Chapter 4 The Stranger in the Dark

The whisper came from just around the corner, too close and too quiet at the same time.

"Eveline."

I didn't move. My hand found the ceramic mug on the table without me deciding to reach for it, fingers wrapping around the handle on pure instinct. A mug. I was going to defend myself with a mug. Some part of me recognized how absurd that was and the rest of me didn't care.

The shadow on the wall shifted. Grew larger.

"I'm not here to hurt you." The voice was low and steady, masculine, carrying something underneath the words I couldn't immediately name. Not aggression. Something more like urgency held under pressure.

"Then why are you in my house?" It came out louder than I intended, cracking in the middle.

A slow breath from the darkness. Almost like resignation. Then the figure stepped forward into the weak edge of the lamplight and I saw his face.

I knew him.

Not well, not recently, but enough. Jonas Whitaker. Silas's oldest friend, the one who always appeared slightly off to the side in photographs, like he was present because Silas wanted him there rather than because he wanted to be. Older now, harder around the jaw and eyes, stubble darkening his cheeks. His hair was the same, perpetually unsettled, like he'd been moving fast and hadn't stopped long enough to notice. Last time I saw him I was sixteen and he was leaning against Silas's truck at the harbor with a wrench in his hand, laughing at something.

Then one day he was just gone. No explanation anyone offered me.

I lowered the mug slightly but didn't set it down.

"Jonas." His name came out like a question. "Why did you come through the back?"

His jaw tightened. "I needed to reach you before anyone else did."

"What does that mean?"

His eyes moved to the folded note on the table. "It means things are moving faster than I expected."

I picked up the paper. "You left this."

He didn't blink. "Yes."

"Why not knock? Why not call?" My voice was steadier now, anger starting to replace the fear. "Why leave something that cryptic and then disappear into the fog like a ghost?"

"Because coming to the front door would have gotten us both seen," he said. "And being seen right now is something neither of us can afford."

The cold in the room shifted. Not temperature. Something else.

"Jonas." I kept my voice level. "Where is Silas?"

Something moved across his face. Pain, maybe, or the effort of holding pain back. "He didn't drown. He didn't run. He didn't fall."

My knees went soft. I pressed a hand flat against the wall behind me.

"He was taken," Jonas said. "By people who knew exactly what they were doing and had been waiting for a reason to do it."

The lamp threw unsteady light across his face and for a moment he looked the way I felt. Like someone who had been carrying something too heavy for too long and hadn't found anywhere to set it down.

"Taken by who?" I asked.

"I can't tell you everything yet."

"Can't or won't?"

"Both." He held my gaze. "Silas found something. Something buried in this town that was never supposed to come up. Old and dangerous and connected to people who still have a great deal of power here. When he started pulling at it, they noticed."

I thought of those half-finished warnings he used to give me. The way he would start a sentence and then stop, jaw setting, swallowing whatever came next. I had let him swallow it every time. I had told myself it was nothing.

"Why come to me?" I asked. "Why not the sheriff?"

"Because some of what's happening runs through that office." He said it plainly, like a fact he had long since stopped being surprised by. "Not all of it. But enough that you can't walk in there with what you know and expect it to stay safe."

I stared at him. "And you? Why should I trust you?"

"You shouldn't. Not yet." He said it without flinching. "But Silas did. And he left something for you to find because he trusted you to do something with it. That ring wasn't an accident, Eveline. He put it somewhere he knew you'd look."

The breath went out of me.

"He's alive," I said. It came out somewhere between a question and a demand.

Jonas paused just long enough to make my heart clench. "I believe so. But the window is not open indefinitely."

Before I could respond the knock came, sudden and hard, and I jumped badly enough to knock the mug sideways on the table. Jonas moved without hesitating, stepping back into the hallway shadow, one hand raised with two fingers pressed together in a clear and practiced gesture. Stop. Wait. Don't speak.

The knock came again, harder.

"Eveline Shore." The voice on the other side of the door was deep and official and did not sound like it was accustomed to waiting. "Sheriff's department. We need to speak with you."

My mother's voice came from upstairs, startled and tight. "Eveline? Who is that?"

Jonas crossed the distance between us in three silent steps. "Do not go out there alone," he said against my ear, barely sound at all. "And don't tell them I was here."

"Eveline!" The door shook in its frame. "Open up."

I looked at Jonas. He was already moving backward down the hallway, each step landing in exactly the right place, no sound, no creak, like he had memorized the floor plan or had done this before in other houses in other situations.

He paused at the edge of the dark and looked back at me once.

"Choose carefully who you trust tonight," he said. Then the shadows took him and he was gone.

I stood alone facing the front door, the note in one hand, the ring box a hard small weight in my coat pocket, the knock still reverberating through the walls of the house I had grown up in.

For the first time since Silas disappeared I did not feel grief or confusion or the heavy underwater numbness that had followed me through three days of fog and unanswered questions.

I felt afraid. Clearly and completely afraid.

And somehow that felt more honest than anything else had all week.