Free Hemlock 03: Willowgrove by Kathleen Peacock Page B

didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t even let myself think of that possibility.
    “We just left them.” A tremble ran underneath Serena’s voice as she echoed my own thoughts. “How could we have just left them?”
    I squeezed my eyes shut because looking into her face—seeing a mirror of my own guilt—was too hard. “Call your dad.”
    After a long moment, I heard Serena walk away.
    I opened my eyes and ran my hand over Amy’s bracelet.
    The universe had an extremely hit-or-miss track record when it came to coming through for me, but I would promise anything—do anything—if it meant Jason, Kyle, and Trey were safe.
    “Please,” I whispered, “just let them be okay.”
    The GPS app on Jason’s phone led us on a twisting route through Hemlock’s historic district before winding past Fern Ridge Cemetery and into River Estates—a half-finished housing development that had fallen prey to the town’s real-estate crash.
    Some of the homes were completed but half were little more than wooden frames or small stakes marking off foundations. As far as I knew, not a single house had sold.
    Nothing hit property values like a string of gruesome werewolf murders.
    The place felt like a ghost town—a feeling not helped byits proximity to the cemetery.
    “Take the next right,” said Serena, relaying the directions from the phone.
    I pulled onto a tree-lined gravel lane and drove up to the only building in the subdivision that wasn’t new: an old church on an overgrown plot of land. Ivy had staked a claim on its brick walls and its heavy wooden doors had been chained shut. There was a small manse next to the church, but its bricks were fire-scorched and one wall had caved in.
    I rolled to a stop next to a For Sale sign covered in graffiti. “Are you sure this is it?”
    “One Douglas Lane.” Serena shivered as she slid off the bike. “One of Trey’s friends told me about this place. He takes girls out here and tells them it’s haunted.”
    It looked like a perfect place for ghosts. Someone had hammered a No Trespassing sign into the trunk of an ancient elm tree, but empty bottles glinted in the grass and cigarette butts dotted the gravel like tiny white bones.
    A small chill crept up my spine. “Why’s it just sitting here?”
    “The congregation moved to a newer, bigger church on the other side of town,” said Serena. “I guess there wasn’t much point in keeping this one.”
    Out with the old, in with the new.
    I glanced back at the For Sale sign. The words MS Commercial Realty were barely visible under a smear of blue paint. MS Commercial was one of the companies Jason’s father owned—which explained how Jason had known about this place.
    “It reminds me of the sanatorium.” Serena’s voice sounded small and lost as she stared at the church.
    “It’s just the bricks and the ivy,” I said, trying to suppress my own memories as I climbed off the bike. “C’mon. Help me get this thing out of sight.” The church wasn’t visible from the street, but leaving the motorcycle in the open still felt like pressing our luck.
    We wheeled the bike around the back of the church and stashed it behind a pile of broken office furniture.
    There was an old tarp tangled in a nearby bush. Serena helped me pull it free and then went to examine the back door of the church as I flung the plastic over the motorcycle.
    I glanced up at the rattle of chains.
    “I hate this,” she muttered, tugging on the huge padlock that secured the door and then turning and walking back to me. “A month ago, I could have torn that door off its hinges. Now I’m just—”
    “A typical girl who’s flunking History?”
    “I was going to go with ‘useless.’” Her skin was flushed. The air was cool, but she slipped off her sweater and tied it around her waist as she dropped her gaze to the ground at her feet. Softly, so softly that I almost missed the words, she said, “Do you think I killed that man? Back at the junkyard?” She