1 "Evie? Are you there?" Evie Archer blinked. The voice on the phone was muted and distant, as if someone were calling to her while she was lying at the bottom of a swimming pool. It was peaceful down there, in the daydreaming. Quiet. There were no thoughts, no painful memories. There was nothing at all. And that was just fine. She didn''t want to return to the surface, but she knew she had to.
Evie rubbed her eyes, dragging herself back into the present moment. She was sitting in the wicker fan-back chair in her bedroom, with Schrödinger purring in her lap. Around her, Hobbie House groaned and creaked like it always did when the cold New England wind blew over the Berkshires. She pulled her patchwork quilt more tightly around her shoulders and readjusted the phone against her cheek. "Yeah, Tina, I''m here," she replied. "Sorry, I just spaced out for a minute." "You need sleep," Tina said with a sigh. "You sound like my mother," Evie said wryly.
She had only known Tina Sánchez for about two months--they''d met on Evie''s first night in Ravenglass--but she already felt closer to the police chief''s daughter than she had to almost any of her friends back in New York. After all, she''d shared things with Tina that she''d never told anyone else. And Tina was there for her when . Evie grimaced, wishing she was back at the bottom of that pool. "It''s late," Tina went on. "C''mon. We can go over this stuff again tomorrow." Evie clenched her fist until her fingernails bit into her palm.
Schrödinger shifted and the purring stopped, as if he could sense the tension suddenly pouring off her in waves. "No, no," she said. "I want to do it now." "Evie, you''ve got to stop blaming yourself for--" "Please, Tina. Now." It had been two weeks since that ill-fated homecoming night. Two weeks since Evie had fallen into the land of shadows, since she and her brother, Stan, had emerged from the gold mines unscathed. Two weeks since Desmond had gone in and never come out.
Sleep and peaceful daydreams weren''t going to bring him back. She had to focus. Concentrate. Remember. No matter how much it hurt. There had been a great deal of confusion the day after homecoming--at first, no one was even sure that Desmond had gone into the mines at all. Friends at the dance had heard him say he was heading there, but no one had actually seen him go in. People held out hope that he''d taken a fall in the woods, that his phone had run out of batteries, that he would come limping home the next day, feeling sheepish.
Search parties had scoured the woods up on the mountain and the mine tunnels for two days straight, and if it hadn''t been for Mom putting her foot down, Evie would have joined them. Then, at the end of the second day, they''d found a boutonniere. A cream white lily, wound with a stillfresh spray of baby''s breath. It had been lying near the mouth of a mine shaft, hundreds of feet deep. The news article in the Pittsfield Post described Chief of Police Victor Sánchez presenting the boutonniere to the victim''s parents and getting confirmation that the item did indeed belong to their son, Desmond King. There hadn''t been any further details, but Evie had imagined the scene in her head dozens of times. Chief Sánchez walking toward them, his face a mask of sorrow. Mr.
King seeing the flower in the chief''s hand and falling to his knees. Mrs. King clutching a framed photograph of Desmond in her arms and crying out-- No, not him, not my baby . The nightmares she''d had when she''d first moved to Western Mass--the ones of Holly Hobbie, the Lost Girl of Ravenglass--stopped the day she faced down the darkness in the mines. But these new horrors, they didn''t come to her in dreams. They came in every waking moment she had to live with the knowledge that Desmond--beautiful, wonderful Desmond--might be dead because of her. The only thing she''d had to hold on to those past two weeks was the packet of papers she''d found underneath a loose board in her bedroom closet. Papers that Holly told Evie to find when they met down in the Shadow Land.
She''d been calling it that since she got back home, capitalizing it in her mind, giving a name to the place that was nowhere and everywhere at once. You can find my notes, Holly had said, now that I remember where I left them. About Sarah. About . everything. Maybe you can finish what I started. Evie knew now that her cousin Holly had been investigating the nineteenthcentury disappearance of Sarah Flower, known by locals as the Patchwork Girl, right before she herself went missing from Hobbie House. With a shiver, Evie remembered something else Holly had said right before letting her go.
Sarah and I, we''re not the only ones down here. Whatever else lived in that terrible place might have taken Desmond. And Evie was convinced that the answer to finding him lay somewhere within Holly''s notes about Sarah Flower, and the history of Ravenglass. "Okay, okay," Tina said. "We''ll go through it. But quickly--I have school in the morning." She paused. "Speaking of school .
When, um, when do you think you''ll come back?" Now it was Evie''s turn to sigh. The thought of walking through the halls of Ravenglass High, and the stares and whispers that would inevitably follow, filled her with a special kind of dread. She glanced out the window, where she could still see the muddy tire tracks and footprints left behind by TV crews, news reporters, and social media influencers looking to get a peek at the infamous Ravenglass "Horror House," which had reemerged into the limelight after forty years'' slumber. It was already a good story when people realized that Evie had vanished on the anniversary of Holly Hobbie''s disappearance from the house in 1982. When they found out that Desmond had been Evie''s date to the dance and was now missing himself--the story only got juicier. There''d been good reason for Evie holing up at home for the first few days, but it had been a week since the last reporter had come sniffing around, so her excuses for skipping school had started to lose their potency. Still . "I''m not sure," Evie murmured.
"Soon, I guess." She didn''t give Tina time to press her further. "Anyway, let me get over to the closet." She stood up, lifting the big orange cat off her lap and placing him on the bed. Schrödinger grumbled, stretched, and gave her one last, sustained glare before sauntering out of the room. Off to go mole hunting , Evie guessed. Grasping the old brass doorknob, she opened the closet and adjusted her bedside lamp to illuminate the papers taped on the inside of the door. There were photographs, handwritten letters, and papers of all kinds--old and yellowed and faded with age.
Evie was sure they''d have been in even worse shape had Holly not stored them in a cool, dark place all those years ago. Each of the items, in one way or another, had something to do with Sarah Flower and her family, who''d lived in Hobbie House when it was first built in the mid-1800s. It was everything that was left of the little girl. Except this , Evie thought, touching the gold locket at her throat. It had been Sarah''s, and then Holly''s. Now it was hers. "So," she began, her fingers on the locket, "in 1851, Sarah Elizabeth Flower is born to parents William and Mary Flower. Mrs.
Flower dies in childbirth, leaving Mr. Flower to raise Sarah on his own. He''s a wellrespected man in the community, so when Wallace Brand comes to town looking to mine for gold, he hires Mr. Flower to be his foreman. Things seem to be going fine until Mr. Flower''s sudden death some years later. They find his body in the cellar of Hobbie House, and Sarah is blamed. She goes missing around the same time, and neither appear in any records after that.
Work in the mines tapers off at that point as well. The house and land lay vacant for years, then it changed hands several times, but it was rarely lived in for long--until the Hobbies bought and renovated the place sometime in the 1970s. Does that sound right so far?" A moment of silence passed. Evie pressed the phone closer to her ear. "Tina?" "No, that''s right," Tina said. "I just . Look, Evie, I believe you, okay? When you told me about Holly, and this shadow place, and everything else--I believed you then, and I believe you now. I''m just not sure this is a healthy way to process what happened to Desmond.
Maybe there are answers to be found in these old papers, and you know my little writer''s heart can''t resist a good story. But I think you also have to open yourself up to the possibility that Desmond is . well, that he''s--" "You know what," Evie blurted, cutting her off. "Maybe you''re right. Maybe we should call it a night." Another beat. "Yeah," Tina whispered. Silence filled the line between them.
"Hey, so . is everything okay with you?" Evie asked after a moment. She realized what a selfish friend she''d been over the past couple of weeks, since they''d first met. Sure, Tina had been much more interested in poking her nose into Evie''s business than talking about herself, but Evie hadn''t done much to counter that. Other than knowing her dad as the police chief, Evie knew next to nothing about Tina''s life. Recently she''d found out that Tina had an older brother in college--Carlos--and a younger brother.