by Elle Gray
“I could hear movement to the left of the house... she must have come from that way. Let’s circle around the cabin and walk north from the back of it.”
Olivia led the way, looking again for trampled ground. The search party hadn’t extended so far as the cabin, so when she saw a pathway in the undergrowth, she felt pretty confident that it was where Amelia had come from. Even though Amelia had already been found, safe and sound, Olivia was sure that if they were dealing with the same kidnapper, then there might be some significance to the path Amelia had taken. If they could follow it far enough, maybe it would lead them to some answers.
“It must have been pretty intense having Amelia show up on your doorstep the way she did,” Brock commented as they carefully picked their way through the forest.
“It was. I was sure she was being followed at the time. She seemed so urgent. Whatever she ran away from had terrified her.”
“Doesn’t it seem strange? Two sudden disappearances linked to this area. Specifically this forest,” Brock said, “There’s nothing here. And yet, strange things are happening.”
“Maggie said it’s always pretty quiet here normally. Maybe it’s me. Sometimes I feel like trouble follows me around,” Olivia murmured. Her thoughts flashed again to her poor sister, her disappeared mother, her estranged father. She thought of how she’d isolated herself from the few friends she had left. Maybe on some level, she did it to save them. To keep them out of trouble.
“Well, I guess trouble is a perk of the job,” Brock mused. “But you know it’s not your fault, right? It’s not you at the center of things just because your job drags you into hell.”
Olivia didn’t respond. She didn’t want to admit that she did believe, on some level, that she was a problem. She didn’t want to admit that working alone was easier for her because involving someone like Brock usually meant involving him in her problems as well. If he knew the things that had happened to her family, perhaps he wouldn’t be so sure-footed around her.
They kept walking in silence. Olivia hadn’t intended to shut him out entirely, but she didn’t want to get in deep with Brock. She didn’t want him to know everything going on in her head. After all, he’d be gone soon and they’d probably never see each other again. As soon as the case wrapped up, he’d be desperate to get out of Belle Grove, she was certain of it.
It was about fifteen minutes into the walk when Olivia noticed something. In the center of a small clearing was a magnificent tree, larger and wider than any of the rest in the forest. It looked old, and tendrils of roots rose out of the ground in a strange manner. Olivia stopped and stared at it in awe. The base of the tree was hollowed out and the ground there dipped low, making almost a small cave inside the tree.
“That’s pretty cool,” Brock remarked, standing beside Olivia to admire it too.
“It is,” Olivia agreed quietly. She knew they should move on, but something made her take a few steps closer to the tree. She placed her hand on the trunk of the tree, feeling the rough bark beneath her fingers as the wind whipped at her hair. She could hear something rustling and she strained her ears. It didn’t sound like leaves in the breeze, or simply the sound of the trees. It sounded like something more synthetic. Like plastic rustling.
“Olivia? Are we moving on?”
Olivia ignored Brock and got on her knees by the hollowed entrance to the tree. She ducked her head inside and looks up, setting off a flurry of insects scampering away from her. Several large spiders had built webs all through the inside of the cave, the sight of which sent a shudder running up her spine. But behind the cobwebs and bits of bark and leaves, there was something else too. Something concealed inside a small plastic envelope tucked into the side of the tree.
Olivia put on a pair of plastic gloves as she heard Brock approaching behind her.
“Did you find something?”
“I think I did…”
She plucked the folder from out of the tree, surprised to find that it was heavier than she expected. It was stuffed full to bursting with several large objects. She ducked out from under the tree again and held it up to the daylight.
What she saw surprised her. There were several objects inside. The first was a large, ugly rag doll. It looked well used. One of its button eyes was loose on a piece of thread, and it was wearing a patchwork dress.
“Do you think it belongs to one of the kids?” Brock wondered, peering at it. “Sophia or Amelia?”
“I don’t know... aren’t they both a little old for dolls like this? I think the parents would’ve mentioned if a beloved toy of theirs was missing…”
“Wait... what is that?” Brock asked, pointing in disgust at something in the bottom corner of the folder. Olivia’s heart froze when she saw what he was looking at.
It was a lock of hair. Blonde and wispy. It had been tied up with a rubber band to hold it together. Olivia tried to match the shade of blonde to Amelia or Sophia, but she wasn’t sure if either were a perfect match. Amelia’s hair was very light, too light to be the hair in the envelope, but Sophia’s hair was more of a dark blonde, from the pictures Olivia had seen.
Olivia spotted a velvet pouch in the folder too and reached her hand inside to see what it was. She shook it gently; several objects clanked together inside. She had a sinking feeling she already knew what was in there, and when she opened it her fears were confirmed.
Teeth.
“Oh, God!” Brock cried in disgust. “What the hell?”
Olivia swallowed, her eyes scanning the teeth over. The more she looked at them, the less ominous they seemed. At first, her mind had raced with horrific images of someone extracting teeth from their victim, but upon inspection, these teeth were much smaller than adult teeth.
“I don’t think this is as bad as you think,” Olivia said, quietly examining the contents of the folder again. “These are baby teeth. Many parents keep their children’s teeth. And the hair—again, not that unusual. I think my mother kept some of my hair after I got it cut short as a kid. I went through a tomboy phase and she wanted something of mine to keep.”
“So you don’t think these belong to Amelia or Sophia?”
“I don’t think so,” Olivia replied carefully. “The hair isn’t the right color, for starters. It’s a different kind of blonde to either of the girls who went missing. And both the girls will have their adult teeth by now. I’m sure we would have been informed if one of them was missing a whole row of teeth…”
“So what are we looking at? Is it relevant?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just some kind of time capsule,” she replied, but Olivia’s instincts screamed at her that the folder in her hand was important in some way. She couldn’t stop looking at the hair. Both the girls who’d gone missing were naturally blonde. It wasn’t actually a very common hair color, now that Olivia thought about it. Did that mean this folder had some kind of connection to the case, even if the things inside didn’t belong to either of the girls?
“Whoever left this here... they didn’t bury it. They wanted easy access to it,” Olivia thought aloud. “Maybe these things don’t belong to the girls, but someone’s child. But the fact that it’s out here in the forest, not kept at home, just doesn’t sit right with me. Why would you keep something so precious out in the forest?”
“Unless you’re trying to keep it hidden,” Brock added. Olivia nodded, glad that Brock understood where she was coming from. She examined everything inside again.
“And the doll looks pretty old. I don’t think it belongs to either of the girls. Even if one of their parents had passed it down to them, it still seems like it’s too old to belong to a forty- or fifty-year-old. Amelia’s parents didn’t mention a missing toy, and I don’t feel like Sophia is the sort of girl who carries around a doll…”
“So how can we connect that to the case?”
Olivia paused. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe we can’t. Maybe I’m just hoping this matters. But I want to send it to the l
ab anyway and have the contents analyzed. You never know.”
“Right. Let’s take it back to town. Unless you want to keep searching?”
Olivia offered up the plastic folder to Brock. “You head back. I’ll keep looking. I know the forest better; I’ll be able to find my way back. But I don’t want to waste any time on this folder if it’s not relevant. Let’s get it checked out as soon as possible.”
“Aye aye, captain,” Brock cracked, pulling on gloves of his own and taking the package. “I’ll send the phone too. It’s unlikely, but it might pull up some fingerprint results or something. I think we’ve got all that we can out of the texts on there.”
Olivia nodded. “Okay. I’ll see you later. Text me if anything important comes up.”
The two of them parted ways. Olivia stood for a little longer by the hollowed-out tree, her heart beating hard in her chest, unable to describe the way she felt right then. She felt like she was right on the cusp of something, some sort of answer. She thought of everything in the folder and her thoughts kept circling back to her mother. Maybe the person she was looking for was a mother—or somebody who wanted to be a mother.
But it wasn’t enough to go off of. She could see the shape of it, but couldn’t quite connect the dots. She thought hard about the similarities between Amelia and Sophia. Both were blonde, both were from well-off families, and both were around the same age. But the elephant in the room was the fact that Amelia was from Seattle and Sophia was from here—and yet they went missing in the same forest. Other than the hair she’d found, was anything else in the plastic folder relevant to the case? Did the old doll suggest that maybe the person she was looking for didn’t have a lot of money, or didn’t at some point, and couldn’t buy new toys for a child? She closed her eyes to try and help her think, but she kept drawing blanks.
Eventually, she resumed walking. She had to explore every avenue. She had to try and follow the path that Amelia had run. But when every path led to a dead end, it felt like it was all for nothing. The phone had been a dead end. Perhaps the folder would be too.
And then where would that leave her?
Ten
Olivia trekked back to her cabin in the mid-afternoon after the tracks she was following hit a dead end. She felt deflated but hoped that Brock’s morning might have been more productive. She texted him to let him know she was back at the cabin, reading the case notes and adding her own thoughts to the folder, and he joined her soon after, letting himself into the cabin.
“Hey,” Olivia greeted him. “Did you get everything off to the lab alright?”
Brock nodded. “I think they thought I was crazy when I told them the connections we made to the case. I guess it is a pretty long shot, but we have to try, right?”
“Right,” Olivia said half-heartedly. She knew if they were dealing with the same person that took Amelia, then the plastic folder probably wouldn’t help them. The kidnapper had managed to get into a locked house without being noticed and left absolutely no evidence behind. Whoever it was wouldn’t be so clumsy with anything that might connect them to the case. They’d chosen a strange hiding place for the items they found in the forest, for sure, but Olivia would bet anything that there would be no trace of them on the items they’d found. Their best hope was to find out who the teeth and hair belonged to.
“Anything we find now, we have to try,” Brock continued. “Honestly, I’ve never gotten this far into a case with nothing before.”
Olivia nodded. “Whoever is doing this has their head screwed on, for sure. I don’t think we’re dealing with some deranged psychopath. Whoever is doing this, I get the feeling they’re just a normal person. Maybe someone who has been through something traumatic. Someone who wants to make other people feel the way they’ve been made to feel.”
Brock nodded. “Yeah. That doesn’t rule many people out though, does it? I’ve met a lot of people over the years that have revenge on their minds.”
Olivia pondered on that comment for a while. After her sister died, she always wanted to be the one to find out what happened to her, to close the case, and get some answers. Especially after Paxton started pressing the theory that there was foul play involved. But she never thought about some kind of revenge spree. She didn’t want to hurt anyone in that way. She just wanted whoever might have done it to be brought to justice. The thought of revenge made her stomach turn a little. She’d dealt with plenty of horrible cases over the years, but she’d never been able to put herself in the shoes of the criminals she dealt with. She could never imagine herself brandishing a knife, no matter how many people buried knives in her back.
“But revenge like this? What does that mean? Does it mean that whoever did this had a child stolen from them?” Olivia wondered aloud. “Did they have a miscarriage? Or lose a custody battle?”
“Both possible. But that’s assuming the cases are even linked. Remember, our first assumption with Amelia was trafficking because of the distance,” Brock pointed out. “If our suspect’s home base is here, that could mean that any connection would have to be very specific for them to go all that way.”
Olivia puffed out a lungful of air. “I feel like I’m going around in circles. I could really use a break here,” she said. As she did, she heard a soft knock at the door, so quiet that she thought she’d imagined it for a moment, but Brock looked at the door too.
“You going to get that?”
Olivia frowned. She never got visitors. In fact, until Brock was sent to work with her, Amelia was the closest thing to a visitor she’d had. She had a sudden fear that she was about to walk out of the door and find Sophia in a similar state. But when she opened the door, she was surprised to see Craig standing there.
“Craig,” Olivia said, folding her arms. “How did you know where to find me?”
“I asked at the police station. Officer Stone sent me here,” Craig mumbled, shifting from foot to foot anxiously. “She said you were the person to talk to about the case.”
That pricked up Olivia’s ears. Was he about to come clean? Had he done something to Sophia? “Well, I think you’d better come inside.”
“Actually, I wanted you to follow me,” Craig said nervously, nodding toward the back of her house to the edge of the forest. Olivia’s heart started racing.
“Why?”
“There’s something I want to show you. I guess I want to show you that—that I’d never hurt her.”
Olivia’s forehead creased in confusion. She had no idea what Craig could possibly want to show her, but if she was going into the forest with him, she certainly wasn’t going alone.
“You won’t mind if I bring my partner along, right?” she asked. Brock appeared behind her, towering over both her and Craig. It seemed to make Craig more anxious, knowing Brock would be there with them, but he nodded anyway.
“Okay. Come on. I’ll show you.”
Olivia exchanged a glance with Brock before the pair of them began to follow Craig out into the forest. It didn’t take Olivia long to realize that they were following the same path they’d walked earlier that day. It made Olivia’s stomach twist with nerves. Somehow, she already knew exactly where Craig was leading her.
The big hollowed-out tree came into view and Olivia was hit with a sense of deja vu. She imagined that something horrible had happened at the tree—and that something equally awful was going to happen to her and Brock if they weren’t careful. But Craig came to a stop in front of the tree and turned around, looking close to tears.
“Me and Sophia come here a lot,” he said quietly. “But it’s not just us. It’s kind of well-known in the town. At least, among teenagers, it is. You know how quiet it is here, Agent Knight. Kids can’t get away with going to wild parties or anything like that. So I’ve been coming here since I was about fourteen. It’s where kids meet up to smoke, drink, make out... you know, that kind of thing. People come here because it’s private, and people can do all the things they’re not supposed to.”
Li
ke kidnapping? Olivia thought to herself. Craig turned a little red, probably knowing exactly what she was thinking. He cleared his throat.
“Anyway, my point is, this is where we’d come. I used to drive her here, but since her mom started getting mad about us hanging out... well, she’s walked here herself a few times.”
“So you cared that much about this underage girl to have her wandering around in the middle of the night?” Brock asked coldly. Craig’s eyes widened with fear.
“It’s not like that, sir. You’ve got to understand, this town is very quiet. It’s not like it is in the city. Kids still play out on the streets because we barely see any cars around most of the time. Everyone knows everyone here, everyone trusts everyone. Kids play out late all the time. I didn’t ever think that something would happen to her. It just doesn’t happen here.”
“That’s bull—”
“Alright,” Olivia cut Brock off. “That’s not important right now. What made you bring us here, Craig? What’s the significance of this place?”
Craig’s lip wobbled a little and he moved closer to the tree, ushering Olivia to follow him. She did so cautiously, still feeling apprehensive of the young man. But when she watched him trail his finger over the bark of the tree, she understood what she was looking at.
Two letters were carved into the tree. C and S. Craig and Sophia. Craig let out a small sob as he traced the letter S.
“I really care about her,” he sniffed. “On the night she disappeared, I was waiting here for her. I kept asking where she was. I thought she’d given up on me. I thought her mom had made her stay home. I stayed here for hours, but eventually, I gave up. What if—what if she made it here, but then someone took her because I wasn’t here?”
Olivia sighed quietly to herself. “Alright, calm down, Craig. I think it’s likely that she went missing on her way here. You’d have been waiting here alone all night. It wouldn’t have changed anything.” She didn’t add that it was his fault that a fifteen-year-old girl was walking around in the middle of the night.