Coleman’s Brewery was abandoned in the 1930s, ravaged by Prohibition and unable to overcome the Great Depression. The brewery tried to stay afloat by offering its customers a place to smoke cigars and play billiards and snooker. Of course, the unspoken promise of bootlegger whiskey was the real draw. The occasional pint of Coleman’s lager, which was secretly brewed and greatly sought after, made an appearance from time to time. It was just enough to keep the doors open during The Noble Experiment. But when the Depression hit, Cole Coleman was unable to stay current on bribes. By the mid-thirties, Coleman’s closed its doors for good.
Eighty years later, the abandoned shell of the brewery still stood in the old industrial section on the west side of Emerson Bay. The Roanoke River ran north-south through Emerson Bay and separated the city into east and west halves. The east side flourished as a bayside community with yacht clubs and waterfront homes and beach access and a hip downtown area. The west side fell into disrepair. It was a place where freight trains passed in the dead of night, where streetlamps long ago spent their filaments and were never considered for replacement. West Bay was where weeds pushed through sidewalk cracks and potholes grew deeper in the streets. The police had given up patrolling the Cove, where Coleman’s was located along with other forsaken buildings from long ago, because nothing much happened there besides winos taking shelter in the crumbling buildings and an occasional stray dog walking the streets. Dark and isolated, it was the perfect place for the Capture Club’s meetings. And scary as hell, Nicole was discovering.
This journey to West Bay was Nicole’s first meeting. Her only association with the club prior to her abduction had been through e-mails with Casey and the chat rooms where they sometimes went back and forth all night typing about the latest abduction in the news. Nicole obsessed with Casey over the details of these disappearances, her fetish for missing-persons cases birthed in childhood when Julie disappeared shortly after her ninth birthday.
There had been commotion and crying and hysteria that summer, and Nicole remembered going with her family to Colorado for the final time. Julie was not there, and no one would come right out and say where she was or what had happened to her. Instead, the adults used big words and promised one another Julie would be back. But besides in her dreams, Nicole never saw her cousin again. Thoughts about what happened to Julie became a festering curiosity Nicole secretly harbored. Livia had never showed much interest in their cousin. Julie was an only child and there was never a reason for Livia to tag along on the week-long trips out west, so when Julie disappeared it was sad and disturbing but affected Livia in a different manner than it had Nicole. A freshman in college then, Livia was older and smarter and understood things more completely than Nicole. What Livia never comprehended, however, was the loss Nicole felt after Julie was gone. Julie had no siblings of her own, and with ten years separating Nicole and Livia, the cousins considered each other sisters. There was a mutual understanding that they were learning things together, not simply being taught by an older sister or parent. And when Julie was gone, so too was Nicole’s accomplice. She was left by herself to figure it out.
The Cuttys never talked about Julie, and only lately had Nicole’s mother reconnected with Aunt Paxie. The sisters’ relationship was difficult for Paxie because seeing Nicole was a reminder of every milestone missed with Julie. With no one willing to answer Nicole’s questions, she took to the Internet for information about Julie. Years had passed, though, and what little she was able to find about her cousin’s disappearance was neither interesting nor pertinent. What Nicole did manage to locate was an online community just like herself—people obsessed with abduction and not afraid to talk about it. They spilled their secret thrill when someone went missing, offering theories about who took them and what was happening to them.
One night she met Casey in a chat room, and after two months of private messaging, Nicole was initiated into the Capture Club while she smoked a joint in the park. It was the craziest thing she’d done in her short life, trusting a stranger to abduct her and blindfold her and stick tape across her face. It was traumatic and thrilling. She still got chills now when she thought of that night. Like a gold nugget hidden away in a tiny satchel, those thoughts were all hers. New and unripe, they played over and over in Nicole’s mind. The sense of danger that told her she had taken things too far. That she had allowed her fascination to overcome her judgment. In the dark of night, alone in her bed, she held on to the moment when she sat still and frightened in that shed behind Coleman’s Brewery and felt real terror. She finally was able to relate to all the girls she had read about. She finally knew how Julie felt. For a brief moment, Nicole had reconnected with her old friend.
She parked, as instructed, at the train station and followed the freight tracks for half a mile out of town until she saw the old Coleman Brewery building down in the Cove. She took a path that led through the brush and down the gentle slope, hearing a train approaching from the north, running wood down from Canada. She wondered if this was the path they had dragged her through while the burlap sack was over her head. She made it to the intersection in front of the abandoned brewery just as the train chugged behind her, blocking the light that came from the streetlamps situated on the far side of the tracks.
A hundred years after the beige bricks of Coleman’s Brewery were laid, they still stood. Mostly. She noticed one area toward the back of the building that was crumbling. Likely, it was where deliveries used to happen and one too many trucks had backed into the delivery bay and banged the foundation to rattle the bricks and jar the rebar, loosening joists to the point that a generation later the walls sagged and cried away the bricks.
Never having met anyone from this group before the other night when they all stood with flashlights under their chins and stared into the shed, Nicole wasn’t sure what to expect from her first Capture Club meeting. She walked to the front entrance, past the debris on the ground—fast food Styrofoam and beer bottles. From inside she heard voices. Through a small atrium first, then past the open door, Nicole found a decrepit-looking room she assumed had once been a tavern. The waist-high bar still stood in the spot patrons used to sit and receive drinks across mahogany. No stools now, but Nicole noticed the group had brought two long folding tables and a dozen mismatched chairs. Two Igloo coolers held cold beers.
She spotted Casey standing near the head of the table. He smiled when their eyes met.
“Our lost girl has returned home!” he shouted.
Everyone looked toward the front of the brewery and cheered when they saw Nicole. She smacked her gum like this was the reception she had expected, then raised her hand. Casey came over and hugged her.