by A J Rivers
“The girl whose family tried to say she was a part of the Arrow Lake Campground murders,” he says.
“Her name is Ashley Stevenson,” I say. “And it’s not as if her family was trying to piggyback on those murders. They had every reason to believe there was a good chance she was one of the victims. The details of her disappearance correspond with many of the aspects of that case. She was ruled out, but she is still missing.”
“Her case isn’t the territory of the FBI. We’re not involved in trying to find her,” he says.
“I’m aware,” I say. “Considering that’s my case. I know the scope of the investigation. But I’m not including her in that investigation. I’m acting on a private basis. Consulting with the private investigator secured by the family.”
“Your cousin?”
“Yes,” I say. “As a matter of fact, Dean has been in extensive contact with the family, and they want him to take over the search for her. The local police haven’t made much headway. As you can imagine, five years is a long time for them to be just sitting around waiting to find out what happened to her.”
“Don’t let it interfere with the Arrow Lake investigation,” he says. The tone of his voice suggests he’s trying to warn me about something, but I stopped being intimidated by Creagan a long time ago.
If there is one thing that gives me the occasional moment of hesitation when it comes to being in the FBI, it’s Creagan. It’s never been exactly a lovefest between us. There’s been some friction since I joined the Bureau at twenty-three. I’ll never say that I was in the shadow of my father, especially since his career is with the CIA rather than the FBI, but everybody knew who I was from the beginning.
And from the beginning, Creagan made it clear he didn’t exactly have the most faith in me. So, I proceeded to prove him wrong time and time again. At this point he doesn’t have much of a choice but to believe in my skill. He just doesn’t like to admit to it.
“I’m more than capable of managing my career and prioritizing investigations,” I say.
“Good to hear. And speaking of which, you said that you’ll be going to the campground this week?” he asks.
“Yes. The day after tomorrow,” I tell him. “I’m meeting with the team to discuss progress and go over new evidence.”
“Perfect. You can take Agent James with you.”
I sit in silence for a few seconds. “Excuse me, what?”
“Agent James. The new agent I told you about. She will be back in Harlan then and I can’t imagine you would make the drive down to Sherando Ridge without going through Harlan to visit your cousin. You can meet Agent James there and she can accompany you on the investigation. It will be the perfect opportunity for her to start getting to know you, and she can shadow you while you’re at the campground,” Creagan says.
“Shadow me?” I ask. “Creagan, this isn’t the Big Sisters program.”
“No, but it is an order. Whether you want to deal with it or not, I’m still your supervisor. I will let her know you’ll be there the day after tomorrow. Watch your email. I’ll send her contact information.”
With that, the call ends. I don’t know if he hangs up first or I do, but there isn’t a goodbye from either side.
When I get off the phone, I’m angry and frustrated. I have enough going on right now. I don’t need to add watching over a brand-new agent to my responsibilities. And I definitely don’t need anybody shadowing me. But it seems I don’t have a choice. So, I do what I know will make me feel better the fastest. I pick my phone back up and call Sam.
“Hey,” I say when he answers.
“Hey,” he says. “Are you okay? You sound upset.”
“Just aggravated. Creagan hasn’t let go of wanting me to buddy up with this new agent. Now he wants me to bring her along with me when I go back to the campground so she can shadow me during my investigation,” I explain.
“Has he never met you?” Sam wonders.
“You know, I’m starting to wonder,” I say.
“Look, this is obviously a thing for him. And even if you don’t want to consider the possibility, it seems he’s asking you to do this because he trusts you. Maybe he sees potential in this new agent, but he knows you would be the one to make her the best she can be,” he offers.
I head for the kitchen to make another cup of coffee.
“You manage to make it sound so optimistic,” I comment. “Why are you so good? It makes me feel guilty.”
“It shouldn’t make you feel guilty,” he says. “Trust me, I understand where you’re coming from. I’m just trying to make you feel better about the whole thing. You shouldn’t look at it like a punishment or a roadblock. You should see it as a chance to unleash another kick-ass FBI agent on the world.”
“I’m not quite there, yet. But I’ll work on it,” I say.
“That’s my girl. All I can ask for is progress.”
“Uh-huh.”
We’ll see how that works for him after I meet her.
“Why don’t we talk about something more pleasant?” he suggests.
“Aren’t you busy?” I ask. “Shouldn’t you be solving crime and helping old ladies across the street?”
“As devoted as I am to my hidden persona of Boy Scout Batman, I’m actually on my lunch break right now,” he says. “Which makes this the perfect opportunity to talk about our wedding.”
“Not that I’m averse to talking about our wedding, but what about your lunch break makes it the perfect time?” I ask.
“Ruby Bea’s Catering brought in box lunches for us,” he says. “They might be on the list for caterers if we decide to have the wedding here in Sherwood.”
“That actually is a good transition,” I note. “Good job.”
I lean back against the counter and sip on my coffee as we bounce ideas about various details back and forth. It’s hard to really nail anything down when we haven’t even decided where we’re getting married yet.
For a little while last year there was some ambiguity as to when our engagement actually started. I sort of asked Sam to marry me as he carried me out of a building after I had been shot. I say sort of, because I didn’t actually ask so much as tell him to do it. Following that up with my almost immediately going unconscious, I’m not sure if he even answered me. Sam seems to think he did, but he’s not positive about it, either.
That left us with a couple of months of uncertainty. We knew we were getting married, but weren’t all the way sure if we were officially engaged. That brought us to Christmas and the official proposal and ring. We figure that makes it the perfect choice for the season when we will get married as well.
That was the easy choice. It’s harder deciding what kind of wedding we want. I’m torn between different lives. Part of me always envisioned getting married in Florida. It’s a place I love dearly and where my mother is buried. Where she died. Where my last memories of her are, even though I didn’t realize that until just a couple of years ago.
Florida is a perfect setting for a destination wedding. A beach backdrop or something unexpected and fun, like exchanging vows on a hot air balloon. It would be small and intimate. Just our closest friends and family gathered around us.
Then there’s home in Sherwood. Our home, where our lives together began. Not just when I came back to help Sam with his investigation into a string of deaths and disappearances in town, but when we were just children. For all the moving around and mystery of my childhood, Sherwood was always there. I came there often to visit my grandparents who lived in the house that’s now our home. Having a wedding there would be much more traditional and let us invite far more of the people we care about.
It’s a debate we’ve been going back and forth on for several weeks now. As of now, we don’t seem to be getting any closer to a conclusion. As soon as we feel we’re leaning toward the same option, one of us will change his or her mind and start leaning forward the other. And that one will catch up with the same thing only for the other to start
going back the other way.
It’ll come to us eventually. Hopefully fairly quickly, so we can actually plan it before the date comes.
Thirteen
Later that evening, Dean and I sit close together in front of my computer and make the video call to Allison Garrett. When she answers, she looks as though she isn’t sure how to feel about the situation. Gone is the bright, vibrant smile in the beach picture; in its place are tightened eyebrows and a slightly downturned mouth.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hi, Allison,” I start. “I’m Agent Emma Griffin. I’m with the FBI. This is my cousin, Dean Steele. He’s the private investigator who got in touch with you.”
I gesture toward Dean and he waves at the screen.
“Hi,” she says. She gives me a bit of a strange look. “Did you say you’re with the FBI?”
“Yes,” I nod, then press one hand to my chest. “But I’m not talking to you now in that official capacity. This is a private investigation.”
She nods, still looking hesitant.
“As I said in my messages, we just want to talk to you about Ashley,” Dean adds. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to her when she went missing. Her parents are ready to bring her home.”
“I think they’ve been ready since the day she left,” Allison comments.
Dean nods. “They have been. You probably heard about the deaths in Sherando Ridge, at Arrow Lake Campground.”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s horrible. I can’t believe that’s somewhere I used to go all the time. I still go up there sometimes to go hiking. It’s so hard to believe something like that was happening right there and nobody knew.”
“Did you know that Ashley’s mother and father contacted the police to find out if Ashley might be one of the victims?” I ask.
Allison swallows hard. “Yes. We still stay in touch a bit. Not as much now as we used to, but when you reached out to me, I called them. I didn’t want to do anything behind their back.”
“Why would talking to us be doing something behind their back?” I ask.
“If they didn’t know there was an investigation going on,” she explains. “A lot of people have latched onto Ashley’s case over the years. And not for the best reasons.”
“What do you mean?” Dean frowns.
“People want to tell stories about her. They want to come up with sensationalized explanations or spread gruesome rumors. There have been a couple of TV shows that have approached Misty and John about featuring Ashley’s case and acted as if they were going to get her name out so more people would know about her. But then they just painted her as a rebellious teenager who was off getting into mischief and ended up disappearing. Almost as though it was her fault. I didn’t want that to happen to them again.”
“They didn’t mention any of that when we spoke with them,” I say.
“It isn’t the most pleasant thing for them to talk about,” she says. “I’d think they are probably pretty embarrassed by it.”
“I can imagine,” Dean sympathizes. “But that’s why we’re doing this. We want to make sure that whatever happened to Ashley is uncovered. And whoever is responsible, if there is anyone responsible, will be held accountable for what theyhe or she did.”
“What do you mean ‘if there is anyone responsible’?” Allison asks, sounding put off by the choice of phrase. “You think she did something to herself?”
I wasn’t expecting her to suggest that. Up until that moment, it hadn’t even occurred to me to think she might have harmed herself. The expected behaviors weren’t there. At least, no one was talking about them.
“We don’t know what happened,” I say, trying to hold her to the conversation. She has information we need and if she gets angry and logs off, we won’t be able to get it out of her. “But we want to know. That’s why we’re talking to you. We know you were very close.”
This seems to take some of the edge off. Allison nods.
“We were. And Vivian. We were always together.”
“Ashley’s parents mentioned you and Vivian are a little older than Ashley,” I say.
Allison nods again. “Yes. Almost two years.”
“So, you weren’t in the same year of school. How did you end up forming such a close bond? She was still in middle school and you were in high school.”
“We met when she was in the sixth grade and Vivian and I were in eighth grade,” Allison explains. “In our school, enrichment classes weren’t divided by grade. None of the three of us could decide which enrichment class we wanted to take, so all three of us ended up in what they called Exploratory. Which basically just meant we rotated through different classes for each semester. That’s when we became friends. We stayed friends after that, even when we went into high school. She was really looking forward to joining us in a couple of years.”
Her eyes well with tears and her head drops down for a second before she looks up at us again, fighting to keep her composure.
“Would you say Ashley was mature for her age?” I ask.
Allison nods. “She never seemed younger than we were. She was so smart. If I didn’t know her, I might even think she was older than we were. She had always been the one to make the good decisions.”
I notice her wording but don’t know if she did it on purpose, so I decide to move on.
“What do you remember about when she went missing? Was Ashley at all upset on that day or the days leading up to it? Did she talk about leaving, or problems she was having with her family or anything?”
Allison shakes her head. “No. She was in a fantastic mood. She was happy and excited to be out. The only thing that was upsetting her at all was the weather. It had been raining for so long and the temperature dropped so it didn’t feel as much like a summer hike. I remember her saying her mom told her she had to bring a hoodie with her, and she thought it was so ridiculous. She didn’t want to have it and had almost left it in the car, but then at the last second, she pulled it out. She ended up wearing it an hour later.”
She lets out another short laugh.
“How was her relationship with her mother?” Dean asks.
“They were close,” Allison says. “They argued like any mother and thirteen-year-old daughter. But it was never anything serious. I never heard her say she didn’t want to be at home anymore, or anything like that. She spent a lot of time with her mom. Ashley was never one of those kids who was embarrassed to be seen with her mom. She would actually still hold her mother’s hand when they were at the mall. Not because she was scared or couldn’t get around by herself or anything. Just because she wanted to hold her hand.”
“How about her father?”
“They were close, too. I never saw any problems between them. Maybe not as close as with her mom, but not in a bad way,” Allison shrugs.
“And she had a sister,” I say.
That’s when I realize how easily we’ve slipped into referring to Ashley only in the past tense. I hate that it’s the natural inclination. No one, not even her parents, has said anything about her in the present tense. Nothing has been that she is a certain way or did certain things. Everything is about who she used to be and what she used to do.
Even if they still have hope she could be alive, they’re too afraid to say it.
“Yes,” Allison confirms. “Leona. She’s three years older.”
“So, it would have been more likely that you were friends with her than with Ashley,” Dean comments.
Allison’s eyes narrow. “Why are you so fixated on our ages? People can’t be friends if they aren’t at the exact same age?”
“It’s not that,” Dean says. “It’s just an observation.”
“We’re trying to understand the dynamics,” I add. “It’s not that you shouldn’t be friends with someone younger, it’s just interesting that of the two sisters, you were friends with one with a larger age gap than another.”
“Leona is really quiet. Not unpleasant or anything, just r
eally quiet and not exactly social. When we were over at Ashley’s house, she would sometimes come and hang out with us, but Ashley was much more like us than Leona, so we were friends with her,” Allison explains.
“So, Ashley and Leona got along well?” I ask.
“The most part,” she shrugs. “I mean, there was some tension between them sometimes. But I think that’s the way it is with all sisters. It would probably be stranger if they got along perfectly all the time.”
“That’s true,” I say. “So, what can you tell us about that day?”
I don’t mention anything Ashley’s parents told us. I don’t want to lead Allison or dissuade her from saying anything she might have if I hadn’t given her a basis for what we already know.
“The three of us, Ashley, Vivian, and I, wanted to hang out because it had been so rainy. We went to the park to do some hiking. We live so close by, going there is like going to any neighborhood playground. We’d been a million times before. It was nothing new. We set up camp and Ashley was talking about how she hadn’t told her parents we were camping out. That was a little bit strange, because we almost always camped out when we went to the park unless we were just there for a couple of hours in the morning.
“We told her we were sure they knew, and it was going to be fine. She was really anxious about it. As though she thought she was going to get in trouble. I don’t know, maybe she’d had an argument with them earlier and we didn’t know about it. But she was really on edge. She kept looking at her phone and checking the reception. Eventually, she said she was going up to the bathhouse and was going to try to call her parents,” she says.
“Did you let her go by herself?” Dean asks.
“Yeah,” Allison nods. “It wasn’t all that far away. And as I said, this is a familiar area. She came back and said everything was fine, but that she was going to have to leave early. The next morning she wasn’t at the campsite anymore. Her shoes, phone, and everything else was gone, so we figured her parents had come and picked her up from the parking lot next to the bathhouse. We realized she’d left her backpack and decided to take it to her house. That’s when everything fell apart.”