“I have to go to Happy Camp. Today. I didn’t bring food.”
“Emmett can bring you food back from Ashland.”
“I thought you said he wouldn’t be back for a few days. I don’t have anything here. I need to eat. And I don’t have clothes. I only brought what I’m wearing.” I also need to be able to leave the ranch. I need to look for you. I need to ask questions. In spite of what your mother claims, I need to talk to the police.
Her horse weaves and she yanks him back. “I might be able to give you a few things,” she finally allows. “To get you through. And you tell me what Emmett can get for you in town.” All this so she can keep me from Happy Camp—why? And why didn’t the woman at the coffee shop mention this place? What would she say about your mother, about you? And most pressing, how will I leave when your mother is always watching?
My mother, you said. She makes me feel like I’m wrong to ever want to leave. And I don’t. Mostly I like it out here. Or else I don’t think I would work anywhere else. Mostly I don’t want to leave. You sigh. But sometimes I do want to get away from her.
Episode 13:
Off the Grid
Elizabeth Lowe wanted to make a change. She cashed in her retirement. She bought a van and a backpack and an ultralight tent. She wanted to go off the grid. And she went so far, she never came back.
That afternoon your mother stations me in the lodge, where I am tasked with cleaning the floor-to-ceiling windows, the hard way. I have to take them apart: pop out the screens with a carefully applied butter knife because the tabs are broken, then tip and force out the sliding glass and remove the plastic runners. The vacuum your mother gave me doesn’t work—the electricity is out here too, so I have to brush the dead box-elder bugs out of the window frames with a toothbrush. Sometimes when I’m not paying attention, I accidentally flick them in my face.
In spite of this, I find the afternoon oddly peaceful. I have never really performed manual labor, and the physical effort is nourishing. The sun drops low through the windows, so the entire lobby catches the fire of its light. There’s something magical about being (almost) alone, in knowing that I am in the middle of nowhere, that no one can see or hear or judge me.
I think about my past life like it was a show I binge-watched, both pulled in and amused by the character who didn’t know she was on a streaming service, who didn’t know she could escape, see herself at a distance. Will anyone be thinking of me? Will anyone miss me? No, I was no more than background noise. And now I’ve changed the program, and maybe someday, people will tune in to me.
I imagine with a small thrill the moment when I find you. In this vision, I pull you up from an underground bunker, the place they put you because they wanted you to disappear. The place they want to put me. You squint in the light. As you climb up from the ground. Your cheeks are dirty and your hair is gnarled, but you are smiling. You are smiling because I saved us.
I jump when your mother backs into the screen door with a box of food. “That’s it for today; you can finish in here tomorrow.” She drops the box on the counter. “This should do you until Emmett comes back. He’ll be in tomorrow morning.” She goes to leave.
“I need to contact my family. Let them know where I am. Do you have Wi-Fi?”
She crinkles her nose. “We don’t turn the Wi-Fi on until the guests come.” I wonder how you broadcast your podcast without Wi-Fi. Maybe you went into town. Maybe you were working with someone else.
“When do the guests come?”
“Six weeks.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a landline.” She points to the back of the lodge where there is a service window looking into the kitchen. “Right there in the kitchen. You can call from there.”
As soon as I hear the roar of her ATV, I rush to the phone. It’s only when I pick up the receiver that I remember that I don’t have anyone to call. I’ve only seen my friends in flickers. When I start to count back, I realize I haven’t seen my closest friend in close to a year, others in nearly two. How did that happen? I watched a lot of YouTube. I listened to your podcast.
I pick up the phone. The only number I have memorized is my ex-husband’s. I don’t want to call him but someone has to know where I am. On Murder, She Spoke, you advised me to leave information with a trusted person—a close friend or family member—in case I disappeared. You called it an MMC Pack, a Murder, Missing, Conspiracy Pack. An MMC Pack can contain anything that may help in the event of your disappearance: a detailed physical description including any identifying marks, a complete medical history or a list of names of people to contact, people who knew you, people who cared about you, people who might know where you are. It’s the first thing I plan to look for now that I am here and you are not. I don’t have a trusted person, a friend to leave an MMC Pack with, but I have to let someone know where I am, even if it has to be him.
“Hello?” His voice surprises me even though I called him. “Hell-o?” he says when I don’t respond. He probably thinks I’m a telemarketer he can harass.
“It’s Sera.”
“Whoa! What the fuck? I didn’t think I’d hear from you again,” he says like I’m a one-night stand that went wrong, which I might be.
I am unsure how much to tell him. My first impulse is to start with I’m only calling you in case something bad happens to me, but I think that sounds insane, so instead I say, “I just wanted to check in. See how things are going.”
“Yeah, great, Los Angeles, great. The house is good.”
“That’s nice.”
“. . . What have you been up to?”
“I got a job.”
“A job? Who gave you a job?” Thanks.
“It’s at a guest ranch, working with horses and . . . cleaning.”
“I can barely hear you. Are you whispering?”
“I said, I got a job with horses.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you rode horses.” He didn’t know me at all.
“I’m at a place near Happy Camp, in Northern California. It’s called Fountain Creek Ranch.” I want him to remember the names, but I don’t want him to know I want him to remember them. “I haven’t seen a fountain or a creek.”
“Hey, that’s funny.” There is something so brusque and abrasive about him, so LA, and I remember the time we were together like it was a role I once played. A role I played so hard that there is nothing left, and now I am a shell of a person working with horses, cleaning windows like a head case between nervous breakdowns. And I feel like I should tell him that I am here for you, I am looking for you, that I haven’t lost my mind and I haven’t lost my nerve; I am a hero of heroless stories. I am a champion of the forgotten. I am on the cutting edge, of something at least.
Instead I say, “Yeah, so random.” “Random” used to be his favorite word, but I don’t think people say it anymore.
And he snorts. “Sorry. This is so bizarre. Last I remember, you couldn’t even cook your own dinner, and now you suddenly drive up the coast and get a job at a guest ranch? No offense, but this is like one of those psycho-podcast things you’re obsessed with. Like, I’m wondering if you’ve been kidnapped or snapped.”
“It is just like one of those podcasts.”
“Oh. Okay.”
My voice is hushed, rushed. I don’t hear your mother’s ATV, so I think (know?) I’m here alone, but I don’t feel alone. There is something in the topography of this place that throws everything together, so every sound is an echo, so every light is refracted, and I’m trying to curb myself but I can’t; it all comes rushing out of me in a wave of nervous delight. “I’m in the middle of nowhere. The town used to be called Murderer’s Bar and it’s— There’s no cell service for two and a half hours in any direction. There’s no police. It’s only accessible by these windy roads on the edge of cliffs following a river, this big river, the Klamath River, and it moves so fast
that bodies don’t even wash up until they hit the ocean.”
Long pause. “What the fuck, Sera?”
“It’s amazing. Seriously, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It sounds dangerous.” A pause. “Especially for you.” His voice has turned over, gone soft, and now I remember why we were more than a one-night stand gone wrong.
He doesn’t love me—or he doesn’t want to love me—but he does care about me, and I say, “It’s a job. I have a job. This is a good thing.” I don’t ask him what other choice I have. I don’t tell him I already feel more real here, more important looking for you than I ever did with him, losing myself. I don’t tell him about you at all. I can tell that it would be too much. The chance that there might be a Murder, Missing, Conspiracy, that I might be walking willingly into a crime scene.
“You know, when people talk about changing their life, it’s not supposed to happen overnight.”
I want to tell him that he doesn’t understand. I want to tell him this is something I’m supposed to do. This is something you would understand, but he doesn’t. I can see now that last year, all that time when I couldn’t leave the house, when I was lying in bed, listening to you, that was just preparation. You were preparing me, and it all means something—all that time I thought I was lost—it means something now because now I am here, and everything is coming together perfectly and it’s like a dream; it’s like the dreams I had when I fell asleep listening to your podcasts. It’s a Murder, Missing, Conspiracy, and I’m the hero. I’m following the clues, and I’m going to find you. And I’m going to prove to him and to everyone that I am somebody, that all that time when I seemed like nobody and I felt like nothing, it was just preparation for this.
But I pull myself in. I don’t tell him and I won’t tell him, not yet. He doesn’t trust me enough. He’ll think I’m crazy, the crazy old lady getting in over her head, so I just pull myself in and I focus on the details. “I got to ride a horse today. And now I’m cleaning windows. I’m doing something. This is good.”
The pause breeds many pauses. I can see them all lined up in a row. He sighs. “Well, you could have cleaned our windows.” I don’t know why it stings, but it does. I chose a selfish man to love, and I asked him not to be selfish. And even now I want him to help me, to think about me, to understand what being a woman is when he’s always and only ever been a man.
“I’ll call you in a week,” I say. “If I don’t call you in a week . . .” I want to say something will have happened. I want to say to call the police. But it feels like I am manipulating him, like I am holding myself hostage to make him care. I have called the wrong person. So instead I just say, “I’m at Fountain Creek Ranch near Happy Camp.” And hope he will remember, if I disappear.
* * *
—
My parents are less demanding. They don’t really do phone calls. They are the kind of people nothing ever happens to. The world could erupt and bombs could go off and the four horsemen could quiver into motion and they would be the same. My dad would watch Hallmark and my mom would watch Dateline. I end the call as I always do, wondering what kind of psychosis, what kind of to-the-core perversion, makes people that constant and ordinary.
I explore the lodge for a bit, unwilling to go back to my cabin but nervous about continuing my search in the daylight. Maybe it would be better if I wait until the sun goes down. The mountains are high around us, and it will touch down early here. In another twenty minutes, I will be able to look for your house in the dark.
There is a bookshelf in the lobby, and I search for something to read: a few books on horseback riding, a lot of books about fishing and topography and four copies of Dear Mad’m. I take one and I put it in the box with my food and I carry it out.
Before I head back to my cabin, I circle the lodge. There is an old gift shop; T-shirts and zip-ups with the Fountain Creek emblem hang on wall racks, speckled with fly shit. Beyond it is a small greenhouse pulsing with the dying light.
I put the box down on the patio and walk toward it. I open the door and am hit with a wall of heat that burns my eyes. As the door shuts behind me, I realize it’s not the heat. The shelves are stacked with potions in thick glass bottles. They carry no labels but are arranged neatly on the shelves, some threaded with ferns and flowers. In one, I spy a fish bone. My eyes sizzle around the edges and my nostrils sting. I can taste the earth at the back of my throat.
I grab the doorknob but the door sticks, making a strange sucking sound like it’s sealed. My heart swells in my chest. My shoulders tense. I dig in my heels and throw all my weight behind me. The glass door flies back and I bump the shelf, setting off a chorus of rattling glass.
I try to shake the shivers from my shoulders. I pick up my box. But I can still taste the dirt. My eyes still burn.
I walk back to the staff cabin, the darkness like a salve as I blink the sting away. I use a worn, almost bristleless broom to attempt to clean, but I bring up so much dust and rat shit from under the furniture that my eyes flare up again.
I settle for clearing a circle around my bed. Then I go to the closet and pull another quilt from the top shelf. It flops to the floor and a book falls with it, a thin volume in a cream cloth cover. My nerves pop.
I pick the book up off the floor and bring it and the quilt to the swept circle around my bed. The spine cracks as I open it. I see the name Lizzie scrawled inside the cover with the year 2007. I am surprised her journal has survived this long in the closet, and then I start to read.
The first few passages are obviously Lizzie’s. They maintain the same lyrical scrawl. They start with how beautiful the ranch is, how free, how secret. And then a new passage begins.
This place is fucking nuts. That woman is a witch.
And then some details about Lizzie’s life back home, a fight with her stepfather, a call from her ex. Three pages in, Lizzie vanishes and another author, this one unnamed, takes over, and as if in conversation with Lizzie.
I have never felt so WATCHED. I’ll be talking to my family about something random, and the next day she mentions it. All the girls say the same thing. Either she’s a fucking psychic or she’s spying on EVERYONE.
She continues for four more pages. And then another author takes over.
She screamed at a guest today. She has no boundaries.
She is sick and obsessive.
She always tells us what to do.
It becomes a burn book for your mother, a list of all the wicked things she does. There are no names beyond Lizzie’s, no dates. It seems to go beyond the normal employer-employee dynamic. They complain about the hours, the lack of breaks, the isolation, the hard labor, how many times a day she makes someone cry and the feeling, which everyone seems to have, that she is always watching.
She’s a control freak.
She’s a bitch.
She’s EVIL.
I read every last word. When I finally shut the book, I think of what your mother told me, how thoughts out here can be contagious. Already, I think I don’t like your mother.
I stash the journal under my mattress. I sit on the end of the bed in my swept circle, eyes fixed out the window, which faces the sun, which is drawing down toward the mountains. A horse nickers.
When it is dark enough, I stand. I know exactly where I’m going. I have learned from you how to solve a mystery, and I know exactly where I need to go. Exactly where your mother told me not to.
* * *
—
I take the same path skirting the perimeter, where I found the dead cat this morning. The body has been removed, leaving a mark like scorched earth. I step around it. The trail ricochets down the steep mountainside, cut deep into the cliff.
At the bottom of the ridge, the trail is blocked by a neat pile of logs. I pause, but only for a moment; then I climb along the steep sides, careful to avoid the poison ivy. I scratch my palms
and my fingernails collect dirt and I bounce down, unsteady, on the other side of the barrier. And I am walking fast along the creek, which crackles, not strong and overpowering like the Klamath but louder, bubbling, angry as it spatters against the rocks. The valley is lush with prehistoric ferns, bows of green turned black in the dark. The path meets a wide fire road running into the mountains. I glance toward the source as I step onto it, then gasp in surprise.
In the distance, at the mouth of the road, two headlights burn like round white globes. As I observe the lights, they shrink, sink back onto the road as the car reverses away from me. My heart is hammering in my chest. It was as if the car was parked there, waiting for me to arrive. I hear the sudden slash of an engine, as if someone’s stepped on the gas. For a moment, it seems to surround me, and then it drops out in an instant, like the car met its vanishing point. I blink. The sound must have hidden itself around a bend in the road, but it felt like magic, like a knot to be untangled.
It could have been anyone, I remind myself. It could have been someone pausing on a long journey, or looking for privacy. Not every road leads to you, but I look up ahead, and I think, This one does.
I hurry, footsteps quick, tripping on the uneven ground. I stop when I see a hair tie yawning on the ground. I pause to pick it up. I imagine a world where I can get it tested, where I find your DNA, but the strands on it are long and blond, gleaming in the moonlight, so I know it doesn’t belong to you.
I follow the creek, which must be the eponymous Fountain Creek, and the road bends and my heart slows and I see it, rising up in the dark so it’s a shadowed, greenish color my eyes still recognize as yellow. It’s your yellow house, just like I knew it would be.
I don’t hesitate, like a kid in a fairy tale; I rush right up the porch steps to the door and I knock. I wait. The house is dark. The lights are out.
If I Disappear Page 5