by A J Rivers
Herman is Xavier's snail. He was a Christmas gift from Dean and lives in an aquarium about fifty times bigger than the space he actually needs. Half the time Xavier can't even find him.
"Well, if Herman isn't expecting you back for a while, what do you want to do, Xavier?"
A little more than an hour later, the pretend roller coaster hits the brake run and pulls into the station with the distinct grind of metal on metal. Sam and I dutifully lean forward, then plop backwards against the couch cushions.
"That was a good one," Xavier says. "A little rough on the ending, but I like the banks in the middle." He sighs. "Well, Herman's nighttime snack is overdue, so I'll be going. Thanks for the trip."
"No problem."
"You're still coming to Harlan in a couple of days, right?"
"Yeah, I have a meeting with Noah White, and there are a couple of things Dad told me to look for at the Order temple," I tell him.
"Vegetable egg foo young with extra gravy, brown rice, and a spring roll? Beef and broccoli and wonton soup?"
"Chocolate chip?"
"Yep. Walnuts for Dean,” he nods.
“He back yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you still tracking him with his phone?”
“He made me stop when I noticed he was at the frozen yogurt shop, and I caught a rideshare down there and interrupted him on a date.”
“Dean was on a date?” I gasp, stunned by the revelation.
“Well, I thought he was. Turns out it was a sting operation, and I almost got shot.”
“You what? Neither of you told me that.”
“Because Dean thought it might distress you.”
“I am distressed.”
“I will let him know he was correct.”
"Tell him to let me know when he gets home safe. And tell Herman goodnight."
Sam is staring at me when I get off the phone.
"You know, if anyone else heard your conversations with him, they would think you were speaking in code about an underground crime ring," he says.
"I know enough about them," I shrug, gathering up some of the snack bowls. "I could probably run a really good one."
"You know, I never would have envisioned myself being the type of person who would pretend to ride a roller coaster," he says, following me into the kitchen.
"What kind of person is that? Compassionate and willing to have fun?" I ask.
"You really know how to just…" he makes a gesture like he's scooping his heart out with a spoon.
I tip the remaining pretzels back into their bag, secure it with a clip, and stuff it out of sight in the pantry, then go over to Sam. Putting my hand over the heart he just scooped out, I lift up on my toes to kiss him.
"Good thing you are exactly that type of person." He gives me a look and I smile at him. "It comforts him. He's able to put himself in that experience just by watching it, and theme parks are his favorite thing. He hasn't been to one in a decade."
"Well, he has, technically," Sam points out.
"Okay, he hasn't been to an operational one or one that hasn't been the site of his attempted murder in a decade. You like watching sports and apparently super ridiculous ghost hunting expeditions. Xavier likes to watch POV ride videos at theme parks. Everybody's got a thing. Besides, how else could you ride roller coasters in three states in one hour?"
I head toward the bedroom and he follows me. "That's true. The ghost hunts aren't super ridiculous, though."
"Sam," I roll my eyes, shooting him an incredulous look as I pull back the covers to get the bed ready.
"I saw you watching. You were fascinated," he gloats, a playful gleam in his eye. “Admit it. It was pretty good.”
"I was fascinated by the sheer quantity of drama one man could put into something as innocuous as a gross abandoned campground bathtub." I lower my voice and take on an extremely serious expression. "This is the very bathtub where Violet's mother said she was rinsing her family's bathing suits when the little girl went missing." I laugh. "I mean… come on."
I make my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth and braid my hair.
"Alright, well when he posts the evidence tomorrow, we'll see what you think about it," Sam says.
"He posts evidence?" I ask around my toothbrush and a mouth full of brisk mint foam.
"Yeah. On their website. They put up unedited versions of their video and audio evidence so people can analyze it for themselves," he explains, reaching for his toothbrush.
I nod. "Well, at least there's an interactive play element to it."
He glares at me and I laugh, giving him a playful smack on the butt as I walk out of the bathroom toward the bed. I still haven't quite gotten over the shock of not knowing about his secret devotion to ghost hunting, but I'm realizing I like finding out something new about him. I might tease him endlessly for it, but he has plenty to tease me about, too. It's nice that after so long, we still have that.
That doesn't mean I'm buying into it, but it's still nice.
Chapter Fifteen
"Caught you," Sam says the next morning when he comes into the kitchen.
I look up from my laptop where it's sitting on the table.
"There's coffee, and I have breakfast in the oven."
"What is it?" he asks.
"That frittata thing Janet gave me the recipe for last Game Night."
"Smells good."
"We'll see." I point at the screen. "Did you know these people do private ghost hunts? As in, people pay them to guide them through haunted houses and stuff and use their equipment?"
Sam pours himself coffee, turns it into socially acceptable melted ice cream with creamer and sugar, and brings it over to the table.
"Oh, so you are interested after all? I knew it!" he crows. "That might be a fun honeymoon."
He has laughter in his eyes when I look up at him, but I still feel the need to shut that down really fast.
"Not even a little bit. Do people actually do this? They sign up to be toured around and try out ghost equipment?" I ask.
"Yes. A lot of them," Sam says. “Everybody has their thing, Emma. You said so yourself.”
That finally draws a chuckle from me, and I raise my hands in surrender as the calendar page on the website loads. “Wow. You're not kidding. They're booked up solid for the next four months.”
“You should look at Halloween. Usually, the couple of weeks around then are booked for a couple of years ahead of time,” he tells me. “What are you doing looking at the site anyway? Just can't resist evaluating the evidence for yourself?”
“Not exactly,” I say. “I don't know what happened to the show last night. Don't you think it's strange it just turned off?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But they could have lost transmission. Or that cop could have gotten tired of dealing with him and not let him turn it back on.”
“He wouldn't have jurisdiction to do that. Not unless he was going to arrest the team under the suspicion of putting in a fake call because of the bones. But for somebody who was putting on so much of a lecture about wasting time, I don't think he would do that. Even if just for the sake of avoiding the paperwork. Something else must have happened.”
“Did you find anything?” Sam asks.
I shake my head, going back to scrolling through the page.
“There isn't any mention of it. Some of the evidence was uploaded, but not the part toward the end of what was shown," I say. "One part they do have is something that's been bothering me. Well, I guess not bothering me, exactly. I just keep thinking about it."
"What is it?" Sam asks.
I go back to the page where the evidence has been uploaded and bring up a portion of a video.
"This is when they first got to the cavern where they found Violet's body. Elsie is climbing up the rocks while Ken talks about what people think about what happened to Violet."
"I remember," Sam says.
"Alright. Listen."
“I mentioned the
re are people who believe Violet simply wandered away and got lost. In fact, that is considered the official theory by the park authorities. But something not many people know, and something law enforcement doesn’t want you to know, is that the case was never closed. It is still an open investigation, and there’s one important detail that is usually left out when talking about this case. There was a witness who …”
I turn the video off. "That's when Elsie yells out to him that she found those bones."
"A witness," Sam states.
I nod. "He never finishes that. Who's he talking about? I went into this thinking her death was suspicious, but figured there was a possibility it could have just been an accident. Things like that do happen. Children go off, they wander around. And even the cavern wasn't really enough to convince me it had to be murder. It's hard for adults to find that place and to get up there, sure, but that's kind of why I thought it might be more plausible she just found it. It's far enough away from the campground she wouldn't have been able to find her way back. It's too deep in the woods. So she would get tired and want to find somewhere to stay during the storm. And think about children on jungle gyms. They can scramble their way into a lot of places.
“Is it completely plausible? Not really. I don't know if I believe a four-year-old getting that far away without making a massive fuss and somebody finding her. And it takes a good bit to die of dehydration outside if you have shade. I don't think she would just sit there the whole time. But that’s how everybody was presenting it. As if there wasn't any other explanation. But if there was a witness…"
My voice drifts off and Sam nods. "If there's a witness nobody talks about, there could be more to the story."
"So, who is it? Why doesn't anybody know who this person is or what he or she had to say?" I ask.
"Could he be talking about Adrian? The neighbor?" Sam asks.
I shake my head. "I don't think so. Ken Abbott already talked about him earlier in the investigation, remember? They went to the cabin, and he described the interview and everything. When he mentioned this person, he said it was something the police didn't want people to know. Why would he say that?"
"I don't know."
"Neither do I. And it strikes me as very odd."
"Something always does, babe," he shrugs, getting to his feet and kissing the top of my head before heading to the coffeemaker for another cup. "Is this thing done?"
The timer goes off.
"Yes," I say. I'm still reading, still sifting through the site to try to find out anything I can.
My phone buzzes on the table beside me, and I glance over at the screen.
"Who's that this early?" Sam asks.
"Eric," I tell him.
"What did you ask him to find out for you?" Sam asks.
"He's one of my best friends," I say. "Has been for a long time. And he and my other best friend are getting ready to have a baby together. Maybe he's calling me to tell me about that. Or even just to say hi."
He turns to me, still wearing the purple and blue floral oven mitt he used to get the hot frittata out and holding a metal spatula in the other hand. On his face is an eye roll even bigger than the one I had last night watching the investigation. We hold at a stalemate for a brief second.
"I had him try to dig up the original case files so I could figure out who the witness was. And maybe about the other disappearances and deaths, too."
"There it is," Sam says.
He comes to the table with two plates of food and sets one in front of me before sliding my computer out of the way.
"I'm just curious. Ever since reading that comment about the curse, and then Ken mentioned the curse during the investigation. He said it right to the officer. What are they talking about?"
"People were murdered or disappeared from the same campground four years in a row. To a lot of people, that would sound like a curse," he offers. "And even if someone thinks that Violet's death was an accident, that still sounds fairly curse-like to me.
"So, is it the campground?" I ask.
"What do you mean?"
"We’re going to go with the working theory that in this and any other instance I use it, 'curse' just refers to the tendency for bad things to occur while linked to one another in some way. All right?"
"You can just take all the whimsy and mystery right out of things, can't you?" he asks.
"In this circumstance, yes. For all intents and purposes, Santa Claus is real, the Easter Bunny hid all those eggs in your underwear drawer this spring, and every single one of the princesses at Disney World is actual royalty right out of the storybooks. But in this case, curse just means bad shit happens for some interconnected reason."
He thinks for a second. "I’ll take that."
"Good. So, what do you think? What's the curse? Why that place? What's linking the deaths and disappearances? The campground? Or something else?"
"I really don't know," Sam says. "I haven't looked into the cases very deeply."
"But what do you think happened to Violet? Do you think she was murdered?"
"Yes," Sam nods without hesitation. "I can't believe it was an accident or a coincidence."
"And what about the ones who went missing but weren't found?" I ask. "Do you think they're alive somewhere?"
"After knowing what happened to the others, would you want them to be?" Sam asks.
"I'm glad Julia is."
Chapter Sixteen
"The Bureau wasn't involved in these cases when they happened, since it was under the national park rangers’ jurisdiction. Apparently, there was a task force assigned to look into it after the last four disappeared, but nothing really came of it. Eric was able to get me the case files the rangers handed over to the task force, along with the information they got from their investigation."
"Which wasn't very much," Xavier comments. It’s been a couple of days since the night of the broadcast, but the deaths and disappearances of Violet Montgomery and all those other victims are still lingering in my mind.
"How do you know that?" I ask.
"Because if it was very much, you would have said 'Xavier, I figured everything out and we're going to go get the bad guy', not 'nothing really came of it'."
"Oh," I say. "Yeah, that's probably true. I don't know if I would have used those words exactly, but… yeah. Anyway, I went back to the first case, Violet's case, trying to find more about that witness."
"What witness?" Xavier asks.
He disappears from the screen and comes back a few seconds later with an apple.
"The one Ken Abbott mentioned. Remember? When he was talking about Violet and what happened to her, he said that a lot of people like to think that it was an accident. But that there's a little-known fact about the case: there was a witness. Who knows who it was or what exactly that witness said, but whoever it was had enough significance to make officers pretty confident something else happened that day.”
“If there was a witness, wouldn't that be included in the case files?” Xavier asks.
“Yes. But here's the thing, the information is redacted. In everything. The police files, the Bureau files. All identifying information is removed.”
“Why would they do that?” Xavier wonders. “Unless the witness couldn't legally be identified?”
“It was a minor,” I explain. “They couldn't release personal information.”
"Does the file have the interview? What did the witness say?" Xavier asks.
"Most of it is redacted, so I don't have all the details. But from what I can read, it seems this person was at the campground that day. He or she was in the woods and was found by police during the initial investigation. The witness had blood on him or her, but explained it was from a fall.. It wasn't until Violet was found that the witness mentioned being chased and seeing someone dragging Violet through the woods. Apparently, though, the statement wasn't considered exactly credible."
"But that must be fairly easy to verify, shouldn't it?" Xavier asks.
"You okay?" Dean asks, coming into the room with Xavier. "I'm going to make lunch. Are you hungry?"
"Yes. Say hello to your cousin."
Dean leans to the side slightly and looks into the screen, then waves.
"What are you up to?" he asks. "I thought you were coming here tomorrow."
"I am," I tell him. "But I've been looking into Arrow Lake Campground, and I wanted to tell Xavier about it since he was interested in it during the investigation last night."
Dean nods, the expression on his face hard to read.
"You look tired," I observe.
"I am. I didn't get home until really late last night," he says.
“Another date?”
This time, it’s Dean’s turn to roll his eyes.
"Anyway, I noticed that. It was almost sunrise when you texted me."
"Xavier wouldn't let me go to sleep until I did," he says.
"Thank you, Xavier."
"He kicked the side of my bed until I got up and did it," Dean says.
"Thank you, Xavier."
"All right, I'm making food," Dean says.
"Is there anything in any of the other interviews that might give some hints about who this witness is?” Xavier asks.
“What witness? Do you know? What are you talking about?”
“On the investigation special, Ken Abbott was talking about the different ideas about what might have happened to Violet Montgomery. He pointed out that a lot of people think that it was just an accident, but there are conflicting reports. And one of those conflicting reports is that apparently there was a witness,” I say.
“A witness?” Dean asks. “I thought nobody knew what happened to her.”
“Well, therein lies the conflict. There was a witness. I have the reports, the interviews. This person existed. The question is whether he or she actually saw anything. I don't know exactly what the testimony said because the pages are redacted, but there's some information in there. The witness was a minor, so we don't know anything about him or her,” I say.