Nadia Hill in New York State was the fifth to fit the pattern.
In addition to my online research, I’d visited the towns where the girls had disappeared, talked to locals, friends, and family, always under the guise of monster research for my podcast. I’d walked the woods and fields where the girls had gone missing. But over and over, I found nothing.
The monster, my monster, was too clever to leave behind clues.
I held out hope that one of the missing girls would surface one day and tell her story. But none of them ever did. And no bodies or personal effects were ever found. The girls vanished without a trace.
I didn’t go to the authorities. I was sure they’d look at what I had and say just what the local police always did: These girls were runaways.
And why would they listen to the crazy theories of a woman who hunted monsters for a living? Besides, once they found out who I really was and where I’d come from—well, that was a road I didn’t want to go down with law enforcement of any sort.
So I investigated on my own. Crisscrossed the country, searching, hunting.
And occasionally, I’d get another email from the same user, MNSTRGRL, at a different address. Always, the notes were cryptic, teasing, sometimes quoting lines from our childhood Book of Monsters: They can pass as human. They hide in plain sight.
Sometimes there would be questions: Do you know yet? Why I do what I do? Have you guessed?
And sometimes, just taunting: You were so close, but again, you missed so much.
I’d printed copies of every email from MNSTRGRL and these were in the file too. I flipped through them now and looked at the last one I’d received, about three months ago:
Do you ever get tired of it? The cat and mouse game we play? The hunter and the hunted. Only, which is which, sister? Which is which?
I shut the folder, shoved it into my bag.
I went into the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and got out my thermos. Not that I felt the need for coffee now—I was keyed up, on edge—but I’d need the caffeine for an all-night drive. While I waited for it to brew, I pulled out my phone, knowing I shouldn’t, but longing to hear my brother’s voice.
“Hey,” he said when he picked up.
“Hey, yourself,” I said back.
“How’s Louisiana? Any sign of your swamp monster?” The words were a little mocking. He didn’t believe in monsters anymore.
“I’m not in Louisiana.”
“I thought you were there for the rest of the week. Where are you now?”
A lump in my throat warned me not to tell him.
But I longed to tell someone, to confess, and who else would I tell? Who else could possibly understand?
“I’m home,” I said. “but I’m heading out soon.” I paused, then made myself finish: “I’m going to Vermont.”
He fell silent, so quiet I thought the call had dropped.
At last he said, “Why?” his voice a little higher than usual. A littleboy voice that took me tumbling back through time. I closed my eyes, pictured a too-skinny Eric, his tube socks pulled up to his knobby knees, curly hair sticking up at strange angles. A boy who was always cradling an animal, trying to tame something wild, to fix something broken.
“I think she’s there.” I didn’t need to say more. Didn’t need to tell him who she was. “There’s another missing girl,” I explained, offering up my evidence. “Taken on the full moon. From a place with a monster. It fits the pattern.”
Eric, member of the Monster Club, illustrator of our book, would have understood this.
More silence. But I could hear him breathing, a soft wheeze that worried me a little. He sounded like an old man. Behind the sound of his breath, I heard a TV. A baseball game. His beloved Tigers, no doubt. The sound dimmed, and his breathing got louder. He was walking, moving out of earshot of Cricket and the girls. I heard a door close.
“Lizzy, listen to me,” he said, voice sharp and no-bullshit, but still barely above a whisper. He didn’t want anyone to hear. “You’re grasping at straws. Seeing patterns that aren’t there. You’ve lost all perspective.”
“I have not.” I prided myself on my perspective. In my podcasts, I was the devil’s advocate, playing the role of skeptic when I interviewed eyewitnesses, asking questions like “If this creature is really out there, how do you explain the lack of physical evidence?”
I held tight to the phone, listening. Eric (Charlie!) was the only person I’d shared my theories with. The only one who knew about the missing girls, the monsters, and full moons. The only one I’d told about the emails I sometimes got from MNSTRGRL.
“Lizzy, please. I’m asking you to stop.”
“I can’t. You know that. She’s got another girl.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know it’s her.”
“Yes, I do. I can feel it.”
“It’s been over forty years, Lizzy,” he reminded me. “She could be dead for all we know.”
“She’s not dead,” I said, knowing it was true. I’d feel it if my sister was dead. I would. “She’s out there. And she’s the one taking the girls.”
“Even if you’re right,” he went on, clearly exasperated, “it has nothing to do with you.”
How could this be the same boy who’d once known everything there was to know about monsters?
“It has everything to do with me,” I told him, my voice edgier than I intended. “Don’t you see? I’ve got to go to Vermont.”
“And what exactly are you hoping to do there?”
My breath caught in my throat.
What was I hoping to do?
Save the girl, of course. Get there in time to save this girl and make sure that no more girls disappeared.
“I’m going to stop her.”
As I spoke, I realized: I meant it this time. I’d thought it before, but this, this felt different. The fact that I was going back to Vermont seemed significant. Symbolic.
Do you ever get tired of it? The cat and mouse game we play?
I wanted to say all of this to Eric, thought that maybe he, of all people, might understand. But once again, I was thinking of him as Eric from our childhood, not the grown man known as Charlie.
Charlie feigned amnesia. Often, when we tried to talk about our past, when I asked him a question about a specific memory, he’d shake his head, say, “I don’t know, Lizzy. That was a long time ago.”
“How?” he asked now. “How are you going to stop her?” His voice was icy cold, dripping with fear.
It was wrong of me to have called him. It was selfish. Foolish, even.
“You know how.” The words came out snappish, scolding. “You know what I have to do. You helped write the book—you know how to stop a monster.”
He was quiet. I heard the flick of a lighter. He’d quit smoking, but sometimes I could hear him sneaking a cigarette when we talked.
“Lizzy, this isn’t healthy,” he said.
I said nothing.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t go to Vermont. Come here instead. Come stay with us for a while. We’d love to have you. Cricket was just asking when you’d come again, and both girls are here now until after Labor Day when Ali goes back to college.”
I doubted very seriously that Cricket had been longing to see me. I knew I made poor Cricket as uncomfortable as Cricket made me. Cricket with her highlighted hair, her Crock-Pot cookbooks, her pretty but practical outfits from JCPenney. And the girls looked at me like I was something they’d scraped off the bottom of their shoe. Their weirdo monster-hunting aunt who came for a visit twice a year and insisted on sleeping in her van in their driveway instead of the guest room with the rose stencils on the wall and the matching rose air freshener that was supposed to make you think you were really in a garden.
“Yeah, that’d be nice,” I said at last.
“Good.” He sighed a relieved breath.
“I’ll drive out just as soon as I’m done in Vermont.”
“Lizzy—”
“I’ve gotta go, Eric,” I said, hanging up before he had a chance to curtly remind me, as he often did, that his name was Charlie.
Vi
May 9, 1978