Shadowlands (Shadowlands 1)

attention to Olive and cleared my throat. “What were we talking about?”

“Some guitar player in the park?” Olive reminded me.

“Right! He was there for a few mornings and then today he just…wasn’t.”

“Maybe he made enough money and hopped a plane to New York,” Olive joked.

“Maybe, but the really weird thing is, Darcy didn’t remember him,” I said, toying with the zipper pull on my sweatshirt as I watched Krista. She hadn’t looked over at me once.

“What do you mean?” Olive asked.

“She was the first one to point him out the day we got here,” I explained, keeping one eye on Krista and her friends. “And then a couple days later, we watched him play for a few minutes together and she said he was growing on her. But when I pointed out he was gone, she had no idea who I was talking about.”

“That is weird,” Olive said, fully alert. She put her cup down and sat forward, like a talk-show host with a particularly interesting guest. The possibility of minstrel boy disappearing hadn’t bothered her, but clearly the idea of Darcy spacing on his existence did. “She just didn’t remember him?”

“No,” I said, glad someone thought this whole thing was as odd as I did. “It was like he was erased from her memory.”

“That used to happen to one of my friends back home,” Olive told me, lowering her voice. “Every once in a while, he would black out whole hours of his life. Sometimes even days.”

“Really?” I asked, intrigued. “Did he see a doctor?”

Olive laughed sarcastically. “I kind of think a doctor would have just told him to lay off the heroin.”

My jaw dropped, and I felt my neck grow warm. “You think my sister’s a drug addict?” I whispered, surprised and kind of offended. “Darcy’s never done drugs in her life.”

Olive looked at me like she’d just been slapped.

“What? Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” Olive said. “I just—something just flew into my eye.” She got up and grabbed her purse, holding her fingers over her right eyelid. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom. I’ll be back in a sec.”

“Olive, wait.” As she ducked around a corner, I got up as well, but when I picked up my bag, it overturned and everything spilled out—my wallet, my hair bands, my lip balm. I quickly shoved it all back in the bag and followed Olive, but as I rounded the corner, I found myself at the end of a long hallway with at least half a dozen closed doors.

Sighing, I knocked on the first one. “Olive?”

Nothing. I moved on to the second. “Olive? Are you in there?”

No answer. Moving slowly down the hallway, the noise from the party started to fade. I knocked on the third door and heard a muffled response. Slowly, I tried the ancient, brass door handle and the door creaked open, but it wasn’t a bathroom. It was a massive bedroom and it was filled from floor to ceiling, with junk.

“Whoa,” I said under my breath.

My curiosity getting the better of me, I took a step inside. Shelves lined every wall, each one overflowing with all kinds of stuff, and even more items were piled up into teetering towers in the center of the floor. There were books and magazines, tangled masses of jewelry, purses and backpacks and suitcases in all shapes and sizes, some of them stuffed to the gills. There were laptop computers piled up on the floor, wires curling everywhere, and a wide shelf nailed to the wall jammed with iPads and other tablets. As I moved farther inside, my hip bumped a huge cardboard box that was filled to the brim with cell phones.

“What the hell…?”

Maybe this was why Tristan’s house was so decluttered. His family was made up of closet hoarders who kept their belongings behind closed doors. Slowly I turned around to leave, and I froze. Along the wall next to the door was a rack of hanging clothes stuffed to bursting, and next to that was a hat rack full of cabbies and baseball caps, sun hats and visors. Slung over the uppermost hook was a well-worn guitar strap in yellow and green and red.

“Rory.”

I blinked. Tristan was standing in front of me, framed by the doorway, his posture ramrod straight.

“What’re you doing in here?” he asked flatly.

“I—I’m sorry, I just—” I cleared my throat, heat creeping up my neck. My eyes darted back to the guitar strap. It was there. It was definitely there. This was no flash. “I was looking for Olive.”

“Well, she doesn’t seem to be in here, so…”

He held the door open for me. I took the hint and slid by him. He closed the door firmly behind me and pushed his hands into the front pockets of his shorts. “Sorry. My mom just doesn’t like anyone coming in here.”