My father stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing his hands with Lava soap. When we came through the door, dripping wet and filthy he scowled.

"Where the hell have you been?"

I clung to Jake's arm. Surely, my nails dug into his flesh, but he didn't complain or pull away. "You're here."

"Ain't never been much of anywhere else."

I knew that. I'd told the police the same thing, and Reverend Hobbs, too. Oh, god. At the thought of the black eyed preacher standing over me, his blood pulsing through his fingers, my legs buckled. Jake caught me and sat me in one of the kitchen chairs.

"Jess was in an accident, Dad. Her car slid off the road and she fell in the river."

"Her car's in the driveway."

"I mean the car she was in," jake said.

"You're lucky to be alive." Our father wiped his clean hands on the towel I'd hung over the oven handle before replacing it and lining the edges up precisely.

Lucky. Yes. Sure. Okay.

"I'm going to get some stuff around so you can get in the shower. You'll be okay for a minute?"

I guess I nodded or mumbled something that he took for agreement because he rose and walked through the door into the hall.

The hall.

I leapt from my seat and ran after him, catching him by the sleeve of his white tee-shirt as he rounded the corner. He stopped and looked down at me.

The hall was spotless. The old floorboards shone with lemon oil. The banister was free of dust. Everything was perfect, as it had always been perfect, except for that single night when my mother died.

"You're making a mess," my father said.

I looked down at the muddy footprints I left on the floor and cringed away from him when he stepped closer.

"I'll take care of it, Dad," Jake said. "She's had a hard day and she's half frozen. Just let me change clothes and I'll come back and clean up."

"See that you do. Filth like this, you let it sit and it leaves a stain."

Jake pulled me toward the bathroom and sat me down again, this time on the closed toilet seat. He spoke in the whispering tones we'd perfected as children. "You've got to tell me what's going on, Jess. Where were you? How did you end up in Dan Tanner's car?"

I tried to speak. I wanted to speak, but I couldn't. When I opened my mouth, only a strangled sob came out.

"Okay, then. Hush, now." Jake kissed my head and left me long enough to grab a change of clothes out of my suitcase. He put them on the counter and started the water, adjusting the knobs until steam rose from the stream coming from the showerhead. "Can you do this?"

Could I? Could I move? Could I breathe? I nodded, though I wasn't sure at all, and I waited for him to leave the room and pull the door shut behind him.

My skin tingled unpleasantly under the hot water, but I stood there anyway, letting it pour over me, washing away the filth and the cold and the terror. Washing my body with Irish Spring soap and Head and Shoulders shampoo took me back to the time when I lived in this place and used these simple products from Summerfield Market instead of the expensive lotions and potions I bought at specialty boutiques in California. By the time I stepped out, the water was starting to cool. I'd run the tank dry. Dad would be annoyed if he realized that. Hopefully he wouldn't notice.

Dressing and pulling the brush through my wet hair were such normal, automatic motions that, when I was done, my adrenaline had melted away entirely, leaving me feeling like a flu patient, the day after her fever breaks. The crisis had passed, but equilibrium remained elusive.

I wiped the tub and the floor, cleaned the sink and made sure the chrome faucet shone and there were no streaks on the mirror and then carried my dirty clothes to my room. It would make more sense to throw the clothes away than to try to wash them, but were they evidence? It hadn't occurred to me until that minute that I should probably call the police.

Call the police who hadn't believed me.

The police who said my father was dead and this house was abandoned.

I sat on the bed that had been mine all my life. As it always had, the quilt my grandmother made covered it. The top of the dresser was bare, but free of dust. Above it, the mirror with its fading patina reflected the room dimly. My suitcase lay open in the corner. In his rush to get back to me, Jake hadn't closed it and set it up neatly after getting my clothes out. Thankfully, my father hadn't been upstairs to notice.

The jeans in my hands were caked with mud. If there was blood on them, it was too mixed with the rest of the filth to be visible. Jake's flannel was mostly clean. My black bra and underwear didn't show any stains.

Where was my shirt? My coat?

Jake had ripped them off me at the riverbank when he'd been trying to get me warm. That made sense, since they'd been saturated with icy water, but had he left them there? Probably. He couldn't have hauled me up the hill and carried that stuff, too. Why would he have bothered? Especially when he was freezing, too.

So I had no evidence that I'd witnessed some sort of crazy ritual sacrifice.

A little voice popped up in the back of my mind. Maybe Dan Tanner has evidence. How much of what he watched on those screens did he record?

He tried to tell me that the town was set up and he'd just tapped into that network somehow, but maybe he was some kind of a sick voyeur who got his kicks by watching other people live their lives.

If that was the case, would it be worth it to try to get him to hand over recorded evidence?

What if he had a recording of the church and it didn't show a thing? What if there was no horrific black-eyed reverend? No gleefully violent old lady? No bizarre bloody scene in the boiler room?

There had been no blood on the floor.

The house was abandoned, but it wasn't. My father was dead, but he was alive.

Slowly, I became aware that the monstrous headache I'd had at the church had grown even worse. I placed the clothes in a pile on the floor until I could decide what to do with them and walked to the mirror.

Exactly in the center of my forehead, I had a dark blue bruise the size of a half-dollar.

Whatever else had or had not happened, the memory of hitting my head on the floor when I fell was real.

"Jess?"

I turned and saw Jake standing in the door. He'd changed into sweats and a hoodie. His damp hair hung limp around his face. A black trash bag, half full, hung from one hand. "I figure we might as well toss these clothes. There'll be no getting clean from that river muck."

"It seems wasteful," I said, a stupid thing to say. I'm not even sure where the thought came from.

He grinned at me. "What? We're rich Hollywood folks now. It would be bad press to be seen in the same jeans twice, anyway."

I rolled my eyes. "I own four pairs of jeans. I wear them on rotation."

The bag rustled like dry leaves when he stuffed the clothes inside. "Now you own three. Guess you should go shopping."

He tied the corners of the bag into a knot and set it outside my bedroom door. "You ready to talk about it?"

My reflection gazed out at me. The girl in the mirror looked frightened and pale. The dark bruise added emphasis. She seemed to be asking what I was going to do, but when I looked at my brother's warm brown eyes doubt vanished. "It's going to sound batshit crazy."

"I love a good story," he said, so I launched into it and told him everything.

When I was done, he dragged his fingers through his hair. "That sounds batshit crazy."

"What should I do?"

All my life, my big brother had known what I should do.

But before he could answer, my father called up from the kitchen. "You making dinner?"

Jake raised a brow at me. "I guess a near-death experience isn't enough to get out of chores."

"I'll be right there," I called down to my father. Then I looked back at my brother. "I'm really freaking scared."

"I know," he said. At the time, and he offered me a smile full of pity, but also something else I couldn't quite name.