The Bracelet

I didn’t block @LenaLived.

I knew I should have. Claire told me to, common sense told me to, and I’m pretty sure anyone with even the slightest sense of self preservation would’ve told me the same thing. Instead, I spent most of Friday morning trying to figure out who was behind an email address I couldn’t actually see.

That went about as well as you’d expect.

I searched Lena’s name with 12:17, then June 14 with 12:17, then 0614, Blackwater, my name, Lena’s name, the podcast. At one point I was three pages deep into an old message board that looked like it hadn’t been updated since people still had MySpace songs.

Nothing.

Every article said basically the same thing. Lena Hart was last seen by friends during the late evening hours of June 14. No time. So either @LenaLived had completely invented 12:17, which was rude but manageable, or they’d gotten it from somewhere I couldn’t find.

I was really rooting for rude but manageable.

My phone rang a little after eleven. Claire.

I answered with, “Please tell me you’re calling to confess.”

“To what?”

“Creating a fake account just to screw with me.”

She sighed. “Mara.”

“What?”

“You’re still doing this?”

“I’m drinking coffee.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

I did. I carried my mug into the kitchen and leaned against the counter. “They knew June fourteenth.”

“So does anyone with Google.”

“And 12:17?”

“What about it?”

“I can’t find it anywhere.”

Claire was quiet for a second. “Maybe because it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s probably exactly what they want. Give you some weird, specific number and then watch you spend your entire weekend trying to figure out what it means.”

“Well, if that’s the goal, they’re doing a great job.”

“Block them.”

I looked down at my coffee. Same blue mug from the other night. Same stupid chip along the rim. I considered switching it out for another one, which immediately annoyed me because now I was letting a coffee mug get inside my head too.

Great.

Claire said, “You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Then block them.”

“You’re really committed to this.”

“Because I know you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’ve never met a loose thread you didn’t want to yank until the whole sweater fell apart.”

I smiled. “That sounded almost affectionate.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Liar.”

She didn’t answer, but I could practically hear the eye roll. Then her voice softened a little. “Just don’t let this drag you back into all that shit again.”

That wiped the smile off my face. I knew what she meant. The police interviews. The searches. Being nineteen and exhausted and scared out of my mind while people kept asking me the same questions, like maybe if they worded them differently enough times I’d suddenly remember everything.

For a second I could smell burned coffee. Not mine. Police-station coffee. A Styrofoam cup between my hands. Fluorescent lights overhead. Claire somewhere down the hall. A door closing.

Then it was gone.

“I won’t,” I said.

“Good.”

We hung up. I carried my coffee back to my desk and immediately checked @LenaLived’s profile.

So much for that.

Nothing new. No comments. No messages. No activity. Whoever was behind the account had thrown 12:17 into my life and apparently gone off to have a perfectly normal Friday.

Asshole.

I had a chapter to write anyway.

---

Chapter Three of The Last Night at Blackwater was due in six days. I’d left the four characters sitting in a kitchen with a police officer while Emily was still officially missing. Ben had blood on his shirt. Claire had showered at two in the morning. Daniel claimed he’d gone to bed before eleven, and Anna had lied about seeing Emily leave at 11:42.

I still didn’t know why any of them had done those things.

Normally that would’ve terrified me. This time I kind of liked it. I wanted to know what happened too.

I opened the document and started writing.

The bracelet was gone.

I noticed it before the detective did.

Emily’s mother had given the police a photograph to use for the search. Emily was sitting on the hood of her car with one hand lifted against the sun. Five silver charms hung from her wrist.

Key. Star. Bird. Moon. Heart.

I stared at the photograph long enough that the detective finally asked if I was okay.

“The bracelet,” I said.

He looked at the picture. “What about it?”

I almost told him. Instead, I shook my head. “Nothing.”

Because the last time I saw Emily, she wasn’t wearing it.

I stopped and read it back. Five charms. I’d finally decided what the last two were. Moon and heart. There wasn’t some big writer reason behind it. They just felt right.

So I kept going.

Claire found me in the bathroom ten minutes later.

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing.”

“Anna.”

“I said nothing.”

She grabbed my wrist hard enough that it hurt. “Then keep it that way.”

I stared at the paragraph. Something about Claire grabbing Anna’s wrist bothered me. I highlighted the line and deleted it. Then hit undo.

“Whatever.”

It worked. Sometimes creepy was just creepy. It didn’t have to be my subconscious trying to send me a secret message every five minutes.

At least I hoped not.

---

The actual secret message came Saturday afternoon while I was standing in the grocery store debating whether seven dollars was an acceptable amount of money to spend on strawberries.

My phone buzzed. I expected another comment on Chapter Two. Instead: New private message from @LenaLived.

“Of course.”

I opened it.

You forgot the bracelet.

I stared at the screen. Around me, the grocery store kept right on grocery storing. Carts squeaked. Someone’s kid was asking for cookies for the ninth time. A woman beside me was inspecting strawberries one by one like she’d been personally hired for quality control.

Meanwhile, my heart had started beating a little faster.

I typed: There’s already a bracelet in the story.

No response. I waited. Then sent: What are you talking about?

Still nothing. I should’ve put my phone away. But of course, I didn’t.

Whose bracelet?

The second I sent it, I regretted it.

“Excuse me.”

I looked up. Strawberry woman was trying to get around me.

“Sorry.” I moved my cart and looked back at my phone.

A new message had come through. Hers.

That was it. Hers.

I stood there staring at the word. Emily? Lena? Emily wasn’t real. I typed Lena’s name into the reply box. Then deleted it.

No. If this person wanted to play creepy little mind games, they could at least put in some effort.

You’re going to have to be more specific.

Nothing. Of course.

I left the store without buying the strawberries. At seven dollars, that was probably for the best anyway.

---

I sat in my car with the air conditioning blasting and stared out the windshield.

The bracelet wasn’t completely new. Chapter One had already made me wonder if I’d pulled the idea from some old memory of Lena. I’d seen that little flash of silver around her wrist when I pictured her laughing. But that was it. I couldn’t have told you what the bracelet looked like. I couldn’t have told you if it had charms. I definitely couldn’t have told you there were five.

So what exactly had I forgotten?

I closed my eyes and tried to picture Lena at nineteen. That part came easier than I expected. Lena sitting cross legged on my dorm room floor painting her toenails. Lena stealing my sunglasses, then swearing they belonged to her while they were literally still sitting on top of her head. Lena holding my hair while I threw up after my nineteenth birthday. We really did drink too much.

I could see her laughing. I could see her angry. I could see her crying, which she hated doing in front of anyone. Her hands were always moving when she talked.

Then I saw silver again. A little flash at her wrist. And this time there was a sound with it. Tiny pieces of metal tapping together.

I opened my eyes.

“Shit.”

Had I actually remembered that? Or had I already written Emily’s bracelet making noise enough times that my brain had decided Lena’s should make noise too?

I had no idea. And that was becoming the problem.

There was a box in the back of my guest room closet. My mother had dropped it off after selling my childhood home. She’d written COLLEGE CRAP across the top in black marker, which pretty much summed up her feelings about sentimental storage. I’d had it for years. I’d never opened it.

Until now.

I dragged the box onto the carpet and sat down beside it. For a second I just stared at the lid. Then I pulled it off.

Mom hadn’t lied. There was a lot of crap. An old university sweatshirt. Notebooks. Birthday cards. A program from a play I barely remembered seeing. A lanyard covered in plastic beads that I apparently once thought was worth saving.

Then I found the photographs. Hundreds of them. Actual printed pictures, back when you could take twelve pictures in an entire night and not know how terrible you looked in any of them until two weeks later.

I grabbed the first stack. Claire at nineteen with eyebrows that should’ve been illegal. I laughed. Nathan asleep in a chair with someone’s bra on his head. Owen holding two beers like he’d just won something. Me with bangs.

“Oh, Jesus.” Claire really should’ve loved me enough to stop that from happening.

Then Lena.

I stopped. She was sitting cross-legged in the dorm hallway looking up at the camera with a huge smile on her face.

Alive. I hated that the word came into my head. Of course she was alive. Everyone is alive in old pictures. Sometimes that’s the worst part about them.

I looked closer. Her wrists weren’t visible.

Next picture. Lena outside a bar. Nothing.

Next. The five of us crammed into somebody’s car, all of us looking like complete idiots. Nothing.

I kept going. Then I found one. Lena and Claire standing together sometime that summer. Shorts, tank tops, terrible early 2000s fashion choices I was thankful had mostly stayed dead.

Lena had one hand lifted. Silver around her wrist.

I leaned closer. A bracelet. Definitely. And definitely charms. I couldn’t tell how many.

“Okay.”

I put that one beside me and kept digging.

Near the bottom of the box were newspaper clippings. I hadn’t remembered keeping those. The first headline was enough.

LOCAL COLLEGE STUDENT MISSING AFTER WEEKEND TRIP

Lena’s picture was underneath. The same one that always showed up online. I didn’t read the article. I didn’t need to. I knew what it said. Missing. Nineteen. Last seen by friends. Search ongoing.

There were more underneath. One from a few days later. Another from the following week. One about the reward.

Then I found a plain white envelope. No writing. Nothing telling me what was inside.

I opened it. More pictures. I knew the weekend almost immediately. Not because I recognized the house. Because I recognized us.

Nathan beside a grill with a beer in his hand. Owen holding up another beer. Apparently beer was a major personality trait for both of them at nineteen. Claire stretched across a porch chair with sunglasses covering half her face. Me sitting on a railing.

Then Lena.

I pulled the picture out. She stood in the middle of us with one arm around Claire. Her other hand was raised toward the camera, middle finger fully extended.

I laughed. “God, Lena.”

That was her.

Then I saw her wrist. My smile disappeared.

The bracelet was perfectly clear. Five silver charms.

I brought the photograph closer.

Key. Star. Bird.

My stomach tightened.

The fourth was a moon. The fifth was a heart.

I sat there staring at it.

“No.”

Nobody had read Chapter Three. It wasn’t published. I’d only decided on the moon and heart the day before.

I grabbed my laptop and opened Chapter One. There were the first three. A key, a star and something shaped like a bird.

I looked at the photograph again.

Key. Star. Bird. Moon. Heart.

All five. Exactly.

For a minute I just sat there trying to make that make sense. Maybe I’d remembered them. Obviously that was possible. I’d known Lena. I’d seen the bracelet before. Maybe my brain had held onto all five charms somewhere and handed them back when I needed them for Emily.

That didn’t mean anything supernatural was happening. It didn’t mean @LenaLived had crawled inside my head. It meant memory was weird.

There. Perfectly reasonable. I could work with that.

Then I picked up the next photograph. Nathan was standing in the kitchen. I almost skipped it because there wasn’t much happening. Then something blue beside the sink caught my eye.

A mug. Blue ceramic. Chip along the rim.

I froze.

“Oh, come on.”

I looked toward the hallway. Toward my kitchen. Then back at the picture.

I already knew the line from Chapter One, but I opened it anyway. The chipped blue mug Emily refused to drink from because she said the crack looked dirty.

Same kind of mug. Same damn chip.

Okay. Maybe I’d remembered that too. Except I didn’t remember remembering it, which was becoming a very annoying sentence to keep having to tell myself.

I grabbed another photograph. Living room. Owen stretched across the sofa while Claire stood behind him making bunny ears over his head. And over the back of the couch…

Red. A blanket.

I didn’t need to look at the story. But I did anyway.

The red blanket folded over the back of the sofa.

I stared at the photograph. Bracelet. Blue mug. Red blanket. Three things I’d believed belonged to Emily. To the story. Apparently they didn’t.

I turned the photograph over. There was writing on the back. Claire’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere.

BLACKWATER WEEKEND

Everything inside me went still. I looked at the words again. Then at my laptop.

The Last Night at Blackwater.

“No fucking way.”

I didn’t remember that name. I remembered going away. I remembered the house being near the water. I remembered pieces of that weekend. But Blackwater? Nothing. Yet months later I’d opened a blank document and typed the name like I’d made the whole damn thing up.

Under Claire’s handwriting was a date.

June 14, 2006.

614.

I stared at it for a long time. The username. The email address. 12:17. Now Blackwater. Whatever nice little explanation I’d been building for myself was starting to fall apart pretty fucking fast.

My phone buzzed. I jumped and dropped the photograph onto the carpet.

Another private message. @LenaLived.

I opened it.

Now look at the porch light.