This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2024 by Samantha Mabry

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Algonquin Young Readers

  Workman Publishing

  Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  workman.com

  Algonquin Young Readers is an imprint of Workman Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Workman name and logo are registered trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Design by Kayla E.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or email HachetteSpeakers@hbgusa.com.

  Workman books may be purchased in bulk for business, educational, or promotional use. For information, please contact your local bookseller or the Hachette Book Group Special Markets Department at special.markets@hbgusa.com.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.

  ISBN 9781616208974 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781523527465 (ebook)

  First Edition March 2024

  Again, for my students

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: Day Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Noon

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Part Two: Night Seven Thirty-Eight

  Seven Forty-Three

  Eight Thirty

  Nine Twelve

  Ten Twenty

  Ten Fifty-Seven

  Eleven Thirty

  Twelve Twenty

  Part Three: Day Eight

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  pagelist

  iii

  iv

  v

  ix

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  101

  102

  103

  104

  105

  106

  107

  108

  109

  110

  111

  112

  113

  114

  115

  116

  117

  118

  119

  120

  121

  122

  123

  124

  125

  126

  127

  128

  129

  130

  131

  132

  133

  134

  135

  136

  137

  138

  139

  140

  141

  142

  143

  145

  147

  148

  149

  150

  151

  152

  153

  154

  155

  156

  157

  158

  159

  160

  161

  162

  163

  164

  165

  166

  167

  168

  169

  170

  171

  172

  173

  174

  175

  176

  177

  178

  179

  190

  191

  192

  193

  194

  195

  196

  197

  198

  199

  200

  201

  202

  203

  204

  205

  206

  207

  208

  209

  210

  211

  212

  213

  214

  215

  216

  217

  218

  219

  220

  221

  223

  224

  225

  226

  227

  229

  230

  ii

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Part One: Day

  acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE:

  DAY

  EIGHT

  All the early mornings look like this: The distant hills are shrouded by a dull gray murk. The trees are frozen in their stark stances. The sky is so thick and ash-colored that it’s impossible to tell what kinds of birds soar silently by until they let out their small, distinguishable cries. When the sun finally hauls itself up and over the zigzag horizon, its weak light is tissue-paper pink.

  Is this beautiful or not?

  Case rolls down the window to get a better view of those shrouded, distant hills and is immediately hit with the smell of a trash fire. She jolts back in her seat. The scent of smoldering wood alongside the sharp reek of melting plastic is so fresh and familiar. Someone is always burning something out here, even though the county has banned fires.

  Case catches the concerned look of the driver in the rearview mirror. “It’s the air,” she says.

  “Hmm.” The man crinkles his nose. “I’ve never been down this road.”

  The driver is maybe only five years older than Case, but he has a row of pictures of his family taped up on his dashboard. There’s a toddler girl seated on a red tricycle, and an older boy in ready position next to a T-ball stand. Several times during this drive, forty miles westward from Fort Worth, Case has noticed him reaching out to tap the faces on those photos with the fingers of his right hand. He does it again, right now. Is it some kind of good luck tic? Are his kids somewhere far away and he has convinced himself that touching their frozen faces will bring them closer? Or maybe any amount of time away from them feels too long, and his fingers always itch to touch their skin.

  “Before I came to pick you up, I double-checked the address to make sure,” the driver says. “Even if you look at the satellite, there’s nothing but trees.”

  “I did the same thing,” Case replies, rolling up her window. “Looked at the satellite, I mean.”

  When someone grows up in a rural county, they know all the roads, even the ones they’ve never gone down. And since this is the county in which Case grew up, she knew this road was here, but she had always assumed it led to some long-collapsed farmhouse or dead-ended into a riverbank. At the turnoff, there wasn’t a sign or street numbers, or even a mailbox. There was fencing, but it had clearly been neglected for a long time. The wire was snapped and bright with rust. The wood posts were split and slanted.

  But the directions in Andrea’s letter were as clear as they could be, and typical for a house tucked deep into the woods: Turn right at the first road after you cross the north fork of the river. Go down farther than you think. The trees will get thicker. The road will get narrower. Keep going. There’s a curve. The house is green.

  As the trees get thicker and the road gets narrower, the driver shifts forward in his seat, his chest hovering an inch from the steering wheel. The road starts to feel like it’s dissolving into the oaks and dying cedars, but then, finally, it curves—just as Andrea had said it would—and the house comes into view.

  “Oh,” the driver says, straightening up suddenly. “This is it? Are you sure this is it? Someone lives here?”

  Case doesn’t reply. She was expecting the house to be green because of paint, but that’s not right. It’s green because it’s covered in ivy. The sides of the old house might be bricked or covered in long strips of siding, but from a distance, it’s impossible to tell. Most of the windows—both on the first and second story—are almost completely obscured by leaves and vines. Wooden steps that lead up to the front door are cracked in half, as if someone had gone and smashed them with a bat. At some point, bricks came loose from the chimney—dislodged probably by that creeping ivy—and they have been left in the driveway where they fell. The whole house looks off-kilter, kicked to an angle.

  “This is it,” Case tells the driver, even though she’s not totally convinced.

  Case glances down to the letter in her hand, the most recent one from Andrea, the one with the specific-vague directions. It’s postmarked just over two weeks ago. Case’s hand is trembling slightly, causing the paper to flutter. Her gaze snags on one sentence in particular: I can’t wait to see you.

  There are more of Andrea’s letters in the duffel bag Case packed for this trip, all tucked into their torn-open envelopes and tied together with a length of gray yarn in a thick bundle. It was important for Case to bring them, to show her friend that she’d read every word of every letter over and over.

  The car rolls to a stop, and the front door of the house swings open. A girl appears. She doesn’t step out and over the broken steps but, instead, leans against the doorframe. The first thing Case notices is the color of the girl’s hair, dark blond, like a bale of hay. It’s woven into a long braid and swept over her shoulder. The girl is wearing a denim apron over a light-colored button-up shirt and rolled-up jeans. She’s roughly wiping her hands on a once-white, now-grayish-and-stained kitchen towel. She looks weirdly wholesome, like she belongs on a label for something like butter or bleach.

  “Oh, there’s your friend!” the driver exclaims, clearly relieved. He throws the car into park and then immediately launches outside to grab Case’s bag from the trunk.

  The girl standing in the door, however, isn’t Andrea, and the bland expression on her face isn’t friendly. She must be one of the roommates. In her letters, Andrea mentioned she’d been sharing the house with three other kids she’d been at boarding school with, but she only ever described one of them—not this one, though. A different one, the boy.

  Imagine my surprise, Drea had written, when Troy told me his family owned a house in Palo Pinto—just a couple miles from the junior high!

  After taking one last glance at the pictures of the dashboard family, Case climbs out of the car. She takes her bag from the driver’s outstretched hand and lifts her gaze to search the house’s second-story windows. Andrea could appear any moment, shaken from sleep by the sounds of car doors and the trunk slamming shut. Any moment now, Andrea could be there, grinning and waving.

  “Pick you up same time tomorrow?” the driver asks.

  “Uh, yeah.” Case spins around. She digs into the front pocket of her jeans to pull out two crumpled twenties for tip. “Yes.”

  She’d paid for the two rides, twenty-four hours apart, in advance—the first from Fort Worth to here, and the second, from here to Fort Worth. Andrea had told Case she could stay at the house, but not for more than a day and a night. Her roommates, she said, wouldn’t like anything longer than that.

  “I’ll be standing right here,” Case adds, passing the cash to the driver.

  Case waits until the car swings around the curve and disappears down the tree-choked lane before turning back to face the house. Again, she peers up to the second-floor windows. The nail on her pointer finger scratches across the paper she’s holding in her still-quaking hand, right across that sentence, I can’t wait to see you. The stink of burning wood and trash still hangs in the air, but there’s a layer of something else now. It’s coming straight from the house: the stonelike scent of bread baking.

  “I’m here for Drea,” Case says. She holds out her letter and steps forward.

  The girl in the doorway doesn’t respond, but she looks down, frowning when she sees the way Case’s hand shakes. Case tries to peer over the girl’s shoulder, but can’t make out anything except the darkened depths of the house.

  “She asked me to come today,” Case clarifies.

  “Are you Case?” the girl asks.

  Case grins, buoyed by the simple joy of having been mentioned. “I am. Yeah.”

  “Andrea’s not here,” the girl says flatly. “She’s not here right now.”

  Another girl, slightly younger, maybe thirteen, emerges from around the far side of the house. She’s running, holding a wide-brimmed straw hat onto her head with one hand and carrying a wicker basket lined with cloth in the other. When she sees Case, she stops so suddenly she nearly trips over her own feet.

  “Is that a letter?” the older girl in the doorway asks. “Like, a letter on paper? Who still writes letters?”

  “Andrea still writes letters.” Case attempts another smile, but this one gets stuck. She extends the envelope out farther. “See? This is her handwriting.”

  All Case gets in response is the girl’s indifferent stare, which makes her feel stupid for even attempting to be cheery. She drops her hand to her side. The envelope slaps against her leg.

  “Where did you come from?” the younger girl asks, approaching Case. She also has hair the color of straw, Case notices, as the girl pulls her own braid over her shoulder and starts to tug at its ends.

  “Not that far,” Case replies. “Fort Worth.”

  “I like Fort Worth!” The younger girl looks to the doorway. “Kendall, remember when we used to—”

  “Steph,” the older girl warns. “Stop.”

  The smell of the baking bread is stronger now, tangy and bright, like sourdough. The older girl—Kendall—lifts her nose to sniff the air. Her expression is still neutral to the point of bored, but Case notices the hard way she grips her dirty towel in her hands, causing her knuckles to pale. There’s dough crusted around the girl’s nail beds, and dried in spots on her palm and the pad of her thumb.

  “You’re late.” Kendall extends her arm toward the younger girl—Steph. “I need the eggs.”

  Steph hands over the basket, and Kendall turns, disappearing into the house.

  Case listens to the long screech of a cicada—a needle-­sharp sound she’ll recognize as long as she lives—and then looks helplessly to the younger girl.

  “Um . . . hey,” Case offers.

  Steph smiles, bright and true, like sun on glass.

  “It’s almost time for breakfast,” the girl says. “Come inside if you’re hungry.”

  If Kendall had walked off a label for butter, then the boy sitting across from Case at the kitchen table could be from a billboard for watches or cuff links or cologne. He is too clean. His white shirt is too white. It’s not breezy linen, but a cotton button-up pressed into offensively hard angles. The sleeves of that shirt are rolled up, and he has his elbows resting on a wooden table that looks at least a hundred years old. The table is covered in nicks and crumbs, but not the boy. He is . . . Case thinks for a moment. He is pristine. Case can smell his soap—a pure white bar.

  Just when she thinks she might be staring at him too long, the boy gifts Case with a grin. He tosses a toothpick into his mouth, grinds and swivels it around with his teeth. Case looks away. She hates when people chew on toothpicks.

  Kendall is at the kitchen counter rolling out a disc of dough with a wooden pin that looks as old and worn as the table. Right beside where Kendall stands is a metal stove—a squat cast-iron beast of a thing. Over on one of the gas burners, bacon is frying in a skillet, creating a little symphony of meat and grease. Steph is standing next to Kendall at the counter, sorting her eggs into a carton. No one is talking, and Case gets the sense she’s entered a scene that plays out the same way every single morning.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18