I saw things I didn’t want to see. It was a talent I didn’t want, an ability I didn’t ask for. But it was one I couldn’t give back.
It wasn’t until years later I learned to focus this skill, to use it to find things that had been lost—to find people. If I knew what I was looking for, if I had the image of someone I needed to find, I could locate the town or street corner where they last boarded a bus or got into a stranger’s car. I could see the argument they had with a spouse, the knife they slipped out from a kitchen drawer. I could see the things they had done, even if they were still alive. Even if they weren’t dead yet.
In college, Ben worked as a private detective, and he hired me on the side to help him with a few cases: stolen pets and stolen lovers and a few stolen credit cards. It was shit work. Driving around at night, rooting through people’s garbage, snapping dark, out-of-focus photos.
But after we graduated, he referred me to someone he knew at the Seattle PD and they asked me to come in and help with a missing person’s case. At first, they didn’t tell me much—they didn’t trust me, and I couldn’t blame them. I was in my early twenties, and looked like I could just as easily commit the crimes they were in the business of preventing. But when I found a fourteen-year-old kid who had vanished from his home a week earlier, camped out in a tent in the woods behind his school—a runaway—the police asked me to look at a few other cold cases.
Within a year, I was getting calls from weeping, anxious, distressed families who had heard I could find their missing whoever: a brother vanished from a Quick-E-Mart parking lot under the glaring eye of the midday sun; a daughter slipped from her second-story bedroom in a cookie-cutter neighborhood with the window still open, rain soaking the caramel-tan carpet; or a niece gone out for a jog along the rocky shoreline near Port Ludlow but never returned home. Her laced running shoes found a day later bobbing in the foamy water, brought in with the tide.
I became a finder of the missing. But I didn’t always find them alive.
* * *
The old logging road is narrow, overgrown, and hasn’t been traveled down in a decade at least. I steer the truck through a low gully—probably a dried creek bed now buried in several feet of snowfall—and the tires threaten to sink into the deep sloppy layer.
When Maggie passed through here, she bounded from one rock to the next over the creek, cold water splashing up her legs—I can hear the memory of water, and the soft tune Maggie hummed while she walked, a nursery rhyme I think, meant for bedtimes, but it’s one I don’t recognize. Maybe she wanted to soothe herself, to feel not so alone as she trekked deeper into these woods.
The truck headlights bounce among the trees. Snow continues to fall from the sky. And the windshield wipers wheeze back and forth across the glass, barely keeping up, while the heater sputters out lukewarm air. But after three hours, I lose the afterimage of Maggie.
She fades in with the evergreens, with the falling snow, and flickers out.
She might have turned into the trees somewhere and I missed it. She might have slumped down into a layer of pine needles to rest and never woke.
Perhaps she turned back.
Or maybe I’m just too tired, my eyes unable to focus, to keep her afterimage steady in my mind. I reach an intersection where another razor-thin dirt road intersects the one I’m on, and I ease the truck to a stop. I need to consider turning around—that maybe I’ve lost Maggie’s image for good, maybe I’ve reached a dead end.
I squeeze the tiny book-shaped charm in my left hand, trying to draw up any last flickering memories. If Maggie reached this intersection, if she kept going, she had to make a decision of which route she’d take. But when I stare out at the snow-laden terrain, at the crossroads, there is no sign of her—only the dark between the trees and the beams of light cutting faintly into the forest ahead of me.
I have to turn around. Go back the three hours to the old chimney and the collapsed barn. Maybe I can try again in the morning, once the sun is up. Or I can backtrack all the way out to Highway 89, turn north, and keep going until I cross over the Canadian border. I tried to find her, didn’t I? I drove way the hell out here into these woods, and now the trail has gone cold. The afterimage of Maggie blotted out or faded with time. Either way, I have no way of knowing which way she might have gone from here. Which road she took.
That old familiar ache thuds at the base of my neck, the doubt always there: It’s probably too late. The odds aren’t good, not after five years. She’s probably already dead.
I put the truck in reverse and the tires spin briefly before finding traction. The truck lurches backward, the rear bumper nudging against a small tree, and when I crank the wheel, the headlights swing wide, illuminating the tall pines.
… there’s something there.
My foot slams the brake, and I squint through the falling snow. Etched into the bark, are three gashes. The same ones I saw back at the burnt-out house. A marker, a roadmap. Maggie turned left here. She followed the marks on the trees: This is how she knew where she was going.
I put the truck back in gear and fishtail up this new, narrower road. Five more times I come to a fork in the road or an intersecting route—a decision to be made. And each time, I find the three marks.
Maggie didn’t wander aimlessly into this dark forest, just out for an afternoon hike, she followed marks made by someone else.
I travel like this for another two hours—cresting the top of steep hills, then inching through a maze of low-hanging branches—until I reach an abrupt end: a mammoth pine tree fallen across the path, limbs splintered and broken, blocking the road. But there is a thin opening through the trees to the left, and I steer the truck toward the gap.
The engine whines as I accelerate, the truck bounces over something—a large rock or a tree stump—and then I hear the sound: the squeal of the engine, followed by the whoosh of tires spinning in the snow.