The house was so still, Kate could hear all the clocks ticking at once, like cartoon bombs about to detonate. Her father got up and filled two mugs with coffee. He took a careful sip. His hands were trembling. He seemed so frail, despite his height, despite his righteous indignation. Kate suddenly pitied him. “Dad, I’m sorry if this upsets you… but you kept it hidden from me all these years, and that’s not fair.”
Bram nodded. “You’re right. But please try to understand. I was always working. Twelve-, fourteen-hour shifts, six days a week, just trying to keep my practice afloat. You know how it is. You’re buried under paperwork—insurance forms, lab results, clinical notes, federal regulations, taxes. I barely had time for my patients, let alone my own family. When Julia came home from the asylum, I was so relieved; she seemed like her old self again. The paranoia was gone and at first I made sure she took her meds and attended her weekly therapy sessions, but it didn’t last long. It was as if our life together meant nothing to her.”
“Did you threaten her with a custody battle?”
“I never threatened your mother. I rejected her request for full custody. I told her I’d fight it. She was becoming a danger to you girls again, and I couldn’t allow that. She stopped taking her meds. She demanded her freedom, and so I gave it to her.” He paused. “Are we done here?” he asked hoarsely, getting to his feet.
A strange, displaced energy wobbled between them, and she wondered if this was one of the factors that had driven her mother away—his tallness, his imposing physicality, his inability to hold a difficult conversation without becoming defensive and angry. His wounded pride.
“Yeah, Dad, we’re done.”
She got up and left.
44
BACK IN HER CAR, Kate cranked the heat and fiddled with the radio dial. Pop tunes. Anything to drown out what she was feeling.
A throbbing headache had lodged itself behind her eyes. Storm clouds were gathering in the distance, and the scrub pines swayed in the wind—dwarfish trees straight out of a Salvador Dali painting. Further up the road were the newer developments, too many FOR SALE signs popping up all over.
Her thoughts turned to Hannah Lloyd. On an impulse, she turned left instead of right and headed toward The Balsams, the thickly wooded area where Hannah’s remains had been found ten years ago, just off Kirkwood Road.
Twenty minutes later, Kate parked by the side of the road, unbuckled her seatbelt, and got out. The last residence was half a mile back. She crossed the street and followed the signs to the trailhead. The old-growth forest was part of an extensive state park that stretched into neighboring townships, a shared treasure of woodlands and wetlands whose crown jewel was Mount Summation in Greenville, New Hampshire, attracting hikers, fishermen, and rock climbers from all over. The Balsams were unique, comprised of icicled northern hardwoods that loomed one hundred feet in the air—balsam firs, red spruce, old-growth oaks—and a lower canopy of hickory, dogwood, and scrub pine.
She listened to the crunch of old snow under her boots as she headed a little ways into the woods and realized the cabin wasn’t far from where she stood. The rocky trails eventually led to Parsons Road on the other side of town. “Her” side of town. It hit her hard. There was a direct route from Hannah Lloyd’s dumpsite to the cabin from which Savannah had disappeared.
It had always been a mystery to her how the killer had managed to snatch her sister away without Kate or any other witnesses spotting a vehicle on Parsons Road. The answer was obvious to her now. Savannah had been led out of the woods in the opposite direction, along one of these trails, probably with a gun pressed to her back or a knife at her throat.
It began to snow, gentle white flakes fluttering down from the sky. Kate wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck and shivered as the wind picked up, goosebumps rising on her flesh. Okay, time to go. A trek through the woods would have to wait.
She was about to leave when she spotted something fluttering through the woods about a dozen yards away. A ghostly swirl. A vortex of motion. What was that?
She blinked and it was gone. Probably an optical illusion. She could feel a migraine coming on, constricting her blood vessels. She shook her head and saw flashes of color darting through the trees—cardinals, seeking shelter from the storm.
Kate scanned the forest again, and there it was—further away this time, a small figure drifting through the woods on an easterly trajectory. She squinted hard. Was it a deer? A dog? Sensory overload? Visual exhaustion? Stress could do that to a person. Too much cortisol released into the bloodstream, combined with a subliminal desire to see something that wasn’t there, and your subconscious would fill in the gaps. An ethereal child walking through enchanted woods. “Enthrallment” was a psychological term used to describe a subset of joy. It was a state of intense rapture that occurred when you experienced something that significantly elevated your mood. Kate was feeling that now. She didn’t know why.
The snap of a twig.
“Savannah?” she shouted.
A flash of movement.
Where did it go?
Get a grip. You’re losing it.
She just had to know what it was. Snow crunched underfoot as she ventured further into the woods. The forest was eerily beautiful. The wind was a siren song. Majestic trees swayed, their boughs creaking like rocking chairs. A flock of birds burst out of the canopy, screeching hauntingly. The snow fell around her like the world’s largest snow globe. She followed the trail deeper, avoiding fallen branches, protruding rocks, sudden ruts. She would have to step carefully if she didn’t want to break her neck.
She reached a point where two trails overlapped, and directly in front of her was a six-foot embankment. Once she’d reached the top, she paused to look around. Nailed to several nearby birch trees were round plastic disks about the size of an orange. These colored disks, secured to every tenth tree or so along the trail, indicated which type of activity was permitted by the state park. Green disks were for mountain-biking, red disks were for horseback riding, and orange disks were for hiking. Unmarked trails were privately owned and not meant for public use. As a safety precaution, all the colored tags were numbered so that, if you ever got lost, Search & Rescue would be able to pinpoint your location.
Kate wondered if Savannah had seen these disks sixteen years ago, as she was marched through the dark woods— crickets in the underbrush, a summer breeze rustling through her hair, a man’s heavy footsteps behind her, his gruff threats prodding her on.
Kate climbed back down the embankment and stepped over a fallen log. She continued along the hiking trail, until it dropped down into a washout. There were icy patches hidden under the snow. Here, she thought. This was the place where she’d seen the ghostly little girl. As expected, there were no tracks in the snow, animal or human.
Snowflakes caught on her eyelashes, and she blinked them away. The afternoon air was as cold as steel. Beyond an old stone wall, the hiking trail split off into two tracks.
Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo.
She spun around.
A small voice carried on the wind. “Kate?”
She spotted something at the top of a rocky eroded hillside about twenty yards away. It stood relatively still, like a tornado hovering in the distance. She tried to blink it away, but a little girl stared back at her. Not a girl. A blur. The suggestion of a girl.
“Savannah?”
Her head throbbed. This is crazy. You’re acting crazy. Adult onset schizophrenia could happen at any time—but especially in your twenties and early thirties. Was she having a breakdown?
The figure dissolved in a gust of wind.
Kate shook her head. There had to be an explanation. Pine branches swaying in the wind. The wind kicking up snow. Her growing migraine.
You’re losing your freaking mind.