? ? ?
The trees were dense past the clearing. It would be easy for someone to get lost. To disappear. The ground cover was so thick that it was hard to look for wolf tracks. Occasionally, I stopped to push some aside and hoped I hadn’t stuck my hands in poison ivy. Mostly, I just watched for tamped-down areas where a wild animal might have stopped to rest.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked Enzo.
“Go for it.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“About what?”
“The first night we came here, you acted like I was crazy. So what changed your mind?”
Enzo took so long to answer that I started to think he wasn’t going to.
“When I was a teenager, I had this fascination with weird stories,” he said. “Mysteries, I guess. I’d cut out articles from magazines and newspapers and paste them into this notebook.”
“What kind of articles?”
“Oh, you know. Alien abductions. Parallel dimensions. People who remembered past lives. Anything bizarre.”
“Anything that couldn’t be explained,” I said eagerly.
“Yeah. Every few months, I’d flip through the old stories and try to find out if any of them had been solved. They never were. Remember what you said the other night? About wanting to know there’s something more to the world? I think that’s why I did it.”
“Do you still have it?”
“The notebook? No. I got rid of it a long time ago. But your werewolf theory got me thinking about it again. Made me wonder when I’d become so logical.”
A weird, fluttery feeling filled my chest. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard someone mirror my own thoughts and feelings so closely. Not since I was little. I wanted to stop and tell Enzo he was totally awesome, that I wished we’d known each other when we were younger. I would have helped him fill his notebook with mysteries. Instead, I said, “So, what was your favorite weird story?”
“The creepiest one was about these hikers in Russia in the 1950s. You know it?”
“No, tell me.”
We were in the perfect place for scary stories. The trees blocked out the sunlight, casting sinister shadows on the ground. I had to keep my eyes on my feet so I wouldn’t stumble. I could have walked right up to a monster or serial killer and not realized until it was too late.
“Well, these hikers didn’t get back from a camping trip when they were supposed to, and people went looking for them. Their tent was found, ripped open from the inside, like there had been a struggle to get out. They’d even left their shoes behind. But there was no other sign of them. It took weeks to find their bodies. None of them survived.”
“Pretty creepy,” I said. And by creepy, I meant fascinating.
“It gets better,” Enzo said, talking faster and gesturing. For the first time since I’d met him, he didn’t seem weighed down by grief. “The hikers were found scattered all over the area, and most of them were naked. One of them was missing a tongue. A couple had fractured bones, like you’d get after a major car accident, but there was no evidence of external damage. Well, other than their hair had turned white and their skin was some weird shade of orange. And all of the hikers tested positive for radiation.”
I stopped walking and looked at Enzo. “Then what?”
“Nothing. No one has ever figured out what happened.”
I scowled at him. “That’s the end?”
“Sometimes, you never get answers, kid,” Enzo said with a grin.
“Doesn’t not knowing make you crazy?”
“Not at all. The truth would only be disappointing.”
He was right, of course. I couldn’t even count how many times I’d been disappointed by the truth. Enzo got it.
My fluttery feeling grew stronger. I turned away from Enzo and started walking again so he wouldn’t see me smile.
We hiked for nearly an hour and never saw a sign of Lizzie, in either werewolf or human form. The terrain got steeper the farther we went, and after a while, we were both too winded to talk. When we reached a section of flat ground, Enzo stopped walking and leaned against a tree, breathing heavily.
“I’m not in good enough shape for this.”
“I’m sure that doesn’t help,” I said when he started to roll a cigarette.
I expected a laugh or maybe a sarcastic retort, but Enzo only shrugged. His good mood had vanished.
“We should call it a day,” he said.
He was right. I was worn out. Neither of us were really dressed for hiking. And we hadn’t seen anything to indicate we were on Lizzie’s trail. I tried to swallow my disappointment. I knew it was unlikely we’d find her on the first day anyway. It never happened that way in books or movies. It would have been anticlimactic.
“You know she’s been gone almost a month now?” Enzo stared into the woods, like he wasn’t really talking to me.
“Yeah,” I said softly.
“It seems impossible. Like time should have stopped when she disappeared. I guess in a way, for me, it did.”