“At least go talk to the parents before you say no,” Ben urged. “Hear the details of the case. I think it’s one you might want to take.”
I breathed into the phone and stared out at the truck stop parking lot, at the dark line of trees beyond. A good place to leave a body. To hide the things you’d like to forget. I know these kinds of places, I’ve found missing people in tree lines just like this one, half buried, pine needles woven into knotted hair, leaves pressed damply over the eyes. Dried blood under fingernails.
“Okay,” I said.
* * *
I stand at the side of a mountain road facing a decaying red barn, soft, lazy snowflakes tumbling down from a milk-white sky, turning everything noir-film quiet.
I curl my fingers around the silver book-charm, trying to squeeze memories from it like juice from an overripe lemon. After locking her car, Maggie St. James strode down the sloped side of the road toward the old barn. Her cropped blond hair, smelling of freshly cut flowers, lilacs, and vanilla. She was more bone than anything else, not unhealthy, but a woman who didn’t seem suited to long treks into the wilderness. She was a coffee-shop and gluten-free-croissant kind of woman, leisurely strolls through a city park maybe, but certainly not this.
There were a few stories online theorizing that Maggie’s disappearance was merely a publicity stunt for the final book in the Foxtail series. And watching the afterimage of her striding away from her car, casually surveying the landscape before her, I wonder if they might have been right. Perhaps she was mimicking the very thing that happened to the kids who read her books and ran away—she wanted to vanish.
And perhaps this is why her disappearance was never taken seriously, not even by the police.
But after five years, could she really just be in hiding, awaiting the perfect moment to reappear? Poof, and Maggie St. James magically strolls out of these backwoods, ready to reveal the sixth and final book in her series, all orchestrated by her clever publicist. Or did something else happen to her?
Maggie was twenty-six when she went missing. She’d be thirty-two now, if she’s still alive. Just another missing woman.
The words form and scatter my thoughts: just another missing woman. Like too many others. Like the one that keeps me up at night, the one I can’t shake—her eyelids gone still, pupils black and glacial and refusing to blink.
I take a step closer to the abrupt edge of the road, the wind creaking through the trees, whipping across the icy surface of the road, reminding me that I’m still standing at the edge of a winter forest. The memory of Maggie blinks in and out, fading with time, but then I see her—the afterimage—veering around the side of the barn, following a hidden driveway deeper into the trees, narrow and rutted and easily missed if you weren’t looking for it. If you didn’t already know it was there. But Maggie St. James walks down the little road with purpose.
She knew where she was going.
I stomp back to my truck and climb inside, melted snow dripping onto the rubber floor mat.
I won’t follow her on foot, not in this deep snow.
The truck heaves once before the engine turns over and I pop it into gear, steering off the shoulder of the road and down onto the snow-covered driveway. A gate that once blocked the drive when Maggie passed through here now sits bent and partially swung open, resting in the snowbank. The truck squeezes through the gate opening—just barely—the passenger side mirror scraping against the metal post, but it doesn’t sheer off. The truck tires sink into hidden ruts, and the driveway leads around what’s left of the old red barn, through the trees, to an open plot of land not visible from the road. Ahead of me, sits the remains of a house, only a chimney now rising up into the thick night sky—a solitary symbol of what once had been.
I put the truck in park, and walk through the snow to the chimney, the headlights gleaming over the carcass. I place my hand against the brick.
The chimney is cool to the touch, and I glimpse the vibrating image of a porch swing and a little girl in army-green rain boots pumping her legs into the summer wind, sending herself up higher and higher. The next burst of memories is of someone screaming, a woman wailing from an upstairs bedroom while tears spilled down her strawberry cheeks. She died in childbirth, left her daughter motherless. A quick slideshow flashes through me, decades of time in half a blink: a man waving goodbye to someone on the porch, his hands work-worn and trembling; a curtain flapping from a kitchen window where a girl is crying softly, writing a letter at the dining table; a boy with autumn-brown hair and deep-set eyes, jumping from the roof and breaking his arm at the elbow when he hit the ground. He never wrote his name right after that, never could bend the arm without causing pain.
Several families, several lives existed within this house.
Click click click, and then it’s finished.
I yank my hand away. I don’t want to muddy my focus, to chase these images deeper and deeper until I know the details of all these lives. I wheel my eyes away from the crumbling chimney and look to the trees beyond the house. Maggie didn’t stop here, she didn’t encounter some villain in the shadows like in her fairy tales, who snuck out from the dark and choked the life from her, silent and still. She isn’t buried beneath the rocks and soil and soot that clot the area around the chimney.
She kept going.
She slipped through the trees. Deeper, deeper, into the woods.