SLEEPWALKER

by Mina Elwell

A terrible grinding noise, like the sound of a drill piercing through a back molar, was coming from somewhere in the bedroom. Beth Joe’s eyes shot open. There was a burning sensation in her arm, radiating down into the palm of her hand. It felt like a heavy weight was crushing her. Desperately, she clawed at the air above her. No use. Her arms crumpled, bouncing off her chest and flopping lifelessly onto the mattress.

Very few people came into Madge’s 24/7 Eatery after 9:00p.m. Still, it remained open at all hours for stoned high school kids, overworked nurses, and undercaffeinated truckers who happened to wander through White Pass, Alaska in the middle of the night. As the first pink light of dawn glinted off the broken jukebox, Samantha Warnow pulled on her coat and walked out the door, done with her tedious overnight shift. She swallowed three ibuprofens dry before pulling out of the parking lot—not that over-the-counter meds could take a bite out of the constant pain in her knees, her hands, her lower back. The real stuff was back home.

Without even locking the front door of her apartment behind her, Sam gulped down pain medication and a pair of sleeping pills. Only then, did she drop her coat onto the floor with the rest of her dirty laundry and sink down onto the couch. She found sleeping in bed almost impossible. It was too much pressure. It was easier just to take the sleeping pills, switch on the TV, and drift into a fog that eventually resembled dreaming.

As the medications started to kick in, the pain went from feeling like someone had stuck a butter knife under her kneecaps to an almost friendly throbbing. She tried to focus on what the unrealistically beautiful TV homicide detective was saying, but already it felt like she was looking out at the world through warped glass. She liked it better that way.

A strange buzzing seeped into her dream. The humming of a neon sign. A swarm of bees. The whirring blades of a helicopter. She bolted awake. It was her cell phone vibrating. The screen showed a number but no name. Mostly to make the sound stop, Sam hit the green button. She expected a cold robotic recording from her pharmacy telling her she needed to have a doctor renew her prescription. Instead, a tearful voice gasped: “Sam? Sam, is that you?”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Sam mumbled. As soon as she said it, she knew it was a lie. It must be at least noon by now, but her blackout curtains were doing their job.

“You’re not sleeping, are you?” The voice had gone very quiet. “Sam, do not go to sleep.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Jennifer. I need to know why you said what you said about the Sleepwalker.”

Jennifer Benally had been her best friend when they were kids, but other than a few Instagram comments, they hadn’t spoken in the eleven years since they graduated high school.

“Why are you calling me?”

“Beth’s dead.” Something about the whine in Jennifer’s voice sent a shiver down the back of Sam’s neck. The blue light from the TV screen flickered and the shadows cast by the stacks of dirty dishes accumulating on her coffee table crept across the wall.

“Beth Joe?”

“They’re saying she had a heart attack in her sleep, but . . . we both know that’s not true,” Jennifer said in a manic whisper. “Her palm was all burned. Just like the Sleepwalker.”

Through the thick fog of chemically induced sleep, Sam struggled to understand what Jennifer was trying to say to her. The word “Sleepwalker” triggered feelings of youthful terror, but when she tried to grab onto it the details slipped through her fingers.

“How did you know?” Jennifer’s desperate voice cut through the confusion. “Sam, how did you know what was going to happen? Sam!”

The line went dead. There was a hazy glow around the glowing phone screen. Sam couldn’t make her eyes focus. The voices coming from the TV were garbled. The dread that Sam was feeling drowned in the murky waters of artificial exhaustion as sleep pulled Sam back under. Half in a dream, she remembered The Sleepover.

Nine-year-old Sam didn’t go to a lot of slumber parties, but since it was only Jennifer and their new friend Beth, she had convinced her mother to let her go to this one. When they changed into pajamas, Sam noticed a little yellow training bra in the pile of discarded clothes. Awestruck, she gently nudged it away from a striped sweater with her toe. Beth was wearing bras already? The three brushed their teeth with Beth’s bubblegum flavored toothpaste. When Sam’s toothbrush flashed and buzzed to let her know two minutes were up, Beth grabbed it out of her hand exclaiming: “That’s so cool!” She didn’t seem to care that foamy pink toothpaste goo dripped onto her hand.

“Don’t you need to take your pills, Sam?” Jennifer asked.

“Pills for what?” Beth asked, pulling her hand away from Sam’s.

“No,” Sam answered defensively. Jennifer had been her best friend for years, but right now she wished she never had to hear her squeaky little voice again.

“Yes, you do,” Jennifer insisted.

“I think you need to take pills,” Sam shot back. Beth laughed, and it felt like the sunshine on Sam’s face. Defeated, Jennifer spat bubblegum toothpaste into the sink.

Sam did need to take pills. Long after the other two were sleeping, she lay in her sleeping bag, feeling the hard, unforgiving floor beneath her. Her legs were stiff and wooden as she crouched in front of her backpack, feeling around for the zipper pouch where her mom had carefully packed her medication. The pill bottles rattled loudly.

“What is that?” Jennifer sat up in her sleeping bag. Sam didn’t move, hoping if she just kept quiet, Jennifer would go back to sleep. Instead, Jennifer leapt up, arms wrapped around herself protectively. “Who’s there?”

“What is it?” Beth mumbled.

The idea of Beth Joe asking why she was creeping around her bedroom in the dark was dizzyingly horrible. Sam blurted: “I heard it, too.”

“Turn the lights on.” Jennifer’s voice was higher than Sam had ever heard it before.

“No,” Sam said, shoving her pills back into the bag, out of sight. “You’ll wake it up.”

“Sam, stop,” Jennifer said loudly.

“Wake what up?” Beth didn’t sound scared.

“It’s called The Sleepwalker,” Sam said. “You hear it at night sometimes, when it sneaks into your house.”

Beth patted the foot of her bed and Sam sat down. Reluctantly, Jennifer joined them. Together, they took turns elaborating on the sinister details of The Sleepwalker, a creature heralded by the sound of rattling bones that killed those unfortunate enough to wake it up and then taunt it by falling asleep themselves. In their stories, the bodies of the dead were found, decades later, with an S burned into their palms. In a quiet, tense moment, Jennifer grabbed Beth’s bare foot, making her scream in terror, and Beth’s father had come in to shout at them all to go back to sleep.

The clatter of the remote control hitting the floor woke Sam. For a moment she had no idea where she was. Beth's bedroom? No, that was twenty years ago, and Beth . . . was dead. Her phone chimed with an incoming text from an unknown number. It took some time for the image to load, and there was something about the empty gray box on her screen that made Sam nervous. It was almost a relief when an incoming call obscured the text. “Hello?”

“Hi, who is this?” a woman’s anxious voice said immediately. It wasn’t Jennifer. She was glad about that, too.

“Samantha Warnow,” Sam answered.

“Sam, honey! I didn’t know you guys were still in touch. This is Mrs. Benally. Jennifer’s mom. Is she with you?”

“No, sorry. She called me last night. Is everything OK?”

“Did she say where she was going?” Mrs. Benally asked.

“No, she didn’t. Is Jennifer OK?”

“If she calls you again, try to get her to tell you where she is, OK? And call me right away if you hear anything.”

“OK, sure. No problem.” Sam hung up the phone. The text was waiting. A wave of nausea and dread washed over her. Sam had burned herself countless times on the toaster, three times on her hair straightener, and once dropping a lit birthday candle. Those burns did not look like the one on her screen. In the photo was a hand with thin, tapering fingers, curled up slightly and purplish gray at the tips. Splashed across the palm was a shockingly red shape, surrounded by torn skin. It looked almost like the letter S.

She jumped up and turned on the lights, taking in every corner of the room. Somehow, seeing it empty didn’t make her feel better. If she spent another second looking at her flickering TV and smelling week-old greasy takeout from Madge’s, she was going to truly panic. So she did what she always did. She ran.

The $271 flight North, wiped out her bank account, but Sam didn’t care. Someone had killed Beth and Jennifer in exactly the way she had described twenty years ago. Only the three of them had heard the details of their made-up boogeyman, but that didn’t mean that it was a secret. She had never thought to tell anyone else about the Sleepwalker, but maybe Beth or Jennifer had. Any number of people could have known the story. The only thing Sam knew for certain was that there was no monster, because she had made it up.

If she was so sure, though, why was she sitting on the plane drinking black coffee after acrid black coffee, heading for a place where the sun never sets?

A terrible grinding sound made Sam lurch awake. For a second, she thought the plane was falling out of the sky, but it had already landed. Everyone else was filing out the door. As Sam struggled stiffly to her feet, a flight attendant holding a trash bag full of discarded paper cups flashed her a smile. “You’re home, honey.”

“What?” Sam asked, but the woman had already moved on.

Sam had chosen the town of Oarlock because it was the farthest north she could get for less than $1,400. She hadn’t even realized that it was an island until she saw sunlight gleaming off the steely gray water. She had always imagined the parts of Alaska that were north of the Arctic Circle as blanketed in ice and snow, but Oarlock turned out to be mostly dirt.

Not counting the few moments of fitful unconsciousness she’d had on the plane, she had been awake for about twenty hours. Within the next four, she had seen rows and rows of square pastel houses with dirt lawns, checked into a motel, and found a job at a two-room sandwich shop with bright blue siding, situated on a patch of dirt next to a dumpster. The owner was surprisingly excited to hire her and put her to work on the spot despite there not being much work to do. All she had done so far to earn her $11.73 per hour was add up the price of a cup of hot coffee and a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on a clunky old calculator and put the cash in the cash box. Her only customer was a young man wearing a hi-vis vest so yellow it made her head ache.

“Is the coffee fresh?” he asked.

“Fresh instant,” she said, giving it a stir.

“Lack of sleep getting to you?”

“How did you know?”

“Constant daylight. It gets to everyone. At first people enjoy it, but after a while they start going crazy out here. They say the best thing to do is keep a routine, use blackout curtains, convince your body that what's happening to it isn’t actually happening.”

“I’m already an expert. Graveyard shifts and insomnia.”

“Why do you look like you’re about to drop dead, then?”

Sam wordlessly pushed his sandwich across the counter.

“Come around Nocta when you get off,” he said. “It’s always crazy on weekends.”

“Is it the weekend?” Sam asked.

He laughed. “Who knows? The sun never sets.”

When Sam finished her shift all she did was rush back to her dark hotel room, close the blinds, and collapse onto the bed. She had been awake for more than thirty hours and it felt like her throbbing limbs were encased in dry, brittle candle wax, that she had to crack to even twitch a finger. Her hands shook as she ripped at the blister pack holding her pain meds. The paper pulled away from the plastic, but it still didn’t open. Desperately, she gripped it in her teeth and wrenched. The pill flew out of the packet and skittered across the floor. She dropped down onto all fours, crawling across the ugly gray motel carpet. She had only planned to take half of it, but as soon as her fingertips closed on the dusty pill, she shoved it into her mouth and swallowed the whole thing dry. The bright white of the sun streamed through the cracks in the blinds creating long, white bars across the floor. She squeezed her eyes closed against the light, but the afterimage remained, glowing almost as bright behind her eyelids.

There was a screech. Sam shot up off the floor, heart pounding. Her eyes fixed on the blinds, fluttering gently in the breeze. Someone had pushed the window open from outside. A chill running down the back of her neck, Sam turned to face the gloom of the hotel room. She took in the bathroom door, the wardrobe, the bed. Could whoever it was already be inside?

She didn’t wait to find out. Sam stumbled out of the motel, blinking in the glaring sunlight and didn’t stop until she was six blocks away. Across the empty street was a building, identical to the other little square houses, but painted deep blue and decorated with yellow string lights. A chalkboard on the porch read: ‘NOCTA. Has it been a long day?’

The inside of the building did not match the outside. There were blackout curtains on all the windows and the lights surged and pulsed blue. The music was one monotonous dance beat. Sam had barely seen five people in her entire time in Oarlock, but here there were at least twenty-five people dancing, leaning on the bar, and cuddling up to each other in the booths. She slid into a stool at the bar and ordered three hot coffees in a row.

Three turned out to be one too many. She felt just as confused and exhausted, but now her heart was hammering in her fingertips. Her eyes fell on a pair of young women, dancing rhythmically with their hands around each other's waists. Sam felt a wave of confusion, and below it, a deep pool of dread, threatening to rise up and drown her. She pushed her way through the crowd towards the two girls, but it felt like trying to run through waist-high water.

“Jennifer?” Sam called. “Beth?”

One of the girls vanished into the crowd, leaving the other dancing alone, hands over her head, long, bare legs catching the blue light. Sam reached out, brushing the hair out of her face. The girl she had thought was Beth Joe looked up in surprise.

“Sorry,” Sam mumbled. “Wrong person.”

“I don’t think so,” the girl answered, a smile in her voice. She threw her arms around Sam’s neck and pulled her into a kiss. She tasted like bourbon and sugar.

The girl who was not Beth Joe flicked off the lights as they both practically fell into the bathroom, still pawing at each other. The wooden door to the restroom continued to swing back and forth, letting in snatches of dance music and flashes of light. Sam ran her hand up the girl’s thigh, taking in the softness of her skin. Her senses were oddly heightened. She kept becoming uncomfortably aware of the sensation of having someone else’s tongue in her mouth, the bright yellow of the girl’s bra, the sound of breath in her ear. The girl was biting her neck and Sam had one hand in her hair, the other trailing down the girl’s wrist, twisting their fingers together. Sam froze. There was something wrong with the girl’s hand.

“What is it?” the girl gasped.

Sam held the girl’s hand up to the light. There was a burn on her palm in the shape of an S. Sam shoved her away.

“What is it?” the girl asked again, but Sam was already scrambling for the bathroom door. She pushed her way through the crowded bar. It was a tangled mess of arms and legs and bodies, writhing under the ever-pulsing thump-thump-thump of the music. It was impossible to push through without feeling the sweaty skin of the dancers and hearing their shrieks of laughter. They didn’t seem to notice her as she forced her way through them, trying to claw her way to freedom. Finally, Sam stumbled out into the blinding sunlight. She stared back at the door to Nocta, waiting for Beth to follow her. It never opened.

As she ran the few deserted blocks back to the motel, she pressed her cell phone to her ear. “Mom? Have you heard anything about Jennifer?”

“Jennifer who? Jennifer from when you were a kid?”

“What about Beth Joe?”

“Oh, I don’t know, hon. I haven’t talked to their moms since your graduation,” her mother said. “I can check Facebook?”

“Sure, whatever you want,” Sam said distractedly, pulling her key card out of her pocket. Her hands were throbbing so badly, just holding the thin plastic was a challenge.

“Whatever I want? You’re the one who asked!”

Sam lay down on the bed and pulled up Jennifer’s sparse social media profiles. There was nothing new, but that wasn’t unusual. Jennifer almost never posted. She tried Beth’s, scrolling through picture after picture of her smiling face. There were no recent posts, but no condolences, either. No obituary. No memorial service. It made her feel so tired she wanted to sob. Could they both still be alive?

“Mom, can you book me a flight? I think I have to come home.”

“Where are you?” Her mother’s voice seemed impossibly loud and grating.

“Oarback Island.”

“Where?”

“Can you just get it for me? I think my cards are maxed.”

There was silence. “Samantha.”

“What?”

“I paid your rent last month. And in April.”

“Great, thanks.” Sam hung up the phone and hurled it across the room. After gulping down a pair of pain pills, she finally let herself close her eyes, blocking out everything. Everything except the pain, anyway. Distantly, the beautiful TV homicide detective described a crime scene. When had she turned the TV on?

When the sound began, it was so quiet that it didn’t even wake her. It was a grinding whine, like a bone saw. Annoyed, Sam rolled over, looking for the source of the noise. Something was lurking outside the window, only visible through the slats in the blinds. At night, it might have been a shadow. At night, it might have been a nightmare. At night, it might have been a human being. In the cold light of the endless day, there was no doubt. It was something else.

The thing had soft, smooth, colorless skin, so thin that its veins could be seen through it. Its face was so crisscrossed with the spiderweb of blue lines that it appeared a sickly gray-blue. Its teeth were short and flat like a baby’s milk teeth, but it had far too many for its narrow jaw. Its eyes were large, flat disks, clouded a pale, otherworldly blue. The shape of its bony shoulders seemed to rise up impossibly high behind it. The rest of its body was hidden, and for some reason, that terrified Sam the most.

She bolted upright in bed. The thing was gone. Sam pressed her hands over her mouth, trying to fight the urge to scream over and over again until her throat was raw and ragged. Instead, she pulled her knees up to her chest, breaths coming in short, shallow gasps.

Sam ran a bath in the grubby motel tub, trying not to think about how many other people’s bodies had soaked in it. Her joints were aching too much to get down on her knees and scrub it. The water was hot and steaming and turned her skin bright red. She didn’t care if it burned. The heat seemed to draw some of the stiffness out of her aching body. The feeling of the water flowing around her and the smell of the floral motel soap chased away the feelings of panic and dread.

Her wet hands left distorted rainbow trails on her phone screen as she opened her call log, half expecting Jennifer’s number to have vanished. It hadn’t.

“The number you have dialed is not in service. Please–”

Sam hung up, then found Jennifer’s mother’s message. A little gray exclamation point had appeared next to the conversation: Spam likely. She was about to try calling, when she saw something move in the mirror over the sink. In the reflection, she could see that the bathroom door had opened a crack. Then she heard it: the grinding sound. Something was moving outside the door.

The creature was at least eight feet long. Its pale, nude body was almost human, but stretched and distorted. Its pointed shoulder blades were the highest point on its body, and its arms were twice the length of its legs. Its forelimbs were long and fragile looking, like the legs of a crane, and bent in the wrong direction. As it crawled forward, face close to the ground like a hound stalking its prey, the bones in its shoulders, elbows, and wrists emerged from its skin. These shards of shattered bone were scraping together, grinding against each other in an unbearable whine.

Every nerve in Sam’s body was screaming at her to leap up out of the water, to run, to shove, to do whatever she had to in order to get as far away as possible from the thing in the other room–but Sam was used to ignoring her body’s screams. Eyes fixed on the form moving in the mirror’s foggy reflection, Sam tried not to move at all. She had the uncanny feeling that she was only still breathing because the thing hadn’t realized it had been seen.

Sam took a deep breath and silently sank down into the warm bathwater. It closed over her face. She could feel her hair billowing around her. If there was any sound, it was muffled by the water. She didn’t need to breathe yet, but the air filling her lungs was just starting to feel uncomfortably tight. She opened her eyes. Through the rippling bathwater she could see it: the creature’s face was just above the surface. Its lipless mouth was stretched wide in a skull-like grimace. A long string of saliva dripped into the water.
It hadn’t seen her. Not yet. If she could catch it unaware, maybe–

Sam tried to shoot up out of the water, but the creature’s claw-like hand plunged down, pinning her by the throat. As its fingers curled around her neck, a sharp, freezing, electric pain shot through her entire body. She writhed beneath the surface, nose and mouth filling with water as she tried to scream. All she could hear was the water slapping at the sides of the tub and sloshing onto the floor and the terrible grinding of the creature’s bones. She grabbed its wrist. Pain shot through her hand, like she was breaking her own bones instead of the creature’s. Her mind was flooded with panic. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. Still, she didn’t let go. A wave of revulsion coursed through her body as she felt the creature’s wrist splinter in her grip. She wrenched as hard as she could. Her fist slammed into the side of the cast iron tub and it rang loudly.

She sat up, spluttering and coughing out a deluge of bath. Her knuckles were bleeding from how hard she’d hit the tub. There was water all over the bathroom floor. The door was shut. She was alone.

Walking proved a challenge. There were more people on the street now, but it seemed almost as if they moved in slow motion. Whether it was the lack of sleep, the pain pills, or inhaling so much water, she wasn’t sure, but by the time she stumbled into work she could barely stand. She wasn’t even sure why she had come into work, except that it was the last plan she’d made and she couldn’t force herself to focus on reality enough to come up with a new one. Nothing made sense and she was too exhausted and in too much pain to try to figure it out. She leaned on the counter, trying to find a position that didn’t make her skeleton pulse and throb, and only looked up when she heard someone speaking. Her vision was hazy, but she recognized the bright yellow hi-vis vest. She grabbed the coffee pot, hoping he would go away if she poured him a coffee, but her hand cramped and it hit the counter with a clang.

“Are you okay?” His voice sounded muffled, as if she was still under water. She grabbed the half-full cup and chugged down the coffee herself. There was a wave of nausea as it hit her stomach. She looked up, dreading the look of concern on the customer’s face. Instead, she was looking into a pair of wide flat eyes. Sam dropped the cup, but barely heard it shatter. She was face to face with the creature. Its mouth contorted into something like a grin, little, flat teeth clattering together as its jaw shook from side to side.

“Wait, where are you going?” the man called after her. Sam threw the door open and ran out into the street. She didn’t bother to look back. All that mattered was putting distance between herself and the beast.

Suddenly everything was pain. Something had slammed into her at full force. The sound of a car horn blared in her ears. There were hands under her arms and people were pulling her to her feet. Sirens wailed in her ears. She opened her eyes and through the flashing of red and blue lights she saw medics pushing their way toward her. A pair of tall, white shoulder blades rose above the heads of the gathering crowd.

“Let me go,” Sam said to one of the people holding her up. “Let me go. I have to go.”

Sam was aware of a repetitive beeping sound. She was lying on her back and a TV was playing quietly. She could detect an astringent, medical smell, but there was something else there, too: the greasy scent of old takeout from Madge’s. A voice said: “Stay still ma’am. Don’t try to move.”

Sam’s eyes focused on a plastic bracelet around her wrist that read: F12 Jennifer Omega Alpha.

“I’m not Jennifer,” Sam said.

“So much nicer than Jane Doe,” the nurse said. “When did you last sleep?”

“What day is it?” Sam asked. “Jennifer died on the 7th. And Beth.”

Something flickered across the nurse’s face. “You haven’t slept in six days?”

“I can’t,” Sam murmured. “That’s what they did. I have to do something else.”

The nurse was adding something to the IV next to the bed. Sam scrambled into a sitting position. She felt a wave of confusion and nausea wash over her and she almost crumpled back down. The nurse came to her, cool hands pushing her gently back down.

“What are you doing?” Sam waved her hand at the IV. “What is it?”

The nurse shushed her. “You need to sleep.”

Sam shoved her away and leapt out of the hospital bed. Metal rings screeched in protest as she threw back the curtain and hurtled out into the hallway. The glowing, red exit sign burned through the haze of sterile hospital whiteness. She sprinted down the hallway, ignoring the pain shooting through her body. People were shouting, but it was just a garbled, wordless noise. She threw open the emergency exit door and plunged down the stairs, bare feet pounding against the cold steps. Looking down at the dizzying flights of stairs going deeper into the bowels of the hospital made her feel like she was going to topple forward, so she squeezed her eyes shut. The world was rippling and flowing like the warm bathwater, and she could hear the distant sounds of a TV playing; the voice of the beautiful primetime homicide detective saying: “It’s been almost a hundred and forty hours. Chances of finding your daughter are slim, Mrs. Warnow.”

Sam opened her eyes and saw the bleeding back of her hand, where she must have ripped the IV out. She didn’t remember doing it. She was grasping something small and round: A sleeping pill.

The lights flickered. Sam looked up to see the silhouette of the creature framed on the landing. One of its long arms was folded up close to its chest. Its head snapped to the side, and it let out a strange snuffling hiss. The sound of its bones grinding together echoed off the empty walls as it leaned forward until its face was just inches from hers. In its flat, clouded eyes she could see the reflection of her own face and the dark hollows around her eyes. They looked as wide and dark as the beast’s.

Slowly, it unfolded its arm. The thin skin around its wrist had torn and hung loosely. Holding its hand at a bizarre angle, it extended its long bony fingers towards her throat. Sam wanted to sob, but she was too exhausted. Instead of grabbing her neck, it brushed its fingertips under her chin. The same cold, crackling pain sent shocks through her jaw, but she didn’t pull away. Somehow, without hearing a word, she understood what it was saying: Aren’t you tired?

She put the pill in her mouth and swallowed. Her throat felt raw and her voice came out as a rasp. “Sorry for waking you.”

The creature pressed its rattling, lipless mouth to her forehead in a kind of goodnight kiss.

Sam collapsed to the ground, slipping down the final stairs and onto the landing. Her entire body pulsed with the pain she had been trying to ignore for more than twenty years. Echoing around the empty stairwell, she heard the sound of thunderous footsteps and shouting. She closed her eyes.

Deirdre Warnow stood outside the funeral home staring at her phone and smoking a cigarette. She was too engrossed in trying to match up the colorful shapes on her screen to notice that another woman was directly downwind of her smoke until she coughed pointedly.

“So sad,” Deirdre said, gesturing back toward the door. “I remember when Beth was a kid. Samantha totally worshiped her.”

Jennifer’s mother nodded silently.

“How is Jennifer?” Deidre asked.

Jennifer’s mother sucked in her cheeks. “I guess Samantha didn’t tell you.”

“I had no idea they were still in touch! That girl doesn’t tell me anything. Never has, not since she was a little girl.” Deidre was laughing, but stopped when she saw Jennifer’s mother’s face. “Why? How is Jennifer?”

“Missing.”

“Oh my God.” She covered her mouth. “That’s terrible. That’s like something out of one of those true crime podcasts.”

Jennifer’s mother pursed her thin lips. “The last time I heard from her she mentioned Samantha.”

“She did? What did she say?”

Jennifer’s mother pursed her lips, and for a second, Deirdre thought she wasn’t going to answer. Finally, she said, “She said ‘Sam should run.’”

Deidre snorted. “Damn right she should. From me. I just got a letter from her rheumatologist’s office saying she hasn’t been getting her bloodwork done. And she still owes me around three grand. She’s getting an earful from me when she gets back from Oarback Island or wherever, I promise you.”

“Oarlock, you mean?” Jennifer’s mother asked. “There’s nothing but snow and harbor seals up there.”

The two stared at each other, then, silently turned to look back at the funeral home. Finally, Deirdre said, “Well. Could be worse.”

Jennifer’s mother didn’t answer. Deirdre dropped her still smoldering cigarette onto the pavement. As she walked away, Jennifer’s mother stamped it out. Back in the safety of her car, Deirdre opened her phone, swiped out of her game, and opened up her contacts to Sam’s number. In the contact photo Sam was smiling, but it was a forced, posed smile. Her eyebrows were raised in an expression that said she hoped the picture would be taken soon so she could go back to her life. Deirdre snorted and tossed her phone onto the passenger seat without calling. Sam would come home when she was ready.