1

B
Y THE TIME the boy in ward four attacked me, I’d already
nicknamed him The Lost One in my head. He’d been ad-
mitted a week ago, transferred from police to orderlies while
dozens of reporters swarmed the entrance, overwhelming security
in their struggle to get a clear shot of our newest, involuntary pa-
tient. Inside, he’d put up such a fight that three men had to hold
him down while they administered sedatives and brought him
straight into isolation. The boy who came back from the dead, the
newscasters called him. The picture they flashed, the only one they’d
gotten before he’d become a violent blur, showed a sunburned, lean
face and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes were a ghostly
blue, the kind of eyes songs get written about.
Ward four wasn’t on my rotation so I didn’t see him after that,
but I heard about him everywhere. Cashiers at the gas station
chewed on their theories. Newspaper editorialists speculated on

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 worst case scenarios, calling him a savage and a murderer. The
fascination bled into the Internet, where social media accounts
popped up overnight. A fake Twitter handle had already gotten
ten thousand followers, someone on Snapchat made him a Bitmoji
avatar, and countless people on Facebook filled his timeline with
unanswered questions. The entire city of Duluth was obsessed with
him; I could practically feel thousands of eyes gazing up the hill
toward Congdon Psychiatric Facility, trying to peer inside these
old, brick walls.
A few days after his admission Dr Mehta called me into her
office. I was the assistant speech therapist on staff, my shiny, new
title after earning my graduate degree from the University of Min-
nesota and getting promoted from orderly. It still hadn’t sunk in,
even five months later. Every time I put a note on a patient’s record,
my signature line popped up, startling me, like I was impersonating
someone whose comments mattered. Me, Maya Stark, the recalci-
trant kid who was suspended from high school, a professional ther-
apist? I looked like I belonged on the opposite side of the couch.
I was the maroon-haired punk girl who ran her German shepherd
along the lake walk, making all the tourists snatch their kids out of
harm’s way. Yet here I was. Twenty-three years old and called in by
the head psychiatrist to work with the most famous patient we’d
ever had.
‘I can’t tell if he understands us or not,’ Dr Mehta said, pacing
behind her desk in a swirl of sari fabric. For a shrink, she rarely sat
down. She also lint-rolled herself a lot because her wife fostered
cats, like an illegal amount of them. ‘Understands the diction, that
is. He knows perfectly well we’re trying to communicate with him
and he wants nothing to do with us.’
Dr Mehta was young, at least for being the senior psychiatrist

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 in charge of an entire mental health facility. She’d made a name
for herself authoring papers and conducting studies on the harm-
ful effects of physical restraints and isolation on patients. The
key to recovery, she proposed, was enabling the patient’s sense of
autonomy within a group dynamic. Treating them like humans.
Imagine that.
‘Are flashcards okay?’ I figured I’d start slow.
Dr Mehta nodded and sighed, pausing to stare at the blanks in
the record on her computer. ‘We’re looking for any response at this
point. Anything at all.’
I waited until after the dinner rounds were finished, when stom-
achs were full and the wind murmured invitations against the dark
windows. This was the loneliest time of day, when you let yourself
wish there was someone to talk to.
A veteran orderly named Stan admitted me into the locked
outer doors of ward four and walked me down the linoleum hall-
way lined with isolation rooms on either side. A few patients stared
at us through the windows. One was banging his fist dully on the
glass, but the rest sat on their beds or paced. I counted eight in
total, eight patients who weighed more than they knew. All of them
pressed on Dr Mehta’s conscience until she could get them safely
reintegrated into the common wards.
‘I don’t think you’re gonna have any luck with him,’ Stan said,
keys jingling at his hip. ‘He’s completely ignored everyone who’s
gone in there except Carol.’
Carol Kelley was the seventy-year-old kitchen attendant who
brought meals to all the isolation patients. She clipped herbs from
her own garden to garnish the mush and served it like she was
having Sunday dinner with friends around her kitchen table. Every­
body loved Carol, even the sociopaths.

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 ‘What does he do?’
‘Examines things – his clothes, the mattress. Feels the walls.
Likes to drag the bed over to the window so he can see out. Stands
there pressing the glass. Sometimes it looks like he’s trying to break
the whole damn thing.’
‘Does he eat?’
‘Some.’
‘Any response to his name?’
‘Huh. Like a wall, that one. You could call him Tarzan and he
wouldn’t care.’
Lucas was his name. Lucas Blackthorn. He’d been arrested for
breaking and entering at an outfitter’s store, attempted robbery of
the store, and two counts of aggravated assault on the owners who’d
caught him in the act.
Stan paused outside the room. ‘I’ll be right here at the window.’
‘I can take care of myself.’
‘That’s why I’m standing outside the door, and not between you
and Tarzan.’
Some of the orderlies resented my promotion, my leap from a
blue-collar hourly wage into the hallowed ranks of the salaried, but
not Stan. He gave me a grin, unlocked the door with a metal creak,
and waved me inside. I stepped in and waited for it to shut behind
me before looking up.
The patient faced the back of the room with his hands on the
cement block wall in a push-up position. From the way he stood
with his shoulders tensed and legs braced it looked like he was
trying to move the entire wall. I took a step closer and noticed his
hospital shirt was torn at the bottom and he’d used the missing strip
to tie his hair back.

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 ‘Hello, Lucas.’
He remained still for a second, but then surprised me by turning
his head. I saw his face in person for the first time.
He wasn’t a boy.
My brain stuttered on that one thought for what felt like a stu-
pidly long time as our eyes met and held. Why did all the media
keep calling him a boy? Lucas Blackthorn looked at least as old as
me and stood a foot taller. His cheeks were hollow and shaded with
the beginning of a beard. His skin was a deep reddish tan, not the
pasty white of most of our long-term patients, and his eyes con-
veyed things that no first session speech therapy could have drawn
out: intelligence and caution mixed with undisguised curiosity.
Moving slowly and deliberately, I walked to the bare mattress
between us. There was no table, so we’d have to start the flashcards
on the bed. He watched my progress, studying my hair. The short,
pixie-cut combined with its dyed color grabbed a lot of patients’
attention. One of the men in ward two, a lifer named Big George
with a traumatic brain injury, even liked to touch the ends of it that
swished in front of my ears. I made sure he stuck to the left side so
he didn’t get distracted by the tiny silver hoop earrings along my
right ear. Lucas noticed those, too. I watched him catalog every part
of me, absorbing the appearance of this outsider to his room, like
someone would analyze a newly discovered insect. His gaze paused
on the blue fabric bag I carried, his expression unreadable now.
I put a hand on my chest and waited until his attention snapped
back to my face.
‘I’m Maya.’ Three syllables. Slow rate, distinct pronunciation.
I didn’t smile. I’d never trusted strangers who smiled at me – they
always wanted something.

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 Patting the place where my pulse beat too fast, I nodded and
said it again. ‘Maya.’
He swiveled back toward the wall, dismissing the insect. I
glanced behind me where Stan was shaking his head through the
lead glass. Shrugging, I started to pull out the flashcards when sud-
denly Stan’s face changed. His eyes widened and his mouth opened
in a warning I couldn’t hear.
I hesitated and before I could turn around, a giant force threw
me into the wall and something was being looped around my neck.
The metal door shrieked as Stan wrenched it open and I was pulled
back, my body turned into a human shield. The thing around
my neck tightened and I panicked, unable to breathe. Lucas had
my arms locked behind me in an impossibly strong grip. I fought
against it, desperate to free myself.
‘Keys,’ he said in a hoarse voice. I bowed my body against his,
trying to find some slack in the cord around my throat, but met
only a column of unyielding muscle. If anything, the cord grew
tighter.
My vision started to contract, black creeping in at the edges.
I kicked viciously, striking his shins so hard they should have
snapped in half, and used the rest of my oxygen in the process.
The last thing I saw before everything went dark was Stan’s hand,
holding out his ring of keys.

I came to on the floor in a gasping, head-pounding mess. Stan lay

next to the door, unconscious, and Lucas Blackthorn was gone.
‘Agghhh.’ I grabbed my head and waited for the air to work its
way back through my body. When I could get up, I crawled over to

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 check Stan’s pulse and saw blood trickling down from his hairline.
He was alive.
A noise came from the hallway. Lots of noises, as my ears started
registering them.
I peeked out and saw patients at their isolation windows, bang-
ing and shouting. Farther down the hall, it became obvious what
they were excited about: Lucas Blackthorn, trying to find the right
key to get through the second set of doors.
Without any conscious thought, I slipped Stan’s baton from his
belt and darted down the hallway with Lucas’s back the only thing
in focus, my progress muffled by the noise from the other patients.
At Stan’s station I tripped the emergency security button and lifted
the baton. Lucas was only a few feet away now, punching key after
key into the old locks, oblivious to the electronic security square
mounted above.
I waited, willing myself to breathe quietly while eyeing his
upper arms, his thighs, the major muscle groups I could aim for
without causing unnecessary injury. He couldn’t have more than
twenty pounds on me. Thirty, tops. My fingers flexed over the
baton while I mentally traced the route from the front desk to
this ward, counting the seconds until backup arrived. Then he
flipped the keys over and found the badge, Stan’s security badge,
which he stared at for a split second before pressing it to the
door, making it beep and flash green. I didn’t hesitate this time.
As soon as I heard the locks disengage, I swung the baton into
his leg.
He stumbled into the outer hallway, still on his feet, and started
to run for the exit at the end of the corridor. I launched myself at
him, jumping on his back and sending us both crashing into the
wall and rolling to the floor.

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 He scrambled to get up and I didn’t care how famous he was,
I didn’t care if he was lost; there was no way this guy was escaping
on my watch. I hooked my legs around his and locked the baton
across his chest, trying to pin his arms. Shaking my hold, he flipped
us both to our backs, crushing me underneath him, and grabbed
for the baton.
Voices and footfalls thundered toward us.
‘A little help,’ I yelled and immediately regretted it. The words
were like fire racing through my bruised throat, and I couldn’t help
the moan that followed them. At my sound of pain, he released his
grip on the baton and fell inexplicably still. We both paused in that
crazy position – like a piggy-back ride tipped on its back – before
his weight disappeared, lifted off me by the cavalry of orderlies and
security staff.
‘Stan!’ I waved some of them toward the ward entrance, before
being seized by a fit of coughing.
Automatically I covered my throat with my hands, trying to
stop the convulsions while the team clamored around, practically
tripping over me to secure our wayward patient. Their boots braced
and stomped inches from my head, sending vibrations through the
linoleum and into my skull, which felt as fragile as an egg on con-
crete. No one offered to help me up. Their voices sounded far away,
eclipsed by the pull and drag of air in my throat, the unsteady rise
and fall of my chest. Only the tremor in the floor, the possibility of
being trampled, made me turn my head to the side and that’s when
I saw him watching me.
They’d flipped him on his stomach and pulled his arms behind
him. He was putting up no resistance and barely seemed aware of
their efforts to subdue him. For a strange, endless moment, our
stillness separated us from the rush of legs flooding the corridor,

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 from the shouts and determination swarming above. We stared at
each other, our faces both resting on the cold, flecked tiles less than
three feet apart.
Then a needle flashed in the fluorescent lights, the men picked
him up, and Lucas Blackthorn was gone.

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9781786489777_Leave No Trace - 2nd proofs.indd 10 17/07/2018 11:47:39
 2

I
SHOULD HAVE stayed on site to write up the incident report,
but I figured a full body assault earned me a little sick time and
the idea of writing it at my kitchen table sounded infinitely
more appealing than the desk I shared with the exercise therapist. I
almost made it out of the building before Nurse Valerie caught me
and dragged me back to the medical ward. As soon as my butt hit
the bed, two more nurses appeared, raptor style, and they started
tearing into me about the boy who came back from the dead.
‘He’s not a boy,’ was all I could say as they rubbed ointment on
my neck. It was hard to swallow.
‘He doesn’t look like a teenager, that’s for sure,’ Valerie replied,
trying to give me a pill that I repeatedly rejected. Painkillers and
I didn’t mix. ‘He must have had to grow up fast out there in the
woods, but they only show pictures of him as an adorable kid on
the news.’

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 ‘How do you think he survived all those years?’ another asked
and they started tossing out theories from the media. Reporters
were falling all over themselves to cover every known moment of
Lucas Blackthorn’s life and mysterious reappearance. Hikers gave
interviews about stories that had only been campfire yarns before,
tales of strange sightings in the wilderness, noises and shadows that
had sparked Bigfoot rumors, and every conversation ended with
the same question: Where was his father?
Josiah Blackthorn had taken his son camping in the Boundary Wa-
ters ten years earlier and neither had been seen since, not until now,
when Lucas had emerged from the wild – violent, uncommunicative,
and alone. I’d wondered about the Blackthorns, too. Right now,
though, the only thing that interested me was the distance between
my head and my pillow. As they traded tidbits various journalists had
dug up, I slipped my backpack over my shoulder and slunk away.
It was dark as I coasted down the hill from Congdon toward
the giant shadow of Lake Superior. The entire city of Duluth,
Minnesota, clung to the side of an ancient basalt ridge, fighting the
slope toward the water, and you knew you were getting close to my
neighborhood when the pavement started buckling like waves on a
high wind. Paint peeled off crooked porches where old couches and
lawn chairs faced the giant warehouses lining the docks. Lincoln
Park was a hop, skip, and a world away from Canal Park, where
tourists snapped pictures of the lift bridge, took their sightseeing
cruises, and ate their fennel and watermelon salads. We didn’t get a
lot of fennel south of Piedmont.
When I pulled up in front of the house, I was surprised to see
the lights on and Jasper out in the yard.
‘How’s my boy?’ I opened the gate and a battering ram of slob-
bery muscle knocked into my legs.

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 Jasper barked and nosed into me, demanding attention.
‘I could’ve used you today, Jazz.’ I bent down and he imme-
diately flipped over to present his belly. For a German shepherd
who prided himself on guarding our house from the dangers of
everything from thieves to seagulls, belly scratches turned him into
a grateful pile of ooze.
I obliged him for a while and let my bag slide to the ground.
Even though the nights were still warm – practically mid-October
and I couldn’t even see my breath – I wasn’t up for our usual eve-
ning walk today. Extra petting would have to suffice.
‘Dr Mehta – you remember her? She smelled like cats? Anyway,
she asked me to go see a new patient.’
Lucas Blackthorn’s face swam in front of my gaze with that enig-
matic expression that seemed oblivious to being pressed to the floor
by a half dozen guards and orderlies. He’d been focused only on me
and he seemed . . . stunned. Maybe he’d been upset that a girl had
thwarted his escape. Maybe he’d been slapped by a moment of lu-
cidity. It was hard to see an expression like that and avoid judgment
or assigning meaning where there might be none, or at least none
that readily translated outside the labyrinth of a patient’s mind. I
shook my head, forcing the image away.
‘Look.’ I tugged down the collar of my hoodie. ‘Look at my
neck.’
Jasper obediently smelled my throat, licked the skin, and then
snorted abruptly. Apparently the nurse’s ointment wasn’t tasty.
Laughing, I let us inside the house. As soon as the door opened,
Jasper flattened me against the jamb, raced through the entryway,
and sent up a torrent of barks from the kitchen. I followed in time
to see him prancing in front of the table, tail wagging, as a man
jumped up and backed around the wall, half behind my father.

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 They could’ve been brothers, the two men both wide-jawed, sun
baked, and too big to fit comfortably on the kitchen chairs, but
even with one look you knew who was in charge.
‘For Christ sake, Butch. He can’t lick you to death,’ Dad said,
picking up his beer for another swig.
‘Come here, Jasper.’ I called the dog to me and patted his neck
before telling him to go lie down.
‘How many times do I have to come here before he leaves me
alone?’ Butch Nelson crossed his menacing, tattoo covered arms,
the tough guy pose at odds with the boyish rose of his perpetually
wind-burned cheeks. As the first mate on my dad’s salvage tug, he
wasn’t easily disturbed, but he’d been attacked by a stray when he
was a kid and refused to see the point of any canine life since. He sat
back down, careful to face the kitchen door where the dog waited
with hopeful eyes.
‘Jasper became anxiously-attached as a puppy. He has confi-
dence issues.’ Dropping my backpack near the table, I glanced at
the depth map covering the spot where I’d planned to write up my
incident report with a ramen noodle and Oreo cookie dinner and
the house to myself. Today was obviously not the day for plans.
‘What are you guys up to? I thought you were heading to Thun-
der Bay.’
‘Grant money came through.’ Butch grinned.
‘You got it?’
Dad glanced up from the table, nodding, and I adjusted the
hoodie to make sure it covered my neck. A hint of a smile passed
over his face, but the logistics of the trip were already crowding it
out. He was planning, navigating, submerged in the details.
‘So which ship is it? The Madeira? The Vienna? The Fitzgerald?’
‘The Bannockburn.’

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 Our eyes met before he turned back to the map, leaving a sud-
den silence in his wake.
The Bannockburn. The ghost ship. I moved to the kitchen on
autopilot and started looking through the cupboards, not sure at all
if I had the stomach to eat.
My dad had spent most of his life on the water. His boat pro-
vided tugging and towing services in the summer and icebreaking
in the winter, plowing the way for the thousand-foot lakers that
lumbered in and out of the Duluth and Superior harbors, which
– contrary to Minnesota’s seemingly landlocked geography – was
the largest freshwater port in the world. No matter how many
ships he guided to safety, though, it was what lay underneath
the surface that called to him. No one knew exactly how many
ships Superior had taken. Most of the official crashes had been
documented in the last hundred years, but add in the unregistered
boats, the rum-runners during Prohibition, and all the countless
vessels sailing before modern navigation or lighthouses and you
might as well be looking at something the size of a mass grave
and guessing how many bodies it could hold. Dad was just a kid
when his father explained to him about the cold temperature of
Superior, how the icy water pulled bodies down and kept them
there, and he’d been fascinated by the cemetery at the bottom of
the lake ever since. Salvage work came rarely because there wasn’t
any money in it, so Dad and Butch recently started applying for
grants based on the historical and cultural value of the lost ships.
Someone must have agreed, giving them a chance to steal back
what Superior had swallowed.
They began murmuring, drawing routes and pointing out haz-
ards while I found a brick of ramen noodles and popped it in the
microwave. I watched the bowl spin until Dad’s voice cut through

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 my reverie. He’d gotten up for another beer and caught a glimpse
of my neck.
‘What the hell happened to you?’
I tugged the zipper on the hoodie higher, trying to cover as
much skin as possible. If it looked half as bad as it felt, my neck
must have been one solid bruise. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘Maya.’ A two-syllable warning that he wasn’t going to tolerate
any bullshit.
I sighed. ‘A patient tried to escape tonight. I was in his way.’
‘He strangled you?’ Butch craned his head to try to see the ev-
idence.
Refusing to make eye contact with either of them, I relayed the
fight briefly in the most generic terms possible.
Butch started to ask another question, but I waved him off, tell-
ing him I couldn’t discuss a patient’s case. Dad’s eyes shifted from
my neck to the depth map, and he took a long drink.
‘We’re not going anywhere. We’ll shelve the trip until spring.’
He cut off Butch’s objections. ‘It’ll give us more time to plan.’
‘Dad, no.’
Ignoring the beep of the microwave, I followed him and planted
my hands on the table when he would have folded up the map.
‘You’re going.’
‘Look at your neck, Maya. That’s unacceptable. I’m going to talk
to Dr Mehta—’
‘No, you’re not. I’m twenty-three years old and this is what I do.
I got the job done tonight, and I’m going back to work tomorrow,
and the day after that. Dr Mehta knows what I’m capable of.’
‘She’s—’
‘We talked about this when I agreed to stay here,’ I re-
minded him.

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 My fingers spread over the shoals and dug into the dark basins.
All their notes and arcs of possible routes had turned the lake into
a biology class dissection of something still alive. ‘Dad, it’s the Ban­
nockburn. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the Bannockburn.’
He drew back. We hadn’t talked about her in years and even
then it had been about endings, not beginnings. His hand dropped
to the western edge of the lake and brushed over the cliffs and tow-
ering pine forests where he’d met my mother.
She’d told me the story, one of the few she shared. A geology
student at University of Minnesota Duluth, she’d been studying how
ice formed in the cracks of the North Shore’s basalt face and caused
rock slides over time. It was why the world’s largest lake was getting
even larger; it ate the land around it. She needed to document the
cliffs from the water and hired Brian Stark, a young salvage tug
captain, to pilot her along the shore. He asked her out every time
they sailed, as determined as the lake breaking against the rocks,
but she didn’t agree until he told her the story of the Bannockburn.
In 1902, a young crew set out on Lake Superior in the S.S.
Bannockburn with 85,000 bushels of wheat in her hold. They
didn’t know the gales were coming, or maybe they did, but they
didn’t know enough to be afraid. Every November the lake turned
gray, the water churned and raged against the coming winter, and
hurricane-force winds whipped the waves into forty-foot crests. The
lake became hungry.
The Bannockburn was downbound that day and spotted by two
other ships also fighting their way through the storm. Then she
vanished. A single life jacket printed with the boat’s name washed
up onshore three weeks later. A few other clues surfaced, fragments
here and there, but the lake didn’t give up any secrets. Countless
ships had disappeared on Superior, but the Bannockburn was the

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 only one sighted after she was lost. Tales of glimpsing the Bannock­
burn’s profile on the horizon of the water spread through the Great
Lakes. It sailed as a ghost ship on the waves, warning other boats of
impending danger before disappearing into the wind.
Something about that had appealed to my mother, something
my dad couldn’t have predicted at the time, but it got him a date
and – a few years later – a marriage and baby, too. My earliest mem-
ories were on Dad’s tugboat, squealing at the empty horizon and
claiming I’d seen a phantom ship as we sped into the endless blue.
The Bannockburn was one of the great mysteries of Superior, and
now Dad and Butch were going to chase it down.
‘Don’t worry about me.’ Ignoring the discomfort in my throat,
I smiled at Butch. ‘I’ll have Jasper for company.’
Butch gave the dog a dirty look and grunted.
‘And I still have the bathroom to finish. I was thinking about
new hardware, because I don’t like how—’
‘Maya,’ Dad scanned me up and down, still searching for hid-
den wounds. ‘Someone just tried to kill you.’
‘He wasn’t trying to kill me.’ And then, before I could stop it.
‘Trust me, I know the difference.’
Pain glanced over Dad’s face and suddenly neither of us knew
what to say. There were too many ghosts in the room, and none
of them had sunk with the Bannockburn. After a minute I mum-
bled goodnight, slung the backpack over my shoulder, and left the
kitchen, forgetting my noodles in the microwave until I found
them the next morning, a cold, tightly coiled lump that had lost
any chance for salvage.
Jasper followed me into the bathroom, where I splashed water
on my face and avoided looking at the angry, red line bisecting my
neck, instead staring glassy-eyed at the handles of the knotty pine

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 cabinet I’d installed last year. Nickel. Maybe brushed nickel. My
throat ached and my head began to pound, but it wasn’t until Jasper
nudged me that I flipped the light off and crawled under my duvet.
He curled up at my feet, facing the door and the voices that
drifted down the hallway, while I booted up the computer and
began outlining my incident report. Hours later, long after Butch’s
truck had fired up in the driveway and Dad shuffled off to bed, after
even Jasper’s vigilance had faded to huffs and doggie snores, I was
still awake with the ghosts.

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