Page 45 of You Belong Here

I stared at the phone, unable to move. Reaching back in time to the moment when I’d found her in the basement, sitting on the floor, facing the dryer.

Hair wet, keys on the concrete beside her.

She must’ve taken a shower, thrown her clothes and sneakers in the wash.

And she’d tossed her phone in a hidden space, hoping it wouldn’t be found.

Something had happened in the night. Something she hadn’t told me.

My hand was trembling as I picked up the phone and slowly turned it over. The screen was shattered—a central point of impact, with cracks spreading outward.

She said she’d lost her phone in the woods. She said she’d dropped it down an embankment. She said—

“Beckett?” Trevor called, standing at the top of the stairs.

I spun around, hiding the phone behind my back on instinct. “Sorry,” I called. “The dumbwaiter’s not working. I’ll be right up.”

The stairs creaked as he took a single step down. I could see the blue of his sneaker, the bottom of his pants. The stillness of his body. “He’s back,” he said in warning.

He’s back.

He must’ve meant the police.

“Hold on—”

I couldn’t think straight. My vision had gone blurry at the edges. What were they doing back here at night?

What were they looking for?

I pressed the button to the side of the dumbwaiter, raising the empty box. Then, before I could question it, I dropped the phone into the shaft below before lowering the dumbwaiter back into position.

I emerged from the basement to find Fred Mayhew on the other side of the screen door. “There she is,” Trevor said as I placed the full laundry basket on the floor of the hallway.

I hoped Delilah was upstairs. I hoped she stayed out of sight. So I could say: No, she’s not available to talk right now. No, you cannot come in. No, you cannot look around .

“I was hoping to catch you here,” Mayhew said, straight-faced. “May I?” He gestured to the screen door.

His eyes were bloodshot, like he’d been up all night. He’d left his sport coat behind today, and the sleeves of his button-down were rolled up, as if he’d been working with his hands.

I wondered if he’d been at the student center pit all day.

“What’s this about?” I asked.

“Is there somewhere you and I can sit down and speak privately for a minute?” he asked.

There wasn’t, really. Just my father’s office, where one of us would need to sit awkwardly behind a desk with a series of masks staring down from overhead. “We can talk out front,” I said, though it wasn’t exactly private.

But I didn’t know where Delilah was. I didn’t want him shifting the conversation to her in a quick bait and switch.

He was older now, and he had gotten better at this.

I joined him outside and sat on one of the two white rocking chairs in front of the living room window. Mayhew dragged the other chair so it was facing me. In the dark, the porch light threw long shadows to the side.

“I heard you were at the scene today,” he said, lowering himself into the seat. He rocked forward, resting his hands on his knees so he was leaning even closer. “Heard you were watching.”

I didn’t answer. Maybe that’s why he was here—wondering what had taken me over there. How I’d known where to go. Wasn’t that a rule for finding a suspect? Look at the people who come back to watch. Everyone knew: You couldn’t return to the scene of the crime.

“I wasn’t the only parent there.” Violet and I were just the closest to the campus.

“What did you hear from Carly Mathers?” he asked, changing directions. As if he wanted me to know there would be no secrets. He knew exactly where I’d been and whom I’d talked to. That I hadn’t been just on campus; I’d been lurking in the woods. Watching in secret.

“I heard that her sister, Sierra, found someone in the student center pit,” I said. “Do you know who it is?”

He stared back at me, silent and still. This was not the strategy he’d used when interviewing me in the past. Back then, he’d pushed and pried and dug.

He hadn’t mastered this tactic of uneasy silence.

He hadn’t quite learned the value of time—to wait for someone else to crack in discomfort and fill it.

He breathed in deeply, rocking back slowly like we were old friends casually chatting on the front porch. “There was a student ID on the body,” he began. “We haven’t officially confirmed it, but we have a name.”

I nodded, needing him to continue. Delilah’s friends had all checked in. Still, my stomach twisted, waiting.

Fred Mayhew folded his thick hands on his lap, leaning forward again.

“Strangest thing,” he said. “The name on the ID is Adalyn Vale.”

I stopped breathing. Whatever I had been waiting for, it was not this.

A girl— that’s what Carly had told me. Which had made me think young, student-age. And that’s what she’d been the last time I’d seen her, twenty years earlier.

Racing through the dark, black mask pulled down over her face, only her blue eyes visible in the beam of the flashlight.

I pictured it anew: That trail in the snow, ending at the road at the edge of campus where she disappeared. The men’s size-ten boots, no longer helping her escape—but catching her.

Someone who had been angry. So angry for what she’d done. Hurting her and then hiding her away. And letting a legend grow in her absence.

Had she been there all along? On campus, hidden inside the student center—dead?

The town was full of suspects. People with motive.

I thought of Cliff—the only one left. He’d been close to the victims through high school and after.

Then I thought about all the other people Micah White and Charlie Rivers had grown up with—their friends and family.

This man, even, smugly sitting in front of me, with all the protection in the world.

Before he was a detective, Fred Mayhew was the young officer who once sat in the Low Bar the night Adalyn was forced to turn over her pearl necklace. I remembered his inaction then.

He’d picked a side, too.

We all had.

Who would know where to hide her, how to bury her?

I took a slow breath, to recalibrate.

This had nothing to do with Delilah. The phone in the basement meant nothing. This had to do with the past. With me. With him.

“Where was she?” I asked, my voice razor-thin.

“What do you mean?” Mayhew asked.

“Where was she buried?” Under a floor somehow? In a hidden basement room, maybe, that had been unearthed? Or had she been in the soil found along the perimeter, under the spot where students walked each day?

The construction vehicles must’ve uncovered the spot just before the weekend. But it was only in searching for Delilah that Adalyn had been actively found.

He tipped his head to the side, looked straight into me. “She wasn’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

The silence stretched again, like he was waiting for me to say something. To reveal something. He’d been waiting a long time.

“ If it’s her—and again, we need to confirm—she’s been living another life for the past twenty years. Best we can guess, she died sometime in the last forty-eight hours.”