Maddie Greyball did not stay home.
She tried. She genuinely tried — she made coffee and sat at her kitchen table and opened her laptop and attempted to do the work she was supposed to be doing and managed approximately forty minutes of it before the particular restlessness of someone who has been told to stay somewhere they don't want to stay became too much to negotiate with.
It wasn't that she didn't take it seriously. She took it seriously. She'd been taking it seriously since Saturday night when Indigo's text had come through and she'd understood from the tone of it — not what was said but how it was said, the specific economy of it — that this was not a precautionary message.
She took it seriously and she stayed home for four hours and then she went out.
Not far. That was the thing she told herself. Not far and not alone — she had her phone and she had the route she always walked, the one she knew, the one that went from her building down Pearse Street and around the block and back. Twenty minutes. The kind of walk that existed for the specific purpose of making a small space feel slightly larger for a short period of time.
She went out at three in the afternoon when the Monday was properly underway and the street outside had the busy unremarkable quality of a weekday afternoon in a small town.
She walked down Pearse Street.
The afternoon was cold and clear, the light at the particular low angle of late October, throwing long shadows from the buildings and the trees along the street. She walked with her hands in her pockets and her earphones in one ear — not music, just the one earbud, the other ear open, the particular compromise of someone who had heard enough about being alert to have adjusted their habits slightly but not enough to give up earphones entirely.
She turned onto the main street.
The Halloween decorations were still up — most of the shops had them, the particular mix of commercial and handmade that small town Halloween produced. Fake cobwebs. Pumpkins on windowsills. A skeleton in the window of the pharmacy that someone had dressed in a small bow tie which she'd found charming on Friday and found harder to look at now.
She walked.
The main street gave way to the residential streets on the east side of town, the ones that ran parallel to the park, the route she always walked. She turned left onto Marsh Road and the sounds of the main street fell back and the afternoon got quieter and the long shadows got longer.
She was thinking about Indigo.
She'd been thinking about Indigo since Saturday night and the thinking had evolved through several phases — concern, then active worry, then the particular helpless anger of someone who cares very much about a person and can't do anything useful about the thing that's happening to them. She'd been through this before, in smaller ways, in the years since she'd known Indigo — the anniversary of Vicrock, the book writing, the tour. The particular experience of being the friend of someone who carried something enormous and carried it quietly and sometimes needed you to just be there and sometimes needed you to just not ask.
She thought about the arm. Through and through, Indigo had said, no structural damage. She'd said it like it was a minor inconvenience. Like having a harpoon go through your arm was the kind of thing you mentioned in passing.
Maddie had been friends with Indigo for four years and had spent most of those four years in a state of low level astonishment at what Indigo could treat as a minor inconvenience.
She turned the corner onto the park path.
The park was on her right — a long rectangular green space, the trees still holding their October colour, the path running along the edge of it. Empty at this hour, the after-school crowd not yet arrived, just the occasional dog walker and the Monday afternoon quiet of somewhere designed for leisure that had no one in it who was managing to feel leisurely.
She walked along the path.
She was thinking about the tour. About the fact that there were six more stops after Millhaven and Indigo was going to get on a car or a train and go to each of them and the thing that was in Millhaven might follow her to each of them. She was thinking about what that meant and what she could do about it which was nothing, which was the thing she was worst at.
She walked.
The park path curved around the far end of the green space and there was a section here where the trees were denser and the path narrowed and the light from the streetlamps — just coming on now, the afternoon edging toward evening — didn't reach as well as it did on the straighter sections.
She walked through it.
She was almost through when she heard it.
From somewhere in the trees to her right. From the park itself, from the dense section where the path curved.
Kuh.
She stopped walking.
She stood on the park path with one earbud in and the other ear open and she listened.
Kuh.
She took the earbud out.
Kuh. Kuh.
Then the scrape. Long and slow, metal on something — not concrete here, the park path was tarmac, and the sound was different on tarmac, lower and less sharp, a soft grinding drag.
Shhhhk.
Then the last one.
Kuh.
Maddie Greyball stood on the park path at three forty in the afternoon and looked at the trees and did the arithmetic of her situation which was that she was alone on a path in a park in Millhaven and Indigo had told her to stay home and she had not stayed home and now she was here.
She turned around and walked back the way she'd come. Fast. Not running — running felt like a decision she wasn't ready to make, running was an acknowledgement that she was certain about something she wasn't yet certain about.
Walking fast.
Behind her from the trees the sound again.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.
She walked faster.
The park path curved back toward Marsh Road. She could see the end of it — the gap in the fence, the road, the streetlamp on the corner, the ordinary residential street beyond it. Sixty meters. Fifty.
She didn't look behind her.
She'd heard enough from Indigo over enough years to have absorbed certain things without being told them directly and one of them was that looking behind you when you were trying to get somewhere was a decision with a cost and you should be sure the information was worth the cost before you paid it.
She kept walking.
Forty meters.
She heard something to her left. In the trees. Parallel to her. Moving.
Not the Kuh Kuh sound. Just movement. Something in the trees keeping pace with her on the path.
Thirty meters.
She took her phone out. She called Indigo without slowing down.
It rang twice.
"Maddie—"
"I'm on the park path on Marsh Road," she said. "I went out. I know I wasn't supposed to. I'm almost at the road. I can hear something in the trees."
A pause. Brief.
"Keep walking," Indigo said. "Don't stop. Don't look into the trees. Get to the road and stay on the road and keep talking to me."
"Okay," Maddie said.
"How far to the road."
"Twenty meters."
"Okay. Keep walking."
She kept walking.
Fifteen meters.
The movement in the trees stopped.
She walked.
Ten meters.
Nothing from the trees. Nothing from behind her. Just the park path and the late afternoon and her own footsteps on the tarmac.
Five meters.
She went through the gap in the fence and onto Marsh Road and stood on the pavement in the ordinary light of the streetlamp on the corner and breathed.
"I'm on the road," she said.
"Good," Indigo said. "Stay on the road. I'm sending Officer—"
"I'm okay," Maddie said. "I think — I think it stopped. I'm on the road."
"I know. Stay there."
She stood on the pavement and looked back at the park path and the gap in the fence. The trees beyond it. The particular dense section where the path curved.
Nothing visible. Nothing moving.
"Maddie," Indigo said.
"I'm here."
"You're okay."
"Yes."
"Don't go back in there."
"I was not planning to go back in there."
A pause. Then, in a different tone — not the flat accurate operational tone, something more like the actual voice, the one that existed underneath the operational one:
"I told you to stay home."
"I know," Maddie said. "I know you did."
"Maddie."
"I know," she said again. "I'm sorry. I'm okay. I know."
The line was quiet for a moment.
"There's a coffee shop on the corner of Marsh Road and the main street," Indigo said. "Go there. Stay inside. I'll send someone."
"Okay," Maddie said.
She started walking toward the main street.
She didn't look back at the park.
The fireworks started at eight.
Nobody had organised them. That was the thing — Millhaven didn't have a scheduled fireworks event on a Monday in late October. They just started. From somewhere on the east side of town, from somewhere near the park, the first one going up at eight oh three pm with the particular crack and colour of something that hadn't been planned by a committee and approved by a safety officer.
Hannah was in the living room of the Forzone house — her dad had brought her home from the hospital at noon, Daphne transferred to the proper hospital forty minutes away for the surgery, Tom splitting his time between the hospital and the house with the particular effortful logistics of a parent trying to be in two places — when she heard the first one.
She went to the window.
The firework was already done — just the fading smoke trail visible against the dark sky above the east side of town. But then another one. And another. A burst of green and then gold and then red against the October night, the kind of display that looked deliberate and felt wrong.
Her phone rang. Indigo.
"I see them," Hannah said before Indigo could speak.
"Where are you."
"Home. Living room."
"Stay there. Lock the back door — is the back door locked."
"Yes. Dad locked everything before he left."
"Good. Don't open it for anyone. I'm on my way to the east side with Officer Reeves."
"What are they for," Hannah said. Looking at the window. At the next firework going up — blue this time, bright and wrong against the ordinary Monday night sky.
"I don't know yet," Indigo said. "But they're not for fun."
Hannah looked at the window.
"Maddie," she said. "Is Maddie—"
"She's at the coffee shop on the main street. She's safe. Officer Reeves has someone with her."
"Okay," Hannah said.
"Hannah. Stay in the house."
"I will," Hannah said.
She stayed at the window and watched the fireworks going up from the east side of town and thought about what they were for and what came next and what Indigo was driving toward right now in the dark.
The east side of Millhaven at eight pm on a Monday was residential and quiet and not the kind of place where fireworks happened.
Indigo sat in the passenger seat of Officer Reeves's car and watched the next one go up from somewhere ahead of them and thought about the fireworks from Maddie's car. The ones Jacob had taken. The particular quality of the display — not a celebration, not a performance, something more deliberate than either of those.
She thought about misdirection.
"Pull over," she said.
Officer Reeves looked at her.
"Pull over," she said again. "This is misdirection. He's drawing us to the east side."
Officer Reeves pulled over.
She looked at the fireworks going up. She looked at the direction they were coming from. She thought about where in Millhaven you would set off fireworks to draw the maximum attention to the east side and away from everywhere else.
She thought about the west side. About what was on the west side.
The bookstore.
The hotel.
Page and Spine.
"Greta Halloway," she said. "The bookstore owner. Did anyone go to check on her."
Officer Reeves looked at his radio.
"I sent someone this morning," he said. "She was at the store. She said she was fine."
"Call her," Indigo said. "Right now."
He picked up his radio. He called the officer he'd sent that morning. The officer's radio went unanswered. He tried again. Nothing.
He tried Greta Halloway's phone directly. It rang six times and went to voicemail.
Indigo looked at him.
"West side," she said.
He turned the car around.
Page and Spine was dark when they pulled up.
Not closed dark — the kind of dark that happened when the lights were off inside a shop that should have its lights on. The door was slightly ajar. The pyramid of books in the window — her face on the cover, thirty two copies — visible in the ambient light from the street.
Indigo got out of the car before it fully stopped.
"Ms Derby—" Officer Reeves started.
She was already at the door.
She pushed it open.
The bookshop smell hit her first — the particular combination of paper and wood and whatever cleaning product Greta used on the floors, the smell of a place that took its books seriously. The front section was dark but not completely — the streetlamp outside throwing orange light through the window, catching the spines of the books on the nearest shelves, the display table, the counter.
The counter.
Indigo stood in the entrance of Page and Spine and looked at the counter and breathed.
Greta Halloway was behind it. Sitting on the floor with her back against the lower shelves, her knees up, her hands in her lap. Alive — the particular quality of someone who was definitely alive was visible even from here. But not moving. Not looking up. Looking at something on the floor in front of her with the particular stunned quality of someone who had been through something and was on the other side of it and hadn't yet caught up with what the other side meant.
On the counter above her head, placed with the deliberate care of something left intentionally, was a book.
Survivors Guide.
Open to the last page.
The last line visible from where Indigo was standing.
I don't know what comes next. But I'm the one who gets to find out.
Beneath the book, written directly on the counter surface in something dark that caught the streetlamp light:
DO YOU.
Indigo stood in the entrance of Page and Spine and read the words on the counter and felt something move through her that was cold and focused and considerably more complicated than fear.
Officer Reeves came in behind her. She heard him make a sound when he saw Greta. She heard him cross the shop and crouch down and start talking to her in the careful voice he used for people who needed the careful voice.
She kept looking at the counter.
At the book. At the words underneath it.
She thought about Jacob Cain writing those words on the counter of a bookshop in Millhaven while the fireworks he'd set up went off on the east side of town drawing everyone in that direction.
She thought about what he wanted her to feel.
She thought about what she actually felt.
She looked at the words for a long moment.
Then she took her phone out.
She called Hannah.
Hannah picked up immediately. "Is everyone okay."
"Greta from the bookshop is shaken but okay," Indigo said. "The fireworks were a distraction. He came to the bookshop."
A pause. "Did he—"
"She's okay," Indigo said. "Hannah. I need to ask you something."
"Okay."
"Chloe. The woman who organised the tour. Have you met her. Has she been to the house."
A silence. Longer than the previous one.
"She came on Saturday," Hannah said slowly. "When you were at the police station. She came to the house and said she was checking on you — checking that you were okay, that the signing was going to be rescheduled. Mum let her in."
Indigo looked at the counter. At the words. At her own book open to its last page.
"What did she look like," she said.
Hannah described her. The height, the hair, the jacket. The particular quality of the smile — friendly, professional, slightly too aware of itself.
Indigo listened.
She thought about Chloe Verhoo who had been on the tour since the beginning and knew every schedule detail and every hotel and every stop. Who had called Claire on Saturday afternoon about logistics for the remaining tour stops and hadn't been seen in Millhaven since.
She thought about Chloe Verhoo standing in the Forzone kitchen on Saturday while Indigo was at the police station. Looking at the house. Looking at the family. Filing everything away.
She thought about what she was missing.
She thought about misdirection and what it was designed to make you look away from.
"Hannah," she said. "Does your house have an alarm."
A pause. "No."
"Is your dad home yet."
"He just got back. He's in the kitchen."
"Stay with him. Don't go upstairs alone. Don't go anywhere in the house alone."
"Indigo what—"
"I'm coming," Indigo said. "I'm coming right now. Stay with your dad."
She looked at Officer Reeves. He was on his radio already — the fireworks, Greta, the counter, all of it going into the system at once.
"I need a car to Clement Street," she said. "Right now."
He looked at her. He said something into the radio.
Two minutes later she was in the back of a patrol car heading west.
She looked out the window at Millhaven going past. At the ordinary Monday night streets. At the fireworks — still going up from the east side, the last few, the display running down — coloring the sky above the town in red and gold and green.
She thought about the tour itinerary that Officer Reeves had requested from Claire. She hadn't seen it yet. She needed to see it.
She thought about Chloe Verhoo in the Forzone kitchen on Saturday.
She thought about what she was missing.
She took her phone out and called Claire.
Claire answered on the second ring with the energy of someone who had been waiting for a call and was not sure whether to be relieved or terrified that it had arrived.
"Indigo—"
"The tour itinerary," Indigo said. "Everything Chloe arranged. I need you to send it to me right now. Every detail. Hotels, venues, contact names, everything."
"I already sent it to the police—"
"Send it to me too. Right now."
"Okay," Claire said. "Okay, sending now."
"Claire." A pause. "Where is Chloe right now."
A silence.
"I don't know," Claire said. "She called Saturday and said she was dealing with some logistics issues for the remaining stops and she'd check in Monday. She hasn't checked in."
"Has she done that before. Gone off grid for a day or two."
"No," Claire said. "Never. She's — Chloe is extremely reliable. Extremely organised. It's the main reason I hired her."
Indigo looked out the window.
"Claire," she said. "How long has Chloe worked for you."
"Eight months," Claire said. "She applied right around when the book was announced. She—" A pause. "She specifically asked to work on your tour. She said she was a big fan of the book. She'd read an advance copy."
Indigo looked at the Millhaven streets going past.
She thought about eight months. About the tour being announced and Chloe Verhoo appearing eight months ago asking specifically to work on it.
She thought about Jacob Cain and how long he'd been planning. How long he'd been patient.
She thought about a daughter who had decided her father's name needed defending before his story could be told by someone else.
"Thank you Claire," she said. "Lock your hotel room door tonight."
She hung up.
The patrol car turned onto Clement Street.
The Forzone house was lit up — every light on, the particular over-illumination of a house that had decided darkness was not something it was willing to tolerate tonight. She could see Tom through the kitchen window as they pulled up, standing at the counter, his back to the street.
She got out of the car.
She went to the front door and knocked.
Tom opened it. He looked at the bandaged arm and then at her face and then at the patrol car behind her.
"What's happening," he said.
"I need to see Hannah," she said. "And I need to use your kitchen table. I have a lot of reading to do."
He stepped back and let her in.
The kitchen smelled like coffee — Tom had clearly been making a lot of it in the way of someone who needed something to do with his hands. Hannah was at the table with her own cup and her phone and the inventory-taking eyes that came up immediately when Indigo walked in.
Indigo sat down across from her.
Her phone buzzed. Claire's email. The tour itinerary — a long document, detailed, every stop from the beginning of the tour to the final signing three weeks away.
She opened it.
She started reading.
Hannah watched her read.
Tom put a cup of coffee in front of her without being asked.
She read.
She went through the hotels first — the names, the addresses, the booking dates, the contact names at each one. Then the venues — the bookstores, the libraries, the one university campus, the conference room in a hotel in the fourth town. The signing schedules. The travel arrangements. The logistics notes in Chloe's handwriting — she recognised it from the emails Claire had forwarded, the particular neat efficiency of it.
She read through Millhaven. She read through the next stop — Harwick, Wednesday, a bookstore called Between The Lines, hotel called The Harwick Arms, contact name at the venue G. Cain.
She stopped.
She read it again.
G. Cain.
Contact name at the Between The Lines bookstore in Harwick.
G. Cain.
She looked at Hannah.
"Chloe's last name," she said. "Her real last name. Not Verhoo."
Hannah looked at her. "Cain," she said. "You told me. Jacob Cain's daughter."
"Yes," Indigo said.
She looked at the itinerary.
G. Cain. Contact name at the Harwick venue. A contact name that Chloe had entered herself, for a venue she had arranged herself, for a stop on a tour she had specifically asked to work on eight months ago when the book was announced.
G. Cain.
She thought about what G stood for.
She thought about Jacob Cain and his daughter Chloe and a last name that was being used openly in a document that everyone had assumed Chloe had filled in professionally and nobody had read closely enough.
She thought about what it meant that the contact name at the Harwick venue was G. Cain.
She thought about misdirection and what you misdirected people away from.
"He's not in Harwick," she said.
Hannah looked at her.
"He's here," she said. "He's been here. Everything in Harwick is Chloe. She set it up. She arranged it." She looked at the itinerary. "He's been in Millhaven the whole time and whatever happens next happens here."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Tom put his hand on the back of his chair.
Hannah looked at her with the inventory-taking eyes moving across her face.
"When," Hannah said.
Indigo looked at the itinerary. At the Millhaven section. At the signing that had been scheduled for Sunday morning and hadn't happened because of the envelope on the window.
She thought about what Jacob Cain had been building toward. The resources he'd gathered. The visibility he'd chosen. The misdirection he'd created with the fireworks and the east side and Greta Halloway in the bookshop.
She thought about what was left. What he still had. What he was waiting for.
She looked at Hannah.
"Soon," she said.
The word sat in the kitchen of the Forzone house on Clement Street in Millhaven and neither of them looked away from it.
Outside the last of the fireworks went up from the east side of town — the final one, gold and high and fading — and then the sky was just the ordinary Monday night sky again, dark and clear and full of stars.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.
From somewhere outside. From the direction of the back garden. Distant. Moving away.
Then silence.
Tom Forzone picked up his phone and called the police and Hannah looked at the window and Indigo looked at the itinerary and the Forzone house held what it held and outside Millhaven was quiet and waiting and the night was not finished yet.