At this point, I would usually call Maggie’s family. Let them know that I might have a lead. That their daughter had not wandered over to the Alexanders’ place like the police report had surmised. She came here intentionally, to this old barn, this burnt-out house in the Three Rivers Mountains of northern California. And second, she brought a backpack and supplies with her, then locked her car and strode off the road into the forest. She knew where she was going—she had a plan.
Rarely do I phone the local police—I let the family who hired me make that call, if they want to convince the nearest jurisdiction that I’m worth listening to, that they should come out and take a look, follow me into the forest in the middle of the night. Only if I find hard evidence do I call it in. I don’t want my prints on anything. Don’t want to give anyone cause to suspect the only reason I found this evidence is because I put it there myself.
Keep your hands clean, Ben told me some years ago. And I’ve stuck to it.
But I don’t call Maggie’s family. Or the police. Because my cell hasn’t had a signal since I left Highway 86 a few hours back. And I haven’t found any hard evidence, no stray boot tossed into the hollowed-out house—a size seven, same as Maggie’s. No clump of hair yanked from her pale white skull. No solid clues that Maggie came this way. Only the memory of her I can see in my mind—a woman who slipped into the trees and disappeared.
No proof of anything yet.
When I took this case, I told myself it was a favor to Ben. And I needed the money. Maggie St. James’s father wrote me a personal check for 50 percent up front—standard with all my cases. The remainder due only if I find Maggie, dead or alive.
But there is another reason I took this case.
My sister.
A nagging in my solar plexus, a black rotting pit in the deepest hollow of my stomach. If I can find Maggie St. James, maybe it will be like rescuing my sister, the one I didn’t get to in time. Maybe it will fill the hole that’s been trying to swallow me up, and I’ll be able to sleep without seeing her pale arms, palms to the ceiling, mouth slightly open, as if she tried to say something at the end but ran out of time. Finding Maggie will be like finding Ruth.
It will set something right.
When I took this job, I also told myself if I found nothing, if there were no remnants of Maggie St. James along this stretch of road, I’d call Ben like a coward and tell him to notify her parents that it was a dead end. I wouldn’t have the courage to do it myself—to admit that I failed. And then I’d resume my own disappearing act, I’d continue north into Canada and then Alaska. I’d vanish and maybe I wouldn’t come back.
Back in the truck, I peer out at the line of trees, trying to steady my focus on Maggie. But out in the dark… my eyes catch on something, and I lean forward against the steering wheel, headlights illuminating the trunk of a tall fir tree.
Three straight gashes are cut vertically into the bark.
Maybe they were made by an animal, a bear tearing away the fleshy surface of the evergreen, yet they look oddly clean and straight. Slit into the wood by the sharp blade of a knife.
A marker, a sign—a warning.
The scent of lilacs fills my nostrils again. This is where Maggie entered the forest, rot and green and black interior. After five years, she might still be alive, somewhere within this mountainous terrain. Or I might discover her body coiled and stiff at the base of a tree, having gotten lost, knees drawn up, autumn leaves and a thick layer of snow her only burial. Eyes frozen open.
But I’ve found worse.
I steer the truck closer to the mark cut into the tree, snow falling in sheets now against the windshield, and discover another half-hidden road—an old logging road maybe, back when this mountainside was clear-cut for timber—and it winds up into the forest. I feel another itch at my spine. An uncertainty. A need.
Redemption.
I’m going to see this through.
I’m going to find Maggie St. James.
* * *
My talent might be considered a disease, a thing suffered among generations, passed down through a family tree.
There were always stories about my ancestors, about Aunt Myrtle who wore long abalone shell earrings that touched her shoulders, and had a habit of lighting matches at the dinner table to rid the room of nosy, lingering ghosts who should have moved on by now. Aunt Myrtle saw things in the objects she touched. Just like her uncle Floyd before her, and a great-great grandmother who immigrated from Dundalk, Ireland.
We were a family of uncommons.
When I was nine or ten, I thought I was seeing flashes of the dead, pale shifting forms, effigies, traces of those who were long buried in the earth. It frightened me, the threat of seeing ghostly apparitions in anything I touched. But my dad—always efficient with his words, and having seen the quiet, distant look in my eyes in the months previous, the way I paused whenever I touched objects around the house—patted me on the shoulder one morning while I sat over a bowl of frosted cornflakes and said, “You have the gift, kid. Tough luck. My advice would be to ignore it, don’t go making a show of it or people will think you odd. Better to stuff it down.”
So I did for a time, careful not to touch anything that didn’t belong to me—I was a hands-in-pockets kind of kid—but there were slip-ups, unintended moments when my fingers found themselves retrieving some item that wasn’t mine: a unicorn barrette slipped free from the honey hair of a girl seated in front of me in history class, my father’s reading glasses left on the kitchen counter that he asked me to retrieve.
In these brief errors, I glimpsed the jerking, shuddering moments from a past that belonged to someone else: the golden-haired girl brushing her hair that morning before school, carefully clipping the barrette into place while her parents argued downstairs, their voices rattling up the hallways, making the girl wince. Or my father, removing his eyeglasses and placing them on an olive-green tiled kitchen counter that wasn’t our own. A woman that was not my mother, round hips and freckled skin, standing before him, her lips on his.