When fifteen-year-old Debbie Boyle stumbles across the rotting body of the most popular girl in school, she becomes the center of a story no one wants her to tell.

Everyone already knows what happened—at least, they think they do. In a town built on rumors, secrets spread faster than truth, and the woods behind Debbie’s trailer park hold more than one kind of dead thing.

As accusations spiral and suspicion turns toward the people closest to her, Debbie is forced to decide what she’s willing to risk: her reputation, her friendships, or the truth.

Because in this town, the real danger isn’t what’s buried in the woods—it’s what people are willing to believe.

14+ due to adult situations

 

Excerpt:

Debbie led the three girls up the bank, the dense foliage challenging their steps. Salal yanked at their jeans, branches scratched across their sweatshirts.

“Have you guys heard anything about the graveyard?” she asked, turning to face them, walking backward, waiting for an answer.

And this is the part Debbie would always regret. The part she would always remember. Their faces. Their faces were etched in her mind more than what happened next.

Lips peeled back, narrowed eyes. She’d interrupted them with the graveyard.

Their sneering faces.

Debbie’s foot caught on something, and gravity snatched her. Later, it would replay in her memory in slow motion. Their faces, their faces, their faces, then slam, landing hard on the ground and her hand slipping across something wettish. Looking down to wipe off the mud or whatever, only to see another face. This time, close. At her level. A face. But not a face. And not yet just a skull.

At first, she thought it must be a deer, but the nose. The nose was not a deer nose. And then the ears. And then the clothes. And she scrambled back. Slipping and kicking to get away from what was not a deer, not a dog, not a bear. She’d seen plenty of torn-apart carcasses and dragged-away bones throughout the woods and along the river. But this was human. The hair, the clothes.

And then the smell.

So much worse than rotting fish along the riverbed.

She tried to scream, to say something, to shout help, but instead only guttural moans and catching breath and something sour to wretch. Debbie reached up for help. The girls’ faces were now just gaping mouths and giant eyes. They stared, but they did not reach back to help Debbie out of the mess.

Debbie scrambled to her hands and knees, then to her feet, wiping her hands on her jeans, up and down, up and down.

Kaylie murmured from somewhere behind her, “Oh gawd, oh gawd.”

“Go,” Debbie said, gesturing back the way they’d come.

Claire moved first. One quick step, but the undergrowth grabbed at her ankle. She yanked her leg back, the sticky weed unrelenting. “Which way—”

Debbie brushed past Claire. She would not turn around, would not look back at what she’d seen, what she’d found, what she’d fallen into. She had to get to the river. She had to breathe. She didn’t want to breathe. The smell. The smell followed her like smoke. She listened for the river, the sound like clapping hands, like an audience most pleased. Debbie went that way.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sadie said, still walking. “How do I get out of here?” she shouted. 

Debbie burst through the door into the living room. Her mother stood in the kitchen, barefoot, staring out the window into the backyard, into the field, into the forest, past the cabin to the mine. To the graveyard.

Debbie stopped just inside the door, the girls pushing against her to get into the house. “There’s something out there,” Debbie said to her mother’s back. “There’s somebody dead out there.”

The girls sobbed and panicked and made too much noise for her mother’s nerves as they followed Debbie into the kitchen.

“Oh, gawd. What if it’s…” Claire’s mouth hung open.

There was no what if for Debbie. She knew. She’d known it when she’d stepped out of the forest and stood next to the river’s edge, when she’d escaped the smell, when she’d finally stopped moving. When what she’d seen landed in her memory and sewed itself in.

The hair.

Now Sadie said something about calling the police, and Claire wept in earnest. Debbie’s mother turned around slowly. “You’re phone ain’t gonna work in here. You’ll have to go out by the road.”

Grasping her phone, Sadie glanced back at the door.

Debbie’s mother squeezed past the four girls huddled together, bumping her daughter out of the group. “Girls, I think we better call your mothers.” She picked up the receiver to the mustard-colored phone that hung on the wall and held it out to Sadie first. 

The first thing Sharon did when the girls were picked up: threw her daughter’s birthday cupcakes in the garbage can. “Sometimes, you just gotta learn to accept who you are,” she said, taking each step slowly up to her bedroom, not looking back. “I’ll call the police, but I need to close my eyes first. Clean up this party shit.”

Sharon was tired from all the other mothers, that’s how Debbie explained it. They wore her out—the mothers who never wanted their daughters to come to Debbie’s birthday in the first place. She was tired of their horror, their gaping mouths, their bulging eyes, their disbelief as, one by one, each girl in tears retold the story. Sharon was tired of all the assurances. Yes, she’d call the police. Not yet, though, not till their angel-girls were safely home and insulated from the trauma.

From the trauma of Debbie’s birthday party. Debbie’s birthday. Debbie’s birth. 

Debbie picked up the birthday gift Claire had brought and sat back on the couch. A streamer had fallen from one corner of the living room.

She peeled the wrapping paper. A leather journal with a tree on the front. She could write her own play, not that she wrote stories of any kind. She could write secrets, like a diary.

A dead body lay rotting in the forest.

Debbie held her new journal, seeing the girls’ sneering faces, feeling the fall, her hand slipping. A line from the school play came to her: “A body mangled to an extreme degree.”

“What did you find?” Sadie’s line.

The black hair.

In the play, Sadie would face the stand—casual, because it was only Act I—and ask, “Judging by the condition of the body, could you say exactly how long it had been dead?”

Three months.

Because that’s how long Marissa had been missing.