What She Found in the Woods

by Josephine Angelini

  ‘About your missing friend Mila,’ he replies. He leans back and adopts a small smile, meant to goad me into telling all. Good cops never give more information than they get, unlike Officer Longmire.

  I tip my head to the side. ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’ he asks, still smiling, sphinx-like.

  ‘On whether or not her disappearance is related to Dr Goodnight.’

  He leans forward suddenly and shoots a look at Aura-Blue.

  I lean forward as well and press on before he can get clearance from her. ‘I’m here because I want to know everything you know about him.’

  ‘Most people would say that he doesn’t exist,’ Grandpa says cautiously.

  I lean away and echo his sphinx smile right back at him. ‘We’re not most people.’

  A laugh lives and dies in his breath. ‘No. I guess not.’ He glances at Aura-Blue, and she shrugs. Given the semi go-ahead, he starts talking.

  ‘He was always out in front of any drug. Always knew how to grow it and refine it if it was an organic, or make and manufacture it simply and quickly if it was a chemical. And he did it before we even knew what the drug was. He made ecstasy before we knew what to call it. Meth. Molly. Fentanyl. Always out front. He’s a genius.’

  Mr Tanis goes on to tell me a story.

  I know stories, and this one is about a detective who was no Sherlock, but who followed the footprints anyway. He stumbled over bodies and saw the same pattern over and over, but never laid eyes on his Professor Moriarty. After listening for half an hour, I see the patterns as clearly as he did. Dozens of women fell asleep and never woke up. All of them were addicts. All of them tried recovery, failed, and then disappeared.

  ‘Why doesn’t anyone believe you?’ I ask and, a moment too late, realize how insulting that was. ‘Sorry,’ I say, cringing and looking down. ‘But someone must have seen him,’ I say, laughing to cover the fact that I know someone who had seen him. Gina. But she won’t talk. ‘Someone must have come forward.’

  ‘Couldn’t get one person to go on the record,’ he says sadly. ‘Too scared.’

  ‘What do you know about him? Any personal details at all?’ I ask.

  ‘He’d be late forties now. Caucasian. Fair. Quiet type. Strange.’ The old sheriff shrugs. ‘He had a son who’d be about your age.’

  ‘That’s it,’ I say, leaning forward. ‘If you know he had a son, then he must be on record somewhere. A birth certificate, at least. Who had his son? What was her name? What hospital?’

  Mr Tanis smiles at me. ‘You’d make a good cop,’ he tells me. He’s wrong, of course, but I don’t correct him. ‘It was a home water birth,’ he says. ‘The woman went by the name Aurora. She took the name from the sleeping princess in that Disney movie. We never found out who she really was, and we only knew about the boy because ten people overdosed in one night. The sole survivor told us it was a bonfire to celebrate a birth. Before she sobered up and conveniently forgot.’

  I sit back. I look out the window. Every detail makes it worse. A strange, genius dad and an Earth Mother woman have a baby in the woods just when Bo was born. It’s too close, but I can’t accept it.

  ‘So you have people dying in droves in this area, but no one will believe you when you say it might be a mass murderer?’ I raise an eyebrow at him. ‘No one from one of the big agencies – the FBI or the DEA – would even hear you out?’

  ‘Oh, they heard me. But they wrote us off as a town with a drug problem.’ His brow furrows as he thinks of how to explain. ‘Drug dealers get caught for a few reasons. Most of them have to do with money. The FBI follows the money, right?’

  I half nod, half shrug. I really don’t know.

  ‘Well, they do. People make drugs to make money, and then they have to launder that money somehow, right?’ He leans forward. The gleam in his eye gets an unstable edge to it. ‘The FBI came here before. They could never find the money. Never. No money, no drug dealer. Dr Goodnight became a joke.’

  Mr Tanis shifts in his seat and looks out the window. I look at Aura-Blue as his agitation builds. She leans in and touches his arm.

  ‘Grandpa, it’s OK,’ she says, trying to soothe him. That only makes it worse.

  ‘OK?’ he scoffs. ‘Do you know how many people he’s killed?’

  Aura-Blue sits back, her lips a thin line. I glance over at the orderlies. They aren’t making a move yet, but their radar is on. Mr Tanis seems to know he’s running out of time, or maybe he knows he’s past the sweet spot in his meds when he’s calm and charming, and he tells me the rest in a rush.

  ‘The reason we could never find him is because he didn’t make the drugs to make money. That’s where the FBI went wrong. That’s why they can’t find him and why they don’t believe he’s real. It was never about the money. Not for Dr Goodnight. It was about killing. But something’s changed. Twenty years of sleep and now blood. He never chopped people up before!’

  By this point, Mr Tanis has jumped out of his chair and he’s pacing. Two orderlies are coming towards us.

  ‘Is that why the FBI are back?’ I ask, standing and pacing with him so I don’t miss a word before he disappears into anger. ‘Do they believe you now?’

  ‘No!’ he screams. ‘It’s all wrong! They’re still girls, and the killings happened on his turf, so it has to be him. But . . . the blood! He likes things clean.’

  He laughs as the orderlies grab him. He feigns weakness for a moment and then surges with strength and breaks free, charging at me again.

  ‘They can ignore dead junkies who overdose, but those bodies . . . What he did to them. They can’t ignore that.’ The orderlies grab him just before he can grab me, and Mr Tanis struggles and screams at the ceiling as he’s carried out.

  The orderlies get him through the door and carry him off to the never-never-land of his room.

  1 AUGUST. MORNING

  I’ve been waiting for Bo for over an hour.

  I got there early. I woke when it was still dark and set out barely past dawn. I brought my blanket this time and spread it out, but I didn’t take anything else out of my pack.

  I’m just sitting here. I still don’t know what to say, but I can’t pretend that Dr Goodnight doesn’t exist any more. And I can’t pretend that every new detail I learn doesn’t point directly at Bo’s father.

  Mr Tanis said Dr Goodnight likes things clean. It’s difficult to keep things clean in the middle of a temperate rainforest that’s brimming with living things and seeping water.

  But Bo’s dad has a clean room, right here in the middle of the woods. It was miraculously spotless.

  I need to be sure that Ray is Dr Goodnight. If he is, there’s no way Bo doesn’t know something about it. The only play I have is to get Bo to say something that he shouldn’t know – like the fact that one of my friends is missing – and then I can go back home, march right into Officer Longmire’s station and tell him that I can lead him and the nearest SWAT team to the killers.

  But how? Bo and I have never spoken about Mila. Except that one time I told him that my friend Mila kissed me. Was saying her name enough for him to be able to find her? Was saying she kissed me enough for him to want to kill her? I know someone from his family takes a monthly trip into town for mail and news. I don’t know if one of them took that trip yesterday and heard about Mila’s disappearance, or if they would know Mila is missing because Ray has her tied up in that shed where he makes his drugs.

  I don’t know Bo.

  But I don’t know how much I don’t know him, and that’s why I’m just sitting here, combing through every conversation I’ve ever had with him. Searching for a way to either trap him or trust him. But I’ve got nothing. There’s no web of lies I can entangle him in. No easy key that unlocks the box and lets the demons out.

  I always thought I was smarter than everyone else. Well, I’m not. I still haven’t figured out what changed. Why did Dr Goodnight go from the clean death of sleep to the gory messes that he’s been leavin
g lately?

  Unless it’s not the same killer.

  That’s a stretch. One killer is hard enough to buy into, but two killers occupying the same area of forest? If Dr Goodnight is real, he wouldn’t allow someone to come into his territory and start killing people in a way that would draw the attention of the FBI. That could bring him down. Unless Dr Goodnight knows the killer, and either can’t or won’t stop the fledgling psychopath from poaching his prey.

  Dr Goodnight had a son. He had a fledgling.

  ‘You’re here early,’ I hear Bo say before I hear his footsteps.

  He breaks through the brush, his cheeks flushed and his eyes sparkling. He’s rushing towards me with all the certainty and warmth of the rising sun.

  What the hell am I thinking? There’s no darkness in Bo. No gruesome secret. I know liars. I know when I’m being manipulated. Bo is certainly not a murderer, and if Ray is Dr Goodnight, then Bo doesn’t know. Even the thought is ludicrous.

  Bo stops at the edge of my blanket. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks, his face mirroring my tortured expression.

  ‘My friend is missing,’ I say, and I burst out crying. I cry over everything, now that I’m not on my meds. No, actually, that’s not true. I only cry when Bo is with me.

  He sits down next to me gingerly. He doesn’t crowd me or try to hug me. ‘Was she out hiking?’ he asks. I nod, and his face brightens. ‘How long? When did she go missing?’

  ‘The day before yesterday, right after we worked together at the shelter,’ I answer while I sniff and wipe my face on the back of my hands. ‘We went out for ice cream, and then she must have gone home and got her hiking gear . . .’

  Bo interrupts. ‘What time was that?’ he asks urgently.

  ‘After four.’

  ‘Did she bring a tent? Camping gear? Does she hike a regular path?’ He’s standing up now and helping me to my feet as he speaks. ‘Think, Lena! We could still find her. Show me where she started from, and I can track her.’

  I’m shaking my head. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t dare get my hopes up or because I’m so surprised by his reaction. But I shouldn’t be surprised. Bo is good through and through, and I can’t believe I was such a fool to think what I did.

  ‘Can you really track her?’ I ask.

  ‘You said she went missing after four, the day before yesterday. It hasn’t rained since noon, the day before yesterday,’ he says. His voice is deep and sure. ‘I can find her. Just show me where she started from.’

  I start to gather up my things, but Bo stops me. He hefts my pack. ‘Too much weight,’ he says, and he starts emptying it out.

  He removes everything that isn’t survival gear, including my journal. I almost stop him, and then I don’t. I don’t need my journal. Not any more.

  ‘I’ll show you where she lives,’ I say, shouldering my nearly weightless pack.

  I knew. A few days had passed since David attacked the doctor, and he seemed to have settled into the new routine. Still, I knew.

  I stood at my door. Mute, but screaming inside until someone came.

  They all wondered how I knew, of course, but it’s not that difficult to put it all together if you had watched him closely. And no one had watched him more closely than I had. I just needed to stand back and see the big picture, and finally, I did.

  When Dr Jacobi opened my door, she sighed – a martyred saint, bleeding to death for my raging stupidity.

  ‘You need to verbalize what you’ve got locked up inside you,’ she told me, shaking her head sadly. ‘The only way you’re going to get what you need in this world is if you ask for it.’

  I dodged and weaved on my bare feet. I pushed past her and pointed. She followed me a few steps, but then nodded at an orderly to grab me. I struggled, but let’s face it, I’m not a wrestler, and the orderlies at the hospital were very good at restraining people.

  I made my first sound in months. Or I tried to. It creaked out of my throat, barely intelligible.

  ‘David . . .’

  It surprised everyone just enough that I could slip away and run the few steps down the hallway to his door.

  The furniture was bolted in place, and the ceilings were so high. No one thought it was possible, but David was exceptionally tall, and he’d played volleyball his whole life. He was an outside hitter – one of those guys who jump up so they can spike the ball down on to the opponent’s court at an impossibly steep angle.

  The details. That’s where the devil lives.

  I can never know for sure if it was what I wrote in my journal that made the doctors aware of David’s feelings for Dr Holt. And maybe if I’d said something about David’s height and his ability to jump, they still wouldn’t have listened to me. It was their job to keep him safe, not mine.

  All those little details that I saw that they didn’t. How silent he’d become since Dr Holt was moved to another floor. How hopeless yet determined he’d seemed. And then, that night after dinner as both he and I shuffled to our rooms, how relieved he looked. Like it was all going to be over soon. All of these details were there, waiting in my inbox for me to read into them if I had just taken the time. If I’d clicked on David’s three little dots.

  It was not my fault. But I knew it was going to happen, and I didn’t stop it. I should have said something but, as usual, I was too wrapped up in myself to give it a thought until it was too late.

  I could have just looked in the window, but I didn’t. I threw the bolt on David’s door and swung it wide open.

  In that slim slice of time after morning check-in when they turn off the night surveillance cameras, but before they came to take him to breakfast, David had hanged himself from the ceiling fan.

  Woop-woop.

  I bring Bo back to Mila’s house.

  It’s odd to see him like this, so close to pavement and pollution and GPS-led cars. We’re standing on the edge of the forest, and her house is across the street. Bo is already looking around for her possible entrance site.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he orders softly.

  I stand stock-still while he works his way around the area in loops. After about fifteen minutes, he calls out, ‘How much does Mila weigh?’ He looks up at me.

  ‘Hundred pounds, soaking wet,’ I reply.

  He smiles. ‘This is her.’ He points down at the ground.

  ‘Can I move?’ I ask.

  His smile turns into a grin. ‘Yes. Come here. I’ll show you.’

  I go to him and look down. I see something pressed into the ground. Maybe it’s the waffle print of a hiking boot.

  ‘How did you see that?’ I ask, shaking my head.

  ‘Practice,’ he replies. ‘We’re lucky it had just rained. She kicked up some mud with the edge of her boot. See right here?’

  I look closer and see it. And it’s like something unwinds in me. ‘We’re going to find her,’ I say, just testing it out, really – the possibility that we could do this.

  ‘We will,’ Bo says absently, looking up the trail. ‘Is this the girl that kissed you?’

  I knew this was going to come up eventually. ‘Yeah,’ I admit, grimacing. ‘But I stopped her before she really kissed me. I definitely didn’t kiss her back.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asks. ‘You like girls, too, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but boy or girl doesn’t matter. I don’t want to kiss anyone but you,’ I say, like it’s obvious. He looks up the trail, embarrassed, but pleased with my answer. Then his expression falls.

  ‘This way,’ he says.

  Bo slides into the underbrush, lithe and sure. I follow in his footsteps.

  A million possibilities unwrap in my mind.

  Mila could be hurt. Fallen. Broken leg or bleeding wound.

  Or she could be secluding herself so she can detox – purposely out in the woods all by herself so she can sweat it out without temptation.

  She could already be back home, and I just don’t know it because I don’t have my phone on me. There’s no point t
aking it into the woods. The coverage is non-existent where we’re going.

  Bo moves quickly. He sees Mila’s tracks clearly, and he rarely has to pause to make sure. He points down at the ground and mumbles briefly about turned moss and scraped logs.

  He’s still trying to teach me, which is adorable. He tells me that her trail is easy to follow. It’s purposeful. Straight. Like she knew exactly where she was going.

  The most unlikely possibility is the one I entertain last. Mila could be leading me right to Dr Goodnight.

  1 AUGUST. AFTERNOON

  Had it been a conscious choice, I would have felt more responsible. Guilty, even. But that’s not how it happened. I didn’t set out for revenge. I didn’t make a plan and execute it – not at first.

  I was angry, yes, and who wouldn’t be? After David killed himself, I wanted out of the hospital. I would have done anything. And even though I was talking again, and apparently responding to therapy, I was no closer to getting out of there than I was the day I’d arrived.

  The doctors had to want to let me go, and with my growing body count, they definitely didn’t want to. I guess I made one choice, vague though it was when I began. I made the choice to use my journal as a tool. Or weapon, depending on your point of view. But after how horribly they’d handled David, they had it coming. Every single one of them.

  The truth. I was going to give them nothing but the truth as I saw it, and watch what happened.

  I started with the new leader of our group therapy, Dr Weinbach.

  There were a dozen better ways to deliver the news about Dr Holt being moved to another floor, but he wanted to impose his leadership over our group. He wanted to show everyone how amazing he was. He wasn’t thinking about David when he told us Dr Holt wasn’t coming back. He was thinking about his career, about his promotion from the state cases downstairs up to our floor with the rich kids whose parents he could rope into expensive private therapy sessions when their kid got out. He was happy Dr Holt was gone, and he wanted to keep it that way.

  He went down first.

  It’s easy to create a character that readers hate. You don’t even have to make it obvious. No moustache-twirling required. All you have to do is show a character make a very big mistake that they cover up with a bunch of excuses and finger-pointing so they can hold on to a potentially lucrative position.