Nowhere

by Allison Gunn

Genres: Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

Mare of Easttown meets The Outsider in this spine-tingling and twisty debut about a series of disappearances in a small, fundamentalist town and what one broken family must do to remain together as dark forces close in.

After losing her young son in an accident, Rachel Kennan throws herself into her career as police chief of a small Virginia town to avoid focusing on her grief. Meanwhile, her husband, Finn, a washed-up writer whose alcoholism led to the devastating tragedy that changed everything, struggles to redeem himself before his family completely falls apart. Their two daughters are the only things keeping Rachel and Finn together, but the girls have demons of their own.

At the same time, a disturbing crime rocks their tightknit, religious community, sending Rachel chasing leads in a place that does not take kindly to outsiders. When an ominous force in the forest starts calling to the children, fear spawns hate among the townspeople, placing the Kennan family directly in the line of fire. Left with no choice but to rely on each other, Rachel and Finn must come together to face threats inside and out.

A haunting family saga and a disquieting horror debut, Nowhere draws from Appalachian folklore to caution us that true terror is what we bury in our own hearts.

Release date: March 25, 2025

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Prologue

PROLOGUE
I’m sorry, Officer. Can you repeat that?”

Officer Danny Boyd would have preferred not to answer the dispatcher. No matter how hard he tried to shake the feeling, Danny knew someone, or something, was watching him from the trees encircling the tiny Virginia town. To speak would draw attention, alerting the predator to his presence just as a deer’s rustling in the forest guided his rifle’s aim. Danny was perfectly aware of what it was like to be the hunter, but never before had he known what it felt like to be hunted… until now.

His gut churned. He had already gambled with the last thirty minutes, spending more time in Dahlmouth than he’d ever wanted to, even before the chilling silence he found today.

“You heard what I said!” Danny barked into the radio as he brought the patrol car’s engine to life. “They’re gone.”

His eyes darted back and forth over the pavement and weeds sticking out of the broken sidewalk along Dahlmouth’s Main Street. Suddenly, Danny caught movement out of the corner of his left eye. He jerked in that direction, his hand gripping the butt of his gun in the leather holster. Danny tried not to exhale directly into the radio as he saw Officer Jack Carlyle, his partner, emerging from Dahlmouth’s police station, shaking his head as he walked back to the patrol car. Danny didn’t need to ask why Jack looked so befuddled. He had already accepted what his partner simply could not.

Danny knew they had a duty to explore further—to follow the obvious lead and start a sweep of the woods. Yet, an alarm bell was screeching in his ears. There was something very wrong with this call, those trees, this place. The moment he saw the carvings on the trees, a strange and primal terror shot through him.

The markings were unavoidable—a circular symbol punctured by a large V. The symbol was everywhere, and the image of some faceless creep wandering from trunk to trunk, methodically carving the sigil for hours on end, was the stuff of nightmares. But in his gut Danny knew something much more disturbing lurked in the shadows.

“Officer, who is gone?” The dispatcher’s nasally voice crackled over the receiver and startled Danny.

Sweat soaked the back of his neck. Jack ignored him as he swung into the passenger side of the car, and Danny took this as his cue to make one last sweep of the scene. Even if Dahlmouth’s entire population popped up now, it would take a hell of a lot to make him stay one second longer.

“All of them. Everyone is just… gone.”

Chapter One

ONE
Uh, guess again, Charlie.” Rachel glanced in the rearview mirror at her two girls. The keys in the ignition swung to and fro. Her dark aviator sunglasses hid her disapproval; nevertheless, she was sure Charlie knew exactly how Rachel felt about her going out for an evening ride to Roanoke with Gemma Thompson while the girl’s teenage brother—Alex—served as the sole chaperone for the outing.

“But Mama,” Charlie implored, “it’s just to see the lights and drive right back. I’ll only be gone a couple hours.” She leaned forward to put her hands on Rachel’s shoulders. Her voice was sweet and high, not so different from the one she’d had when she was eight or nine—the days when Charlie still seemed to like Rachel no matter how headstrong she had always been. Rachel had been proud of her daughter’s feisty nature back then. It was a commonality the two shared, and perhaps the only quality Charlie possessed in which Rachel could see herself. Now, it was quickly becoming the very thing driving them apart.

“Why can’t Mrs. Thompson take you, then? Why does it have to be Alex?”

“Because the PTA meeting is on Thursday night. You know that. Mrs. Thompson has to be there; she’s president.”

Rachel couldn’t keep the damn meetings straight, even though they were held with religious regularity. None of them were particularly useful. Thus far, the only one Rachel had found enlightening was when Mrs. Janet Jamerson showed up to give Principal Gary a talking-to in front of the middle-school gym regarding the number of times he’d given her girl detention for dress code transgressions. This was injustice at its finest when, per Mrs. Jamerson, everybody knew Alice Henn wore shorter skirts with bright lacy undies underneath for god and everyone to see. Naturally, Mrs. Kimmy Henn had a few words to say to Janet.

Before anyone knew it, Rachel was serving as a human wall between two women in their late forties who swung their fists like bikers and pulled hair like they were teenagers all over again. Kimmy busted Rachel’s lip and should have had charges filed against her for assaulting an officer. However, seeing as Rachel was Dahlmouth’s police chief, it would make for awkward future encounters. Besides, it was good for a belly laugh later that evening when she and her husband, Finn, were on the back porch with two beers.

The happy memory quickly soured in Rachel’s mind. She didn’t even recognize the people she and Finn had been before. Where once the echo of Finn’s laughter in her thoughts brought a smile to her face, Rachel now felt nothing but disdain.

“Daddy said she could go,” Lucy piped up dreamily. Rachel looked back to see her six-year-old drawing faces in the condensation on the window with her pudgy little fingers. The morning sun lit up Lucy’s light blonde hair so that she glowed like a pint-sized saint.

“Absolutely not,” Rachel said.

“Lucy!” Charlie shrieked and brought her fist down into the seat between the two girls. “Thanks a lot!”

“Lucy doesn’t have anything to do with it. You’re not going because it’s a stupid idea,” Rachel boomed and prepared to put the van in reverse. She pretended to focus on safe driving skills ™ like she lectured the kids at Dahlmouth High about every spring, just before half of them flooded the country roads with shiny new IDs and bottles of Miller High Life hidden in the trunk.

“I’m lucky anyone wants to take me out at all anymore!” Charlie’s vitriol turned toward Rachel. “Thanks to you and—”

“Daddy could take us,” Lucy suggested, face still hidden by the holy light around her head.

“SHUT UP!” Charlie shrieked and once more slammed down her fist, this time dangerously close to her little sister’s thigh.

“ENOUGH!” Charlie and Lucy froze mid-breath. “We’re done with suggestions for the day, ladies. How ’bout we focus on the scenery in silence while we drive to school, yeah?”

Rachel hit the gas hard, wheels spinning before they caught on the gravel and the car screeched out of the Kennan family’s driveway.

“So, did you hear old Bobblehead Melanie is coming back to town?” Deputy Jeremy Whitman cackled as he spun half circles in his swivel chair.

As Rachel watched him spin, his usual shit-eating grin spread wide across his face, she still marveled at how the hell Jeremy was the most capable officer at her disposal—the second-in-command over what was otherwise a nearly comical ragtag police force. With a perpetual fondness for gossip, Grey Goose, and girls, Jeremy had yet to fully understand the responsibility resting on his broad shoulders. Though only two years younger than her, his brown puppy-dog eyes and immaturity kept him pegged at twenty-five rather than thirty-five in Rachel’s mind. While Jeremy’s small belly bulge had recently turned into a full beer gut and his dark hair had started to thin, her deputy would forever be an incurable man-child.

“You’re worse than the goddamn hens at church.” Rachel brought her coffee cup down harder than intended and sent brown sludge dribbling onto her desk where there were already hundreds, maybe thousands, of other coffee stains and cigarette burns covering the wooden relic. Most had been imprinted there years before she was born.

“How much time do you think will pass before we get another old biddy calling about a parked car with the windows fogged up?” Jeremy proceeded to make an offensive gesture to mimic Melanie’s well-known oral talents.

“I’ll make sure I send you out on that call since you’re so happy to see Melanie coming back to town.” Rachel rolled her eyes and checked her cell phone. She still had fifteen more minutes before she could justify a smoke break in secret.

“Rachel. Rachel!” Officer Marcus Blevins, a kid better suited for pizza delivery than the police force, shouted for her at the station’s front door. His usually spiked, light blond hair was flattened against his head, dark hollows cradling his eyeballs. “AJ Johnson’s flipping shit again.”

“What’s wrong now?”

“He’s on his CB going on about something he and Tommy Wise found in the woods off Route 6.” Marcus sounded as if each word pained him, not out of concern but annoyance. “Sounds like one of us should go out.”

“I can already tell you the kid’s blitzed out of his mind, ’specially if he’s out there with one of the Wises again,” Jeremy said, and suddenly became interested in sorting through the months-old citations scattered across his desk.

“It’s nine o’clock in the morning,” Marcus stated, as if it made a difference.

“You think that matters?” Rachel grunted. “The Wises shoot up their breakfast.”

“Thanks for explaining that, Chief,” Marcus scoffed. “Like I didn’t grow up with these pricks.”

“Anywhere else, they’d kick your ass for talking to your superiors that way.” Rachel took another sip of her coffee. One of these days, she would go ahead and follow through with her threats. After three years, she was almost there. She’d start with this cartoon character first.

Marcus Blevins could have gone into IT or graphic design or even the circus, but under no circumstances should he have gone into criminal justice. That was his parents’ doing. Marcus was hired a week before Rachel, a parting gift from the bitter old man who was her predecessor. Ever since then, she had tolerated the golly gee whiz veneer Marcus offered strangers, the cocky retorts he shot at anyone who challenged him, and the utter incompetence that would have prevented him from getting a job anywhere other than the tiny town he’d never left. Marcus believed Dahlmouth owed him respect as a birthright. Only outsiders like Rachel needed to work for the locals’ approval.

“Look, he’s hysterical.” Marcus shrugged. “I can’t even tell what he’s talking about.” He took another step backward. Jeremy kept wheeling around in the chair as it screeched its disapproval.

“You’d better be backing your ass out of that door to go check in on him, then.” Rachel offered him a cheers with her coffee cup.

“Oh, come on, guys. Please! Jennifer’s been up all night with Maisie. Jenn thinks she’s cutting teeth, but it’s fuckin’ miserable. Nobody in the house has slept for days.”

“Cry me a river, Marky boy,” Jeremy began in his usual machismo tone. “We all got kids here.”

“Yeah, but I actually see mine, dipshit,” Marcus sneered.

“Hey, fuck you!” Jeremy brought his fist down on his desk and sent notices flying in every direction. “I’ll kick your ass, you—”

“So you want one of us to go out there so you can head home?” Rachel had very little time for puffed chests and red faces.

“Jenn really needs—I mean, she hasn’t slept—and I think Maisie might need the doctor at some point. And we don’t have any more baby Tylenol in the house, so…” The kid shifted awkwardly in the doorway. His abrupt absences always seemed to correspond with the days when they received any kind of call that would require actual assistance. Now that his daughter had arrived, Marcus just had a better excuse.

“Fine,” Rachel snapped. “But you owe me personally.”

“You know she hates dealing with that stretch of road, dickhead.” Jeremy glared over his shoulder. “Imagine how you’d feel if somebody made you go stomping around where your kid—”

“That’s not why, asshole.” Rachel softly kicked the edge of his desk with her boot to cut the conversation off.

Her son was not a topic she cared to discuss with anyone, not even when combating her officers’ nonsense. Jeremy knew that better than most. The pair spent nearly every day together as is, but in the weeks following the accident, the man didn’t leave her side. He’d continued searching the riverbanks along with Rachel well after everyone else had abandoned the task. Not once had they talked about those days in the entire year that had passed since.

“None of us wants to deal with the Wises’ bullshit anymore, myself included. But as far as I can tell, you’re not really giving me an op—”

“Thanks a ton, Rachel.” Marcus sighed and disappeared in the same breath.

“Dick,” Jeremy said and rapped his knuckles on the desk.

“Get your shit.” Rachel gently nudged Jeremy’s boot this time as she pushed herself away from the desk.

“What?”

“You’re coming with me.”

“No. Do I have to?” Jeremy groaned. “Why would you do this to me, Rach?”

“I’m not dealing with those hopped-up bastards alone. If you’ll recall, the last time we had to clean up after the Wises, the fuckers took a baseball bat to the county deputy and our cruiser.”

Jeremy snorted. “That was a hell of a lot of fun, though.”

“I’m putting an end to one of them if they pull that shit again today.”

“No, you ain’t.” Jeremy smiled broadly and winked. “You’re too much of a bleeding-heart, finely trained city cop to do that. I don’t think you could put a bullet in ’em if they charged at you with rifles.”

“Get your ass in gear. Let’s go!” Rachel fought to dismiss the burning in her cheeks, already halfway out the door with the cruiser keys jingling between her fingers.