Where There's Smoke

by E. B. Vickers

Genres: Young Adult

Synopsis

In this fast-paced thriller, eighteen-year-old Calli finds herself alone after the loss of her father—until a bruised and broken girl shows up on her property, forcing her to face the present, rethink her future, and unearth the skeletons of her own past.

Life has never been easy in the small desert town of Harmony, but even on the day Calli Christopher buries her father, she knows she is surrounded by people who care about her. But after the funeral, when everyone has finally gone home, Calli discovers a girl on her property.  A girl who’s dirty and bruised and unable to speak. And petrified.

Calli keeps the girl secret—well, almost secret.  She calls her Ash and begins to nurture her back to health. But word spreads in a small town, and soon a detective comes around asking questions about a missing girl from another town. But these only raise more questions--about Ash and about the people Calli knows well. Still, she must ask: is Ash in danger…or is she the danger?

 

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Release date: December 12, 2023

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 336

Sample

1

The day we bury my dad, I am almost a ghost myself.

My mom waits at the cemetery already—she’s been waiting there for five years. But her old friends are with me today in her stead: Maggie wakes and dresses me, Sofia brushes my hair and pulls it up. Trish makes toast and eggs just in case I’ll eat a few bites, and she won’t stop hovering until I do.

After that, it is Ben at my elbow all day, best-friend-turned-babysitter even though, technically, we’re both adults now. He leads me into the church, where the whole town of Harmony has gathered for the funeral and every speaker makes Dad sound like a saint. He guides me out of the church and walks beside me through the cemetery, where Dad will be laid to rest next to Mom. The grass over her grave has transformed from a patchwork of sod strips into an unbroken extension of the greater field of green. When did this happen, and why didn’t I notice? How long will it take until the seams of his grave disappear too?

A memory comes, then, of sneaking into their bed on cold, dark mornings, not because I was afraid, but because I knew there was no safer place in the world. “A Calli sandwich,” they would say as I wedged myself between their warm bodies. I want so much to climb back into my own past life, into that warm, safe bed, that I drop to my knees in the grass, stretching one arm forward—

—until Ben pulls me back and whispers my name, and it strikes me how wrong this is. Not just because we’re in a cemetery and there’s a hole and a headstone instead of a down comforter, but because my parents are on the wrong sides.

He should be on the right.

She should be on the left.

That is where they belong, and I belong between them. But they are mixed up with no safe space between them, and they will be like this forever. Couldn’t we have gotten at least that small thing right?

Ben loads me back into the passenger seat of his old white truck and pulls the seat belt across my body. What does it matter?I almost ask, but it’s easier to click the buckle into place and look away.

Before we turn out of the cemetery, I see Dylan Rigby climb into a backhoe next to the storage shed, and I realize he is coming to move the dirt.

It is Dylan Rigby, my first boyfriend, who will bury my dad.

Back at home, Maggie, Sofia, and Trish are here again, helping the women from church serve lunch. Long, rectangular tables covered with taped-on, dollar-store tablecloths wait under the two tall cottonwoods in front of the house. Even in early June, it’s hot enough in our corner of high southwest desert that we’re all seeking the pockets of shade wherever we can find them.

Up by the porch, they’ve set up a serving area for the food. Lines of people pass by on both sides of the serving tables, taking thin slices of ham and scoops of cheesy potatoes—funeral potatoes, we call them around here—and wilted salad from a bag. I’m not sure I can eat any of it.

I’ll have the prime rib.

Dad’s voice cuts through the crowd, so clear and sudden that it startles me. I know he’s gone; it’s not like I look around to see if he’s standing beside me somehow. But still, there’s a comfort in knowing it’s exactly what he would have said, just to lighten the moment—and in feeling like the words didn’t come entirely from me. I’ve been flooded by memories ever since he died, but the voice—this is new.

I find myself hoping to hear him again as I accept the plate that’s been assembled for me, hoping this hallucination can bring me back into myself somehow.

Because from the moment I got the news of the fire, I’ve felt myself fading from my own life. Maybe part of me has wanted to show Dad that this is how it’s done; you don’t just leave all at once. I know he didn’t have a choice, but I’m still angry at him for disappearing so suddenly, so completely. No smell of shaving cream in the morning, no slightly off-key singing while we fold laundry, no guilty smile when he peeks into my room at night to check that I’m home in bed and not off with Ben. (Or Dylan Rigby, once upon a time.) When he left, it wasn’t a slow fade, a gentle ride into the sunset, but the click of a light switch. Binary. There, then not.

He was there at my graduation ceremony, just over a week ago. When they talked about all the ways we’d change the world, I looked out and found him. We locked eyes, and he said to me, without a sound, that I didn’t have to change the world to be his whole world.

And even though it helped, I wanted to say back to him, What if that’s not enough? What if who I am is average? What if I never become brave or strong or sure?

Because I wasn’t anything special in high school. Average height, average grades, average social status. Brown hair that can’t decide if it’s curly or straight, blue eyes that are more winter fog than clear summer sky. Nothing noteworthy or even very noticeable.

I tried to be something more. I joined cross-country and Future Health Professionals and half a dozen other extracurriculars. I tried out for Into the Woods and got cast—but only as Ensemble/Villager #4. I got good enough grades to get into a good enough college that’s close enough that I could still live at home and help out. But was any of it really enough?

I wanted to ask him, but afterward, the stadium was crowded, and there were pictures to take, and Dad had to leave for Cedar Falls soon anyway, and then Ben was waiting, ready to force me to come to the grad party and be social for once. So I only told my dad I loved him and would see him tomorrow.

After the party, Ben and I lay in sleeping bags on his trampoline, drifting off under the canopy of stars just before the morning light began to wash them out. We were still there, baking on the slick black surface, hair matted to our foreheads, when Bishop Carver came to tell me Dad was gone.

The first words out of my mouth were: “But what about my questions?” Which, of course, Bishop Carver misunderstood and therefore answered in the absolute wrong way with details about the fire itself. I sank to the ground, not because my dad had died but because I had traded my last chance to talk to him for a night of loud music and meaningless conversations, and who would understand me or have answers for me now? In spite of my questions, I knew in that moment that every part of who I was and who I wanted to be was built squarely on the foundation of my father: all he was, and all he believed. So who was I without him? And how dare he leave me with the inevitability that I would crack and crumble in his absence?

Selfish, I know.

I know.

---

Now, in the heat of this impossible afternoon, Ben scoots a chair next to mine and sits down. I hadn’t even noticed he wasn’t right beside me. I should have noticed, though. I should hold on as much as possible to everyone who’s left.

“People are starting to go,” he says.

“But not you?”

“Not me. Not until you kick me out.” He hands me a cold bottle of Dr Pepper under the table. “You look like you could use a stiff drink.”

Our bottles hiss as we open them, sighing at the relief of a little less pressure. Together, we sip and watch as the women begin to untape the tablecloths and the men begin to fold up the chairs.

Bishop Carver turns and catches my eye, and a strange thought strikes me that maybe he’s the closest thing I have to a father now. Not just because a bishop is the “father of the ward,” but because he’s also my dad’s cousin and has known me all my life. He even looks a little like Dad: same sandy hair, same barrel chest, same crinkly smile. He ambles over and sits a safe distance from us, always the model of love—but also propriety.

“Calli, I’m so sorry. He was a great man, and a great example to me.”

They’re not empty words. Bishop Carver always said he learned everything he knew from Dad, from throwing a fastball to casting a fly line to raising a kid. They were both natural leaders too, charming and charismatic. Everybody said so.

Which is probably why they were both chosen, one after the other, to be the bishop. Dad went first, as always, and I was so proud to see him sitting at the front of the congregation. To feel important because of his importance.

When Mom died, he insisted that he wanted to keep serving, even though it was already a lot with raising a kid and running a veterinary practice. But somebody higher up decided it was time to release him from that role anyway, three years into what’s usually a five-year calling.

The blow should have been softened a little by the fact that it was Travis Carver, the younger cousin who’d always tried to follow in his footsteps, who replaced him. But things were never quite as natural between the two of them after that, maybe because Dad even insisted that he and I both call his cousin Bishop from then on—even though we’d only ever called him Travis, and it took a lot of getting used to. “He is the presiding high priest over us now,” he said, “and it’s too easy to forget that if we call him by his first name, even outside of church settings.” Dad didn’t mention the fact that his cousin had never used the title for him.

Now Bishop Carver rests his hands on the table, clasped together like he’s ready to start praying any second. “We’ve got folks lined up to mow your lawn and bring in meals, and any bills you get, you send them straight to me. I’m happy to handle the financial end.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Anything else you need, you know where to find me.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Or you tell him,” he says, nodding at Ben. “He knows where to find me too.”

“Okay,” I say. And “Thanks,” because maybe then we can be done.

Soon everyone is gone but Ben, because he promised to stay until I kick him out. He would stay forever to keep that promise, but as much as I want him to, his brown eyes are sunken and his broad shoulders stooped.

“You can go,” I say. “I think I want to be alone for a while.”

He probably knows I’m lying, but he also knows I don’t want him to call me on it. That’s the kind of best friend Ben is. So he leans his forehead against mine, his hairline prickly against my skin. “You know where to find me,” he says in his best Bishop Carver voice. Then he wraps me in a hug that smells like laundry and home before climbing into his truck and leaving me behind.

Inside, I change my clothes, then wander around the empty house, which is cleaner than it’s been in years. The funeral flowers are at the graveside now, since the one thing I managed to decide in all this was that I’d rather let the deer eat them than watch them die, day by day.

So instead of flowers, there’s a little bouquet of gifts in the center of the table: a pair of thick-soled shoes from Maggie, a molecular model kit from Trish, a set of soft scrubs from Sofia. No cards, but I know who each gift is from all the same. I can even hear what they’d say if they were here: For your future. You still have one, you know. They would make some joke about how the minute I pass my NCLEX, they’ll take somebody out so there’s an opening on the med/surg staff. “Your mom did that for each of us,” Maggie told me once. “Made us feel like there was a place for us, and we could belong here. Like we belonged to each other.”

That’s been the plan ever since we lost her: As soon as I finish nursing school, they’ll find a place for me where Mom once was. I never had the guts to tell them that I think I mostly agreed to it all because it seemed to mean so much to the people who love me best.

I hardly felt a thing as I watched everyone gather today, and even less as I watched them leave, but somehow their leaving has still left me empty. Outside, the sun’s finally setting, spilling a last splash of warmth across the sky. I can’t bear the beauty of another sunset he’ll never see, so I turn my back on it and walk east instead. When I reach the fence at the back of our property, the wind takes my shoulders, and I turn left. Or maybe I turn left for no reason at all.

North.

North to Alaska…

It’s a ridiculous song from a terrible John Wayne movie that Dad and I laughed and cringed our way through when it randomly popped up as “Recommended for You” a couple of weeks ago.

A couple of weeks ago? Is that possible?

Go north, the rush is on….

I smile. I mean, I’m crying, but I smile too, because he’d sing that song at the most random times after that, and I can still hear the sound of his voice, singing that stupid song.

Maybe if I keep moving, he’ll keep singing.

Go north, the rush is on….

I’m almost running toward the tallest cottonwood in the northeast corner of the field. The tree towers above me, whispering with its leaves, beckoning with its branches. Maybe I’ll climb it. Or maybe I’ll hop the creek that forms the northern border of our property and keep going, all the way to Alaska. Whatever it takes to keep this voice, this memory. To not forget.

Then something shifts beneath the tree: a scrape and scramble of a shape, retreating beneath a heap of burlap. One ragged breath and a rancid smell. An animal. Not dead yet, unless that was a trick of the wind rippling the edge of the fabric.

The moment feels like it’s already been scripted, so there’s no conscious choice in what to do next.

I inch forward.

Pull back the burlap in one quick motion.

At first, only the long flannel shirt tells me this isn’t an animal but a girl, since the shape in front of me seems so dirty and wild as to blur the line between the two. She’s sunburned—blistered and peeling—everywhere her shirt doesn’t cover. A long gash across her leg still seeps. Her fire-orange hair is matted against her scalp, but still, patches of scabbed scalp show through.

Who is she? How did she get here? She’s smaller than I am, but it’s hard to tell how much younger. Maybe eleven? Twelve? She opens her mouth, lips cracked and bleeding. Reaches out a blistered hand.

And I recoil. Bile fills my throat.

I want to look away.

Turn away.

Run away.

I can’t do this. Not today. I’ll get Bishop Carver or my trio of nurses or literally anyone else in Harmony. She needs help, and I am still hollow.

“I’m going to call somebody,” I say, reaching for my phone before remembering it’s back at the house.

The girl shakes her head.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell her. “We should get you to the hospital.”

She shakes her head harder. Groans in a way that’s painful even to me.

Then Dad’s voice, clear and firm, reverberating through the caverns of my heart.

Take care of her, Calli.

Love thy neighbor.

That’s when I know it’s really him, because those are the words he would always say when someone needed our help. Everyone was our neighbor, our family.

She’s your sister, when the Chapman girl showed up, clothes too small and eyes wild, asking if I could play.

He’s our brother, when we’d see somebody with an out-of-state plate stopped on the side of the road, staring helplessly at his flat tire.

I look down at her, and as I do, the sound of the creek brings me back into my own body, the vessel filling again.

“It’s okay. I’m here.”

I’m not sure if the words are mine or his. The girl winces as I slide one hand under her knees and the other behind her shoulders, but she wraps her arms around my neck. “I’m going to pick you up now,” I say, hoping I’m strong enough.

I am—but she shouldn’t be this easy to lift. As I carry her to the house, she buries her head against my neck and cries quietly, and I speak the words he said to me every time I had a skinned knee or a broken heart.

“This will heal,” I promise her. “God will help.”

The day we bury my dad is the day he comes back to life.

And because of the girl, so do I.