by Paula McLain
* * *
—
A short while later I’m out at Jug Handle, hoping to find even a fragment of the answers I need in the krummholz grove. Hiking in, Cricket rushes ahead of me as if she’s long known the way, through the break in the trees with her nose to the ground, already getting down to business. Morning sun comes through the canopy in spears. Light catches dozens of spiderwebs, turning them into diamonds. Some are the size of maple leaves. Others are tiny and pearled with dew, like fairy hammocks or swings. It’s the kind of place that can make you believe almost anything: that whole civilizations can live under mushroom caps; that the usual laws have never fully landed here, or mattered.
While Cricket explores, nudging under low, tortured branches, I do my own slow reconnaissance of the area. Way too much time has passed for physical clues to be likely, but I’m searching for something deeper and more subtle—something I might not see as much as feel. My eyes flick from branch to branch. Was it here Cameron stood that day? Or here? And when she looked out, her best friend behind the lens, what did she want? Who came along to trigger her hope? And how did he reach her in the first place?
It’s hard for me to imagine the hook coming out of nowhere, someone stopping Cameron on the street, after school maybe, and asking her if she’d ever wanted to be a model. Even if her boundaries were bad, and her desperation was high, wouldn’t she have told Gray what she was thinking of doing? And anyway, even if this was the method her predator had used to draw her in and then dangle large promises, could the kind of guy we’ve been looking for lately—a ranger or parks employee with access to and knowledge of reserve land—also have encouraged Cameron to think she had this kind of shot at being successful, or even famous? How do those two elements connect, if at all? Are we wrong about the ranger angle, and am I on some ludicrous tangent right now? Following a false lead to a place that signifies nothing?
Talk to me, Cameron, I think. Please. But only Cricket stirs, her coat flecked with sunlight while fine pollen motes float all around us, never settling.
(fifty-six)
When Eden died in September of 1975, we buried her in Evergreen Cemetery in the Strater family plot, next to Hap’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles, the dates on stones going all the way back to the 1850s.
Hap didn’t deliver her eulogy or speak more than a few words at her service. He didn’t want people gathering at the house, passing along words of comfort, and didn’t want to wear his suit a moment longer than necessary. He just wanted to be in the woods.
Afterward, we went to Van Damme State Park, just the two of us, into the fern forest, walking without talking much. What was there to say? We hiked for an hour or more, not resting until we reached a shaded area along the river. There, we sat on a large flat rock, side by side, just looking at the water.
“Did I ever tell you the story about the boy I found once who had accidentally shot his brother?” he asked after a while.
I shook my head. He hadn’t, but I would have told him no anyway. I would have done anything to keep him talking. Any story would do. Any lesson at all. I needed all of them.
The boys had been sixteen, he told me, Jake and Sam Douglas. Twins. At first, he only knew they’d been reported missing after a day hike. Their mother had dropped them here, at Van Damme State Park, and then panicked when they didn’t return to the parking lot three hours later.
Hap’s team had gone out before dark that same day, but came back empty-handed. The next morning, he pulled more men and went back in. The park was eighteen hundred acres, with ten miles of maintained trail along the Little River. The boys’ mother had insisted they wouldn’t have any reason to go wandering, but they didn’t turn up along any part of the trail. Not in the pygmy forest, where the soil was spongy with fresh rain. Not in the groves of stunted cypress and rhododendron and dwarf pine.
It wasn’t until late afternoon the second day when one of Hap’s rangers spotted a bright blue shirt inside the camouflaging hollow of a redwood trunk, a small cave where the root system had opened like a secret door. Inside, crouched in that narrow space, Sam Douglas was found mute and dumb and completely disoriented. Beneath him, his brother Jake was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the thigh that had nearly ripped off his leg. The two boys had apparently been target shooting with their grandfather’s contraband pistol. The gun had gone off in Sam’s hand. Ashamed, he’d dragged the body into the cave of the tree, hiding there all day and night, unable to face what he’d done.
“Did he die?” I asked Hap by the river, feeling sure the answer was yes. Someone always died in his stories.
“Actually, it was the damnedest thing. Jake had lost consciousness and probably would have bled out if Sam had gone for help. The weight of his body made a tourniquet.”
“Wait,” I said. “He didn’t know his brother was still alive?”
“That’s the most interesting bit as I see it. He thought he’d passed beyond forgiveness, but that was just a story. A terrible story, but believing it saved his brother’s life.” He looked at me to make sure I was with him. This was the important part. “You know, we don’t always understand what we’re living inside of, or how it will matter. We can guess all we want and prepare, too, but we never know how it’s going to turn out.”
I struggled to take in his meaning. Was he still talking about the boys, or was he trying to tell me something more, about us and now, about Eden and how we could possibly go on without her? I wanted time enough to ask him and hear his answer, wanted years, decades—an eternity. But he’d rested enough and was ready to hike again. The lesson was over.
We had one more year together, just the two of us on our own, then I went away to college at SFU. Hap drove me down himself, the back of his Suburban crammed with boxes and bedding. I should have been excited to start this new adventure, but I was already homesick. And I hadn’t even gotten out of the car.
“I’ll see you at Thanksgiving,” I said later, when we’d unpacked everything and it was time for him to go. I was trying and failing to keep my voice even, to be strong when I felt the opposite.
“Take care of yourself, sweetheart,” he said, closing his car door. His hand lingered for a moment on the open window gasket. “Be good.”
Two months later, in the early hours of November 12, 1976, one of Hap’s junior rangers found his pack seven miles beyond the trailhead in Russian Gulch State Park, but no sign of Hap himself. No one had seen him since the previous afternoon, when he’d gone off on a recreational hike alone. An extensive search turned up nothing, even with K-9 units. He’d vanished into thin air.
When Ellis Flood called, he reached me at my dorm, through my RA. I sat on a hard chair in her room, looking at a painted cinder-block wall, a laminated poster about teens and stress. As Ellis Flood talked, I could barely take it in, plunged into confusion and disbelief. What would have caused Hap to leave the trail without his provisions or even water? He was a consummate professional in the field, intimate with the challenges and dangers of any wilderness area. It didn’t make sense to me that something terrible could have happened to him. Not with his skill and experience.
“Obviously we’re going to keep searching,” Ellis reassured me, “but, Anna, it’s possible that grief could have caused him to lose focus. You and I both know he hasn’t really been the same since Eden died.”
He was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. Instead, I began to cry as the sheriff went on gently, trying to explain his thinking. Hap could have made some critical error and gotten lost, or contracted hypothermia. He could have miscalculated his footing and fallen into a ravine. He could have become disoriented and drowned, or been attacked by a bear. These things happened all the time, even to those who knew what they were doing. As for the body, it must still be out in the woods somewhere, too well camouflaged for the searchers and dogs to find, or dragged off by a bear or
mountain lion. Ellis wasn’t giving up hope, just wanting me to at least begin considering that we might not find him.
The next few weeks were hell as I waited for any kind of news. I couldn’t focus on my classes or homework, could barely eat, in fact. Every few days, I’d check in with Sheriff Flood. Finally, near Christmas break, when not a single sign had appeared in more than a month, he said, “We’re still going to keep looking, Anna. But some part of me is starting to wonder if Hap meant to leave the trail that day. He might have been trying to take his own life.”
I was on a pay phone in the hall of my dormitory. As Ellis went on, I wedged my body into a corner and shook, not caring who saw or heard me. If Hap had wanted to die, this was the way he’d do it, of course—in the woods alone, on his own terms. No drama or fanfare. No goodbye. As much as I wanted to believe he would never abandon me, no matter how unhappy he was, I was eighteen now, and no longer his ward, at least as far as the state was concerned. He’d fulfilled his promise to me.
In the corner, as tears streamed, Ellis’s words continued to echo through the phone, stealing the air from my lungs. “Will you have a funeral?” I managed to ask him, feeling strangely hollow.
“In cases like this, it takes many years until someone is declared dead by the state. But there’s talk of a memorial service. I’ll keep you posted so you can come home for it.”
Home. Somehow the word had altered completely in a single moment. Without Hap and Eden, Mendocino was just a place—anyplace—or so it seemed as I tumbled through grief. “Sure,” I said, then thanked him and hung up. I never went back.
(fifty-seven)
When I leave the grove, I head straight for Navarro Beach, south of the village, to meet up with a team of searchers. The little beach parking lot is at the end of an overgrown road that takes me past an old inn, here since the lumber boom in the nineteenth century. Back then the coast was pocked with dogholes, as they were called, tiny shipping points where millworkers sent boards down rickety flumes to the transport schooners that waited. Later there were whalers, rumrunners, women of ill repute. For seventy-five years or more—an entire generation—this area had grown and flourished, supporting saloons and little subsistence stores and homes that were more like camps. Now there’s just this haunted inn to show for it, a broad spread of beach full of driftwood, and twenty or thirty searchers readying themselves in the parking lot.
I get out and, putting Cricket in her harness, notice a group of women nearby, zipping windbreakers over exercise clothes. One of them is Emily, and I feel proud of her. Surprised, too. This is a big step for her. Seconds later I spot Hector stamping his boots as he waits, as if his feet are already cold. More likely it’s anxiety he’s feeling, at the idea he could find his sister, too late. Or not find her at all.
It’s strange to see him and Emily standing less than twenty feet apart. In Cameron’s fifteen years of life, they’ve shared her in a blind and disconnected way, knowing utterly different versions of the same girl, versions that have never touched. But just now, they almost do.
The organizer is Bill Muncy, Caitlyn’s father. As he splits the party into smaller units, I quickly say hello to Hector, and then pull alongside Emily so that I end up in her group. I haven’t seen her since before Shannan’s body was found, and want to know how she’s doing.
She seems relieved to have something to do with her fear this morning. I feel the same as the party fans out from the parking lot. Our group has been assigned to the northernmost section of the beach, where most of the driftwood is localized. The tide brings it in and leaves it here in sun-bleached piles, where for decades teenagers and artists and free spirits have scavenged through the pieces to make castaway-looking shelters and strange, elaborate sculptures, all cobbled together naturally, anchored in the sand.
I’ve always found the structures beautiful, but today the wind is cold and the sun is hidden, and we’re not here as tourists, but to look for a body, or a murder site.
“You found that girl,” Emily says as we begin to walk. Her voice is brittle, fragile sounding. “What does this mean for my daughter?”
“We don’t know yet, unfortunately. But in a way this might be good news, Emily. The FBI is helping us now. We have a lot more hands on deck and more resources. I’m really hopeful something will click soon. We’re going to find her.”
When she doesn’t respond, I follow her eyes to a long pile of driftwood, where there are hollow places, shadowy areas that someone will search today, carefully, and even painstakingly. From the tension in Emily’s body, I can guess what she’s thinking, that “finding” Cameron doesn’t necessarily mean bringing her home alive.
Subtly I turn us north, where the beach is wide open, bounded only by a rocky black cliff face at the far end, and a small estuary that’s already been dredged. Not that Emily needs to know this. I keep it to myself as we walk side by side, the wind at our backs, gusting in small pushes that feel almost like human hands. The sand courses by, glinting, giving the air a body, one made of glass. My hands are cold and I shove them deep in my pockets.
“Did you know Cameron wanted to do some modeling?” I ask her, deciding to open up a little, to share my thinking, whether or not it’s a good idea.
“What? No. Cameron didn’t even wear makeup. There was nothing girlie about her.”
“Not outwardly, maybe.” I draw out the photo, handing it to her.
She stops midstride, as if she’s seen a snake. “It doesn’t even look like Cameron. When did she do this?”
“At the end of summer, just before school started. I think she was working on a modeling portfolio. She never mentioned her interest at all?”
“I would have said no.”
“Why?”
“Because she would have just gotten her heart broken.”
Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn’t know what she meant then. My heart had been broken lots of times, and I was supposed to say thank you? Now, all these years later, I’m at least starting to see that she was really talking about the whole journey. That it’s impossible to be alive and not get hurt sometimes, not if you’re doing it right.
“She’s so beautiful,” I tell Emily. “She might have had a shot.”
“The world is full of beautiful girls.”
“Even if she had been disappointed, that would have been her choice, right? Part of her figuring it all out.”
She doesn’t answer.
We’re a hundred yards from the lip of the estuary now, a shallow trench of seawater with a foam-pocked shore, a hundred and fifty yards from the tide line. Something in the expanse of flat water catches my eye, a rock levitating or a scuba diver, I think, but really it’s a seal surfacing at the edge of the estuary. We watch as it hoists itself out of the cloudy water, its front flippers, its sleek brown head in profile, nose pointed at the surf. This is where it needs to go, inch by inch—back to the sea. No one can help it get there.
Emily says, “Why are you bringing this up now? What does it have to do with the case?”
“I’m just trying to understand Cameron’s dreams.”
“Why?”
For some reason I can’t stop following the seal with my eyes. The way the animal struggles along through loose sand, throwing its body forward like a seesaw or like a bag of rocks. It wasn’t made to move like this, wasn’t made for the earth at all, but for water. And yet it keeps going.
“Sometimes our dreams can be the most revealing things about us. Who we are when no one’s looking, who we believe we’re truly supposed to be, if we can get there.”
She flicks her eyes at the photo again, and then stares at me, confused or angry or both. “Are you saying this Cameron is more real than the girl I saw every day?”
“Not the makeup, Emily. That’s not what I mean. The wishing. The wanting to be more.”
As she shakes her head, I can see she’s not following me at all. Maybe it’s because I’m barely following myself. This might be the wrong conversation completely.
Before I can censor or second-guess myself, I say, “Emily, I don’t mean to hurt or shock you, but I have reason to suspect your daughter might have been sexually assaulted as a child. Do you know anything about that?”
She freezes so fast it’s like I’ve punched her. But of course I have. “Why would you even say that?”
All I can do is keep talking, hating every word. “Some evidence has come forward from a health clinic Cameron visited about a month ago. I can’t share more right now, but the exam showed internal scarring.”
“What?” The word rips through the air between us. The sand at our feet feels treacherous, full of knives. Of all the questions Emily’s fighting with now, about why Cameron had gone to the clinic in the first place and hidden it from her, only one issue has the power to kill her a little. Or a lot.
Me too. “Can you think of a time when Cameron was young when her personality seemed to change? When she started to have bathroom accidents at night? Or asked to sleep with the light on? She might have been having nightmares or acting out suddenly, becoming more emotional for no reason?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember anything like that.” She shakes her head, thinking, her honey-colored hair whipping past her face.
“Lydia says that Cameron used to seem lighter somehow. Does that make sense to you?”
“I don’t know,” Emily says again. “Maybe. There was a time when she started having a lot of stomachaches. I thought it was just nerves about tests or whatever. She’s a sensitive person.”
“How old was she then?”
“Eight or nine?”
“Were her symptoms worse in the mornings? Or when she’d try and do her homework?”