Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel

by J. R. Erickson

  Lori looked at the paper and then at Ben. "Like everyone? I doubt I could even remember most of their names."

  "Well, rattle off anyone you can remember. Just men."

  "Why just men?"

  "Because in situations like these it's usually men."

  12

  Lori's face fell. "Oh, okay. Umm... well, the first man who was there that night was Mark Melton. He was our next-door neighbor, and he came to look right away."

  "How did he know she was missing?"

  "My mom called Charlotte, his wife, to come over and watch my little brother while we went back to the woods. Mark had some kind of survivalist training or something so he joined us."

  "And how long was that after she'd disappeared?"

  "Less than an hour."

  "Okay, that makes it unlikely to be him. After all, he wouldn't have had much time to conceal her or her body. Who else?"

  Lori closed her eyes and tried to remember. The moments after Mark had joined them in the woods blurred. "After Mark came, we walked back to the house. My mom thought Bev might have made her way back by then, but she wasn't there. My mom called Bev's parents and then the police. They didn't let me go back to the woods. Within an hour police had a search group out, and Mark had gotten a bunch of the neighborhood guys to join. Some of the women too, but a lot of them had small children at home."

  "What about your dad? Did he help search?"

  Lori's face pinched, and she opened her eyes. "No. He didn't come home until after midnight. Things had been... strained between my parents. That might have been the night that put the final nail in the coffin for them."

  "They split up?"

  Lori nodded.

  "Where was your dad?"

  "Working, he said, and honestly I've never gotten the full story. I think he was having an affair."

  Ben looked at her curiously for another moment and then nodded. "What's his name?"

  "Brian Hicks. He moved to Florida though."

  Ben wrote down his name. Lori's eyes lingered on the name for another moment.

  "Anyone who was noticeably absent? Like someone in the neighborhood you'd expect to be searching who never showed up?"

  "No. Not that I'm aware of, but since I didn't get to go back out, I don't really know who showed up that night."

  The door to the café opened, and Deb walked out with a tray. "Dinner is served," she announced, sliding a plate with a hunk of quiche in front of Ben, who hastily moved his notebook aside. She added the salad beside it.

  "Did you decide on anything?" She looked at Lori.

  "No, thanks. Just a refill of coffee, please."

  "Make that two," Ben said, tapping his mostly empty mug.

  "In a jiff." Deb walked back into the café and returned a moment later with a pot of coffee. "Fresh-brewed," she announced.

  Ben took a few bites of his quiche and then returned to his notebook. "How about whispers in the neighborhood? Did anyone have suspicions?"

  "Not about people. The whispers mostly landed on a couple of swamp spots out there. People seemed to think she'd probably gotten lost, twisted an ankle or something and ended up succumbing to the elements."

  "Yeah. That's how we leaned too, but..." He shook his head. "Four girls didn't disappear without a trace after spraining an ankle in the woods."

  "Have you ever considered something supernatural?" Lori asked.

  "Like the Dogman?" Ben grinned.

  "Maybe, or, like... Bigfoot."

  Ben took a bite of salad, chewed, and swallowed. "No. I can say with complete honesty the Dogman and Bigfoot never crossed my mind as potential culprits."

  "Okay, but did anything not of this world ever cross your mind?"

  "No, and based on what you just said, that's why. 'Not of this world.' If it's not of this world, it doesn't exist. If it doesn't exist, it couldn't have kidnapped a girl in the woods."

  Lori sighed. "This place doesn't serve any wine, do they? I could use a drink."

  "Nope, they're dry as bone."

  "How about you? Want to grab a drink after this?"

  "I'm also as dry as a bone," he said. "Not in personality, I hope. But in the alcohol department."

  "You don't drink?"

  He shook his head.

  "Is it you don't drink because you had a problem with it or just don't enjoy it?" She realized it was a very personal question after she asked it and almost took it back, but Ben didn't look affronted.

  "I don't drink because my dad had a problem with it. Nothing crazy until after Summer went missing and then our entire family became pariahs in Manistee. My dad owned a hardware store in town. People stopped shopping there. It was like they'd held a town hall meeting and vetoed our family because Summer disappeared.”

  "That's ridiculous."

  "Yeah, it is. Summer had an uncle, J.B. Newton. He had a lot of pull in town and he pointed to me right away. I'd gotten into a scuffle with his kid the year before because the little punk trashed my bike after I made out with his girlfriend at a football game. J.B. hung a target on my back, started telling everyone in town that all the signs were there that I'd been a ticking time bomb." Ben set his jaw. "So that's my roundabout way of explaining why I don't drink. My dad started coming home with cases of beer, then he started just drinking them right there in the hardware store, sometimes stumbling out into the middle of the street, inebriated and cussing out the town."

  "Her disappearing wreaked havoc on your family."

  "Destroyed it. My dad's business closed. My parents got divorced about a year and a half after she vanished. I wanted to move. I begged my mom, but... she was a single mom after my dad left. He's sober now, but he went off the rails for a few years. Now he lives downstate. I see him a couple times a year."

  "Is your mom still in Manistee?"

  "Hell, no. She got out when Carm and I left for college. She just couldn't afford to get a house with three bedrooms. That was part of why we stayed. After we left, she found an apartment on the east side of the state—Alpena area, it's close to her sisters—and she moved there. This year she got remarried. She lives with Greg now in a little ranch on a golf course. She's doing a lot better."

  "How about Carmen?"

  Ben scratched his jaw. "Carmen lives in deep denial. She stopped talking about Summer, stopped acknowledging it ever happened."

  "I did that too," Lori murmured.

  "You did?"

  Lori nodded. "Kids at school whispered about me. They said I was jealous of Bev and murdered her and threw her in the pond. It didn't matter that they had dragged the pond." She shook her head bitterly. "You never imagine something like that will happen to you, this crazy, horrible thing, and then somehow the aftermath is even worse. Your life implodes."

  "Yep. In the years after, I wondered, what if I'd gone to wrestling practice that night like I'd planned? Would everything have been different? If it had only been Carmen home that night and she'd just run home and called Summer's parents instead of me going out there and looking? Maybe people never would have blamed me and thus my family."

  "The evening Bev disappeared she almost didn't come to my house. It was the last week of school and her parents had sent her a note that she could ride the bus home with me. She got a poor grade on her science test and said she'd better just go home—her parents would be mad if she came to my house instead. I talked her into it. ‘It's our last week of school, come on, either way you're in trouble, let's have fun before they find out.’ If I hadn't talked her into it, she never would have been in the woods that night."

  "That's a losing game, the what-ifs. I've played it enough to know. But anyway, just because I don't drink doesn't mean I won't join you."

  Lori sighed, pushing her fingers into the hollows by her eyes. "No. I'd better take that back. I have to drive home and work tomorrow. I'm tired and all of this"—she nodded at the notebook—"is taking every bit of brain power I have left to concentrate on. What about you? Was there anyone you suspected?
"

  "Hector Dunn," Ben told her, picking up his phone. He clicked several things and then handed it to her.

  An image of a grizzled man, looking down and left rather than straight at the camera, populated on the screen. Beneath the image was a headline that read, 'Local man arrested for attempted abduction of teen.'

  He was bald and his ears were large, protruding from the sides of his head. One of his eyebrows had a line through the center as if he'd had an injury that prevented a strip of hair from growing back. His nose was beak-like, his lips thin and chapped.

  "This is his mugshot from 1994. A year after Summer vanished, he tried to kidnap a girl."

  "Police arrested him?"

  "Yep, he drove up behind a twelve-year-old girl who was riding her bicycle. He tried to force her into the woods. A farm truck carrying a trailer of heifers came along and the girl bolted. The farmer said later he almost hit her, but slammed on the brakes. She jumped into the passenger side of the truck, crawling right up on his wife's lap. They drove her straight to the police. Hector took off, but not before the wife wrote down his license plate number. Cops picked him up that evening at his house and booked him."

  "Did he go to prison?"

  Ben glowered. "Nope. Hector coughed up some alibi that his mother corroborated. Mind you, she pulled the same stunt back in 1988, I found out later, after someone had accused him of peeping in their daughter's window. ‘Oh, no, not my Hector,’ his mother said, ‘he was right here with me all night.’ Lying straight to investigators' faces when they had not only the girl he tried to abduct, but the farmer and his wife who saw Dunn plain as day and wrote down his license plate number. But then the girl got cold feet and didn't want to testify. Dunn got off scot-free."

  "That's insane."

  "Yep. Our good ole justice system."

  "How did you get focused on him for Summer?"

  "Luck really. A few people in our neighborhood mentioned seeing a van in the area the day Summer disappeared, a van that looked an awful lot like Dunn's van. I saw his face in the paper that next summer and when I read what he'd done and then the description of his van, I put two and two together."

  "Did you tell the police?"

  "Yeah, and supposedly they looked into him, but couldn't make a case."

  "But you think he did it?"

  "Yeah. I do."

  Deb returned with their checks.

  "I've got this," Ben told Lori, handing Deb his credit card.

  "Thanks," Lori said, covering her mouth as a yawn erupted. "What now?" she asked. "I mean, not right now. Right now, I've got to go home and go to bed, but what do we do next with all of this?"

  Ben crumpled his napkin and dropped it on his empty plate. "We dig."

  "So you want to keep looking into this?"

  Ben looked away, his expression troubled, but when he looked back at Lori, he appeared determined. "Yeah. The police will never solve these cases. If we tried to make the link between the four girls, we'd probably get laughed out of town. But if we could find a viable suspect… who knows? Maybe we could put it to rest—the mystery and maybe even Summer."

  "And Bev."

  "Exactly."

  Ben spent the evening hunting online for more information about the missing girls. When he fell into bed after eleven, his brain was a haze of disturbing facts and a collage of photographs of pretty young girls who’d walked into the forest and never reemerged. When he finally drifted off, a vision of Summer danced behind his eyes.

  Ben stood in front of the ramshackle cabin, every detail stark and pulsing. He'd never noticed the mushrooms, white and bulbous, growing from the front right corner of the shack.

  He'd walked inside a thousand times after Summer vanished, searched on hands and knees for some scrap of her left behind, some clue that pointed to where she'd gone, but he'd never found so much as a hair. Now, as he gazed at the formidable little structure, a terrible dread laced his blood and traveled to his heart, thumping faster with each passing second.

  Though he did not want to go in, his legs carried him through the doorless entryway. He smelled the mildewy interior.

  He turned around the single wall that separated the two halves of the cabin, and as he did, he spotted a figure standing in the far back corner, facing the wall as if looking out a window, except no window stood there. As he stepped closer, he saw Summer's long blonde hair above those red and white striped shorts. Tan legs disappeared into white tennis shoes. His mouth fell open and his heart leapt with joy, but still something in him felt disturbed at the sight of her.

  She turned haltingly, oddly, and Ben's eyes went wide.

  Her face was a pocked pool of withered gray flesh. Worms squirmed from a gaping hole in her right cheek and he could see bits of her teeth clinging to her black gums. Her eyes were two balls of yellow jelly. Her arms hung slack at her sides and he saw much of her flesh had fallen away from the wrists. Her hands were brown and bent like the branches of a tree. Though she didn't look at him, more down and off to the side, he sensed her growing awareness of him.

  He tried to shriek, to leap away, to turn and run, but he could not move, could not make a sound, and suddenly she darted like a shadow and closed the gap between them.

  Ben's eyes popped open, a whine groaned out of him and his heart heaved against his breastbone.

  "Holy fuck," he whispered into the darkness, the image of Summer not trailing away as dreams do, but glaring in his mind's eye as if it had been burned there.

  He shuddered and blinked into a darkness so black it instantly troubled him. He gazed into nothingness, unable to discern anything but that which he could feel beneath him—the softness of his sheets and the prickly sensation of gooseflesh running up his legs and arms.

  Gradually he understood why the darkness so disturbed him. The light that always trickled in beneath his bedroom door was no longer. This light came not from a single source but from two—the dim bathroom light that he left on and the small halo of light that poured in from the fixture by the front door.

  Even the shuttering red light of his fire alarm was invisible in the darkness. His mind scrambled to explain it. A power outage did not explain the battery-operated fire alarm failing.

  He stood and groped blindly through the room, hitting his shin on the hard edge of the chair that usually sat tucked into the corner, at times piled with clean laundry waiting to be put away. He cursed and reached into the darkness, searching for the wall that should be behind the chair, but there was no wall, only empty air, and he understood that he'd hit the chair not because he'd lost his bearings, but because it had been relocated from the corner of the room to the empty space between his bed and dresser.

  As Ben groped in the darkness, the entire house came to life, lights blazed into the room and sounds boomed.

  He smacked into his dresser, the corner poking meanly into his chest, and stumbled back, shielding his eyes as the sounds of television and music and a beeping alarm blared throughout the house.

  The room washed in blinding yellow light. The television turned on a loud movie and an actor screamed as if the volume had been cranked to its maximum. The speakers strained under the sound.

  Ben heard the radio that sat on the kitchen counter, loud, deafening, and playing a familiar and haunting song—the Police singing Every Breath You Take. He might have heard it in the intervening years, but now it transported him back two decades to the first time he and Summer had kissed, and she'd whispered, 'Now this is our song.'

  As he tripped downstairs, the lyrics thundered through his house.

  Since you've gone I've been lost without a trace

  I dream at night I can only see your face

  Ben rushed into the kitchen, turning off the radio first, extinguishing lights as he went, coming more fully awake as adrenaline pumped through his limbs. He lurched into the living room where the flat screen blared the eleven o’clock news. Except it wasn’t local Clare news, it was news from Manistee.

  A r
eporter stood in front of the derelict cabin in the Manistee National Forest.

  “This is the cabin where Summer Newton vanished twenty years ago this past Friday.”

  The image shifted and a photograph of Summer filled the screen. She stood on a cobblestone bridge, blowing rainbow-tinted bubbles through a pink stick. Her blonde hair hung over her shoulders in twin braids.

  Ben stared at the photograph, walking backwards and sagging onto the couch. He’d never seen the picture before, a photo likely given to the reporter by Summer’s mom or sister. Fingers trembling, he picked up the remote and turned off the television.

  13

  Before Lori left the office, she stopped in to see Naomi, who sat flipping through a wedding magazine. Glossy images of brides in princess-style gowns filled the pages.

  Naomi looked up and smiled. "Uh-oh, you caught me." She closed the magazine and set it aside. "You done for the day?"

  "Yeah. I'm going to drop by Stu's and see if he wants to go out to dinner. I still need to make amends for bailing on him when we went camping."

  "Hardly," Naomi said. "He should be making amends for dragging you into the woods to begin with."

  "I need to use some vacation time," Lori said, fidgeting in the doorway. It wasn't a big deal. The company was fully staffed and they had two other HR assistants, but Lori still felt guilty anytime she requested time off.

  "Sure, okay." Naomi flipped open her calendar. "What days do you need?"

  "The rest of this week and next week too."

  Naomi's eyebrows went up. "Starting tomorrow?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay." Naomi pursed her lips, writing in her calendar. "Is there anything going on? You're not sick or—"

  "No. I just... I need some time off."

  "Gotcha. Say no more." Naomi closed the planner. "You're off the rest of the week and next week too. Hey"—Naomi waggled her finger from side to side—"next week is your thirtieth birthday, isn't it? Are you planning to run away with Stu and elope?"