“Mom.” The mere sound of her name scattered the nightmares I’d just pulled myself out of. A wave of calm filled me, loosening the knot of fear in my chest.

  I knew she was crying by the way her body shook against mine, little tremors at first and then great racking heaves. “You remember me,” she said, nothing short of deliverance welling up in her voice. “I was so scared. I thought — Oh, baby. I thought the worst!”

  And just like that, the nightmares crept back under my skin. “Is it true?” I asked, something greasy and acidic churning in my stomach. “What the detective said. Was I … for eleven weeks …” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. Kidnapped. It was so clinical. So impossible.

  She made a sound of distress.

  “What — happened to me?” I asked.

  Mom dragged her fingertips under her eyes to dry them. I knew her well enough to know she was only trying to appear self-composed for my benefit. I immediately braced myself for bad news.

  “The police are doing everything they can to piece together answers.” She put on a smile, but it wavered. As if she needed something to anchor herself to, she reached for my hand and squeezed it. “The most important thing is that you’re back. You’re home. Everything that happened — it’s over. We’re going to get through this.”

  “How was I kidnapped?” The question was directed more at myself. How had this happened? Who would want to kidnap me? Had they pulled up in a car while I was leaving school? Stuffed me in the trunk while I was crossing the parking lot? Had it been that easy? Please no. Why hadn’t I run? Why hadn’t I fought? Why had it taken me so long to escape? Because clearly that’s what had happened. Wasn’t it? The shortage of answers pecked away at me.

  “What do you remember?” Mom asked. “Detective Basso said even a small detail might be helpful. Think back. Try to remember. How did you get to the cemetery? Where were you before that?”

  “I don’t remember anything. It’s like my memory …” I broke off. It was like part of my memory had been stolen. Snatched away, with nothing left in its place but a hollow panic. A feeling of violation swayed inside me, making me feel as if I’d been shoved off a high platform without warning. I was falling, and I feared the sensation far more than hitting bottom. There was no end; just a constant sense of gravity having its way with me.

  “What is the last thing you remember?” Mom asked.

  “School.” The answer rolled off my tongue automatically. Slowly my shattered memories began to stir, fragments shifting back together, locking against one another to form something solid. “I had a biology test coming up. But I guess I missed it,” I added, the reality of those eleven missing weeks sinking in deeper. I had a clear picture of sitting in Coach McConaughy’s biology class. The familiar smells of chalk dust, cleaning supplies, stuffy air, and the ever-present tang of body odor rose up from memory. Vee was beside me, my lab partner. Our textbooks were open on the black granite table in front of us, but Vee had stealthily slid a copy of US Weekly into hers.

  “You mean chemistry,” Mom corrected. “Summer school.”

  I fastened my eyes to hers, unsure. “I’ve never gone to summer school.”

  Mom brought her hand to her mouth. Her skin had blanched. The only sound in the room was the methodical tick of the clock above the window. I heard each tiny chime echo through me, ten times, before I found my voice.

  “What day is it? What month?” My mind spun back to the cemetery. The composting leaves. The subtle chill in the air. The man with the flashlight insisting it was September. The only word repeating over and over in my mind was no. No, it wasn’t possible. No, this wasn’t happening. No, months of my life couldn’t have just walked off unnoticed. I shoved my way back through my memories, trying to grasp anything that could help me bridge this moment to sitting in Coach’s biology class. But there was nothing to build on. Any memory of summer was completely and utterly gone.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Mom murmured. “We’re going to get your memory back. Dr. Howlett said most patients see marked improvement over time.”

  I tried to sit up, but my arms were a tangle of tubes and medical monitoring equipment. “Just tell me what month it is!” I repeated hysterically.

  “September.” Her crumpled face was unbearable. “September sixth.”

  I sank back down, blinking. “I thought it was April. I can’t remember anything past April.” I threw up walls to block the outbreak of fear banging inside me. I couldn’t deal with it in one great flood. “Is summer really — is it over? Just like that?”

  “Just like that?” she echoed in a detached voice. “It dragged on. Every day without you … Eleven weeks of knowing nothing … The panic, the worry, the fear, the hopelessness never ending …”

  I mulled this over, doing the math. “If it’s September, and I was gone for eleven weeks, then I went missing—”

  “June twenty-first,” she said blandly. “The night of summer solstice.”

  The wall I’d built was cracking faster than I could mentally repair it. “But I don’t remember June. I don’t even remember May.”

  We watched each other, and I knew we were sharing the same terrible thought. Was it possible my amnesia stretched further than the missing eleven weeks, all the way back to April? How could something like this even happen?

  “What did the doctor say?” I asked, moistening my lips, which felt papery and dry. “Did I have a head injury? Was I drugged? Why can’t I remember anything?”

  “Dr. Howlett said it’s retrograde amnesia.” Mom paused. “It means some of your preexisting memories are lost. We just weren’t sure how far back the memory loss went. April,” she whispered to herself, and I could see all hope fading from her eyes.

  “Lost? How lost?”

  “He thinks it’s psychological.”

  I plowed my hands through my hair, leaving an oily residue on my fingers. It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t considered where I’d been all those weeks. I could have been chained in a dank basement. Or tied in the woods. Clearly I hadn’t showered in days. A glance at my arms revealed smudges of dirt, small cuts, and bruises all over. What had I gone through?

  “Psychological?” I forced myself to shut out the speculations, which only made the hysteria clamp down harder. I had to stay strong. I needed answers. I couldn’t fall apart. If I could force my mind to focus despite the spots popping across my vision …

  “He thinks you’re blocking it to avoid remembering something traumatic.”

  “I’m not blocking it.” I closed my eyes, unable to control the tears leaking from the corners. I sucked in a shaky breath and clamped my hands into tight balls to stop the awful trembling in my fingers. “I would know if I was trying to forget five months of my life,” I said, speaking slowly to force a measure of calm into my voice. “I want to know what happened to me.”

  If I glared at her, she ignored it. “Try to remember,” she urged gently. “Was it a man? Were you with a male this whole time?”

  Was I? Up until this point, I hadn’t put a face with my kidnapper. The only picture in my head was of a monster lurking beyond the reach of light. A terrible cloud of uncertainty loomed over me.

  “You know you don’t have to protect anyone, right?” she continued in that same soft tone. “If you know who you were with, you can tell me. No matter what they told you, you’re safe now. They can’t get you. They did this horrible thing to you, and it’s their fault. Their fault,” she repeated.

  A sob of frustration rose in my throat. The term “blank slate” was nauseatingly accurate. I was about to voice my hopelessness, when a shadow stirred near the doorway. Detective Basso stood just inside the room’s entrance. His arms were folded over his chest, his eyes alert.

  My body reflexively tensed. Mom must have felt it; she looked beyond the bed, following my gaze. “I thought Nora might remember something while it was just the two of us,” she told Detective Basso apologetically. “I know you said you wanted to question her, but I just thought—”

  He nodded, signaling that it was okay. Then he walked over, staring down at me. “You said you don’t have a clear picture, but even fuzzy details might help.”

  “Like hair color,” Mom interjected. “Maybe it was … black, for instance?”

  I wanted to tell her there was nothing, not even a lingering snapshot of color, but I didn’t dare with Detective Basso in the room. I didn’t trust him. Instinct told me something about him was … off. When he stood close, the hairs on my scalp tingled, and I had the brief but distinct feeling of an ice cube slithering down the back of my neck.

  “I want to go home,” was all I said.

  Mom and Detective Basso shared a look.

  “Dr. Howlett needs to run a few tests,” Mom said.

  “What kind of tests?”

  “Oh, things related to your amnesia. It’ll be over in no time. And then we’ll go home.” She waved a hand dismissively, which only made me more suspicious.

  I faced Detective Basso, since he seemed to have all the answers. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  His expression was as unfaltering as steel. I supposed years as a cop had perfected that look. “We need to run a few tests. Make sure everything is fine.”

  Fine?

  What part of any of this seemed fine to him?

  CHAPTER 3

  MY MOM AND I LIVE IN A FARMHOUSE NESTLED between Coldwater’s city limits and the remote outback regions of Maine. Stand at any window, and it’s like a glimpse back in time. Vast unadulterated wilderness on one side, flaxen fields framed by evergreen trees on the other. We live at the end of Hawthorne Lane and are divided from our nearest neighbors by a mile. At night, with the fireflies lighting up the trees in gold, and the fragrance of warm, musky pine overwhelming the air, it’s not hard to trick my mind into believing I’ve transported myself into a completely different century. If I slant my vision just so, I can even picture a red barn and grazing sheep.

  Our house has white paint, blue shutters, and a wraparound porch with a slope grade visible to the naked eye. The windows are long and narrow, and protest with an obnoxiously loud groan when pushed open. My dad used to say there was no need to install an alarm in my bedroom window, a secret joke between us, since we both knew I was hardly the kind of daughter to sneak out.

  My parents moved into the farmhouse-slash-money-pit shortly before I was born on the philosophy that you can’t argue with love at first sight. Their dream was straightforward: to slowly restore the house to its charming 1771 condition, and one day hammer a bed-and-breakfast sign in the front yard and serve the best lobster bisque up and down Maine’s coast. The dream dissolved when my dad was murdered one night in downtown Portland.

  This morning I’d been released from the hospital, and now I was alone in my room. Hugging a pillow to my chest, I eased back on my bed, my eyes nostalgically tracing the collage of pictures tacked to a corkboard on the wall. There were snapshots of my parents posing at the top of Raspberry Hill, Vee modeling a span-dex Catwoman disaster she sewed for Halloween a few years back, my sophomore yearbook picture. Looking at our smiling faces, I tried to fool myself into believing I was safe now that I was back in my world. The truth was, I’d never feel safe and I’d never have my life back until I could remember what I’d gone through during the last five months, particularly the last two and a half. Five months seemed insignificant held up against seventeen years (I’d missed my seventeenth birthday during those eleven unaccountable weeks), but the missing gap was all I could see. A huge hole standing in my path, blocking me from seeing beyond it. I had no past, no future. Only a huge void that haunted me.

  The tests Dr. Howlett had ordered had come back fine, just fine. As far as anyone could tell, except for a few healing cuts and bruises, my physical health was as stellar as it had been on the day I’d gone missing.

  But the deeper things, the invisible things, those parts of me that lay under the surface out of reach of any test — with those things I found my resilience wavering. Who was I now? What had I undergone during those missing months? Had the trauma shaped me in ways I would never understand? Or worse, never recover from?

  Mom had imposed a strict no-visitors policy while I was in the hospital, and Dr. Howlett had backed her up. I could understand their concern, but now that I was home and slowly settling back into the familiarity of my world, I wasn’t going to let Mom seal me up with the well-meant but misguided intention of protecting me. Maybe I was changed, but I was still me. And the only thing I wanted right now was to talk everything out with Vee.

  Downstairs, I swiped Mom’s BlackBerry off the counter and took it back to my room. When I’d woken up in the cemetery, I hadn’t had my cell phone with me, and until I picked up a replacement, her phone would have to do.

  IT’S NORA. CAN U TALK? I texted Vee. It was late, and Vee’s mom enforced lights-out at ten. If I called, and her mom heard the ring, it could mean a lot of trouble for Vee. Knowing Mrs. Sky, I didn’t think she’d be lenient, even with the special nature of the circumstances.

  A moment later the BlackBerry chimed. BABE?!?!!!!!! AM FREAKING OUT. AM A TOTAL WRECK. WHERE R U?

  CALL ME AT THIS NUMBER.

  I set the BlackBerry in my lap, chewing the tip of my nail. I couldn’t believe how nervous I felt. This was Vee. But best friends or not, we hadn’t talked in months. It didn’t feel that long in my mind, but there it was. Thinking of the two sayings, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” versus “Out of sight, out of mind,” I was definitely hoping for the former.

  Even though I was expecting Vee’s call, I still jumped when the BlackBerry rang.

  “Hello? Hello?” Vee said.

  Hearing her voice caused my throat to thicken with emotion. “It’s me!” I choked.

  “’Bout time,” she huffed, but her voice sounded thick and emotional too. “I was at the hospital all day yesterday, but they wouldn’t let me see you. I bolted past security, but they called a code ninetynine and chased me down. They escorted me out in handcuffs, and by escorted I mean there was a lot of kicking and bad language being slung in both directions. The way I see it, the only criminal here is your mom. No visitors? I’m your best friend, or did she not get the memo every year for the past eleven? Next time I’m over, I am going to lay into that woman.”

  In the darkness, I felt my trembling lips crack into a smile. I clutched the phone to my chest, torn between laughing and crying. I should have known Vee wouldn’t let me down. The memory of everything that had gone horribly wrong since I’d woken up in the cemetery three nights ago was quickly eclipsed by the mere fact that I had the best friend in the world. Maybe everything else had changed, but my relationship with Vee was rock solid. We were unbreakable. Nothing could change that.

  “Vee,” I breathed, a sigh of relief. I wanted to bask in the normalcy of this moment. It was late, we were supposed to be sleeping, and here we were, chatting with the lights off. Last year Vee’s mom had trashed Vee’s phone after catching her talking to me after lights-out. The next morning, in front of the whole neighborhood, Vee went Dumpster diving for it. To this day, she uses that phone. We call it Oscar, as in Oscar the Grouch.

  “Are they giving you quality drugs?” Vee asked. “Apparently Anthony Amowitz’s dad is a pharmacist, and I could probably score you some good stuff.”

  My eyebrows lifted in surprise. “What’s this? You and Anthony?”

  “Heck, no. Not like that. I’ve sworn off guys. If I need romance, that’s what Netflix is for.”

  I’ll believe it when I see it, I thought with a smirk. “Where is my best friend and what have you done with her?”

  “I’m doing boy detox. Like a diet, only for my emotional health. Never mind that, I’m coming over,” Vee continued. “I haven’t seen my best friend in three months, and this phone reunion is crap. Girl, I’m gonna show you the bear in hug.”

  “Good luck getting past my mom,” I said. “She’s the new spokeswoman for helicopter parenting.”

  “That woman!” Vee hissed. “I’m making the sign of the cross right now.”

  We could debate my mom’s status as a witch another day. Right now, we had more important things to discuss. “I want a rundown of the days leading up to my kidnapping, Vee,” I said, taking our conversation to a far more serious level. “I can’t shake the feeling that my kidnapping wasn’t random. There had to have been warning signs, but I can’t remember any of them. My doctor said the memory loss is temporary, but in the meantime I need you to tell me where I went, what I did, and who I was with that last week. Walk me through it.”

  Vee was slow to answer. “You sure this is a good idea? It’s kind of soon to stress about that stuff. Your mom told me about the amnesia—”

  “Seriously?” I interjected. “You’re going to side with my mom?”

  “Stuff it,” Vee muttered, relenting.

  For the next twenty minutes, she recounted every event during that final week. The more she talked, however, the more my heart sank. No bizarre phone calls. No strangers skulking unexpectedly into my life. No unusual cars following us around town.

  “What about the night I disappeared?” I asked, interrupting her midsentence.

  “We went to Delphic Amusement Park. I remember taking off to buy hot dogs … and then all hell broke loose. I heard gunfire and people started stampeding out of the park. I circled back to find you, but you were gone. I figured you’d done the smart thing and bolted. Only I didn’t find you in the parking lot. I would have gone back inside the park, but the police came and kicked everybody out. I tried to tell them that you might still be in the park, but they weren’t in the mood. They forced everyone home. I called you a zillion times, but you didn’t answer.”

  It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. Gunfire? Delphic had a reputation, but still. Gunfire? It was so bizarre — so completely outrageous — that had anyone other than Vee been telling me, I wouldn’t have believed it.