Chapter 3
Story: The Girl at the Flooded Window
The water was worse than Marisol expected.
They stepped off the porch into thigh-deep current, and the force of it nearly knocked her sideways. Dean's hand caught her arm, steadying her, and she gripped the rope she'd tied around her waist and leaned into the current. The flood had a smell — wet earth, gasoline, rotting wood, something sweet underneath that was probably sewage. She tried not to think about it.
The rowboat was where she'd said it would be: a battered aluminum hull tied to the porch post of the empty blue-shuttered house, half full of rainwater. Dean hauled it to the front walk, tipped the water out, and held it steady while she climbed in. The oars were under the seat, old and cracked but whole.
"I'll pull," she said, taking them. "You push us off and then get in."
He shoved the boat into the current and swung himself in over the side. Water sloshed over the gunnels, cold and gritty. Marisol dug the oars in and pulled.
The current caught them immediately, twisting the little boat sideways. She corrected, pulled harder, felt the muscles in her shoulders burn. The water that had been a street was now a river, and the river had its own ideas about where they were going. She fought it, angling the bow toward the porch of the Whitaker house, and for every foot she rowed forward the current pushed them two feet downstream.
"Left," Dean said. "Pull left, hard."
She did. The boat slewed, caught an eddy, and drove forward. The Whitaker house grew in front of them, dark and slumped, its windows like empty eyes. Marisol could see the waterline on the siding — the flood had risen to the tops of the ground-floor windows. The porch was nearly awash.
"She's up there," she said, breathing hard. "Second floor, left window. She was there when we left, she has to be there still."
"Unless she moved."
"Don't say that." She pulled again, harder than she needed to, and the boat shot forward. The hull scraped against something underwater — a car, a fence, she didn't know — and then they were at the porch, and Dean was grabbing a post and hauling them in.
The house had a smell up close. Old wood, mildew, something that had died inside the walls and dried. The porch floorboards buckled under Marisol's boots as she climbed out of the boat, water up to her knees. The front door was boarded over — plywood nailed across the frame, painted over with the same grey as the siding. Someone had tried to keep people out.
"Back door," Dean said. "There was a back door off the kitchen. It connects to the creek side."
They slogged around the side of the house. The water here was calmer, caught in the yard behind a hedge that was doing its best to hold the current back. The back door had a window in it, and the glass was broken — a hole the size of a fist, edges crusted with old paint. Dean reached through and unlocked the deadbolt.
The door opened onto darkness.
Marisol stepped into a kitchen that time had abandoned. Dishes in the sink, caked with twenty years of dust. A table with three chairs — the fourth was missing, its place marked by a square of lighter wood on the floor. The refrigerator door hung open, empty, its shelves rusted. The cabinets were open, showing nothing but dust balls and a single can of peaches, its label faded to a sun-bleached white.
"Dean." Her voice came out hushed. "Dean, do you hear something?"
They both listened. The house creaked around them, the floodwater slapping the foundations below. But underneath that, faint, rhythmic, coming from upstairs — a voice singing.
It was a child's voice. Small and clear, singing a melody Marisol didn't recognize. Something old-fashioned, a lullaby maybe. It floated down the stairs like a memory.
"Riley?" Dean's voice cracked on the name. "Riley, is that you?"
The singing stopped.
The silence that followed was louder than the rain. Marisol looked at Dean — his face was grey in the dim light, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, a man hearing a ghost.
"Riley," he said again. "It's Dean. It's your brother. Please. Say something."
A floorboard creaked above them. Then another. The sound moved across the ceiling toward the stairs, slow and deliberate, like someone who had nothing to fear and nowhere to be.
The stairs were to Marisol's right, dark and narrow, crowned with shadows. She walked toward them without deciding to move, her heart hammering in her throat. Dean followed, his boots loud on the linoleum.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and looked up.
What she saw made her stop breathing.
The girl was standing at the top, silhouetted against the grey light from the window behind her. Her hair hung damp around her face. Her nightgown was stained dark at the hem. And she was holding the grey rabbit in both hands, pressed against her chest, watching them with eyes that seemed to hold the whole room in them.
"Hello," the girl said.
Her voice was small and steady. The voice of a child who had learned that being quiet was the only way to be safe.
"We're here to help you," Marisol said. "We're going to get you out of here. Do you understand?"
The girl tilted her head, like she was considering the question from a long way away.
"I know you," she said, and she was looking at Dean. "I remember you. You left me."
Dean's face went white. "Riley, I didn't —"
"You left me," the girl said again, in the same flat voice, and Marisol felt the floor tilt under her. "You left me here, and you never came back."
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