Truly, Madly, Deadly

Chapter Three

THREE

Chloe fell into step with Sawyer as they walked down the junior hall the following morning. “So I didn’t hear from you last night.”

Sawyer worked the straps on her backpack, her eyes on her shoes. “Sorry. I got busy.”

“Were your dad and Tara howling at the moon or something equally metaphysically odd?”

Sawyer thought about the lone shoe, about Detective Biggs perched on the edge of her couch. “Did a detective come to
your house?”

Chloe stopped cold, spinning to face Sawyer. “Huh?”

“Never mind.”

“A detective? No. Never. But the DEA came out to bust my neighbor’s pharmaceutical business once.” She wagged her head. “Leave it to the Feds. Always trying to take down the small businessman. Hey.” She reached out and pinched Sawyer hard on the arm.

“Hey! Ow!”

“You’re zoning out on me.”

“I know, DEA.”

“It was funny. You didn’t laugh.”

Sawyer forced a smile as big as she could muster. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

“So unload.” The final bell rang and Chloe shrugged, her hand on the door to her English class. “Later.”

•••

It was dark by the time Sawyer made the turnoff to Blackwood Hills Estates. The days were getting shorter, and though Sawyer usually liked the crisp, cozy days of fall, the impending darkness now felt like sheets of doom across the empty housing development. Her father kept promising that the streetlights that now reached out like cold, stiff hands toward the sky would be lit soon. Soon, Sawyer figured, probably meant when another family moved into the housing tract.

Now Sawyer’s headlights made only dim slits in the blackness, obscured even more by the bales of fog rolling over the brand new blacktop. That was the thing about living in a town that billed itself as “oceanside adjacent.” No real ocean views but all the ocean fog and the occasional brackish scent of filthy bay water.

Sawyer zipped through the blackened streets, sighing as she passed empty house after empty house. The Dodd house was the first to be populated, though it sat at the very back of the housing tract. It rested on a gentle slope, and once the rest of the neighborhood was full, the house would have an excellent view of twinkling lights before the miles of cypress trees beyond. The brochures called Blackwood Hills a “forested oasis.” Sawyer called it an annoyingly long distance from civilization and creepy in the dark.

The porch light glimmered at the front door of the Dodd house, and Sawyer picked her way through rocky dirt and a maze of landscape flags and spray-painted future walkways. She sunk her key into the lock, kicked open the front door, and dropped her backpack on the marble foyer floor.