Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel

by J. R. Erickson

  Lori dropped her bags inside the front door to her apartment and walked to the bay window, where Matilda lay curled in a nest of calico fur.

  "Hey there, sweet girl," Lori told her, running her fingers over Matilda's head and spine. The cat shifted, emitting a low purr, but didn't stand to greet her owner.

  Lori sat beside the cat, leaning against the wall and gazing into the backyard where her downstairs neighbor, Kenny, apparently had thrown a party the night before. Beer cans lay strewn around the firepit and in the grass. The glass-topped table was also scattered with beer cans and a large plastic funnel that was likely a beer bong.

  Kenny, who rented the apartment below Lori's, had moved in the previous fall. He was a junior at CMU and his presence had caused Lori to wonder why she was still living in the apartment she'd been renting since her own junior year at Central Michigan University eight years before. Many of the people she'd graduated with had moved away or bought houses and condos.

  Stu had suggested more than once that she move in with him, but she'd always said no. He rented a small two-bedroom house within walking distance to the restaurant they'd all once worked at and Steak Pit employees regularly crashed at his place after hanging around after work and getting drunk.

  There were days when Lori wondered if her life had gotten stuck. Despite the passage of years, she still worked for the same company she’d started at after graduating from college. She still dated the same guy she'd met during her senior year at MSU. They were going on four years, but oddly she felt no closer to him than she had in the initial months. They'd never moved in together, talked about marriage or children. They lived in a state of suspension.

  "Bev…" Lori whispered the name that really occupied her mind. The name she'd not uttered in years, not allowed herself to remember in any meaningful way in more than a decade.

  After Bev had vanished, Lori had been consumed with fear and grief. That had transformed when kids at school started whispering she'd murdered Bev because she was jealous. Then her life had been uprooted with her parents' divorce. Her mother had packed up Lori and Henry and they'd moved to Clare and into Grandma Mavis's house. New school, new life. Bev had become a figment of her past, her former reality, a scary story that she’d stopped talking about and eventually stopped thinking about.

  She might have gone on doing that forever, living as if Bev had never existed at all, except Jafar had told his story and she couldn't unhear it. The similarities were uncanny, the situation made ever more disturbing by the proximity of the disappearances. Both girls had gone missing in the Manistee National Forest. It was a big forest, sure, but… it felt connected.

  But surely police were aware that more than one girl had vanished in the same general area under the same circumstances. And Lori knew if she opened all that back up again, only to run into the same nothingness, no closure, it could derail her.

  "Derail what?" she asked out loud, laughing dryly. "Derail my perfect life?"

  Matilda lifted her head and then rolled onto her side, raising one leg in the air and curling up to lick her side.

  Lori stood and walked to the little work station beside her kitchen counter. Her desktop computer, also a relic from her days of undergrad, sat on an antique writing desk that had once belonged to her grandma Mavis. Mavis had given it to Lori when she'd moved into the dorms at CMU more than a decade before. Lori turned the computer on and waited for it to churn to life, watching the little time wheel spinning. She'd had the computer upgraded several times. More than one technician had asked her why she didn't just buy a new one and she'd never had a suitable response beyond not wanting to learn a new system.

  When the screen saver appeared, Lori gazed at a photograph of Matilda as a kitten. She stood on her cat tree batting at a dangling furry mouse that hung on a string. Lori clicked the internet browser and then paused with her fingers above the keys, considering the blank search bar.

  She typed ‘Beverly Silva’ and clicked ‘search.’

  Her cell phone rang in her purse, startling her. Lori stood and walked to the bag, fishing out the phone. Stu's name was on the screen.

  She pressed ‘answer’ and held the phone to her ear. "Hi."

  "Hey, where are you? I woke up and all your shit’s gone."

  "Yeah, my grandmother had a little fall last night," she lied. She'd decided on the story on her drive home, knowing anything less serious would have Stu fuming.

  "Oh, damn. Is she okay?"

  "Yeah, she's okay, but I'm heading up there this afternoon."

  "Okay, yeah. Well, we'll miss you."

  "Thanks. Have fun." Lori hung up the phone and returned to her computer.

  Thousands of results had come back, most of them concerning an actress named Beverly Silva who'd starred in a series of slasher films. Lori revised her search, adding ‘Michigan’ after Bev's name. This time the search included links to archived newspaper articles and several forums.

  Lori clicked the first article dated from 2008 that appeared.

  Ten Years and Still No Answers.

  Every year on Beverly Silva’s birthday, her mother, father, sister, and grandmother gather on Tanglewood Drive at the edge of the Manistee National Forest to release fourteen yellow balloons.

  ”Yellow was Bev's favorite color,” explains her mother, Carrie Silva.

  Fourteen is Beverly Silva’s eternal age. The age she was when she walked into the woods with her best friend and never walked back out.

  Beverly's friend, also a minor and thus unnamed, told police that Beverly climbed up a large oak tree to watch the sunset. She's never been seen again. Law enforcement has speculated that the girls got separated and Bev sustained an injury of some sort. They theorize she eventually succumbed to the elements. Her parents disagree. They believe something more sinister occurred in the woods that night.

  "Bev was an athlete, a runner and a swimmer,” insists Beverly’s father, Francisco Silva. “She grew up in the woods. We live on thirty acres. She loved to climb trees and swim in the streams. She was a strong swimmer, climber, a strong girl. We believe and we have always believed that something bad happened to Beverly that night."

  Cold case investigator Pete Weyland, with the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, started looking into the case in 2006, eight years after Beverly vanished. He considered all the theories: an accident in the woods, the possibility that Beverly got lost and eventually perished from the elements, a potential runaway and finally foul play. He declined to commit to any outcome, but said he too finds it very suspicious that no evidence of Beverly has ever been found despite extensive searches that went on for three weeks.

  Weyland said, "If Bev had fallen in the pond and drowned, gotten hurt or gotten stuck out there, it's hard to believe one of those searches didn't find her."

  Police were informed after nightfall, further complicating initial search efforts.

  Despite a decade gone by, Lake County investigators say Beverly’s case is open and ongoing.

  Lori scrolled further down the page where a video of the news report also appeared. She clicked play. Lori gasped as Bev’s mom and dad materialized on the screen. They stood in Bev’s bedroom, unchanged though ten years had gone by.

  Tears streamed down Francisco Silva’s face. "We put all the… the gifts over here in this corner,” he said. “People sent teddy bears and flowers and trinkets for when she came home. I still remember when we got this one." He picked up a plush yellow bear. "She collected Beanie Babies, and she didn’t have this one. I said to Carrie, ‘Oh, she'll just love this,’ and I remembered that it had been weeks and maybe she wasn't coming home. She wasn't ever going to see these things. We were piling this stuff in her room like one day she'd touch it and laugh and hug us again, but—" His voice broke and he turned from the camera.

  Carrie Silva closed her eyes and reached a trembling hand to her husband's back. When she looked back at the camera, her eyes were filled with tears.

  "Rosa,” Carrie said, “
Francisco's mother, called us the night Bev disappeared. She said, ‘Go check on Beverly,’ and we said, ‘She's at a girlfriend's house, she’s fine.’ But Rosa was very persistent. She’s an older woman from Mexico and… sometime she’s quite superstitious. We dismissed her worries." Carrie's hand fell away from Francisco. "I wonder today, if I'd gotten in my car right then and driven to Bev's friend's house, could I have changed everything? Could I have gotten to her first?"

  Tears streamed down Lori’s face as she watched Beverly’s parents, their grief palpable. Accusing, weepy eyes glared at her with the unmistakable question: Why wasn’t it you?

  Lori pushed away from the computer, chair rolling across the room as sobs rocked her body. She clutched her arms around herself trying to hold it all in, keep the emptiness from spilling out. Matilda jumped from her window seat and padded over, rubbing against her legs.

  After a time, Lori’s cries gave way to whimpers and then to silence. She thought of Jafar's story from the night before. He'd said it had happened in a town near Lake Michigan. Lori had visited those towns with her family in the summers before Bev vanished, before their intact life disintegrated. They'd camped in Ludington and gone further south a few times to hike the sand dunes at Silver Lake. Jafar had said the girl's name was Summer.

  Steeling herself against the image of Bev’s parents on the screen, Lori moved back to her computer, exited out of the video and returned to the search bar. She paused with her hands over the keyboard, the cursor blinking.

  Did she want to know about this second girl? Would she be better off ending the search, grabbing her copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes, and escaping into someone else’s life for a while? She glanced at the bay window where sun slanted through the open curtains and painted the wood floors in honey.

  "No," she murmured after a moment of imagining curling up in the window, book open and disappearing into the pages for hours.

  She typed, 'Summer missing Manistee National Forest.'

  A series of results populated on the screen. The first included a newspaper article published only two days before.

  Twenty Years This Week Since Summer Newton Vanished Without a Trace.

  6

  Lori cast a final, fleeting look at her book and the bay window, and then she turned back to the article.

  It was a warm evening in June when Summer Newton and her best friend, Carmen Shaw, walked into the Manistee National Forest in Manistee, Michigan. The girls talked excitedly about the beginning of summer vacation, which had started the previous week. All was right in the world until they stumbled upon a cabin in the woods.

  The cabin was derelict. It had been built during Manistee's boom logging years and long since abandoned. For a time, hunters made use of the little structure as a deer blind. Children crept across the wood floor, daring each other to run all the way in and touch the opposite wall before sprinting back into the forest to safety.

  Summer went in for reasons that are still unclear, though her friend later told investigators she had a curious spirit and simply wanted a closer look into the old cabin. Summer's parents would later tell police she was a collector of odds and ends. Stones lined the windowsill in her bedroom and a box contained trinkets she'd found from beach glass to old Coca-Cola bottles.

  Summer walked into the cabin and her friend stayed behind, kicking around the forest, and grew frustrated when Summer didn't reappear. Carmen called Summer's name, but the girl did not emerge.

  That evening, Summer wore a unique bracelet—a tambourine made of strong leather with zils, or little metal discs, inserted in the leather. It made a jangling sound as she walked. Carmen had heard the bracelet when Summer entered the cabin, but the piece of jewelry had grown silent as the minutes stretched on.

  As time passed, Carmen worried that a piece of roof had fallen in on Summer. Carmen had heard no commotion, but she was lost for a better explanation. She began to call Summer's name and finally ventured fearfully into the cabin. Summer was not inside.

  Carmen searched the woods around the cabin and then, after a period of a half hour to an hour—reports differ—she returned to her home and asked her older brother Benjamin Shaw to help in the search. Ben, then sixteen, and Carmen returned to the woods. They found no trace of Summer in the cabin or the surrounding forest.

  They alerted their parents and then Summer’s parents at approximately eight p.m. A search by family turned up nothing. Police were informed of the missing girl at ten p.m.

  A large-scale search did not immediately occur. Investigators with the Manistee Police Department were not initially alarmed. It was 1993 after all, and the kids had only just begun summer vacation. Plus, Summer Newton was fourteen years old, hardly a child. They assumed she'd argued with her friend and stalked off.

  Summer's parents were less convinced. They contacted additional family and friends and along with the Shaw family resumed their search. The police would not begin their own search, along with more than a hundred volunteers, until the following day, an unfortunate delay considering that night a rain storm swept in from Lake Michigan, potentially wiping away critical evidence.

  Summer's case grew as cold as winter long before the snow flew that year. No one had seen anything. There were no confirmed sightings of the fourteen-year-old. Police considered the usual suspects, including a local man with a history of sexual misconduct. They interviewed the residents who lived within two miles of the woods, which in these parts consisted of only twelve houses.

  By the fall of 1993, police shifted their focus to Benjamin Shaw, the sixteen-year-old brother of Carmen, Summer's best friend. He claimed he was at home when Summer vanished, but since both parents were away, investigators could not corroborate this. Still, no evidence pointed to Ben other than his proximity to the scene and rumors that he had a short fuse.

  Summer's family has not given up hope, but in the years after she vanished, the grief became more than they could bear. They moved south, relocating to a suburb outside of Grand Rapids.

  Her parents no longer speak to the press about the case, but her only sibling, a sister named Spring, said this, "I feel like my family has lived two lives—the life when Summer was alive and the life after. The second life is a grayer life, a quieter life, a life marked by grief. If you're reading this and you know something, please tell the Manistee Police. Twenty years is too long not to know what happened to my big sister."

  Lori reread the article and searched for the neon glowing link she'd sensed two nights before when Jafar had regaled them with the campfire tale. There were similarities, but were they groundbreaking similarities? Were they merely the tendency of the mind to group slightly similar things to ease the burden on its processing system? Or did Bev and Summer have something more in common? They'd been around the same age. They'd both disappeared from the Manistee National Forest. Both girls had gone missing in June. They'd both been wearing jewelry that made a tinkling sound. But the girls had vanished five years and more than fifty miles apart.

  Lori studied Summer's picture. She was pretty as Bev had been, but she looked petite where Bev had been long and lean with red-blonde hair and dark eyes. Summer had blonde hair and pale eyes, a wide smile with perfectly formed teeth.

  "Dude, it's going to be epic!" The shout cut through Lori's thoughts, and she cringed at her downstairs neighbor Kenny’s voice.

  She stood and walked to the bay window, where she could see Kenny in the backyard with several friends. Thankfully one girl, clad in turquoise pajama pants with the word ‘flirty’ on the butt, was wandering the yard with a trash bag, throwing beer cans inside.

  Another girl held a bundle of Christmas lights. Kenny and a second guy, who stood a foot taller than Kenny and looked like he'd made lifting weights his life purpose, surveyed the back lawn as if preparing for a major renovation project.

  "I'm thinking beer pong over here," Kenny said. "Bonfire right there, obviously." He gestured at the firepit.

  "We totally need a jello sho
t station," the girl in turquoise pajamas called. "I mean it's Sydney's twenty-first birthday."

  Lori sighed. So much for her relaxing weekend reading in her bay window. It was barely noon, and Kenny was already getting ready for another party.

  Lori glanced at her backpack, still sitting inside the door.

  She smoothed the fur down on Matilda's head. The cat stood and rubbed against her hand before jumping from the window and padding to her food bowl in the kitchen. She looked back at Lori expectantly. Lori followed her and filled her food and water bowls.

  "I promise we'll cuddle tomorrow, Matilda," she told the cat.

  Lori slung her bag over her shoulder and walked out the door.

  Lori drove the hour north to Clare, to the home her mother shared with her grandmother Mavis. Lori knocked on the front door and then slid her key into the lock.

  "Mom, it's Lori," she called, pushing into the entryway. She left her backpack on the floor and walked down the hall into the living room, where she found her mom and grandma watching television.

  "It's Lorraine," her mother announced, pushing the handle of her reclining chair forward and standing up. "I didn't know you were coming for a visit." She smiled and gathered Lori in a hug.

  "Hi, Mom, Hi, Grandma."

  "Hi, Lorraine," Grandma Mavis said. "Don't you look pretty? All grown up. We're watching Laverne & Shirley. I love how you can watch any old thing now."

  Lori’s mother released her and turned for the kitchen. "I made homemade chicken noodle soup and Grandma baked bread and cookies this morning. She had a bug in her bonnet for baking. She must have sensed you were coming our way. Can I get you a bowl?"

  "Yeah, sure. Thanks, Mom." Lori sat at the kitchen table as her mother heaped ladles of chicken noodle soup into a ceramic dish. She slathered a hunk of bread with butter and slid the food in front of Lori.