Page 46 of You Belong Here

I couldn’t sleep. From my spot on the futon in the office, the wind pushed against the windows in a low whistle. It’s Adalyn.

Wasn’t that what the kids at the school said now, under the sound of the howling? It’s Adalyn. Like a whisper, a séance drawing her back.

Hadn’t I felt it? The past existing right beside me here? I had never been able to shake the feeling that something else was coming. I’d just been preparing for the wrong thing.

Detective Mayhew had said they couldn’t be sure yet, but they seemed sure enough to tell me.

Adalyn’s parents had died in a car crash five years ago, so there was no next of kin to identify her, no DNA available for a quick match.

But they were working their way back in time from the details in her wallet.

A license under another name. A photo that looked similar enough.

And she’d had the old school ID with her—like proof.

Something she had held on to for twenty years, for the moment she returned.

I imagined her name spreading through town in the wind, in whispers, on phone lines, in text messages. It’s Adalyn .

I had done it myself after the detective left. Said the words to Trevor and Delilah first, where we were all together in the living room: It’s Adalyn.

I needed to speak it out loud, make it real. I saw Trevor reaching for context in the silence—she was a stranger to him. My old roommate, I added.

Delilah must’ve known enough. Her eyes widened, but she remained silent. As if there were too many questions to know where to begin.

Trevor, like me, first assumed she’d been dead since that tragic night. And I had to explain it all over: Died sometime in the last forty-eight hours.

I had emailed my parents. Channeled my mother, quick and to the point, with no emotion: Adalyn Vale was just found dead on campus.

In my mind, I tried to reconcile the twenty-one-year-old I’d last seen, with someone who had aged two decades. An entire second life in between. All I could picture was a before and after. The beginning line of her story—and the very end.

She must’ve been out there for twenty years, living an entirely different life. She’d gotten away with it. She’d gotten away. I didn’t understand why she’d come back. Didn’t she know? You couldn’t return.

Fred Mayhew assumed I knew more than I did. It seemed like he thought I’d been in contact with her since she’d been gone. But I hadn’t been. Despite what he thought, I hadn’t seen her since that night in the woods. I hadn’t helped her. I wouldn’t have.

Now I pictured her as a shadow, lurking around campus. Seeing Delilah, someone who looked just like me. Sneaking into her dorm, messing with her until she had to move. Following her. Writing threatening messages on my bedroom wall.

I pictured a horde of kids running through the woods, celebrating the first howling of the year—a tradition that must have reemerged sometime in the years since. I pictured Adalyn joining—she always loved a game.

And then I pictured Delilah out there, too.

I had to wait until the middle of the night, until I knew I was alone.

Delilah was upstairs in my old room. I’d set Trevor up in my parents’ room—I had no interest in staying in there myself.

I’d taken up residence in my father’s office.

As if I alone could keep watch from the front windows of the house.

I thought of those footsteps in the house that I’d heard when I was up in the attic. Realizing it was not Delilah. Wondering now if it had been Adalyn, so close.

Wondering if she’d known I was here, too.

The house had fallen silent, save for the wind pushing up against the windows, whistling through the gaps. If I put my hand up to the base of the glass pane, I could feel it: a hiss through the window seal.

I tiptoed out of the office and stood in the hall, listening. I didn’t turn on a light, hoping to remain undetected. And when I let myself into the basement, I closed the door behind me before flipping the switch.

At the bottom, the concrete floor was cold against my bare feet. I paused before continuing, making sure I didn’t hear anyone overhead.

I opened the cabinet for the dumbwaiter, then pressed the button to raise the box. The hum of the gears felt louder in the silence of the night. Slowly, the hollow space underneath was revealed, the spot where I’d panicked and stashed Delilah’s phone.

I leaned inside the cabinet opening and used the flashlight on my phone to peer down into the dumbwaiter shaft. At the base, the neon of her name on the phone case caught the light; it rested on a layer of grounded rock and soil.

I had to get inside.

I raised the dumbwaiter box even higher, to make sure I had space to stand beneath it—and in an attempt to alleviate the impending claustrophobia. Then I shone my light around the pulley system, checking the gears, making sure I avoided anything that could hurt me.

This was an old apparatus. All I could picture were the accidents waiting to claim the curious and naive: electrocution, a chain snapping, the box falling from above. Another missing person, this time trapped in the walls of the house.

I flipped my mother’s laundry basket upside down to use as a makeshift step stool. Then I eased myself backward onto the small cabinet ledge, twisted my legs around in the narrow space, and dropped inside.

The base felt gritty, ancient, like I was standing on top of some untouched history.

I crouched down carefully, picking up Delilah’s phone. I’d barely had time to look at it earlier, hadn’t tested if it worked. I held the power button, trying to get it to boot up, but nothing happened. No light from the shattered screen, no sound of it coming to life.

The phone was in her clear case, which looked splotchy with dried watermarks. Exposed to the mud and the elements from a night in the woods, like she claimed.

I placed the phone on the cabinet ledge, preparing to launch myself back out, but it wasn’t as easy from this side, without the step stool.

I couldn’t get enough leverage to push myself up.

I tried bracing my feet against the concrete wall on the opposite side of the shaft, but it was a little too far.

A decade or two earlier, I was sure, I would’ve climbed out of here easily.

As it was, my heart was pounding, and the claustrophobia was making the enclosed space seem even smaller.

My phone didn’t get good service in the basement, but I knew noises carried.

If I called for help, someone in the house would hear me.

I just didn’t want to have to explain what the hell I was doing down here.

I positioned myself backward, braced my hands on the ledge, and kicked off the bottom in an attempt at a jump.

Finally I made it up, scooting myself onto the ledge. But in the process, the angle of my foot had dislodged a piece of metal on the floor of the shaft, sharp against my heel. I shone my light down there again. A curl of silver. A small jagged edge.

I dropped down into the shaft once more, pulling a chain free. On the other end, a fine layer of grit slid away, revealing the shape underneath. A key.

I recognized it immediately.

A skeleton key. Attached to a necklace.

I couldn’t get enough air. Felt the four walls closing in, the space narrowing. The feeling of being trapped, with no way out.

I was holding the key from the original construction of the tunnels, the one my father once oversaw as part of the archive collection, a living history of the school.

“Is that you?” A groggy and disoriented Trevor was halfway down the steps. “I thought you were…” His sentence trailed off. He watched as I scrambled to climb back out from the walls of the house—like an animal or a ghost.

“What the hell are you doing ?” he asked.

I needed to decide fast. Could I trust him? No, did I?

Trevor reached a hand to help pull me out.

But I lifted the phone from the ledge and watched as his eyes moved from me to the neon script of his daughter’s name.

Delilah must’ve hidden it here as soon as she was back.

I stared at him, waiting. Begging him to come up with a different explanation.

Something that didn’t end with Delilah lying to us. Hiding her phone. Coming straight here to wash her clothes, her shoes, her hair.

Destroying the evidence of what really happened out in the woods that night.