I worried about them mingling with all the other wildlife in the area, but had been frequently told they were fine.
When I first moved to Benedict and asked what wildlife I could potentially run into, I’d been told “all of it.” I hadn’t had any scary run-ins, but I’d seen my share of bears, moose, wolves, and porcupines—lots of porcupines. I knew how to keep a respectful distance, and though I didn’t consider myself wildlife smart yet, I’d become less stupid. At least I hoped so.
Once the carrots were gone, the horse had no interest in me. He turned and carried on with his morning explorations, bidding me adieu with a noisy snort. I wondered if I’d ever again be able to live in the kind of place that didn’t have horses roaming around freely.
I looked around as I pulled my cap down over my ears. It was early, just after eight. Maybe it was the conversation with Randy, maybe it was just the cold, but now, as I looked into the woods again, goose bumps rose on my arms.
“Just get to work,” I muttered, shaking away the chill.
As I made my way back to the other side of the Benedict House, I glanced up to its second-story windows. One was illuminated, probably the window to Ellen’s room. Was Viola there, too, or was Ellen alone and scared?
My truck was old, a purchase I’d made from Ruke, a local Tlingit man. His sister had driven it until she left to marry a man from another tribe. I was surprised every time the engine turned over, but it had never once sputtered. Even this morning, it started right up, and its almost-new tires got me onto the unpaved road that would take me to the Petition. The road had become covered in enough foliage that I wasn’t mired in mud, but it wasn’t an easy drive. Like Viola, I also looked forward to everything freezing over. Of course, other issues would come with that.
I was almost to the Petition’s building, an old tin-roofed hunting shed, when I saw vehicle lights coming my direction. I hoped it was Donner, and I hoped he hadn’t found anything terrible.
I pulled over a little, put the truck in park, and rolled down the window, having to push in the crank with my right hand as I rolled with my left to keep the handle from falling off. I loved my truck.
The oncoming vehicle was, in fact, Donner’s, but it didn’t look like he was going to stop. I put my arm out the window and waved.
He sent me a look I couldn’t quite decipher, other than that he wasn’t happy. He slowed to a halt and rolled down his window. He was dressed in his brown park ranger garb, and a Russian-style fur hat covered his head. His beard took up so much of the rest of his face, I often thought it was a good thing he had such bright green eyes, or no one would be able to distinguish the back of his head from the front.
“What’s up, Beth?” he asked, brusquely. “You okay?”
“I’m fine … I talked to Randy. Did you find anything out there?”
Donner squinted. “What did he tell you?”
“He heard a strange noise.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Donner?” I said when he didn’t continue.
“Listen, don’t go out there, and don’t drive past the Petition building today. The weather has caused some unexpected shifts in the roads. Okay?”
“Sure. I never go farther than the library,” I said.
There was something I could only describe as “tight” to his voice. It was more than shifts in the land, mudslides, concerning him. I was curious, but certainly not brave enough to go exploring on my own.
“Don’t even go that far today. Just to the Petition. Got it?” he said.
“Donner?”
“Do what I say, Beth. Okay?”
“Sure.”
He rolled up his window. His wheels spun for only a second as he put the truck in gear and drove away. I almost turned around and followed him back to the cabin that housed the local police to ask more questions, but no one cared about my position as “the press.” It wasn’t that they didn’t respect me; this part of the world was theirs, Gril’s and everyone else’s who made this wild place a safe place to live. Freedom of the press just wasn’t their priority. I’d stay out of the way for now.
I’d hear the details, probably in gossip form, soon enough. I’d head back to town for lunch later and learn what was going on. More than anything, I hoped Randy was okay.
I put my truck back into drive and continued to the Petition.
Two
Hey, baby girl—How’s it hanging? Low and to the left, I always say. I have a little news, but it’s not about the piece of scum that took you. It’s about your dad. Hold on to your butt. I’m pretty sure he’s alive.
I slammed down the screen of my laptop, an involuntary reaction to the first part of my mother’s email.
She was “pretty sure” my father was alive? The man who had disappeared when I was a child, the man my mother had become obsessed with finding until a new man had come into our lives—the piece of scum who had taken me and kept me in his van for three days.
Though I always thought it a remote possibility that my father wasn’t dead, my mother’s note made me think she’d finally come upon some proof, and if that was the case, this was big news. I might not have acknowledged the fact that deep down I was sure my father was dead, but that was, in fact, what I’d come to believe.
The man who had taken me was still on the run, in hiding. For a time, I thought—was convinced—his name was Levi Brooks, but that had only been a name on an envelope I’d seen inside his van. I’d remembered that envelope on the same day the man’s body had been found on the shoreline near where the Glacier Bay tourist ships docked, the body that Randy had just asked me about, the dead man in the white dress shirt.
I had to tell myself that though this was potentially big news from my mother, it was nothing to be concerned about. My go-to reaction to almost anything “new” had become panic; I thought it must be a post-traumatic-stress reaction, but I wasn’t sure. Yet another deep breath was in order, and a silent reminder to myself that I was safe, that this wasn’t bad news. I was far away from danger. I was fine. I lifted the screen again and it lit to life, the email still there.
So, if he’s alive, that’s the good news. Or maybe it’s the bad news, hard to know for sure at this point. Fucker. It’s good he might not have been murdered, killed, torn apart limb by limb, whatever. Maybe you can tell I’m having a hard time figuring out how to feel about all of this. What are we supposed to make of the fact that he might have left us on purpose? Hang on, though—I don’t know all the details. Not yet, at least. I’m going to get them. I’m going to get him. I don’t know what I’ll do with him, but if he is alive, he will have to answer for leaving us.
Just wanted you to know the latest. I’ll keep on keeping on and let you know if I find anything t’all about the scumbags in our lives. So you don’t worry, I’m going to talk to Detective Majors about this too. I won’t run off half-cocked. I’d rather be well armed with information and then cock-up all the way.
LURVE you so much.
Mom.
“Oh, Mom,” I said when I finished reading the email. “Oh, Mill.”
Millicent Rivers, my mother, would always be a force of nature. I loved her, but she could be exhausting.
I decided to try to look on a bright side, however dim it might be. The man who’d taken me—I’d been calling him my “unsub,” for “unidentified subject”—was still out there, and I knew my mother would kill him if she found him. But if she was distracted by my father’s possible whereabouts, then her priority was no longer killing the guy who had terrorized me. I wanted him dead, but I didn’t want my mother to pay for the crime.
A surprise—though it shouldn’t have been—twinge of pain suddenly ran along the side of my head, right next to the scar from my brain surgery. I stopped everything, stopped thinking, and sat back in my chair. I closed my eyes, placed my palms on my thighs, and did even more deep breathing as I tried to meditate, think about things that wouldn’t take me back to either those three days I’d been held capt
ive or when my father had disappeared—my two most traumatic experiences—and the resulting feelings that had just been stirred up.
Learning to rein in and control uncontrollable feelings made for hard work. I was determined to rise above everything that had tried to bring me down, but to do that, I had to learn to control not only my reactive panic but the blinding pain, the strange “spells” that sometimes came on during moments of stress.
Dr. Genero, my brain surgeon, told me the pain would subside over time. It had, a little. But when I talked to her about it, I lied and said it was getting much better. I don’t know why I lied; maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her more than I already had when I’d left the hospital without being properly discharged. She and I had talked some over the phone, but she hoped I could find someone local to help me. She said it would still take time for the pain to go away completely, but she thought a therapist of some sort might help with it as well as the unreasonable panic, too.
I still hadn’t found a doctor or a therapist I could trust. I didn’t want to talk to anyone in Benedict about the abduction—about who I truly was—except Gril. I didn’t trust anything online, either, but I was still looking.
I was working on it.
The pain in my head rode an upward wave, but not for long. I was able to relax so that the threat of a sharp knifelike stab didn’t come, and I was left with a low, dull ache. I could work with a dull ache.
I hoped to get to the point where memories were just normal thoughts, not things that sent me to places I didn’t want to go back to.
Not long ago, I had a memory of my father rehearsing his sales pitch to me. He’d sold cleaning supplies—he’d “made women’s lives easier and better.” But there had been a moment in that memory when my father had seemed bothered by something he might have done, some wrong he hadn’t righted. Maybe there was something more to those moments, but I couldn’t be sure. I opened my eyes, dull ache and all, and decided that now wasn’t the time to try to remember anything else. I should just get to work.
I had a newspaper to put together, and a thriller to write, which you’d think would have gotten easier after living one of my very own terrifying plotlines. No such luck. Writing books was still a one-word-at-a-time job that would never be easy. At least it hadn’t become more difficult.
My office, the shed where the now deceased Bobby Reardon had created the Benedict Petition, was small. Bobby had written on well-used typewriters and used a newfangled copy machine as his printing press. Along with the two old desks in the place, he’d adorned the walls with old movie posters and kept a bottle of whiskey in a bottom desk drawer. I’d become accustomed to my visitors and their expectations of a drink and some friendly conversation. I still couldn’t bring myself to leave the door unlocked, but most everyone knew to knock.
I’d kept Bobby’s typewriters and added one of my own, an ancient Olympia I’d found years earlier in a Missouri Ozarks antiques shop. I always wrote my first drafts on the typewriter. I’d been working on my latest thriller for two months now. The first draft was almost done. I’d gone with medical technology this time, a mix between Robin Cook’s early book Coma and the 2001 movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. It had been going well, and my editor had been pleased with updates I’d sent.
I’d considered writing about, re-creating, what I remembered going through with my unsub, but I wasn’t ready to do that to myself; also, sometimes truth just really was way too off the rails to be accepted as fiction. If I could find a way to make the story therapeutic, then maybe. But not now.
My head was clear enough to get to work, but just as I threaded a clean sheet of paper into my typewriter, a knock sounded on the door. The locked door wasn’t just because I was paranoid; it also gave me a chance to hide my work before I let anyone in, since Gril was the only person who knew I was also the novelist Elizabeth Fairchild.
I hadn’t typed anything for either the newspaper or the novel yet, but I sat frozen for a moment, hoping whoever was on the other side of the door would announce themselves. They knocked again.
“Who’s there?” I said.
A series of knocks, this time rapid-fire.
“Shit.” I pushed away from the desk and walked the three steps to the door.
“Who is it?” I asked, one hand on the doorknob.
There was no answer, so I asked again. Still no answer.
Another set of quick knocks startled me back a step or two. The calm I’d gathered was gone. Why wouldn’t they tell me who they were?
“I need to know who it is before I open the door,” I said as I approached again.
I had no weapon. I looked around the shed. The most lethal things were a lamp and the typewriters. I could heave a lamp better. I took a step to grab it.
Then I heard something: a garbled noise that verged on an airy scream. Randy had said something about hearing something like a scream, something that was a mix between animal and human. Was I hearing the same thing?
If I could have put myself outside that moment and observed it, I would have yelled at myself not to open the door, but I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop my shaking fingers from turning the lock and then the doorknob.
Three
“Hello,” I managed to squawk. I cleared my throat. My entire body was now shaking, my heart beating fast in my ears. But the grown-up part of me told me to get it together.
Two girls stood on the small stoop. They were young, probably not even ten years old. They were both dressed in boots, pants, and coats, it seemed, but it was hard to tell; they were covered in mud.
I could see their eyes. One girl’s were brown, the other’s blue.
The blue-eyed girl nodded and blinked at me.
The idea that something here was so very wrong began to solidify in my mind. My focus moved from my own nightmares to the fact that this just wasn’t normal, even for Benedict, Alaska. As if a switch had been flipped, I stopped shaking. I looked out behind the girls and saw no one else, no attacking wildlife, but an urgency filled in all the places within me that had been overtaken by fear only a few moments earlier.
“Come in, come in,” I said.
They didn’t look at each other to see if the other would go. They didn’t hesitate. The brown-eyed girl stepped forward first and the other one followed. I scanned outside again to see if there was anyone else around; there wasn’t. I closed the door, threw the bolt, and brought two chairs to a spot where they could sit beside each other.
They stank. Badly. I tried to ignore the smell. I could feel the cold coming off them. How long had they been out in the elements?
“Let me get you some water,” I said as I made my way to the water cooler. As I filled two paper cone cups, I continued speaking. “Are either of you hurt?”
They didn’t answer, so I looked back at them. They were staring at me with wide eyes and more silence.
I handed each girl a cup. They drank greedily. I had the sense that I needed to tell them to slow down, but I didn’t have time to get the words out.
They finished and then held their empty cups out toward me.
“More?” I asked.
The brown-eyed girl nodded, but the blue-eyed one only continued to stare.
I took the cups and filled them both halfway. “Can you tell me what happened to you two? Where are you from? Can I call your parents?”
Neither of them spoke. I made my way back again and handed them the water. They drank a little slower this time. I tried to assess the situation. The only good news I could suss out was that they didn’t seem to be hurt.
Bottom line, though, this still wasn’t good.
However, I knew lots of people lived out in these woods. I knew baths weren’t a priority for everyone. I knew it was muddy outside. Okay, this might not be as strange an occurrence as it currently seemed.
But it was cold, and these girls were young.
“Can you give me a name or a number of someone to call?” I tried again, gently. “Anyone?”<
br />
They looked at me, but didn’t extend the cups again.
“I’m going to need to call the police,” I said, trying to keep my tone gentle. I didn’t want to scare them, but if the threat of calling the police would get them to tell me who I really needed to call, I would use it.
Their eyes were glassy but aware, tracking me, and seeming to pay appropriate attention. They didn’t argue or protest.
“Do you understand English?” I said.
They both nodded once.
“Okay,” I said. They could hear.
Cell phone coverage was stronger by my desk than anywhere else in the shed. I moved back behind my chair and dialed Gril’s number, using the burner phone with the number he would recognize.
“Beth, what’s up?” he said as he answered.
“A couple of young girls just knocked on the door of the Petition. They don’t … something’s not right.”
“Names?”
“They aren’t talking.”
“Are they hurt?”
“I can’t be sure, but I don’t think their lives are in imminent danger. They’re muddy.” Maybe someone had been chasing them. I looked toward the door, glad I’d locked it.
“Beth?”
“I’m sorry. I’m here. What should I do?” I said.
Gril thought a moment. “Stay put. I was headed out that way anyway. I’ll grab Dr. Powder and we’ll be right there.”
“I’ve got the door locked,” I said randomly.
“Okay. Are you worried for your or the girls’ safety?”
“I’m just not sure,” I said.
I heard Gril make noises like he was standing up. “Be right there. I’ll get Powder. Stay where you are.”
“We will.”
Four
True to his word, Gril was there quickly. I hadn’t realized that I recognized the sound of his truck engine, but when I heard it this time, I knew it was him and wasn’t afraid to open the door. I was relieved.
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