The Forest of Forever (The Soren Chase Series, Book One)

by Rob Blackwell

  “You want to find your son,” Soren said.

  “This isn’t just about finding my son,” Wallace said. “I’m not stupid; I know he’s dead. There’s nothing I can do to protect him anymore. I failed at that job, the most important task I had in my miserable, privileged existence. I can’t make up for that now. But there’s another missing girl now, and even if I can’t help her I can damn well help anyone else who gets too close to that fucking forest.”

  “Why not be upfront from the beginning?” Soren asked.

  “For one thing I wanted to find out how good an investigator you were,” he replied. “I expected you to show up within twenty-four hours.”

  “Again, my initial instinct wasn’t to investigate the people who were hiring me,” Soren said.

  “Then that was your first mistake,” Wallace replied. “It’s the primary rule of business—always do your due diligence. You’d be surprised how many assholes break that requirement, but they always, always live to regret it.”

  “It could have helped me on the case,” Soren said. “There was no good reason to keep me in the dark.”

  “Sure there was,” Wallace said. “How did you find out about Owen? Did you read up on him somewhere else?”

  “No, I . . .”

  Soren stopped as he realized what he was saying.

  “Go on,” Wallace prodded him.

  “I saw him in the forest,” Soren said.

  Wallace leaned forward. He looked at Soren intently.

  “How did he look?”

  “Exhausted,” Soren said. “Lonely. Terrified.”

  Wallace closed his eyes for a moment. Soren detected only a slight tremor in the man’s hands when he said those words, but he had the feeling it was more emotion than Wallace usually displayed in a week. When Wallace opened his eyes, however, it was with the same hard expression from earlier.

  “I wanted you to see him for yourself,” Wallace said. “If you’d seen Indians, Coakley, or Civil War soldiers, you could have convinced yourself it was just something planted in your head. But nobody told you about Owen, and yet he’s who you saw.”

  “You couldn’t know that was going to happen,” Soren said. “I would have eventually learned about him.”

  “I follow my hunches,” Wallace said. “I wanted to see what kind of investigator you were—and I didn’t want to prejudice you with stories about Owen before you actually went into the forest. And now I know.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Soren said.

  Wallace cocked his head to the side.

  “You’re hardly the first,” Wallace said. “I’ll admit I was impressed with how you handled the Association, however. Annika told me about your little run-in in the forest and the conversation with Mr. Chastain. You also saved Annika’s life. That counts a great deal with me. She hasn’t worked here long, but I’ve grown unexpectedly fond of her. Please don’t let her know I said that. I believe it’s healthy for the hired help to not know where they stand.”

  Soren’s eyes narrowed as he tried to assess what it meant that Wallace was “fond” of her.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter,” Wallace said, as if he had read Soren’s mind. “I’m too old for that shit. But let’s get down to business. Annika said you threatened to quit.”

  “I don’t like being lied to,” Soren said. “It wasn’t just your son you kept hidden. It was also the Association.”

  “Boo-fucking-hoo. You work for me? I’ll keep you in the dark if I damned well feel like it. I didn’t want you facing the Association with a bias. There are some things you need to find out for yourself.”

  “Great,” Soren said. “They were a fun bunch. I’m really happy I wasn’t properly prepared to face them.”

  “Nobody’s ever ‘properly prepared’ to face them.”

  “What else do you know about them?” Soren asked.

  “That depends. Do you still work for me or not? Because I’m not about to provide information to someone not in my employ.”

  “I guarantee you this: I want to find out what’s in that forest almost as bad as you do,” Soren said.

  “Don’t care. I feel safer when someone is indebted to me. I’m not going to ask a third time. Do we still have a deal?”

  Soren considered it briefly and then nodded.

  “Good,” Wallace said. “I’m beginning to like you. For an accused murderer, you’re not all bad.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “I’ll send over the file on the Association,” Wallace said. “But it’s thin. I’ve dug at those guys every which way from here to Sunday, and I can’t tell you a goddamned thing about them. They’ve got money, but I can’t tell where it comes from. Certainly not the usual business interests—I have plenty of fingers in those pies. And Randolph Chastain is an enigma. I know mostly what I don’t know: that’s not his real name and he’s not human.”

  “Neither one of those assertions would surprise me if they were true. But if he’s not human, what is he?”

  Wallace shrugged.

  “No fucking clue,” he said. “Not one of the usual suspects. He’s not a ghost, ghoul, pretender, or some other nasty. But we don’t know what he is either.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “More than once,” Wallace replied. “And it was Chastain himself who implied he wasn’t exactly mortal. I had a gun pointed at him at the time. He strongly suggested that shooting him wouldn’t hurt him.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Once I shot him in the chest and he barely flinched, yes,” Wallace said.

  “Damn. You don’t fuck around.”

  “No, I do not,” Wallace said. “I don’t make a threat unless I plan to follow through. I recommend you do likewise. It makes your threats much more effective.”

  “How effective were they against the Hill kid?”

  Wallace gave him another soft laugh.

  “Clearly you don’t know how that story ended,” he said.

  Soren realized that was true. He and Glen had discussed it the day before, but he was unaware of what happened to Jeff Hill.

  “He hung himself in a closet,” Wallace said, and there was a trace of satisfaction in his voice. “That was after he went to college, almost a decade after he stranded my boy.”

  “Stranded?”

  “You think Owen went paddling out into the middle of the woods by himself in the dark? Before Hill died, he wrote a note where he admitted the truth. His father didn’t have the balls to tell me himself, not after all the times he insisted I stop harassing his son. They left the police to do that.”

  “What happened?”

  “Owen was a nice kid,” Wallace said, “but he was shy. He had friends, but none of them were particularly close. Jeff was a couple years older, and for some reason he just had it out for Owen. He was always picking on him, tripping him up—stupid stuff like that. Owen told me about it and I told him to toughen up, fight back. But that wasn’t my son at all, and I should have known it. I didn’t want to raise a sissy. I wanted him to be tough, the way my daddy made me. Life is full of bullies. But I was a fool. Had I addressed the situation earlier . . .”

  He paused for a moment before continuing.

  “During the snipe hunt, Hill comes racing up to Owen and tells him he knows where the real snipes are,” Wallace said. “He also apparently told him he was sorry for how he’d treated him and wanted to make it up to him. The idea was that they would come back with a real snipe, while the rest of the troop returned empty-handed. Hill said that Owen resisted but eventually was convinced. The two of them got into a canoe and paddled downriver.

  “Hill claims they paddled straight across the river, but either he was lying or perhaps he intended to and drifted off course. Either way, they ended up on the edge of Reapoke Forest. Not that they knew it existed. They get up onshore, and Hill tells him to head off into the forest to find a snipe. While my son does, Hill gets back in the canoe and starts paddl
ing away.

  “Owen starts screaming at him to come back once he realizes what’s happening, but Hill just laughs at him. Owen starts chucking rocks at him from the shore and one grazed Hill. He got pissed off and left. In his note, Hill says he did eventually come back for Owen after several minutes, but by the time he did Owen was gone. When he got back to camp, he insisted he fell asleep by the river. If the leaders had questioned him further, Jeff would have caved. I believe that. In that moment there was still time to save my son.

  “But Jeff was too worried what would happen when they found Owen, what he would tell the others. That would be the end of his scouting days, that much was certain. And Jeff Hill wanted to be an Eagle Scout, just like his daddy. It’s amazing what pressure fathers put on sons, as if we can stave off mortality by molding them in our images. So Jeff shut his trap and never opened it, not even when I threatened or cajoled. And he did become an Eagle Scout. I attended the ceremony and sat in front. You should have seen his face when he saw me there. But I knew. I knew he killed my boy. I wasn’t prepared to let it go.

  “He went to the College of William & Mary,” Wallace added. “Don’t you find that funny? Jeff Hill had good grades and came from money. He could have gone anywhere, but he went to the university closest to Reapoke Forest.”

  “Maybe his father was an alumnus.”

  “No, I checked,” Wallace said. “And maybe it really was a coincidence, but I doubt it. I doubt it very much. The boy didn’t last six months. By all accounts he was having a good time. He had friends, a girlfriend, and was pledging a fraternity. And then one day his roommate comes in to find Jeff Hill hanging from a noose in the closet. He reads the letter on the desk, which is a very good thing. The police told me a bit about what was in it but left out a key part. In the letter, Jeff Hill confesses to all of it, says how much it weighed on his mind, how he can never forgive himself for Owen’s death. At the end of it he says something else. He says when he sleeps, he can still hear Owen calling him. He says he can still hear Owen calling his name.”

  Soren leaned forward.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Leggett,” he said. “I truly am.”

  Wallace’s granite eyes flicked over to him but remained impassive.

  “You’ve asked the right questions but not the big one,” he said.

  “What does the Association want?”

  “To keep us out.”

  “Why?”

  “Officially, we don’t know,” Wallace said. “I’ve had investigators come up with a bunch of different theories, ranging from the mundane to the fucking ridiculous. My favorites are that it’s secretly drilling for oil or dumping nuclear waste. But I suspect the truth is much worse than that.”

  “You have a guess?”

  “When I first cottoned on to them, I thought they were a secret society of assholes. Maybe they were Satanists or sex fiends. I didn’t care. I just wanted to find my son. But back in the 1970s, all they ever did was keep people away, unless they had to cooperate with the police. That’s been changing lately.”

  “How?”

  “That warehouse you were at? They just built it,” Wallace said. “They’ve stepped up security, hired more men. Chastain didn’t use to sit on the premises—now he does. What does that tell you?”

  “They’re getting ready for something,” Soren said.

  Wallace nodded.

  “Precisely,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s accelerating. You told Annika you suspected someone purposely lured Evan and his friends to the woods. You’re right. It was the Association, I’m sure of it. Chastain’s attempt on your life was also out of character. Generally, they just want to scare people away. This seems different. I think he’s anxious about something. Whatever they’re preparing for, it’s going to happen soon. And knowing Chastain, my hunch is whatever that is will be very bad.”

  Wallace crushed the cigar in the ashtray, pausing only to take a breath. “Which means if you’re going to get to the bottom of this, you have to move fast.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Soren started to drive back to his office, still reeling from his conversation with Wallace, when he spotted Sara walking on the sidewalk, holding a small boy’s hand. He slammed on the brakes, causing the car behind him to honk its horn. When Sara looked over at the noise, she spotted Soren, who waved.

  Soren pulled the car over to the side of the road. He rolled down the passenger-side window and Sara leaned inside, looking at him in surprise.

  “Wow,” she said. “Now I’ve seen you twice in one week. That has to be some kind of record.”

  The boy pushed in between his mom and the car, standing up on his toes to get a better view into the car. Soren looked at his wide eyes and smiled.

  “Are you here to find more ghosts?” he asked.

  He seemed as if he expected to see spirits in Soren’s car.

  “Not around here,” Soren replied. “Nice to see you again, Alex.”

  Soren thought the boy seemed disappointed.

  “Why are you out this way?” Sara asked.

  She glanced at her watch. Soren glanced at the time and realized she was walking Alex to school.

  “You two want a ride?” he said.

  “Yeah!” Alex exclaimed, and he immediately opened the back door and jumped inside.

  Sara laughed.

  “I guess our answer is yes,” she said, opening the passenger door.

  Alex was smiling widely, exploring the car as if it were an undiscovered cave.

  “He hates walking to school,” Sara said. “He complains about it every morning. It’s almost a ritual.”

  “It’s a really long way,” Alex said.

  Sara gave Alex a look that Soren recognized from his own mother’s face thirty years earlier, probably an expression that had been passed down through generations of maternal ancestors. It conveyed disbelief, amusement, and exasperation at the same time and in roughly the same amounts.

  “Sure it is, bud,” she said.

  “It is!” Alex protested.

  Soren laughed.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  Sara pointed in the opposite direction from the one Soren had been headed, and he chucked a U-turn. The school wasn’t far down the road. Soren pulled off onto a side road that was already clogged with cars and buses. He heard a sigh beside him.

  “I really wish they’d do something about this,” she said. “Better let us out here. If we wait, he’ll be late for school. Again.”

  “Can I give you a lift back?” Soren asked her. “Or maybe we could go for coffee or something.”

  She looked over at him curiously.

  “Sure,” she said. “Just wait over there.”

  She pointed to another side street as she stepped out of the car.

  “Bye, buddy,” Soren said as Alex slid over and opened the back door.

  “Bye, Daddy’s friend,” he said, and hopped out.

  Soren drove his car over to the appointed spot and turned to watch them walk hand in hand into the school. He couldn’t hear them, but he could see Sara laughing at something Alex said and him smiling up at her. They disappeared into the building. Soren found it hard not to feel sad.

  He wasn’t surprised Alex hadn’t remembered his real name. When he’d showed up to help Sara several months ago, he’d made a point of introducing himself as one of John’s best friends. The invocation of Alex’s mythical dad had done more than Soren expected. The boy had peppered him with questions about what his father was like.

  It grieved Soren that John had never met Alex, or vice versa. As far as he was aware, John hadn’t even known Sara was pregnant. The boy was born roughly seven months after John’s death, so it was possible even Sara hadn’t known. It hadn’t been planned, of course, but Soren knew a child would have been happy news nevertheless. John had loved Sara since the three of them were kids. It had been Sara who put off the wedding, which had ultimately never happened at all.

  It was far to
o easy to imagine John in Soren’s place right now, driving the two of them to school and dropping them off. Alex’s life would be completely different. But then again, if John were alive, both Soren’s and Sara’s lives would also be radically changed.

  He didn’t know what his life would be like, only that it would be much better. Soren missed John every day. He’d never grown used to his absence. He wondered what it was like for Alex. Could you miss a man you never knew?

  His thoughts were interrupted when Sara opened the door and climbed in.

  “So how about that coffee?” she asked. “I’ve got a little time before I need to get on a conference call.”

  “Sure,” Soren said, his mind jumping back to reality. “Just steer me in the right direction.”

  “We’re just looking for a Starbucks, John,” she said, smiling. “It can’t be that hard to find.”

  Soren felt the blood drain from his face. He tried to cover for it quickly, but he saw her smile falter.

  “Shit,” she said. “I called you John, didn’t I? I’m sorry. When you showed up, I started thinking about him, and then with Alex, I . . .” She shook her head. “Maybe this is a bad idea,” she said softly. “I can walk home.”

  She made a move to open the car door, but Soren put his hand on her arm.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “It’s fine—it really is. I was thinking about John, too. Of course we were. We can do this. We can go have coffee like two normal people.”

  Sara looked at him, her brown eyes holding his gaze. Slowly, she took her hand off the door handle.

  “Okay, but I don’t think you were ever normal,” she said, a small smile playing on her lips.

  Soren laughed louder than the joke deserved and started driving.

  Soren and Sara sat quietly while sipping coffee, both of them clearly reluctant to break the spell. It was as if talking would bring back the awkwardness that had surfaced in the car. Or maybe that was always going to be there, Soren speculated.