Case scoots and then bucks, lifts herself the best she can and then slams herself into the floor again. The screws that hold the remaining pieces of the chair together squeal with the strain.

  She counts to ten, closes her eyes, and breathes. Her headache has now taken a shape, the way that puffy clouds do on a bright day. The shape is like a pine cone, sort of oval but with a bunch of hard, blunted spikes. Case takes another breath to try and smooth out those spikes, and it works some. She needs to stop thinking about her head and think about the rest of her body.

  The ropes around her right hand are looser than the ones around the left. She sucks in a sharp breath and tries to pull her right arm straight up, like she’s trying to start a lawn mower, then she does it again, straining the rope. On the third attempt, her arm flies high, part of the chair still attached to it by a length of rope.

  She’s free. Sort of. It’s a start.

  After unwinding the rope, Case gently reaches her fingers to her throbbing head. There’s a knot there, above her left temple, and a painful, squishy place, but no blood. She doesn’t come across anything matted or sticky as she pats along her hairline. Case flinches, remembering how the fireplace poker flew toward her head. But what she’ll remember most of all—forever, probably—is the sound the poker made as it cut through the warm air. A slight snick, like the click of a bird’s beak.

  Case taps her fingers around again, still expecting to find a gaping hole in her skull. How the tip of that poker didn’t sink into her brain the way it sank into the tire of Abby’s car, Case has no idea.

  Case shakes off the rest of the rope, stands, then immediately stumbles. Her left foot is completely asleep from being immobile for who knows how long. She lunges forward to lean against the side of one of the metal shelves, pats her back pocket to make sure Andrea’s pages are still there, and thinks.

  The glow of the sunset is gentle on Case’s still-wobbly vision. She knows she’ll have to battle her way out of this house, then off this land. But she has nothing. No tools, no weapons. Her phone is, again, gone. She needs . . . things. And it just so happens that this cellar is full of things.

  Once her foot is stable enough to stand on, Case moves. She grabs a length of the rope, threads it through a belt loop, and then winds the rest into a loose coil that hangs by her hip like a lasso.

  She searches through a rusted coffee can on one of the shelves, finds a folding knife and a plastic cigarette lighter, and slides both into her pockets. On another shelf, there’s a red shop rag, splotched with what looks like motor oil, and next to that is a metal can of linseed oil, which Case knows is flammable under the right conditions. She ties the red rag to the handle of the linseed oil and, as quietly as she can, sets it down by the door.

  There are tools hanging everywhere—hammers and wrenches and a hacksaw—but Case needs something more portable. Her gaze lands on a flathead screwdriver, which she puts into a pocket alongside the knife.

  She grabs the can of linseed oil and starts creeping up the stairs.

  It appears as if the stairs go nowhere, like they dead-end into the ceiling. They don’t, though. What appears to be a ceiling is actually a floor—the main floor of the house. Case can see muted streams of light coming in through the edges. She stops and waits, listening for footsteps or chatter, or Kendall’s angry kitchen thumps and bumps. There’s nothing.

  Placing her palm on the wooden slats above her head, Case braces her weight and pushes.

  Case is a mouse, her face emerging from a crack in the floor, her nostrils flaring. It’s too dark to see anything except a strip of pale light coming from underneath yet another door, but all that light does is illuminate the specks of dust against the rough grain of the wood floor. She can smell that dust—dust smells clean, like fresh parsley, but also dirty, like old sheets. Also, though, there’s the thick and tangy scent of used cooking oil. Dinner must be over.

  Case slides the can of linseed oil into place, using it to prop the cellar door, and now she’s able to use both her hands to push herself through the opening and out into the dark room. It’s a pantry, Case realizes, once she’s fully inside. White bags of flour stand out on the shelves, puffed up like the chests of proud children and tidily arranged with their labels facing out. There’s a row of stacked pots, and on the shelf above those, a collection of glass jars.

  Case steps forward, and can see, in neat print, words written on white labels—plum, mixed fruit, blueberry—along with dates, as far back as four months ago and as recent as last week. Case makes a half turn, and there on another shelf are dishes, matching white: plates, saucers, soup bowls, teacups, a gravy boat, a sugar bowl, and a serving platter. There are enough settings for a large party—as if that would ever happen here—and every dish looks perfect, not chipped or streaked with fine cracks.

  These are Kendall’s things. Neat, ready, waiting. Case is suddenly queasy, feeling like she’s literally emerged from the floor into another girl’s body.

  The one door in this room must lead straight to the kitchen. There’s a door in the kitchen that leads directly outside. Outside this terrible house. There are two doors between Case and her escape.

  Case has to get out, she knows, but she has choices. She can save herself, which would mean plowing through this door, through the kitchen, out of the house, up the lane, to the highway, into the looming dark in the unforgiving country, without a flashlight and nothing but a screwdriver, a plastic lighter, a pocketknife, a can of linseed oil, and a piece of rope.

  But it’s not like anyone could follow her, because Troy ruined the car.

  Her other choice: She could burn the house down.

  She could soak the rag in the linseed oil, set that rag on top of the stove, and let the pilot light catch it and do its work. That doesn’t seem like too bad of an idea. She survived one burning house. She could survive another.

  Right?

  Case doesn’t know what to do. She’s thinking and trying to listen for noises. And doing these things with a massive pine-cone-shaped headache is hard.

  Finally, once Case is again certain she hears no signs of life, she pushes the pantry door open. The smell of used cooking oil is stronger now. The kitchen is darkening, and there’s a light coming from above the counter, right next to the stove. It’s a night-light, in the shape of a star.

  Oh, Kendall, Case thinks, how thoughtful of you to leave a night-light on so that Troy won’t stumble when he comes down in the dark for a glass of water.

  And Case can see her phone miraculously sitting right there on the counter, like a gift, as if perfectly, purposely placed in her line of sight.

  If this is a gift, Case will take it, but her relief in finding her phone is fleeting.

  Right now, she’s vulnerable, out in the open. If she hears someone approach, she probably won’t have time to duck back into the pantry and hide. There’s a butcher knife within reach, though, just in case, stuck onto the wall by a thick strip of a magnet. She imagines that Kendall used it earlier, before dinner, to whack the head off one of Steph’s chickens.

  God, Case thinks, I hate this house.

  SEVEN THIRTY-EIGHT

  When Case picks up her phone, the screen flashes to life and shows the time: 7:38. She’s lost almost three hours. On her home screen, there’s another message from Bryan, sent about an hour ago: Still ok?

  This time, Case rushes a response: Need help now. Pls come. She hits send and then punches out a couple of other messages: one to Andrea again, another to her mom. The chances of either of them responding are next to nonexistent, but Case tries anyway.

  Case hears a creak—a foot on a stair maybe. She twists her head in the direction of the sound, and that sudden movement causes an immediate and magnificent pain, radiating from her neck through her throat and into the damaged tissue of her shoulder. She buckles, goes blind for a moment, and gropes at the counter to stay upright.

  Pills. They’re here, across this room, in her bag on the floor.

  Case treads as lightly as she can, following the counter, hand over hand, until the toe of her boot grazes the dark mass of her duffel bag. She kneels, opens the bag, and starts pushing aside her clothes and her letters—the letters she was going to give Andrea, the ones that are untied from their bundle, loose now that Troy and Kendall have sifted through and read them. Panic flares. She can’t find the pill bottle. But then she does—wedged back behind a fold in the fabric.

  Her fingers wrap around the familiar smoothness of the plastic, but almost immediately her panic flares brighter. Something’s wrong. The bottle is too light. She shakes it, hoping desperately for the comforting rattle of pills against plastic, but there’s nothing. The bottle is empty.

  “Motherfuck,” Case gasps.

  This can’t be right. Case had five pills left. She knows this because she always knows how many pills she has left.

  Her brain stops working. The rest of her body stops working and then kicks into overdrive. She’s shaking—her hands are, of course, but also her shoulders, and then even what feels like each of her individual ribs. The pain isn’t only in her head, neck, and shoulders now, but also way down deep into her scarred right arm and needling into her spine.

  Case turns on her phone’s flashlight. She’s searching the depths of her bag, looking for anything tiny, white, and circular. She scoots across the room to the metal trash can, thinking that if one of the roommates threw her pills away, they might be in there, sitting on the top of garbage.

  When Case opens the lid, she sees the remains of dinner: small bones, gray-colored, with bits of meat still clinging in places. The flies have already found the carcass. Poor Steph. Case hopes it wasn’t Gertie who had to be sacrificed for this meal.

  One of the flies soars up, straight at Case’s nostrils, which causes her to jerk back. The metal lid she’s holding hits the metal can. The resulting sound isn’t loud, but it’s clear—a resonant ping, like the lingering note of a tuning fork.

  Someone heard that. Case knows someone heard that.

  She nearly lets out a curse but, instead, scrunches up her face. Her phone is still in her hand. She turns off the flashlight, shoves it into her front pocket, and then dashes across the room to pick up her duffel. There’s no way she’s leaving Drea’s letters in this house. As she pushes open the door that will lead her outside, Case half expects to come face-to-face with the housemates, all lined up and ready to hit her over the head again. But when she steps outside, there’s nothing.

  It’s not totally dark yet, but dusk after an afternoon of orange haze is supremely gloomy. Sunsets aren’t pretty anymore. They haven’t been for months. There are no multicolored stripes in the clouds. Everything just glows dully.

  There’s also a damp chill in the air, and an unnerving quiet.

  Case’s eyes will eventually adjust, but she can’t stand here and wait for that to happen. Holding her duffel and armed with her stash from the cellar, she skirts the front of the house and sets off in a jog in the most hopeful of hopeless directions: down the lane and to the road.

  SEVEN FORTY-THREE

  The quickest and cleverest creatures of the night, like cats and coyotes and possums, are deathly quiet, detectable only by the shine of their eyes. But there are also armadillos, which are loud and sound like grown men stomping through the woods. Armadillos are shaped like little oil drums with feet. They are harmless, and not particularly brave. One night, a few months ago, when Case was taking a bath and listening in on her aunt watching Jeopardy! in the other room, she learned that the Germans, when they first settled in Texas, referred to armadillos as Panzerschwein, which translates to something like “tank pigs,” which seemed about right.

  Case is thinking about armadillos because she doesn’t want to think about hogs, which she’s sure are everywhere now, watching her from all directions. As she trots up the lane and away from the house, she swears she hears stubby legs scurrying across the dirt, or puckered snouts snorting, or brittle hooves shoving aside leaves and branches. Distracted by these sounds, Case loses her footing and trips. Both her knees hit the ground as she falls, and the screwdriver flies out of her pocket and rolls roughly across the gravel.

  Case scrambles. She scoops up the duffel that fell from her arms and then rakes her fingers through the dirt for the narrow tool. When she can’t find it, she quickly stands. She toes the ground for a few moments and then stops.

  The most vicious tool she has left is the pocketknife, and while Case may be able to fight a person with a pocketknife, she sure as hell can’t fight a fucking hog with one. She looks ahead, narrows her eyes.

  She’s at the bend in the lane. Abby’s car is just ahead, tilted on its sunken tire. It’s not much of a sanctuary, but it’ll do. Case needs a minute . . . or several. She’s out of the house, which is something, but now, still radiating with pain, she has to figure out what comes next.

  Case jogs forward and reaches for the handle of the passenger-­side door. She’s sure her luck with unlocked doors has run out for the day, but the handle gives. Case swings the door open, climbs in, and then throws the duffel into the back seat. Her foot hits something hard, and she yelps out in pain. She reaches down, and her hand finds a rock—the rock she’d picked up this morning before she crossed the river, when she was also convinced she’d have to confront a hog. This is the best weapon yet. Holding the rock, she hauls herself over the center console and into the back seat. Once there, she wedges herself onto the floorboard. Case pushes her duffel bag next to her feet. Her knees are squashed to her chin.

  A quick and clever creature of the night, Case is not. She wishes she were.

  Shifting awkwardly in the small space, Case pulls the phone from her pocket and cringes when she sees the screen. Only 16 percent battery, and no bars. It’s 7:43. Bryan hasn’t responded. No one has responded.

  And then, to make things even worse, there are sounds approaching from outside the car. They’re not the hungry noises hogs make, but the sounds of hushed voices—people being loud-quiet, like Andrea’s mom’s boyfriend Danny when he used to come home tipsy in the middle of the night. Case tilts her head, like she’s tuning in on a radio dial. She picks out Kendall’s voice, then Abby’s.

  “This is your fault,” Kendall spits out. “You told her about Charlie. How else would she have known?”

  “How is this my fault?” Abby replies. “I didn’t bring Case here. I didn’t ask her to come, and I sure as shit didn’t tell her that we lured some stranger into a rushing river. You give me no fucking credit, I swear.”

  “Because you don’t deserve any credit!” Kendall barks.

  As the voices come closer, Case attempts to wriggle deeper onto the floorboard. Through the window, Case can see the bob of flashlights, proper handheld ones, not the tiny beams from phones. She shouldn’t have gotten into this car—she should have just kept going, on foot, down the driveway. She grips the rock in her hand. She will definitely hurl it at Kendall before going in for Abby.

  “You know what, Kendall?” Abby goes on to say. “Believe what you want. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days, you come after me with a fireplace poker and then tie me up in the cellar, because clearly you’ve turned into a total psychopath.”

  “Shut up, Abby. You don’t get it. You still have family back in Arizona. This place and my sister and Troy are all I have left, and I’ll do whatever I can to protect it.”

  “Wow,” Abby drawls. “How brave. Such conviction. Why do you always talk like the main character on some dumb television show?”

  “Fuck you.” There’s a pause, then Kendall’s tone shifts. “How much do you think there is?”

  “I don’t know, sixty bucks maybe.”

  In the next moment, the front passenger door swings open. Case holds her breath. Abby sticks her head in, releases the catch of the glove box, and starts searching through.

  “I usually keep some stashed in here, but it’s possible Troy or Andrea found it.”

  Through the gap between the seat and the door, Case watches as Abby finds something—an envelope—but what the girl does next is strange and stealthy. Abby tosses that envelope behind her, into the back seat, so that it lands on Case’s legs and then bounces down to her feet. For a few more seconds, Abby continues to search through the glove box before giving up and slamming it shut. She ducks out of the car and shuts the door.

  “It’s not here,” Case hears Abby say. “There’s nothing.”

  “Crap,” Kendall replies. “We’re running out of bacon.”

  Naturally, Kendall would be more concerned about their bacon supply than about Case, who she clearly still believes is tied up, unconscious, underneath their house.

  The loud-hushed voices retreat. Case exhales. And then she waits. Her ankles are kinked at weird angles, and she can feel sweat in the creases of her clothes. Eventually, both of her feet fall asleep. Her head hurts so badly that she can actually hear the pain. It goes whomp, whomp. Hearing her headache, however, might not be that bad, because now she can’t pretend-hear the rooting of the hogs.

  Case hazards a glance at her phone: the time shows 7:55. The battery is down to 10 percent.

  “Shit,” Case mutters.

  She grabs the envelope that has fallen to her feet and then turns on the phone’s flashlight. A second passes. 9 percent.

  It’s an envelope addressed to Case in Drea’s handwriting. It was once sealed, but now it’s been torn open, of course, because one of these shithead roommates went and read it. She rips out the paper and starts reading.