Two girls vanished. A woman buried alive. Between two crimes—decades of secrets yet to be unearthed in a pulse-pounding novel by the Edgar Award–nominated author of Unspeakable Things.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Jess Lourey’s The Taken Ones, which is out September 19th!
Summer 1980: With no fear of a local superstition, three girls go into a Minnesota wood. Only one comes out. Dead silent. Memory gone. No trace of her friends. The mystery of the Taken Ones captures the nation.
Summer 2022: Cold case detective Van Reed and forensic scientist Harry Steinbeck are assigned a disturbing homicide—a woman buried alive, clutching a heart charm necklace belonging to one of the vanished girls. Van follows her gut. Harry trusts in facts. Their common ground is the need to catch a killer before he kills again. They have something else in common: each has ties to the original case in ways they’re reluctant to share.
As Van and Harry connect the crimes of the past and the present, Van struggles with memories of her own nightmarish childhood—and the fear that uncovering the truth of the Taken Ones will lead her down a path from which she, too, may never return.
Prologue
July 1980
Leech Lake, Minnesota
The sun smiled violently overhead, causing the tar beneath Rue’s blue-striped Adidas to glisten and pulse. She swiped at the sweat dripping down her cheek and wondered how much longer until they reached the icy coolness of the creek.
Amber, seemingly unaffected by the heat, began skipping.
“One, two, hop to my Lou,” she sang, tossing her butterscotch curls. She wore a bubble gum–pink gingham summer set that Rue thought was the prettiest outfit she’d ever seen. “Three, four, bonked into a door!”
All three girls busted into giggles.
Those weren’t the real words, but they were close enough. Or maybe they were better than the real words. Mr. Ellingson, Amber and Rue’s third-grade gym teacher, had made them square-dance to the song the last day of school. They’d been making fun of it ever since. Lily didn’t know exactly what the two older girls were talking about, but she liked being included.
“Can I eat my sandwich now?” she asked, when the laughter settled into purrs.
Rue sneaked a glance at Amber to see if Lily’s question bugged her. Rue hadn’t wanted to invite her baby sister, but her mom had insisted. Said she needed some rest, and wouldn’t Rue be a dear and look after Lily for a few hours? Their mom had been tired a bunch since their dad ran out. She said she was still getting the best part of him—a check every other week—but the raw purple around her eyes told a different story.
So Rue had said okay, said it in a put-upon way so her mom knew what it cost her to drag a five-year-old on an adventure with Amber Marie Kind, the prettiest and most popular girl in third-going-on-fourth grade. Then Rue set out Lily’s favorite plum-colored romper and packed a double lunch so her mom wouldn’t have to get out of bed. Two olive-loaf sandwiches on white bread (mustard and lettuce on hers, Miracle Whip on Lily’s), two snack-size bags of Fritos, a can of Hi-C Fruit Punch for each of them, and two red apples in case her mom asked to look inside the paper sack.
Lily had been begging for her sandwich since they’d left, asking for it nearly every minute she wasn’t scratching around the bright-yellow Band-Aid on her knee. The bandage covered two mosquito bites, side by side and swollen with itch juice. Rue didn’t think it would stay on in the water, but you never knew. She still couldn’t believe she was finally getting to swim in Ghost Creek, and with Amber.
Amber’s parents were the richest folks in Leech Lake, her dad a heart surgeon up the road in Minneapolis and her mom a real estate agent right in town. Despite their wealth, Rue’s mom marveled, the Dr. and Mrs. Kind were so down to earth.
Just like regular folks.
Her mom had said that at the beginning of the summer, after Mrs. Kind dropped off Amber for their first hang-out. Rue had no idea what godly miracle had compelled Amber, with her milky skin and golden curls, to want to spend time with her, but she hoped it lasted until school started back up so the other kids could see. Even if it didn’t, even if it was only a summer friendship, Rue would still have the necklace Amber had surprised her with. She touched the metal, warm against her skin. The front was half a red enameled heart, two glass chips that glittered like diamonds embedded in its plumpest corner. On the back, “Best” was engraved below Rue’s initials. Amber’s half was identical, except hers said “friend” and beneath, “AK.”
“You can’t have your sandwich now, but you may eat your apple,” Rue said primly.
When Lily held out her hand, Rue reached into the paper sack she’d been carrying, its top wrinkled and dark from her sweat. The inside smelled like hot lettuce.
I bet Amber’s Strawberry Shortcake lunch box doesn’t stink.
I bet there’s even a thermos inside to keep her drink cool.
Amber’s wooden Dr. Scholl’s sandals slapping against the sticky pavement provided the beat to those thoughts.
Click clap. Click clap.
Rue located the apple and handed it to her sister. Lily accepted the warm fruit, but she screwed up her nose before taking a bite, swiping the back of her hand across her mouth as she chewed. Her ruby Ring Pop sparkled in the sun before it snagged her hair, a hunk of which had escaped from her pigtails even though Rue had twisted in the marble hair bands herself.
Rue untangled the ring as they walked, sneaking a glance at Amber to make sure she didn’t notice. Lily got on Rue’s nerves sometimes, but she wasn’t bad for a kindergartner, and anyhow, like their mom kept saying, it was the three of them against the world now.
“How much longer?” Lily asked, squirming under her sister’s attention.
“We’re almost there,” Rue said. She let her sister go and tugged at the edge of her creeping swimsuit bottoms. They were giving her a wedgie beneath her shorts. Lily’d asked whether they should wear their swimsuits or pack them in another bag. Rue had said wear them. She hoped she’d guessed right. “It’s through those trees, I think.”
“Yep,” Amber confirmed, nodding happily, still skipping.
Click clap. Click clap.
The creek—or “crick” as Amber called it, before giggling—was on Amber’s end of winding Elm Street. Rue, Lily, and their mom lived on the whole other end. This side felt like a different planet, the houses huge and clean looking, the lawns golf-course-neat. Rue and Lily’s section wasn’t bad, but the houses didn’t look new down there, only big. Rue’s grandpa had built theirs, and he’d left it to her mom in his will. There hadn’t been any money to go along with it, but staying in the fat ol’ house and paying upkeep was the same price as renting a shitty little apartment in town.
At least that’s what Rue’s mom said.
“The swimming hole is through there.” Amber pointed ahead as she led them off the swampy tar and into the ditch that marked the very end of Elm Street. Or the beginning. Rue supposed it depended where you stood.
The three of them stepped into the dusty grass, took a few strides forward, and without uttering a word, came to a dead stop at the forest edge. The dark-green leaves of the canopy tangled with each other, promising cool shade, and Rue thought she heard the music of water ahead. Still, something pushed back at her.
Despite melting in the heat, she didn’t want to enter those gloomy woods.
She swiveled. Behind them was a scene so perfect it looked plucked out of a movie: one huge, glamorous house after another; a few shiny vehicles parked in driveways, all of them free of dents and rust; a line of new brown telephone poles like a row of guards with wires looped between them, getting smaller and smaller in the distance until Rue thought she could pinch their tops with her fingers.
Somewhere, a dog barked.
She turned back to face the forest’s hungry mouth. A path curved through its center, narrow like a tongue. The three of them were teetering on a sharp edge, the world overbright and familiar behind, an unknown fairy tale ahead. Rue shivered despite the heat, thinking about the stories of the Bendy Man twisting and humping his way through those woods, stories her mom said were silly but felt really, really real as she stood here, on the lip of the forest.
Amber must have felt it, too, because she hadn’t moved from the ditch, either, just stood there staring into the thick forest. The path was enticing them to step out of the blazing sun and into the coolness; still, Amber and Rue didn’t budge. It was Lily who finally pulled them in, tossing her apple so she could grab each of their hands.
“Last one to the creek is a rotten egg!”
Her excitement broke the spell. Amber and Rue smiled at each other over her head, and they crossed the forest boundary. The drop in temperature was delicious against Rue’s bare skin, like they’d opened a giant fridge door. She had overheard kids, mostly boys, talking about the swimming hole at Ghost Creek, how there was an old tire swing hung over the widest spot, how you could do cannonballs so deep into the crystal water that you’d send the fish flying. But nobody had ever invited Rue before, and she wasn’t exactly sure where the creek was.
Amber was, though.
At least she’d said she was, and she was marching forward like she knew just where they were headed.
It was difficult to walk three in a row down the hard-packed path, its narrowness forcing Rue to release Lily when the trees crowded too close. Rue would drop behind until the path widened, and then she’d hurry back alongside Lily and clutch her hand again, grateful she’d worn sneakers rather than sandals so the fallen branches didn’t scrape at her feet’s tender edges. It would have been easier for her to simply remain in the rear, trailing Amber and Lily, but she found she didn’t want them out front alone. It had something to do with the temperature of the woods, she thought, such a troubling coolness after the burning sun.
Or maybe it was the absolute silence, like they’d stepped into an empty church rather than a living forest. Shouldn’t they hear the happy yells of other kids playing in the creek? Kids like Jacob Peters? He’d asked her to square-dance on the last day of third grade. Everyone had made oohing sounds when he did, then kissy noises. She’d hated the teasing, but she’d liked do-si-doing with him. She thought she’d enjoy swimming with him, too, maybe demonstrating how good she was at jumping off a tire swing.
She was holding Lily’s sweaty little hand and wishing her traffic-cone-orange one-piece wasn’t stretched out and secondhand from Goodwill when yet another tree loomed in front of her, its trunk thick and rough. She’d almost barreled straight into it. She’d just released Lily to step behind her when she noticed Amber frozen like a statue, staring ahead, her skin gone the color of cottage cheese. Rue leaned over her sister to shake Amber, that’s how terrible her expression was, but then she noticed Lily’s face, too.
It had closed in on itself, tight as a puncture wound.
The enormous tree blocking Rue’s view meant that she couldn’t see what awful thing they were staring at, not without stepping around the trunk. She didn’t want to look, but how could she not? How could she let them be paralyzed, wearing those awful, scared masks, and not see what they were seeing? What person could have?
So she leaned around the tree.
Distantly, she felt the warmth of pee trickling down her leg.
“I’ll get another one prettier than you,” Amber groaned, but it wasn’t her voice.
Rue would later remember Amber saying that. She would remember thinking it was a real line from “Skip to My Lou,” not one of their silly made-up ones.
And that was the last thing she would remember about that day.
Excerpted from The Taken Ones © 2023 by Jessica Lourey. Reprinted with permission from Thomas & Mercer. All rights reserved.
