Still, I was a guest in this house, one who had no way to show my host how unbelievably grateful I was to have her—not to mention her guest room—in my life. Pulling out my laptop, I decided that if I couldn’t pay for rent, food, or practically anything else (thanks a lot, medical bills), then I could at least try to chip in where I could.
For whatever reason, this fence was bothering Lulu enough to consider brandishing a firearm. Setting that bit of lunacy aside, I figured if I could take matters into my own hands and fix the stupid thing, then that might be a good way to show her how appreciative I was for all she had done and was doing for me.
Never mind that the closest I had ever come to real manual labor was that time I had to provocatively press a sledge hammer against my chest for the cover of Maxim.
Fixing a fence couldn’t be that hard. A bit of wood, a couple nails, and some of that elbow grease I always heard the camera people talking about, and the job would be done. Lulu wouldn’t have to wait three days for those carpenter idiots to finish whatever crap they were doing at Dumbass Mills. It would be finished. I would have finished it, and aside from loosening Lulu’s death grip on that pistol, maybe getting something accomplished would actually make me feel better.
I opened the browser and searched for the nearest hardware store.
One hour away.
“Seriously?” I muttered to myself.
For all the expanding this stupid town had done, one would think a hardware store would be among the first improvements. Of course, my luck didn’t work that way.
A drive out of town for a piece of wood was impractical; I couldn’t afford the wood and nails if I spent all my money on a tank of gas. I would have to go to the town’s open market. And I hated the town’s open market.
I glanced at the clock and cursed under my breath. It was after eight, which meant most of the vendors would have closed shop by now. As much as I wanted to let Lulu wake up to a newly mended fence, it would have to wait until tomorrow. Better than three days, sure, but not the perfect surprise I had hoped for.
An image of a very pregnant Lulu snoring and clutching her pistol flashed through my mind. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so … okay, it was still pretty funny. But it was strange, too. What was it about those woods, and what had Lulu meant when she told me I wouldn’t understand?
On a whim, I typed Bookman’s Woods into the search engine. Bookman’s Woods was a mammoth, a national reserve really. It stretched through pieces of four towns and two counties and held more than three endangered species. But according to the search results, it turned out that wasn’t all it held.
A news article from the Freemont Times (the second town to the left) led the search results.
THIRD BODY IN TWO WEEKS FOUND IN BOOKMAN’S WOODS.
When I clicked, a picture of a smiling girl loaded, beneath it a caption that read “Same strange markings cover the remains.” Same strange markings? As what? The other bodies?
When I examined the picture more closely, I shuddered. She was brunette, like me. And she had blue-green eyes … also like me. In fact, she shared more than a passing resemblance with me, which made her death even more unsettling.
I didn’t want to read the article. I shouldn’t have read the article. But I couldn’t stop myself. I scrolled through quickly, learning that the girl who looked like me was named Nancy Redcliff, was a second year pre-med student at Freemont U, and had recently gotten engaged to her boyfriend of a year.
My scrolling finger froze as I neared the picture of her body. A lump grew in my throat the way it always did when I looked at something like this. But it wasn’t the gore that gave me pause.
The markings—large scratches that crisscrossed the poor girl’s back—looked just like those I saw on Dad that night … the night he disappeared.
The memories flooded my mind as fresh as if it’d just happened, when in reality, it’d been decades ago. Heck, I’d only been eight when he’d walked through the front door, silent and gruff. It wasn’t unusual for him, though. Dad was often that way. He laid concrete, and he hated it. Mom and I stayed out of his way on nights like those. But that night, for whatever reason, I decided to bring him cookies, something to make him feel better.
When I walked in, he was changing his shirt. The unexpected markings on his back took my breath away.
“Daddy! Oh, goodness! What—”
He screamed at me get out, said I would be better off as far away from him as possible.
I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, but he brushed past me. I hadn’t even noticed the bag in his hand until I stood at the window, perched on my tippy toes as I watched him march into the woods. The same woods that Lulu was so afraid of now.
It was the last time I ever saw him.
I slammed the laptop shut. This was ridiculous. So a couple of kids got themselves killed out in the woods. It was probably an animal and had absolutely nothing to do with what happened with my father.
For so long, I had convinced myself that Dad disappeared, that something must have happened to him. Forget the telltale bag slugged over his shoulder. He would never leave us. He would never leave me.