He found himself back on County Road 600, the road Jacqueline Foley was presumed to be riding on when she was taken. But if there were no witnesses how did anyone know for certain she was taken there? The police surmised, based on the girl's usual route, rate of speed and time of departure, that she would have been in the vicinity of County Road 600 when she was taken, but they had no real way of knowing. But despite the fact that it was simply a guess by the police, people in town and at the college had latched onto it. Ludwig cruised down the road, the fields on either side cordoned off by raggedy and rusted barbed wire, until he saw the makeshift shrine that had sprung up in honor of Jacqueline Foley. He stopped, turned the car off and climbed out.
The air was turning cooler. The sky was clear and blue, the sun shining bright, but the air had a cold bite to it, an indication that fall had settled in, and soon enough, he would have to turn the heat on in his house and prepare for the inane parade of trick-or-treaters and their parents who liked to beat on his door and beg for candy. His scuffed shoes scrunched across the roadside gravel as he approached the shrine.
The local paper had done a story on the shrine as soon as they became aware of it, and Ludwig read it with fascination. What motivated people to spontaneously gather at a place that may not truly harbor any real significance? Why the intensely human desire to cling to any hope, be it false or imagined? It started with flowers left by the Foley girl's sorority sisters, but then townspeople drove out and left notes and teddy bears. They burned votive candles at night and prayed. Ludwig bent down and examined a water-stained piece of paper attached to a withered rose. We're praying for you, it said. He found another attached to a small wooden cross. Come home soon, girl. We'll party again. He wanted to shake his head and scoff, to take the academic's pose and look down his nose at the pipe dreams of the masses, but he stopped himself.
Who was he to criticize someone else's pipe dream? Who was he to scoff at someone who still believed in the impossible? Wasn't his whole life—professional and personal—dedicated to the pursuit of proving the impossible?
He straightened up and returned to the car. He wore a light sweater, but the cool breeze actually felt good. He pulled the passenger side door open, making sure that the breeze didn't sweep the papers away, and pulled out a thin file folder. He stood by the side of the car and carefully opened the file, using his right thumb to hold the all-important documents in place. They were maps of the locations in the county where he thought The Pioneer Club might have held their meetings. There were about ten possible locations, ten really good options, and over the course of the past few weeks he had been traveling to them and checking them out, crossing them off as they proved to be nothing worth pursuing further. Eight of them down, two more to go. Of course, Ludwig wasn't much of a hiker or outdoorsman, and given the remote locations and the difficulties associated with traveling to some of them, he had decided to leave the most difficult, the most remote areas for last. Not the most logical course of action, he knew, but he had clung to the na?ve hope that he would find The Pioneer Club meeting ground on the first try and save himself weeks of pulled muscles and torn clothes from wandering through the underbrush.
No such luck. So he was back for more today.
And he had reason to believe that today's investigation might prove more fruitful than the ones from the past. He had pinpointed an area in the woods approximately one mile from the shrine to Jacqueline Foley, a plot of heavily wooded land that had belonged to the same family for close to two hundred years. The Donahues. At one time, they were movers and shakers in the New Cambridge area. Thaddeus Donahue ran a livery stable at the time of the township's founding, one of the first businesses to thrive in the new settlement. And his son, Thaddeus Junior, served three terms as mayor in the years prior to the Civil War. But as was so often the case, the family's fortunes ebbed over the course of generations. A family that had once been the equivalent of royalty in New Cambridge had now simply become another, run-of-the-mill country clan, their numbers and resources diminishing as the town around them changed and evolved. They still owned the land—Ludwig had researched the deed at the county courthouse—but little else. At various times over the past twenty years, the taxes on the property had been delinquent, but somehow, the family always avoided foreclosure. Perhaps they managed to scrape together enough of a living to pay the bill, or perhaps the county simply had no interest in reclaiming land that couldn't be used for much of anything. Someday a motivated developer would come along and buy it, but until then, the current owner of the Donahue property—someone named Roger Donahue who the clerk at the courthouse told Ludwig was a "grade A odd duck"—would be allowed to stay on it, maybe even unaware of the rich history his family once lived out.