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“And one of the last people to see her was your dad,” she adds.

“And your uncle,” I tack on, a little too quickly. “If we’re going to start pointing fingers—”

“No,” Bristal says, waving her hand and shooing the last ribbons of smoke from the car. “I’m not pointing at anybody—yet. All I’m saying is that your dad knew that even the mention of her name was getting people’s hair up all over town, and here we have a picture of him talking to her, after she’d supposedly ran away. It’s just—sorry—but it’s weird that he wouldn’t have said anything.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But then again maybe not. This picture was taken during the Sweet Corn Festival. It’s a big event, everyone is there. And it’s Henley, everyone knows everyone. I don’t think it’s that weird that some teens from the same class would stop and say hi to each other.”

“Would you stop and talk to me, before we were doing this podcast together?” Bristal asks, flipping her phone around so I can see the picture again.

I sigh, the happy, fuzzy edges of the buzz that I’d been working on filtering out into the cool night air. “I don’t know why my dad is talking to Denise, and I don’t know why he wouldn’t mention it to me, okay? But you have to admit that it’s totally possible that this is just three teenagers who happened to bump into each other.”

“And then one of them fell off the face of the planet,” Bristal adds.

“He might not even remember this conversation,” I say, raising my phone but not able to drop my point.

“Only way to find out is to ask him,” she says quietly.

“I’ll find a way to do that, good idea,” I snap. “Should I wedge it in there before I tell him that I snuck out to try to catch bigfoot after someone targeted our home, or make sure I ask him about his connection to a missing girl after—”

A scream rips through the night, rising and falling, overriding my words.

“Oh God!! Oh my Gooooooooood!”

Everything I have contracts. My hand tightens on my phone, my arms and legs pull into the fetal position, and I swear it feels like every cell inside of me grabs the one next to it, holding on in fear. Bristal, on the other hand, leaps out of her car.

“What are you doing?” I whisper-scream after her, just as the scream comes again.

“Oh God!! Oh my Gooooooooood!”

My hair is standing on end, goose bumps like an army of sentinels marching across my skin. My numb fingers fumble with my phone. “I’m calling nine-one-one,” I announce.

“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Bristal says, then opens my door and jerks me out into the night. I yelp, dropping my phone, then scrambling after it.

“You don’t need to call nine-one-one,” Bristal says, hauling me up by the shoulder.

“Oh God!! Oh my Gooooooooood!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I ask, arms wrapped protectively around myself as she sits on the hood of her car. “Someone is screaming for help!”

“They’re not,” Bristal says calmly, nodding her head toward the strip of woods that follows the line of the stream through the fields. “Listen.”

“Oh God!! Oh my Gooooooooood!”

“Screaming for help from God still counts,” I say, but Bristal only shakes her head.

“C’mere, and calm down,” she says, patting the hood of the car next to her. I reluctantly do as I’m told, the heat from the cooling motor seeping through my jeans.

“Listen,” she says calmly.

“I’ve heard it enough—”

“No, listen to everything else. What do you hear?”

I go quiet, aware that I’m not going to get anything out of Bristal until I play along. “Crickets,” I say. “Some insects.”

A high trill joins the insect hum, and Bristal lifts a finger. “That’s a screech owl.”

“Cool, thanks. It’s good to have identified the last thing I’ll hear before I’m murdered.”