“What do you know about the two girls?” I said. My voice sounded louder than I had expected, and I tried to pull it back, ashamed suddenly of breaking the silence.
Dad picked up another rock and weighed it in his hand.
I wasn’t sure if he heard me, and I was all set to let it go when he began to speak.
“It happened in the early sixties, when I was just a little kid. I don’t remember any of it really, but I grew up with the stories, same as you. They wandered off or were kidnapped or killed. Hell, nobody knows. Law enforcement in this town.” He spat into the creek. “‘Frank, we’re doing the best we can,’” he said, imitating Sheriff Martin’s slow drawl. “‘It ain’t like they left a trail of crumbs.’”
“But wasn’t there something about the old cabin?”
He shrugged. “That was a separate incident. Maybe they’re related, but nobody knows that either.”
“What happened?”
He threw the rock. It landed heavy, breaking the surface of the water and sinking. He turned and fixed me with a hard look. “I thought we were going to do something fun today.”
I didn’t know what to say. I looked away, not wanting to meet his eyes.
“This kind of talk is for shit,” he said.
He stepped closer to the water and knelt down. He studied the stream as if reading some message in it and I took the hint. He wanted to be alone.
The quicksand was a few hundred yards upstream and I wandered that way, noticing the change in the bank as I drew closer. Gradually, it went from solid to damp to squishy. The quicksand didn’t look like anything dangerous. If anything, it just looked like any other area right near the creek. The difference could not be discerned by the eye, at least not by mine. When I felt like I was getting close, I picked up a stick and poked around at the ground until I felt it give way. I tossed the stick in and it lay on the surface, too light to sink. Looking around, I found a large stone. I tossed it up in the air and it hit the quicksand with a gurgling sound and started sinking. Within seconds it was gone, disappeared from this world, as if it had never been here at all.
Broken Branch Page 12