Chapter 4 We know bad things happen in the world, that they always have, that they’ll continue to do so. We also know that we can’t stop them, and this knowledge is almost worse than the bad things themselves. That’s what we’ve learned from Alice Lange. Sometimes the darkness wins. It creeps in like a thick, gray fog, covering everything as we stumble around, and when it finally lifts, we see what it has done, what it has taken from us and what it has left behind. Before Alice, there was another girl. Rachel Granger. This was whom Millie was thinking of that night, when she said it wasn’t safe to be out wandering alone in the dark. Her mother had only talked about Rachel to her husband, changing the subject when Millie walked into the room, but she’d picked up on the story, had known there was something, someone out there, to be afraid of, and the idea of it lodged itself in her brain. Rachel wasn’t from our neighborhood, but she lived only a few miles away. Like Alice, she was here and then gone. As far as anyone knows, this is what happened: on a Friday, she…