The Lost Hour - Book One of The 3:13 Club Series

The Last Night Noah Was Seen

The chain slipped again at the bottom of Church Street, and Noah Carter coasted the rest of the way into downtown with one sneaker dragging the asphalt, because a brake was a brake if you believed in it hard enough.

Rose Haven on a Friday afternoon in October smelled like cut grass and fryer grease and dry leaves burning somewhere over on Magnolia. Banners sagged between the lampposts — HARVEST GAME TONIGHT in letters the booster club repainted every year and never quite got straight. The hardware store had pumpkins stacked out front in a pyramid that Mr. Alvarez rebuilt every time a toddler took the bottom one. Pete’s Diner had a line out the door, which meant the marching band had gotten out early again.

Noah stood on his pedals and let all of it roll past him.

Above the square, the Clock Tower said 3:13.

It always said 3:13. It had said 3:13 since before his mother was born, since before anybody’s mother was born, and every few years the town council voted on whether to fix it, and every few years the town voted them down. Right twice a day, folks said, which is more than most of us. Tourists took pictures of it. Kids arranged to meet under the clock without ever saying what time, because in Rose Haven there was only one.

Noah checked his real watch against it anyway. 4:52.

He was late, and he was late on purpose, because if he timed it right, he’d hit the practice field just as the varsity team came off it.

✦ ✦ ✦

He heard practice before he saw it — the flat crack of pads, a whistle, Coach Daniels hollering something about feet, always feet, like the whole sport happened below the knee. Noah leaned his bike against the chain-link fence behind the end zone, crouched beside it, and pretended to fuss with the chain that had legitimately needed fussing with for two years.

The trick was to look like a kid with a broken bike. Not a kid who was waiting.

Water bottles hissed. Helmets came off. And there, in the middle of everything the way some people just got to be, was Abe Tinson — a senior built like the town had poured him, laughing at something with his whole chest, spinning a football on one finger like the laws of physics were a rumor he’d chosen not to believe.

Noah had a theory about Abe Tinson’s crowd. He had theories about most things — it was kind of his whole deal, ask anyone — but this one was simple: they were a solar system. Abe was the sun, and everybody else had found an orbit, and if you could just get close enough, gravity would do the rest.

He was still pretending to fix the chain when a shadow fell over it.

“That thing’s held together with tape,” Abe said.

Noah looked up. The sun was behind Abe’s head, which felt about right.

“Electrical tape,” Noah said. “It’s — there’s a difference. Regular tape stretches, but electrical tape has a vinyl backing, so when you wrap the chain stay it actually — “

He heard himself and closed his mouth. That was the thing about Noah Carter that nobody had ever needed a notebook to figure out: the harder his heart pounded, the more facts fell out of him, like his brain was bailing water.

A couple of the guys behind Abe laughed, and Noah couldn’t tell yet which kind of laugh it was. He’d gotten good at sorting laughs the way Lucy Williams sorted her folders, but this one came in too fast to file.

“You’re the Carter kid,” Abe said. “The one with the notebook.”

The notebook. Of course it was the notebook. Three years of careful observations — lights over Blackwood, dates, weather conditions, sketches — reduced to a punchline that followed him down every hallway at Rose Haven Middle and had apparently taken the bus over to the high school ahead of him.

“I don’t really do that anymore,” Noah said.

It came out smooth. He’d practiced it.

Abe studied him for a second, and something moved behind his eyes that Noah would spend a long time trying to name. Then Abe grinned, and the grin was so easy, so bright, that whatever the other thing had been slid right off the back of it.

“Bunch of us are going out to Blackwood tonight,” Abe said. “Bonfire. Off the old fire road, past where it splits. Nine o’clock.” He bounced the football off Noah’s handlebars and caught it. “You should come, Carter.”

Behind him, one of the linemen looked at his shoes.

Noah didn’t notice. Noah was busy holding his face very still, the way you do when something you’ve wanted for so long finally walks up and hands itself to you, and you’re terrified that if you smile too big it’ll change its mind.

“Yeah,” Noah said. “Maybe. I mean — yeah. I’ll be there.”

“Course you will,” Abe said, already turning, already laughing at something else, the solar system wheeling on around him.

Noah stood there gripping the fence, and the cicadas were so loud, and the sky over the field was the kind of gold that October in Georgia saved up all year for, and he was pretty sure this was the best Friday of his entire life.

✦ ✦ ✦

Henry Carter — no relation, a coincidence the two of them had decided in third grade made them basically brothers — was on his porch steps with a comic book when Noah skidded into the yard.

“You’re doing the face,” Henry said, without looking up.

“What face?”

“The face from when you found the arrowhead that turned out to be a bottle cap.”

“It was shaped like an arrowhead.” Noah dumped the bike in the grass. “Abe Tinson invited me to the bonfire tonight. Personally. Like, walked over and invited me.”

Henry looked up then. He had glasses that were always a little crooked and a way of going quiet that did more work than most people’s talking.

“Abe Tinson,” Henry said.

“Off the fire road. Nine o’clock.”

“The fire road behind Miller Mansion.”

“There’s only one fire road, Henry.”

“What did you say back?”

“I said maybe. And then I said yeah. Twice.” Noah cleared his throat. “And then I told him I don’t really do the notebook stuff anymore.”

Henry lowered the comic book with the terrible slowness of a lawyer approaching a witness. “Say that again.”

“What?”

“‘I don’t really do that anymore.’ “Henry’s eyes narrowed behind the crooked glasses. “You practiced that. In the mirror.”

“No.”

“Noah.”

“...Twice. Okay? Twice, and once in the shower, but the shower one doesn’t count, the acoustics in there make everything sound cooler — “

Henry made a sound like a dying goose and tipped sideways into the porch railing, laughing the way only a best friend is allowed to laugh at you — full volume, zero mercy — until Mrs. Jenkins looked up from her flower bed across the street, and that made it worse.

“The acoustics,” Henry wheezed. “The acoustics.”

“I hate you.”

“You rehearsed being normal.”

“Everybody rehearses being normal!” Noah said. “You think normal people just happen?”

The laughing wore itself out the way it does, in little aftershocks, and the porch got quiet.

Henry closed the comic book on his thumb. Across the street, somebody’s sprinkler ticked around its circle. A screen door slapped. Way off, the church bells marked the hour like they had something gentle to say and all evening to say it.

“We swore we weren’t going back there,” Henry said. “Behind the mansion. We swore.”

“That was different. We were ten.”

“We swore because of the thing, Noah.”

And there it was. The thing. Neither of them had ever come up with a better word for it, which bothered Noah more than the thing itself, because he had words for everything. Four years ago, deep in the trees behind Miller Mansion, past where the property fence had rusted through: an object half-buried in the leaves, big as a dinner plate and shaped like a scale — not the kind you weighed things on, the kind that belonged on something alive. Too big to belong on anything Noah could name. It had been cool to the touch on a ninety-degree day. And when the moon came through the branches, it had glowed. Faint, like a watch face. Like it was answering.

They’d run the whole way home and sworn on Henry’s dog to never go back, and Noah had broken the swear only once — on paper, in the notebook, page after page of sketches from memory.

“The bonfire’s not even near there,” Noah said. “It’s off the road. It’s fine. It’s — normal. Normal kids, normal fire, normal Friday.”

“Those guys aren’t your friends.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Noah.” Henry’s voice cracked a little, which happened these days at the worst times, and he hated it. “Last month Tyler Odom’s brother told freshmen there was a team car wash and eleven kids showed up to an empty parking lot in the rain. That’s what these guys do. It’s a whole thing.”

“Abe’s not like that.”

“You’ve talked to him for one minute.”

“One minute more than you.”

It landed harder than Noah meant it to. Henry’s face did something small and closed, like a door easing shut on a spring.

“I just —” Noah pulled a breath in through his nose. Overhead the first streetlight buzzed on, tuning itself up for the night. “I’m tired of being the alien kid, Henry. I’m tired of the notebook jokes. High school just started. It could just — not follow me there. You know? I go tonight, I stand by a fire, I laugh at people’s jokes, I come home. And on Monday I’m not the weird kid anymore. I’m just Noah.”

Henry looked at him for a long moment.

“You were never weird to me,” he said.

“I know.”

“And the notebook? You’re just — done? Four years, and done?”

Noah looked down the street, to where the tree line at the end of Cedar went black against the last of the gold.

“A mystery isn’t a puzzle, Henry,” he said, quiet, in a voice he never used at school. “A puzzle wants to be solved. A mystery is just a lonely story, waiting on somebody to believe it.” He shrugged the shrug of somebody setting down something heavy. “Somebody’ll believe his. Someday. Doesn’t have to be me anymore.”

“Fine.” Henry opened his comic book back up and stared at a page he wasn’t reading. “Go get left in the woods. See if I care.”

Later — for the rest of his life, actually — Henry would give anything to take that back.

Noah just laughed. That was the terrible part, the part Henry would keep. Noah laughed, easy and bright, and picked his bike up out of the grass.

“Text you tomorrow,” Noah said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

✦ ✦ ✦

The note on the refrigerator said the shift ran until eleven and there was casserole, love you, lock the door. Noah ate standing over the sink, watching the backyard go blue, then navy.

At 8:40 he opened the hall closet.

His father’s jacket hung at the end of the rod where it had hung for six years — brown canvas, flannel lining, a rip in the left cuff. It still smelled faintly of engine grease if you wanted it to. His mother never wore it and never moved it and never talked about it, and the closet had quietly become a museum with one exhibit.

Noah had been eight the night his father went out for cigarettes and didn’t come back. Eight years old at the end of the driveway in his pajamas, and out past the tree line, over toward the fire road, the whole sky had gone white. One long, silent flood of light through the trees, there and gone. He’d stood in the dark afterward with his heart slamming, and by morning his father’s truck was gone and his father was gone, and everyone in Rose Haven had a theory that made Noah’s mother cry, so Noah built his own theory, one with room in it for his father to be innocent. Taken. Not gone — taken. It wasn’t a story about spaceships, no matter what the kids at school turned it into. It was a story about how his dad would never have left on purpose. That was the entire theory. Everything else was just the notebook.

He took the jacket down and put it on. The sleeves finally almost fit.

The notebook sat on his bed where he’d left it. Noah looked at it for a second — three years of careful pages, the whole embarrassing map of his heart — then squared it on the nightstand and left it there.

Just Noah tonight.

He locked the door like the note said.

✦ ✦ ✦

The bonfire was bigger than he expected and louder than he expected and better than he expected.

Somebody’s truck sat backed up to the clearing with its doors open and country music rolling out of it. Sparks climbed and died. There were maybe twenty kids, mostly juniors and seniors, faces swimming orange and gold, and nobody — this was the miracle — nobody looked twice at him. He was just a kid at a fire. He drank a soda somebody handed him and laughed at jokes he only half heard and felt the heat bake his shins, and for a while Rose Haven felt exactly the size of that clearing.

“You’re in my astronomy class.”

A girl had climbed up onto the tailgate beside him. He knew her face from the sophomore hall — freckles across her nose like somebody had flicked a paintbrush at her — but the music ate her name when she offered it, and asking twice felt like something the notebook kid would do, so he let it go.

“Am I?”

“Third period. You corrected Mr. Feldman about Betelgeuse.” She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. “He said it would explode in our lifetime and you did this — “she made a small, pained face, hand half-raised — “like it physically hurt you not to say anything.”

“It could explode in our lifetime,” Noah said. “It’s just, the odds — it’s more like a hundred thousand years. Which in star time is basically Tuesday, but.”

She laughed. Not at him. He ran the laugh through the sorter twice to be sure.

She pointed her chin at the sky over the fire. “Okay, so what’s that one.”

“That’s — okay, that’s actually Jupiter, it’s not a star.”

“Shut up.”

“Planets don’t twinkle. Stars twinkle. If it’s just sitting there all smug and steady, it’s a planet.”

He was doing it again — heart pounding, facts bailing out — and for the first time in his life, somebody was catching them.

“All smug and steady,” she repeated, delighted, and Noah was drafting the text to Henry in his head — you were wrong, you were so wrong, best night ever — when a hand landed on his shoulder.

“Carter.” Abe’s grin came firelit out of the dark, and the crowd noise dipped around it the way it always did. “Walk with me a minute. Time to make it official.”

The girl’s smile went uncertain. “Abe —”

“Two minutes,” Abe said, five of his friends already peeling off the fire like they’d been waiting, and later she would tell Sheriff Hayes that she almost said something, that she was still deciding to say something when the dark folded them all up and took them out of the light.

✦ ✦ ✦

The fire road at night was a tunnel with the roof off. Trees crowded the edges; stars ran down the middle. Abe’s truck sat parked in the ruts fifty yards up from the clearing, far enough that the bonfire was just a glow behind them, a rumor of a party.

“Everybody does it,” Abe was saying. His voice had the easy, spinning-football confidence, and Noah wanted so badly to keep believing it. “One hour in the dark. No phone, no light, no crying. You last the hour, you’re in. I did it. Marcus did it. It’s tradition.”

“In,” Noah said. “In — what, exactly?”

“In,” Abe said, like the word was its own explanation. And standing there in his father’s jacket with six older boys around him, one week into high school, Noah did the math the way fourteen-year-olds do the math, which is to say he took everything he wanted and divided it by everything he was scared of, and got the answer he’d already decided on back at the fence that afternoon.

“Okay,” he said. “One hour.”

“Phone.” Abe held out his hand, and Noah’s phone disappeared into Abe’s pocket. “No cheating. Arm.”

“What —”

It happened fast, and it happened laughing — a zip tie whipping out of somebody’s pocket, threaded through the cuff of the jacket, Noah’s sleeve cinched to the steel loop of the tow hook on Abe’s front bumper before he fully understood the shape of it.

“Hey — hey, whoa —”

“Relax.” Abe crouched to his eye level, and up close the grin was still doing its work, still warm, and that was the thing nobody would understand later, how warm it stayed the whole time. “It’s so you don’t bail. Everybody gets tied off, it’s part of it. One hour, Carter. We’re right down there.” He knocked twice on the hood like sealing a deal. “You can hear the music. You’re basically at the party.”

“Right,” Noah said. His voice came out steadier than his chest. “One hour.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.” Abe stood, and the pack of them moved off down the road, shoving each other, somebody howling at the sky, the howl breaking up into laughter, the laughter going small, and smaller, and folding back into the music and the glow.

Noah leaned against the bumper of Abe Tinson’s truck.

“Okay,” he said to the dark, and laughed a little, shaky. “Okay.”

The cicadas were enormous. The stars ran the length of the road. Down the hill through the trees the bonfire glittered like a coin at the bottom of a well, and Noah worked out the constellations to keep his hands from shaking — Cassiopeia on her chair, the Pleiades in their little smoke-smudge huddle — and told himself the story of Monday morning. Walking in. Somebody nodding at him by the gym. Just Noah.

He never could say how long it took before he understood the music had stopped.

Not faded. Stopped. He straightened up off the bumper. The glow through the trees was going down like something draining, orange to ember to nothing, and now there were engines — two of them, three, coughing awake down past the split — and headlights raked through the trunks, huge and white and swinging.

“Hey!” Noah shouted, and the light swept over him and past him — right over him, he was standing in it, he was waving — and kept going. Taillights strung themselves down through the trees, red beads on a wire, farther, fainter.

“HEY! Guys — hey, come on — ABE!”

The engines faded the way the laughter had. The woods took the sound and swallowed it and gave nothing back, and Noah Carter stood zip-tied to a parked truck in the middle of Blackwood Forest, alone.

The panic came in a wave, and to his credit, he rode it. He was his mother’s son, and his mother stacked her worries in careful rows and dealt with them one at a time, so: they’d come back. Obviously. Abe’s truck was right here. Nobody abandons a truck. Somebody sober up at midnight going where’s my truck, and headlights, and sorry man, we thought Marcus got you, and it would be a story he’d get to be inside of instead of under. That was the math. He just had to wait.

He waited.

The cold came up out of the ground the way it does in October, patient, taking its time about it. He jumped in place as well as the tether let him. He sang to himself, quietly, then less quietly, because there was no one to hear, and the sound kept the woods at their proper distance.

Nobody came at midnight. He knew the shape of midnight by the moon.

Sometime after that he began to work on the zip tie in earnest — sawing the cuff against the tow hook’s edge, the canvas too tough, his fingers too cold, and finally the obvious thing arrived like a gift: it’s threaded through the sleeve, genius, not through you. He unzipped his father’s jacket, worked his right arm free, then his left, and stepped out of it, shivering, loose, free.

The jacket hung there off the bumper of Abe Tinson’s truck with one sleeve raised, like it was waving, or asking a question.

“I’m coming back for you,” Noah told it, teeth chattering, and almost laughed.

He got maybe ten steps down the fire road toward town.

That was when the cicadas stopped.

All of them. At once. Mid-note — not dying away, not one section at a time, but off, the way a television goes off, and the silence that came down on Blackwood Forest was so total that Noah heard his own heart knocking and the tiny tick of the truck’s engine cooling behind him and nothing else in the whole world.

The cold changed. It stopped being October cold, which comes up from the ground, and became another kind, which came from everywhere, from inside the air itself, and his breath poured out of him in a flag of silver he could suddenly see —

— because there was light.

Ahead of him, around him, rising. Not headlights. He knew headlights now; headlights swing and rake and pass you over. This light didn’t move and didn’t flicker and made no engine sound, no sound of any kind. It came up out of the trees off the fire road — out toward the mansion, out toward the place he and Henry had sworn on a dog to never go — soft at first, like a watch face, like something answering, and then not soft, then everywhere, the trunks going to black paper cutouts against it, the whole ordinary world becoming a photograph of itself, overexposed, whiting at the edges.

The air changed smell. Storm smell — that green, split-open smell right before rain — except sharper, closer to a struck match, closer to pennies held in a sweating hand. Under his sneakers the fire road was humming, so low it wasn’t a sound at all, just a feeling in his teeth and the hinge of his jaw, and his stomach dropped the way it does at the top of the Ferris wheel out at the county fair, that long weightless second before the fall.

And the shadows were wrong.

Every trunk along the fire road through its shadow toward the light. Not away — toward, all of them leaning in like iron filings finding a magnet, and Noah saw it, of course he saw it. Noah Carter saw everything. There has to be a second light behind me, he decided. Landing lights. Bracketing the road. It was a good observation and a wrong answer, and a long time would pass — and six kids would follow him into these woods — before anyone understood what Noah Carter was actually looking at.

Every hair on his arms stood up. His watch — his cheap plastic watch, his real watch — beeped once, a sound it had never made in its life, and died.

And Noah Carter, alone at the bottom of the night, fourteen years old and shaking, felt something he could never have explained to anyone in Rose Haven, though there was a boy on a porch on Cedar Street who would have understood it instantly.

He wasn’t afraid.

Under the fear, or over it, or through it — there was recognition. The light through the trees, the night his father vanished. The same light. He had been eight years old at the end of the driveway, and he had watched it take his father, or so his theory went, and here it was, and every page of the notebook stood up inside him at once.

“Dad?” Noah whispered.

The light got very bright.

✦ ✦ ✦

Saturday morning came to Rose Haven the way it always did.

Church bells at eight, gentle, unhurried. Sprinklers ticking around their circles. Pete Dawson flipped the diner sign and started the coffee, and Mrs. Jenkins swept her porch, and downtown filled up slow and easy under a sky rinsed clean by the cold night.

On Cedar Street, Henry Carter sat on his front steps in yesterday’s clothes, looking at his phone.

Text you tomorrow, Noah had said. I’ll tell you everything.

Henry had already texted him four times. He’d already called twice, and the calls didn’t ring — they went nowhere, they went to a flat automated nothing, and Henry sat very still and told himself that phones die, that Noah forgot his charger constantly, that it was fine, it was nothing, it was normal, and the word normal turned over in his stomach like something with an edge.

A mystery is just a lonely story, waiting on somebody to believe it.

Henry sat on the steps while the bells finished and believed.

By Sunday there would be a cruiser in the Carters’ driveway.

By Wednesday there would be volunteers walking Blackwood Forest in a long slow line, and dogs, and a brown canvas jacket in a clear plastic bag, and a hundred-yard signs with a school photo of a kid with a cowlick and a careful smile.

By spring there would just be the posters, fading in shop windows.

And through all of it — through the searches and the rumors and the prayer vigils and the long quiet giving-up that towns do so gradually no one can ever say when it happened — the Clock Tower above the square went on telling Rose Haven the only time it knew.

3:13.

Like always.

Like it was waiting for someone to finally ask why.