Liz nodded, gathered the papers into a pile.
“I once believed that too, but it’s almost cruel what we can survive.”
11
Hazel
Hazel’s head hit the pillow, and she fell into an instant sleep.
She woke surprised at the darkness. When she’d crawled into bed, the half-light of evening had left her room awash in a warm summer’s glow. Now the black of deep night surrounded her.
She had been exhausted, still was, but an insatiable thirst turned her mouth dusty.
She swung her legs down and felt along the floor for her slippers.
“Hazel.” Her head snapped up at Orla’s voice.
“Finally,” Hazel huffed, her relief instantly turning to irritation.
Orla had come home.
She pushed through her door into the hallway and found her friend hovering at the top of the stairs, but she looked all wrong. A blindfold covered her eyes, a dark strap stretched over her mouth, and her wrists and ankles showed angry red welts.
“Orla,” she shrieked, running to her friend. But as she reached out to grab Orla, who appeared to be falling down the darkened stairs, her friend vanished.
Hazel teetered on the edge of the top stair, her torso jutting forward, hands flailing at the emptiness, and she started to fall.
She let out a little squeal, seized the bannister and caught it with one hand. The momentum of her body rocked forward, but her grip pulled her hard sideways and she crashed into the wall, twisting one ankle painfully as she missed the second step and landed awkwardly on the third.
The hallway light flicked on. Bethany hurried to the top of the stairs, her long t-shirt stopping above her.
Hazel still clutched the bannister, balancing her weight on her good ankle, breathing heavily and unable to shake the image of Orla, bound, calling out for help.
“Are you okay?” Bethany asked, squinting at Hazel while holding up a hand to block the glare from the lightbulb.
Hazel pushed away from the wall and winced at the pain in her ankle.
She sagged onto the top step.
“I heard Orla,” she murmured.
“Here? Is she home?” Bethany peered into the dark stairwell, but Hazel shook her head.
“No. It was like a dream, but it wasn’t a dream. I don’t know.” She pressed a finger against her already swelling ankle.
“Did you hurt it?” Bethany squatted next to her.
“Yeah. Could you get me a towel with ice and a glass of water? Sorry to be a pest, but I think walking down the stairs might do me in.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
Bethany hurried down the stairs.
Hazel stood shakily and limped back to her room. She turned on her bedside lamp and picked up her tarot cards, shuffling several times, envisioning Orla. She pulled a card from the top.
The Devil stared back at her. She pulled a second card - the ten of swords - an equally, if not more, ominous card that depicted a man lying face-down with ten swords jutting from his back.
Bethany hurried in, handed Hazel the water.
“Here, let’s prop your leg up.” Bethany stacked two pillows and helped Hazel lift her leg on top. She laid the towel with ice over her leg. “Are you worried about her?”
Hazel nodded.
“I know there’s something wrong. I know it.”
* * *
More than a week had passed since Orla disappeared. The searchers gathered at Birch Park, a natural area Orla often rode her bike to. Hazel knew if they found Orla in the woods, she’d likely be dead. That was the terrifying aspect of disappearances. If people could come home, they would.
Cars crowded the parking lot and bikes lay in heaps along the tree line. The police weren’t involved. Hazel wondered if they’d do it all differently.
“Here.” Calvin handed her a walkie-talkie. He’d tucked his long, dark hair behind his ears and opted for jeans over his usual shorts.
Hazel had planned the search, but Calvin organized it. Though he worked in a bookstore, detested law enforcement, and fit snugly into the 1970s counterculture many young people preferred, he came from a military family. He understood how search parties worked. Despite their political differences, his father and two brothers had volunteered their help. They’d also brought maps of the natural area marked into grids to organize searches, walking sticks, two-way radios, and jugs of water.
Hazel smiled gratefully at Calvin’s father and gave him a quick hug. Tall and broad with buzzed hair, he looked the part of a soldier, as did Calvin’s two brothers, who fanned out giving people directions.
“How ya doing, honey?” Calvin asked, trotting over.
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
Thoughts jumbled her mind. Fear of discovering Orla’s decomposing body had soured her sleep for two nights. She searched the sky for crows and vultures, some signal that death lay near.
“You don’t have to give any directions. I’ll lead this group. My dad’s taking searchers west. My brothers are covering the group along the road. If you spot anything,” he pushed the red button on the side of the radio, “give your location.”
Hazel nodded and started forward with the searchers. She saw neighbors, a woman who Orla mended clothes for, and many people she’d never met. Orla’s father, Mr. Sullivan, arrived with a pickup truck filled with the same men she’d seen at the job site. He offered her a nod but didn’t say hello.
As she walked through the knee-high grass, she concentrated on the ground. Twice, other searchers paused, exclaiming they’d found something, only to hold up empty pop cans or discarded food bags.
“Is that a shoe?” a woman several paces to Hazel’s right, asked.
Hazel rushed over.
The woman pointed at a dark blob that appeared to be leather. Hazel stared at shoelaces tangled in the object. Moss covered most of the boot.
“It’s not Orla’s,” she sighed.
* * *
After the search, Hazel gulped water from a jug Calvin handed her.
The searches had come up empty. Hazel felt hollow. Perhaps Orla had not gone to Birch Park at all, and Hazel had wasted everyone’s time searching the wrong woods.
Across the parking lot, a man held his camera up, snapped a shot of the group, twiddled with the lens and took another, and then another. He didn’t speak with other searchers and appeared to be on his own. A notepad hung by a string around his neck.
“Are you a reporter?” she asked, stopping just short of him, blocking his shot.
He lowered the camera.
“Yes, with Up North News.” He held out a hand. “Abraham Levett. I prefer Abe.”
Hazel looked at his hand and felt torn. Was she supposed to befriend this man, beg him to print a story about her friend? Or did he intend to act as so many others had, as if she were making a spectacle out of a girl who’d hitchhiked out of town and would be back any minute.
Finally, she offered him a limp shake.
“I’m Hazel. Why are you here, Abe?”
He glanced toward the woods where more searchers trickled in, their faces sunburnt, their shoulders slumped.
“To cover the story of a missing woman.”
“So, you don’t think she just took off?” Hazel asked, an edge in her voice.
“Have you heard of Rita Schneider?”
Hazel frowned. The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“She vanished from Beulah the summer of 1973. That’s where my father lives, where I grew up. She used to feed his cat if he went out of town. On July 17th, 1973, she rode her bike to Platte Bay and vanished without a trace.”
Hazel blinked at him, a cold, sinking feeling in her stomach.
“And you suspect her disappearance is connected to Orla?”
“Orla doesn’t fit the type, but maybe.”
“The type?” Hazel asked, irritated.
“It’s not an insult. If you truly want to know, I’ll explain it.”
“I do, b
ut I need to help Calvin wrap this up. Can we meet in a few hours?”
Abe looked at his watch, a raggedy thing with a cracked face and a worn leather band.
“Sure. I’ll come by your house.”
“How do you know where I live?”
“I’m a journalist. That’s my job.”
12
Hazel
Abe knocked on Hazel’s door moments after she poured herself a glass of water and slumped onto the couch. Calvin had gone home with his dad to drop off the search supplies and would return in the evening. Hazel wanted to curl up and sleep. Her feet and lower back ached. She was in good shape, but trooping through the woods, hunched over and squinting at the ground until her eyes crossed had worn her down.
In the end, they’d found nothing.
She pulled open the door.
Abe still wore the same blue jeans, rolled at the bottom, and brown t-shirt. His hair was black, curly and just above his ears. His beard and mustache were not unruly like many men Hazel’s age, but neatly trimmed. Though Abe looked young, she suspected he wasn’t her age - closer to thirty than twenty.
A black camera bag hung over one arm, a folder tucked into his armpit, and he held his notebook in his hand.
She smiled and almost threw the door open wide to invite him in. Instead, her mind drifted back to the Devil card she’d pulled for Orla days earlier. She quickly stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind her.
“We can talk out here,” she said, leading him to the patio furniture at one end of their long front porch. It was white aluminum cushioned in green floral fabric. It had belonged to Hazel’s mother. Every night, Hazel carried the cushions inside and stored them in the closet.
Abe sat in a chair and opened his folder.
Hazel looked at a map of northern Michigan spotted with little red dots.
“What are the dots?” she asked.
“Where each girl went missing.”
“Wait.” She looked up, startled. “Each? You mean there are more than two?”
“Six, if we include Orla. Six women have disappeared since 1971.”
Hazel gaped at the page.
“How come I haven’t heard about this.”
Abe looked at her squarely.
“Because there are no bodies. Without bodies, there’s no conclusive evidence of foul play. Worse, there’s no evidence at all. Maybe they took off, started a new life, hopped on a plane.”
“Maybe they did,” Hazel said.
“They didn’t,” Abe told her. He pushed the map aside and pulled out paper-sized photos of each girl. “I’ve spoken with their parents, their friends. These weren’t runaways. They didn’t hitchhike. Most of them didn’t smoke pot. Not one of them had ever taken off, not even once. Rita left three hundred dollars in cash in the bureau next to her bed. Susie had plans to go camping for Labor Day Weekend.”
He pointed at pictures as he spoke.
“Orla was making costumes for Harvey at the Old Town Playhouse,” Hazel murmured. She imagined Orla’s room with the book laying open, the tepid glass of water, the beautiful dress she’d made days earlier hanging unworn in the closet. It was not the room of a woman leaving town.
“Why haven’t they been in the newspapers?” Hazel asked, growing angry.
“Why isn’t Orla in the paper? We’re coming out of a time when a lot of women took off, when they hopped in a van and moved to California to drop LSD and sleep on the beach. Unfortunately, most of our law enforcement view the ‘70s girls the same way they did the ‘60s girls. They assume the parents are being paranoid, overreacting.”
“But six girls in four years!”
“Exactly. But they’re all in different jurisdictions. Or they were, until Orla.”
“Who’s the other girl from Traverse City?”
“Darlene Rice.” He slid out a Polaroid of a smiling girl with long blonde hair pulled over one shoulder. She was leaning her head on a large man, her father perhaps. In her arms she held a struggling puppy.
“Her name sounds familiar, but…” Hazel shook her head. Had she read about the girl? Seen a missing poster? She wasn’t sure.
“Her case is especially difficult. She was vacationing here with her parents, renting a house in town. Her mom and dad and two brothers went to get ice cream and watch a movie. They’d been here for a week and were beached out at that point. Darlene wasn’t. She took her beach bag and walked out the door, and they never saw her again.”
Hazel lifted the photo to look closer and wanted to cringe away from the smiling face. How could someone vanish without a trace?
“No one saw her? How is that possible?”
“People saw her up to a point. But she disappeared on a Tuesday in the middle of the day. A wooded trail offered a shortcut to the beach. The last sighting of Darlene was by a woman driving, who glimpsed her walking into that park. No sightings after that. No one saw her at the beach.”
“She disappeared in the woods? Which means you think someone is taking them - going into the woods and abducting them?”
“That’s my theory.”
“You said Orla doesn’t fit the type. What did you mean?”
Abe pulled out more photos of the girls. He spread them on the table.
Hazel studied the pictures.
The first thing she noticed was their hair. They were all blonde. Their hair appeared mostly long and straight. Their eyes were light colored, blue or green.
“You can’t tell in all the pictures, but the girls were also petite. Most of them were no taller than five-foot-four inches and weighed less than one-hundred and twenty pounds.”
“Orla’s tall.”
“I know. But she’s the right age, and the circumstances are similar. Her hair is dark, but it’s straight. And I think she’s connected.”
“Why?”
Abe gazed at the images before him, as if the answer lay within the faces of the missing girls.
“Call it a hunch, a somewhat confirmed hunch.”
“Confirmed?”
“I’ve been talking with Susan Miner’s mother for a year. The morning I saw the news brief about Orla, I knew he had taken another one. Susan’s mother called me fifteen minutes later. She had the same instinct.”
“He?”
“In cases such as these, it’s usually a man.”
Hazel swallowed. She remembered her vision of Orla. It had not been a dream; of that she was sure.
“I want her to be in a car somewhere, driving to Vermont to a music festival or visiting her cousin in Detroit. I want so much to believe she’s going to pop through the door, apologize for taking off, and act shocked that we raised the alarm.”
“But you don’t believe she will.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You mentioned her cousin in Detroit. Who’s she?” Abe flipped open his notebook.
“It’s a he, Liam. Why are you taking notes?”
He glanced up at her.
“Because I’m investigating her disappearance. I’ve been investigating all of them. I’m writing a story about these women. It’s going on the front page next week. I’m going to be under the wire, but I want Orla in that article. I need to gather as much information as possible.”
“For your story?” she demanded.
He laid his pencil down and regarded her.
“To find out who’s behind this. To stop him before he strikes again.”
Hazel studied his face.
“Why haven’t you written it yet? If these girls have been disappearing for years…”
“I only learned of the disappearances last year. Liz Miner contacted me. I knew of Rita’s disappearance, but local gossip claimed she took off with a boyfriend. After Liz reached out, insisting she’d spoken with the other parents, I started looking into it. I realized she was on to something. I’ve spent the last year talking to families, pouring over police reports, trying to find the link.”
“And you haven’t found it?”
&n
bsp; “Not exactly, no.”
“How do I help?” she asked. “I need to help.”
13
Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane
Orla
Orla woke to discover someone had moved her. The white hospital walls and dim lighting no longer surrounded her. She lay in a dark space, cave-like, except the walls were brick rather than stone. Lights flickered from torches lining the walls. Gleaming silver instruments and a glass bottle sat on a metal table beside her. The label on the bottle read ‘sodium thiopental.’
She turned her head to the side. A man in a white coat hunched over another metal table.
When he turned, she noticed a startling resemblance to Spencer, the man she’d spent that final night with. He’d told her his father was dead.
Did he know what happened to her? Or worse, was he in on it?
“Who are you?” Orla croaked, mouth gritty.
“At last she wakes,” the man said, unsmiling.
He pushed the needle into the bottle and pulled the syringe back.
“Please,” she murmured.
He didn’t respond but stepped to the bed and slid the needle into her neck. She tried to cringe away, but the straps held her in place.
He returned to the metal table.
“We’ll give that a little time to do its work, shall we?” he asked.
He walked away from her, disappearing into a dark tunnel.
* * *
When he returned, Orla studied him.
His thick, dark hair was combed away from his forehead. Piercing blue eyes gazed out from his tanned face. Like Spencer, he had a sharp nose and a square jaw. Handsome, but cold. In his fifties, she thought, or older.
“Truth serum,” he told her, picking up the bottle and tilting it in the firelight. “Have you heard of it, Orla?”
“Yes.” She closed her mouth, surprised at her answer. The moment he’d uttered truth serum, she’d intended to clamp her mouth shut and not speak a word.
Ashes Beneath Her: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 6