The Forgotten Child

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Riley shot a glance over her shoulder at Rochelle’s old car; it was apparently always a small miracle when the thing started on the first try. Riley would tough it out for her sake.

  Jade’s front door swung open and Riley jumped.

  “Were you ever planning to come in?” Jade asked, one hand on the open door’s knob, the other on her hip.

  “I was admiring your fancy-pants landscaping.”

  “Shut up. You saw my fancy-pants landscaping last week. And the week before that. You were planning an escape.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  Jade grinned. “Get your butt inside. We’re making road-trip margaritas.”

  Following Jade in, Riley dropped her duffel in the front hall with the other luggage. Laughter erupted from the kitchen and the urge to hightail it in the other direction hit Riley full force. She already felt like an intruder. One foot in front of the other, she told herself as she trailed after Jade. It’s only a weekend.

  “Ladies!” sing-songed Jade. “Riley Thomas has finally decided to grace us with her presence.”

  Pamela Chang fought to dislodge the ice bin from the fridge. Rochelle Humphries sat on one of the stools positioned around the kitchen’s center island. Riley knew Pamela from their days as college roommates with Jade. Rochelle—and the yet-to-arrive Brie—had been at an awkward Christmas shindig at Jade’s three months ago. Ugly sweaters and too strong eggnog and a White Elephant gift exchange where she’d ended up with a jar full of off-flavor jelly beans like cat vomit and grass and sardine. Riley had slipped out after a hastily sent text message to Jade a few hours in, unable to handle the small talk.

  Small talk was hard to manage at the best of times, but with total strangers from Jade’s yoga studio and Jonah’s tech buddies? It was a miracle Riley had lasted as long as she had. The rest of the night had been spent alone in her apartment, a tiny, unlit, and undecorated Christmas tree sitting on the edge of her coffee table while she binged half of season three of Tiana’s Circle.

  An ominous scrape sounded from the refrigerator while Pamela continued her battle with the ice bin. Shooting a quick grin over her shoulder, Pamela said, “Hey, girl. Long time no see!”

  “Work is a time-suck,” said Riley.

  Jade flashed her a pointed look.

  “I’m also a crap friend because I choose Netflix over other humans.”

  “God, me too,” said Rochelle.

  If a gust of wind swept through to gently tousle Rochelle’s hair without explanation, Riley wouldn’t have been surprised. The other woman was a curvaceous 5’4” and had dark brown hair that hung to her mid-back in shiny, expertly styled waves. Without a doubt, she’d missed her calling as a model for shampoo commercials.

  Riley did that “I have nothing interesting to say so I’m just going to awkwardly nod a lot for no discernible reason” thing she was so good at. Really, she couldn’t come up with a follow-up comment about Netflix? Her one true love?

  Her palms grew clammy.

  Why was she so damned nervous? It was like the Christmas party all over again. Had she really been sequestering herself for so long that she’d developed some kind of social anxiety?

  “Have you seen Tiana’s Circle?” Rochelle asked.

  Riley’s focus snapped to the other woman. “Oh my god. You’ve actually seen it?”

  Now fully turned on her stool toward Riley, Rochelle’s eyes widened. “Have I seen it?”

  “Oh hell,” muttered Jade, rummaging around in her liquor cabinet on the opposite side of the kitchen. “Are they about to nerd out?”

  The question seemed to be directed at Pamela, who’d just freed the ice bin. “Sounds like it.”

  “I’ve seen all the available seasons twice,” said Rochelle.

  Riley grinned. “I’m a little over halfway through viewing number three.”

  “Oh, sweet heavens, so you’re in the middle of season three? Has Cooper—”

  “Confessed his undying love for Kendra? Yep. But my next episode is ‘Fear Me Not,’ so I’m stalling.”

  “Ugh!” said Rochelle. “I cried for a solid half hour the first time I watched that one.”

  “The second time I watched it, the moment I saw Howie pull that picture out of his wallet—”

  “Stop!” Rochelle fanned her face.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Pamela and Jade staring at them like they were aliens who had just crash-landed in her kitchen.

  To Riley’s surprise, she and Rochelle got so lost in their theories for season five, it wasn’t until Jade clapped twice right by her ear that Riley noticed Brie had arrived and a round of frozen strawberry margaritas sat on the counter.

  “I didn’t even hear the blender turn on,” Rochelle said, blinking slowly.

  “That was … disturbing,” said Jade, looking from Riley to Rochelle and back again.

  “Oh, like you aren’t just as bad—worse—about Paranormal Playground,” said Riley.

  “That’s research for my future as a paranormal investigator!” Jade said.

  Riley laughed. “The second you see an apparition, you’ll be out of there with the quickness.”

  “How dare you,” said Jade. “I’ll have you know that I am very brave.”

  Riley jumped to the side, dancing from foot to foot. “Shit! Spider!”

  Jade shrieked, leaping onto a stool with the agility of an antelope. “Where where where!”

  Smirking, Riley rested her hip against the counter and crossed her arms.

  Jade glared at her, but, perched on the stool like Catwoman, it was hard for Riley to take her seriously. Riley finger-waved at her.

  Grabbing a margarita, Pamela said, “Oh, how I missed you girls.”

  Riley, Rochelle, and Jade—once she climbed off her stool—snatched up the remaining drinks. Brie was handed a virgin one; she was both designated driver and trying to conceive baby number three.

  “I propose a toast!” Jade hoisted her glass.

  The girls followed suit.

  “To a weekend of old friendships and new—some of them disturbingly nerdy.” She smiled sweetly at Riley and Rochelle. “May we grow closer, enjoy our time away from our everyday lives, and may we see some motherfucking ghosts!”

  The other three whooped.

  Riley let out a mental “Nope!” just before they all clinked glasses.

  Thanks to the margarita, Riley’s nerves were more of a low hum than an all-out scream fest while she helped load up Brie’s tricked-out SUV. She could handle this weekend. These ladies were fun and excited and Riley could get through this. She could. Plus, Rochelle was her TV show soulmate. Well, aside from Paranormal Playground—but no one was perfect.

  Questions and answers about boyfriends and jobs and school and kids were tossed about the car like a beach ball, bouncing from topic to topic in an attempt to catch up on five lives at once. During the second hour, song after song from high school blasted through the speakers.

  “This is my jam!” Brie and Rochelle called out in unison more than once.

  By the time Riley’s mild buzz had worn off, they had moved on to talking about a set of people Riley didn’t know. People she’d never even heard Jade mention. Riley listened, not sure if there was an appropriate time to throw out a “Who are we talking about?”

  When Rochelle made a joke about someone named Albert, the four of them erupted in a bout of laughter so intense, Jade was near tears.

  The air in the car felt a little thin, too hot. Alone while surrounded by people. She ran clammy palms down her thighs. She was an intruder here. But unlike the Christmas party, she couldn’t slip out a door and scurry back to the safety of her apartment.

  Hinging forward, she rummaged around in her purse at her feet. She swiped on her phone.

  No emails. No text messages. No calls. Not that she expected to hear from anyone.

  Another raucous bout of laughter filled the car. Before she’d realized she made the decision, she’d typed “Jord
anville Ranch” into her search engine. Somehow, getting sucked into internet wormholes had become her go-to method for calming her anxiety. Yet, despite her penchant for borderline obsessive search habits, she hadn’t been to the ranch’s website in a couple years. Active avoidance and all that.

  “Home of serial killer Orin Jacobs,” the headline of the site read. “The site where Orin’s Girls lost their lives.”

  Lost their lives. As if they’d merely misplaced them, not that Orin Jacobs had taken them. Stolen them.

  Riley still couldn’t believe Jade had convinced her to stay in this monster’s house. Between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, Jacobs had kidnapped girls, taken them to his cellar to do who-knew-what to them, then brutally cut them open, removed vital organs—some of which were never found; one girl had yet to be identified due to being decapitated—and buried them on his massive property in a neat row of unmarked graves.

  He’d been caught when one of the girls, Mindy Cho, managed to escape in the middle of the night and ran for the road. Luckily, she was spotted by a couple out on that back road who had gotten turned around in the dark looking for a nearby dude ranch.

  Orin Jacobs’ trial made national news, as these things often did. Though the ranch had become a popular tourist stop for people visiting the Gila National Forest—especially after Orin died on death row in the late 1990s—its popularity skyrocketed after the Paranormal Playground episode.

  Despite the wealth of paranormal shows available, Paranormal Playground found an original niche that hadn’t been saturated yet: creepy ghost children. The show blew up almost immediately, the show’s hosts, Daniel and Heidi, becoming international stars. They traveled all over the world to investigate claims of hauntings. They went from small, obscure places in the beginning—mainly playgrounds, hence the name—to the more obvious ones in later seasons: Alcatraz, Lizzie Borden House, Whaley House, Stanley Hotel.

  Mindy, in her late forties now, had come out of her media hiatus to denounce the show for using her tragedy as fodder for better ratings. Given the haunted look in her eye during her plea to the public two years ago, Riley was positive the woman hadn’t recovered from her ordeal with Orin. At all.

  Riley clicked over to the ranch’s chat forum, which was surprisingly active. There were dozens of past guests who claimed to have heard a crying girl at or around three in the morning. Fewer had actually seen the apparition.

  On the ranch’s episode of Paranormal Playground, it was Heidi—offscreen—who’d glimpsed a glowing child just as it rounded a pillar. Riley had watched the episode mainly out of curiosity, and a little out of pride for her home state of New Mexico.

  The camera had been focused on Daniel at the time, as he and another crew member attempted to get an EVP. Heidi called out “Oh! I see her!” That was followed by pounding footsteps as Daniel and his crewmate—Mark? Matt?—ran off in the direction of Heidi’s voice, the cameraman struggling to keep up. At the end of a short chase, the shot bouncing violently, they caught up with a heaving Heidi, hands on her knees.

  Heidi had shaken her head. “She got away. Disappeared right through the wall.”

  Maybe Heidi had actually seen something. Or maybe Heidi and the crew concocted the scenario to make a mostly boring episode seem more exciting.

  From what Riley read on the forum, no one had reported anything like poltergeist activity; things hadn’t been tossed across the room by an unseen hand. The only “verified” phenomena were the occasional flickering of lights—which could easily be explained as an electrical glitch—and cold spots, which were usually easily debunked too.

  The only consolation Riley had was that the Paranormal Playground crew hadn’t gone into the cellar, the site of Orin’s torture chamber. Daniel and Heidi said the areas below the house had been blocked off from the public at the homeowner’s request.

  The SUV wove around the curving roads that snaked through the forest. Reading in the car started to give Riley a headache. When her reception bars dropped down to two—Jade had warned her that they’d lose reception entirely once they reached the ranch—and pages took longer and longer to load, Riley gave up and dropped her phone back into her purse.

  During her reading binge, the atmosphere in the car had filled with a nervous energy. And night had fallen. Riley hoped Brie’s headlights didn’t reveal the eyeshine of some forest creature. This was elk country, after all.

  “Oh my sweet lord,” said Jade. “We’re so close. I can feel it.”

  “I’m dying to see an apparition,” Brie said, though her usual deadpan tone implied the opposite. “I love the idea of seeing a glowing figure in period dress. A snapshot from the past, you know?”

  “What about you?” Rochelle asked, elbowing Riley lightly in the side. “You’ve been super quiet.”

  “What about me?” Riley asked, trying to keep her tone casual.

  “What are you looking forward to this weekend?”

  “Hiking?”

  Jade groaned dramatically. “Okay, that’s it. You know what, y’all? I have a theory. I’ve been working on said theory for quite some time.” Turning to face the back of the SUV, she said, “I think Riley’s a chicken shit.”

  Riley gasped; the other three girls let out an “Oooh!”

  “I’ve known you for, what, seven years now? You only watch scary movies if they’ve got vampires or werewolves or whatever in them. Haunting, possessions, demons—you always opt out. Now that I think about it, you always seemed to work on Halloween, too! No haunted houses, no costumes …”

  “I’ve had a lot of shitty jobs that don’t let me have holidays like Halloween off.”

  “Bullshit.” Jade narrowed her eyes at Riley. “Some people just can’t handle this stuff. I was thinking you’d get excited about it once we were on our way, since you’re so into true crime. Like, I just thought you needed an intervention to get your butt out of the house. But you look … pale, girl. Are you really this scared?”

  Riley didn’t exactly love being called out in front of everyone—Rochelle and Pamela were on either side of her, boring holes into the sides of her head; Brie kept shooting glances in the rearview mirror—but maybe this was the out she needed. Plus, she was scared.

  “Terrified,” said Riley.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Only Jade could call her that without it sounding patronizing. Reaching an arm over the center console and into the back seat, she clutched Riley’s hand. “I feel like an ass now. I really thought you’d like this. Just do whatever makes you comfortable, okay? If something freaks you out, and you need to bolt, just do it.”

  Riley nodded. “Thanks. I just don’t want to ruin the trip because I’m a wimp.”

  They assured her they thought nothing of the sort. “No, not at all!” and “I totally get it. This stuff freaks me out too” and “We’re just happy you’re here.”

  Guilt for lying to them sent her leg bouncing uncontrollably for a while, until Rochelle placed a gentle hand on her knee to still it. Telling them the truth about her sensitivity would be harder. If she was uncomfortable with her own skills, why wouldn’t they be too?

  The Great Ouija Board Fiasco had proven that keeping her ability locked away was the only way to keep others—and herself—safe.

  When Brie slowed to make a turn off one two-lane highway onto another, Riley caught sight of a sign illuminated by Brie’s headlights: Jordanville Ranch, 23mi.

  The forest was even denser here; rows and rows of dark sentry trees. Were these the same trees Orin’s Girls had seen? Had they peered out of the dark windows of his car, wishing they could fling themselves onto the road to get lost in this massive forest of Douglas-fir and Engelmann spruce?

  Brie switched on her high beams; they hadn’t passed another car in ages.

  Had the captured girls felt a growing dread knowing that even if they escaped, there wasn’t anywhere to go?

  The couple who found Mindy Cho had been heading to a dude ranch for the weekend to scope the place out for their
wedding. They’d gotten desperately lost and while they were idling on a thought-to-be deserted road consulting their map, the frightened, filthy form of a young girl had appeared in the beams of their car’s headlights. Riley couldn’t imagine how scared the couple had been to see her appear out of the dark, and how scared Mindy must have been that they might not help her. That they might be privy to Orin’s depravity and take her back.

  Riley’s leg started bouncing again. She folded her arms. Unfolded them. Her stomach performed acrobatics.

  She really needed another drink.

  Checking her phone, she saw “No Service” in the upper left corner.

  The steady hum of tires over smooth asphalt gave way to the slow thumping of the SUV rolling onto a semi-uneven road. The blinding glow of her phone’s screen bounced erratically, and Riley placed a hand on the back of Jade’s chair in front of her. They passed through an open gate set into a stone wall that stretched out in either direction into the tree-laden darkness. The iron gate was one swinging piece, a JR enclosed in a circle taking up a large chunk of the middle. Riley’s stomach flipped over again.

  Please don’t be haunted, please don’t be haunted.

  A large metal sign rose up just past the gate. “Welcome to Jordanville Ranch!” it said. And in smaller letters beneath: “As seen on Paranormal Playground.”

  Riley’s companions clapped as if the sign just performed a magic trick.

  Up ahead sat the unmoving red glow of another car’s taillights. Jade began rooting around in her bag. “Can you all pass me your IDs? I’m guessing that’s the check-in up there.”

  Brie pulled up behind the SUV stopped next to a guard booth. It reminded Riley of the kiosks that rangers manned outside parks. Riley, Pamela, and Rochelle passed up their IDs, then Jade handed all the pertinent information to Brie. It was a ridiculous amount of paper. It was only a most-likely-not-haunted house, not a government building requiring security clearance.