imagined each of them trying to contact their child—

“I don’t know,” he said. “For all their talk of open communication bullshit, they’re keeping everyone back, even us. We’re completely out of the loop.”

“What the hell is going on out there? What happened?”

He took a deep breath, looking me over carefully. “It’s fucking chaos, is what it is. I’m only home because there’s no power, and we need to have access to the class lists. I’ve been printing them off. We’ve got a crew out at each dorm.”

“Was it an accident?” I pictured the students running through the night, chased by seniors in masks. How easy it was to slip and fall. I could see the pit on campus being a hazard in the dark.

“They haven’t said.” He blinked slowly before speaking again. “But they did ask us to initiate a lockdown.”

My throat tightened. Lockdowns were to protect the students. Lockdowns were to keep people safe from an active, present danger.

“They’re worried someone pushed her. And that they’re still out there,” I said. A threat that remained in the area.

He didn’t confirm but didn’t deny. I understood why he wouldn’t want his son around, even if he were working from home. It was the same reason I was desperate to keep Delilah away from this place.

We wanted to shield them from danger, even if we couldn’t prove it was here.

I looked toward the open door of his office. “Aren’t there cameras around that area? Wouldn’t they see?”

He shook his head. “Not at the construction pit. The building’s demolished.”

“But around it. There are other buildings nearby.”

He frowned, crossed his arms. “The power’s been out since late last night.”

A chill worked its way through my body, like there was something darker at play. The power out at night and a dead body by morning.

Maybe it had nothing to do with the night of the howling. Maybe it was more recent—a student walking across campus in the dark.

“How long are you going to keep the kids up there? Violet’s already been at the gates, demanding action.”

He sighed. “Until the police advise us. In the meantime, you seem to know just as much as I do.” He shifted his jaw like he was trying to pop a joint. “Is Delilah still at the house?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then,” he said, guiding me toward the front door, “you have nothing to worry about, do you.”

I didn’t argue as I exited his house and walked down the front steps. But he was wrong.

I was worried that something was after her—looking for her.

I worried that someone had died in her place, out in the dark of the night. That she was still in danger. Not just in an implied threat from the words on the wall. But someone tracking her, close by.

My fear only grew as I pulled up the street.

Something was happening at the house.

There was a police cruiser parked at an angle in my parents’ driveway, the rear tires sticking out in the street. Trevor stood on the porch, arms crossed, speaking to an officer in uniform.

“Hey,” I called even before I’d finished climbing out of the car. “What’s going on?”

My heart raced, every nerve on high alert. Had something happened to Delilah while I was gone?

I didn’t know the man in uniform, hadn’t seen him before. He was stocky and older, not much taller than I was, with a round face and soft expression.

“Hi, ma’am,” he said, taking a step closer. “I was just telling your husband here, I’d like to have a word with Delilah.”

My stomach dropped. I shook my head, climbing the steps. “She already talked to your colleagues last night,” I said, standing beside Trevor.

“Yes, we’re just working on a timeline. We need a little more detail. Trying to close out the paperwork on this one today.”

He said it soft and sneaky. Like it was protocol.

“She’s sleeping,” I said, and I felt Trevor’s body tense.

I hoped she stayed inside. I hoped she didn’t hear us out here.

“It would be helpful to know the details of where exactly she was. For safety training.”

“She was lost,” Trevor said. “How would she even know?”

I raised my hand to Trevor’s back, pressing firmly, to get him to stop. He didn’t know what was happening here. And wasn’t that the point? This man was coming to us before we found out.

The officer stared back, waiting. As if he expected me to be more accommodating. Invite him in, like my parents might’ve done.

But there was a dead body on campus and a police cruiser at my house.

My daughter had been missing for nineteen hours—unaccounted for during that period of time.

She had been lost in the woods, but her last name was also Bowery.

I knew what they were doing here. I knew exactly what they were looking for.