A Letter from L.T. and Tim
Kara kicked at the wood chips beneath the park bench, flinging flecks of red every which way. Something about the activity jarred her out of a daze, highlighted the level of boredom she’d now achieved.
Christ. This was how she was spending her Christmas break? Sitting on a park bench, kicking wood chips?
The street was dead. This part of Salem Island always was.
Even the air itself seemed lifeless. Overcast sky the gray shade of a stone. No sun. No breeze.
Kara checked the time on her phone again, wondering what was taking Maggie so long. She should have been here by now.
She felt his presence before she saw him. Bodily responses communicating the signs of danger one by one.
A prickling of the hair on her arms.
A chill climbing up her spine.
Her breath hitching in her throat.
Someone was watching her. Someone in the shadows.
Kara locked her eyes on her feet. Searched out of the periphery of her vision.
There was a darkness there. A hulking shape across the street. A man. His broad-shouldered silhouette framed in the doorway of one of the boarded-up shops.
And he stared straight at her.
She fidgeted on the bench. Wished she could keep still. Convey no emotion. Like playing dead.
The last half hour flashed through her mind. She’d wandered down here after the fight with her mom. Stormed out of the house and then circled through town, killing time, smoking cigarettes, cutting through lawns. Waiting for Maggie to come pick her up. So, where was she?
She glanced up, eyes seeking and finding him at last. He turned his head the other direction, overselling the nonchalance.
That chill in her spine grew colder, shooting up her back and hovering between her shoulder blades.
He looked like he could be in witness protection, covered up to the point of ridiculousness. Chunky sunglasses screened much of the face behind sheening black plastic. A Detroit Tigers hat rode low over his brow. His hand rose to cover his mouth, index finger and thumb pinching at his top lip like a crab claw.
She froze. Watched.
After several heartbeats, he spun away and walked off in the other direction.
She held her breath as she watched his figure grow smaller, breathing again only when he disappeared around the corner. Relief.
Her shoulders sagged. Tiniest puffs of laughter exited her nostrils in a staccato hiss.
It was nothing, of course. Just some rando out for a friendly afternoon stare with his best pair of Kim Jong-il sunglasses on.
Her trembling hands peeled the soft pack of cigarettes out of her left hip pocket, adhered the crooked tube of tobacco to her lips. Then she fumbled back into the pocket for the matchbook. Struck one. Brought the flame up under her chin.
She inhaled. Tasted the sweet breath of tobacco smoke. Right away the nicotine calmed her—maybe it was the habit more than the chemical itself.
She texted Maggie.
Hurry up. I’m freezing my ass off.
When the Marlboro was about half gone, she stood, her heart still hammering away inside. Weird. She hadn’t even been that scared. Not really. She’d tell Maggie about it later, and they’d laugh. Kara the paranoid.
She crossed the street. Stepped up on the curb on the other side. The library was only a few blocks away. She could loiter inside until Maggie texted her back and avoid dying of hypothermia. She made sure to avoid the doorway where the creep had stood, reassuring herself in a little whisper that she was overreacting, though she didn’t quite believe her own voice.
The cigarette smoldered between her fingers, mostly gone now. She held off on hitting it again, not quite wanting to let it go as she approached the corner where the man had disappeared.
She chewed her lip. Couldn’t help but picture the man in the black sunglasses lurching out from behind the wall of the donut shop like a mountain lion leaping for her jugular.
She held her breath as she rounded the corner.
Nothing.
He wasn’t there.
Just another sleepy street on Salem Island.
She crossed to the next block. Jitters still running up and down her limbs.
She lifted the cigarette butt to her lips and hit it. Tasted the caustic tang of melting plastic. She’d burned it down to the filter now.
Shit.
She flicked it toward the storm drain, the cherry detaching upon impact.
She swallowed, and her throat clicked.
He lunged out of the bushes. A ski mask now covered his face, his arms outstretched.
He gripped her around the shoulders. An awkward hug. Forceful. Kara screamed. Threw an elbow into his gut. Heard a woof of breath knocked out of him.
Now she stumbled into a run. Choppy steps. Half-falling.
He leapt after her. Fell flat on the concrete.
His right arm shot out and hooked her ankle. Tripped her at full speed. Thunked her head-first on the cement.
Dark. Stars. All of reality seemed to suck down into a tunnel. The world around her grew smaller. Smaller. A little circle cutout. Dark around the edges now.
He rolled her. Lifted her torso. Hands snaking under her armpits. Each finger pressing into the soft flesh there. And he dragged her face up.
She could hear a choppiness in his footsteps. Hurried and uneven.
Her head lolled. Neck slack.
She watched through slitted eyelids as her limp legs dragged over the concrete behind the two of them, but she couldn’t feel them. Couldn’t feel much.
When he tried to shove her into the backseat of a sedan, she lurched. Clawed for his eyes, for his masked face.
Missed.
He dropped her. The back of her skull thumped down on the asphalt.
Things got far away again. Distant. Quiet. That black circle around the edge of things cinched tighter.
“Enough already,” he hissed between his teeth.
He knelt over her. Picked her head up and slammed it down again. A solid connection of skull and concrete that shot bolts of lightning through her vision.
The last circle of light retreated. The darkness became total.
Misty sobbed in the seat across from Charlotte Winters’ desk, tears tinted with mascara gathering along her jaw.
“Jesus H,” Allie said. “The waterworks came on like she flipped a switch.”
The observation was true enough, Charlie thought, even if it was phrased in Allie’s typically rude fashion. The girl never knew when to keep quiet.
Misty hadn’t managed a word yet. She’d just walked into Charlie’s office, sat down, and started bawling.
Now her face wrinkled up like a Halloween mask, and violent sobs shook her from the center of her torso out. The little pot belly quaked, the shoulders and legs seeming to throb a beat later.
Charlie was so taken aback by the abrupt blubbering that she froze. Lips parted. Watching Misty cry. Not sure what to say or do.
She stared at a strand of clear snot collecting in the center of Misty’s top lip, threatening to rush down into her mouth.
“Get her a Kleenex before I puke, for God’s sake,” Allie said.
Charlie nudged the box of tissues closer to Misty, thanking the universe for the millionth time that no one could hear Allie’s running commentary.
She hadn’t seen Misty Dawkins since high school graduation. They’d been friends back then. Maybe not close, but the kind of friend you paired up with in biology lab and ate lunch with in the cafeteria.
Charlie studied her. Misty looked mostly the same, with her small elfin chin, freckled nose, and kind brown eyes. She spotted a few strands of gray here and there, but Misty’s dishwater-blonde hair hid it well. None of these observations told her why her old friend was in her office or why she was crying. She suspected the two were related.
“Just breathe,” Charlie said, her voice finding that soothing tone two notches louder than a whisper. “Take your time, and tell me what you need.”
Misty nodded, her shoulders rising and falling with a deep breath.
A crying woman wasn’t what Charlie had expected when she arrived at A1 Investigations this morning. Her stomach grumbled, and she couldn’t help but think longingly of the bagel going cold in the other room.
“It’s probably the standard,” Allie said. “Missing cat or cheating husband. No offense, but my money is on the cat.”
Misty smeared a wadded tissue across her cheeks, which had now gone red and splotchy beneath the smudge of makeup.
“I’m sorry, Charlie. I guess I didn’t expect to see you here. I was all prepared to say my piece, and then I came in here to find you instead of Frank, and it just… How long have you been back in town?”
“A few months,” Charlie said, trying to find a comfortable position in her chair.
Misty’s eyes fixed on a photograph on the wall. A snapshot of Charlie, age eight, her twiggy arm slung around the shoulder of her twin sister. The water of Lake St. Clair sparkled in the background, dotted with boats. Misty got the same sad look on her face people always got when they looked at old photos of Charlie’s sister.
“I bet your family is glad to have you back home.”
“Yeah.” Charlie’s chair creaked like an ancient ship as she leaned back. Eager to avoid any further questions about her family, she flipped the question back at Misty. “What about your family? How’s Kenny?”
The furrow between Misty’s eyebrows pretty much answered that question. Charlie should have known better, really. Kenny Barnes, the guy who’d knocked Misty up while they were still in high school, had always been kind of a loser.
“Oh, he left way back, when Kara was five. Got together with a gal down in Columbus. They have a four-year-old now. He sends money when he can. Child support, you know. Tries to call Kara on her birthday and at Christmas.”
Charlie noted the phrases Misty had used: “Sends money when he can…” and “Tries to call Kara on her birthday…”
She was the same old Misty, alright. Still too damn nice for her own good and making excuses for people who didn’t deserve it.
“That’s why I’m here, actually,” Misty said, the words coming out strangely high-pitched and tight.
And then she burst into tears again.
“Damn it,” Allie muttered. “I should have known it would be a deadbeat ex.”
Charlie did her best to block out Allie’s voice so she could focus on Misty.
“I don’t know what to do, Charlie. I’m so scared,” Misty wailed.
Tugging another tissue free from the box, Charlie leaned across the desk and handed it to Misty.
“Why don’t you start by telling me exactly what happened,” Charlie said.
“It’s Kara. She’s missing.”
Charlie flinched at the word “missing,” and goosebumps prickled over her forearms. Her own twin sister had gone missing when she was eighteen, and she’d never been found. The jolt of alarm Charlie got when she heard about disappearances was an old tic she’d never been able to shake. But she’d gotten good at covering the reaction, and Misty hadn’t seemed to notice.
Charlie took a deep breath.
“How long has she been gone?”
Misty’s hands clenched around the handles of her purse.
“Two days. We had a fight… an argument. And she stormed out of the house. I haven’t seen her since.”
“What about her friends?”
Misty shook her head.
“I’ve called everyone. No one knows where she is.”
A montage flashed in Charlie’s head of the early days of her sister’s disappearance. The panicked phone calls. The frantic searching. She didn’t have to imagine what Misty was feeling because she’d been through it all herself.
“Have you talked to the police?” Charlie asked.
Misty nodded.
“They took down a report, said they’d ‘look into it,’ whatever that means. That’s why I need your help.”
Charlie sighed. She could see the anguish in Misty’s eyes and remembered that feeling, the way not knowing gnawed at your insides until they were raw. But the reality was, a missing persons case wasn’t in her wheelhouse, not with the resources she’d be working with. A1 Investigations was equipped for run-of-the-mill stuff: cheating spouses, insurance claims, worker’s comp fraud, bail jumpers, and, yes, the occasional missing pet.
Folding one hand over the other, Charlie gazed across the desk at her old friend.
“I’m really sorry you’re going through this, and I know how worried you must be. But I’m not quite sure how I can help.”
Misty blinked, letting loose a tear that slid down the side of her face.
“You guys are the best. Everyone says so. My cousin hired Frank when she was going through her divorce. He’s the reason she got sole custody of the kids.”
Charlie fiddled with the corner of her notepad. She hated this. Hated having to turn an old friend away when she was scared and desperate, but she didn’t know what else she could do.
“That’s what I’m trying to say, I guess. Divorces, marital issues… those are the kind of things we’re equipped to handle,” Charlie said, trying to sound apologetic. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re very good at what we do, but this sounds like something that’d take manpower and hours way beyond our capability.”
“If it’s an issue of money, I’ll pay. I will pay anything to get my daughter back.” Misty opened her purse and started to pull out her wallet. “Some of it might have to go on credit cards, but—”
“No, Misty. It’s not about the money.”
“Then I don’t understand. You’re a private investigator. You find things. So why can’t you try to find my daughter?”
Eyes closed, Charlie frowned. Misty wasn’t hearing her.
“I’m trying to tell you that this is something better left to the police. They’ve got the resources to handle a case like this. We don’t.”
Misty stared at her wordlessly. The silence stretched out long enough that Charlie felt obligated to fill it with something.
“The police will find your daughter. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”
Brow furrowed once more, Misty swung her head from side to side.
“I can’t believe this. When I walked in the door and saw you sitting behind the desk, I thought it was the answer to all of my prayers. Because if there was one person who would understand, one person who would listen and take me seriously, it would be you.”
“Misty—”
“No! How can you tell me everything will be OK after what happened with your sister?”
The comment hit Charlie like a punch to the gut. Everyone in town had an opinion on the disappearance of Allison Winters, but the one thing they could all agree on was that the Salem Island police had botched the investigation. And it was true, wasn’t it? They’d never found her sister. Never brought her killer to justice. And Charlie’s family had never gotten any closure.
The lump in Charlie’s throat kept her from speaking, and she wasn’t sure what she’d say anyway, so she kept quiet.
“How can I trust them to find my Kara after that?” Misty asked. “Besides, they’ve already written her off as a runaway. I saw it on their faces the second I mentioned that she’d run off a time or two in the past. Little sidelong glances at each other like I’m too dumb to know what they’re thinking. They gave up on her right then, I could see. They don’t care that this time is different.”
With a final sniffle, Misty snapped her purse shut and got to her feet.
“Well, if you won’t help me, then I guess I should be moving on. Someone out there’ll take my money. But thank you for your time anyhow.”
Charlie found her voice at last.
“You said she’s left before, but this time is different,” she said. “Why? What’s different about it?”
Pausing near the door, Misty squinted at Charlie, like the question might be a trap.
“Her phone. It goes straight to voicemail. Like it’s turned off or something. If you knew Kara, you’d know that means something is wrong. She never turns her phone off. It’s always glued to her hand.”
Charlie plucked a pen from the mug on the desk and flipped to a fresh sheet of paper on her notepad.
“Does this mean you’ll take the case?” Misty asked, and Charlie could hear the hope in her voice.
“It can’t hurt for me to do some poking around,” Charlie said, ignoring Allie’s tongue clicking in disapproval.
Misty clutched her chest, and for a moment, Charlie thought she was going to start crying again.
“Oh, thank the Lord. Thank you, Charlie. And I meant what I said before, I can pay. I’ll pay whatever it takes.”
“We’ll worry about that later. For now, let’s get some of the basic questions out of the way.” Angling her face back at her notepad, Charlie asked, “The other times she ran away… how long was she gone?”
“Usually it wasn’t even a full day. She’d stay overnight at a friend’s and be back the next day. Maybe a weekend at the most, but…”
Misty chewed at her lip. Charlie waited.
“Well, one time she was gone for four days, but that was because I confiscated her car keys.”
Charlie waggled the pen between her fingers. Clicked and unclicked the tip.
“And you said this time you had a fight? What was that about?”
“Not really a fight. Just a little argument. You know how teenagers are,” Misty said, fiddling with the zipper pull on her bag. “Kara got into some trouble this past summer, right after her seventeenth birthday. She’d been drinking, and, well… she got into an accident. And then she left the scene. It was kind of a big mess, but thankfully her lawyer was able to get the charges brought way down. I mean, there was talk of sending her to juvenile detention, but the judge agreed to six months of probation and some community service. So she may have dodged a bullet as far as all that, but she’s lost a lot of privileges at home. I mean, she knows how I feel about drunk driving. I won’t tolerate it.”
“Right,” Charlie said, making a note to look further into this blemish on Kara’s criminal record.
“Anyway, for Christmas break, a bunch of the seniors were going on a cruise. Miami, Key West, and Cozumel. We told Kara she could go if she got her grades up at the end of last year, which she did. But then she pulled the stunt over the summer, and Chris and I discussed it—that’s my husband—and we decided that we just couldn’t reward that kind of behavior. We have other kids, and we don’t want them getting the idea that we’ll look the other way with this stuff. So we told her she couldn’t go.”
“And I’m guessing Kara wasn’t too happy about that?”
Misty let out a sad laugh.
“I think she thought I was bluffing. It was all paid for, and we’re way past the cancellation window. We told her a month ago it wasn’t happening, but I guess it didn’t hit home until Wednesday.”
“What happened on Wednesday?”
“That was the day everyone was getting on the bus for Miami.”
“And she couldn’t have tried to get on the bus anyway?”
“I still have the tickets for the bus and the cruise, not to mention she wasn’t going to get far without her passport, which I have locked up. And I called one of the parent chaperones for the trip, just to be sure. No one has seen her.”
Charlie jotted this down, turned to a fresh page on her notepad, and slid it across the desk to Misty.
“I want you to write down the names of anyone Kara might have seen or spoken to after she left the house. Friends, boyfriend, co-workers if she has a job.”
Pen in hand, Misty scribbled down names and phone numbers.
“I’ll need to come by your house later. Take a look through her things and talk with the rest of your family, if that’s OK.”
Fresh tears glistened in Misty’s eyes, and she lifted a hand to wipe them away.
“Of course. Anything you need,” she said, passing the notebook back. “I meant what I said before. I was never scared any of those other times she left. Not once. You know how they say a mother knows these kinds of things? Knows it in her bones? Well, it must be true. It has to be. Because I’m scared, Charlie. I’ve never been so scared.”
Charlie took down a few more details, and when they finished, both women stood. Misty crossed around the desk and threw her arms around Charlie, gripping her tightly.
“Thank you, Charlie. You have no idea what this means to me.”
“Well… you’re welcome,” Charlie said awkwardly.
Misty seemed to swallow another surge of emotion, and then her eyes went to the photograph of Charlie and her sister again.
“I always admired Allie. She was such a free spirit.”
Charlie nodded. People were always saying things like that about Allie.
The glass on the door rattled as Charlie closed it behind Misty. She sank back into the crumbling wooden chair, and one of the slats jabbed into her spine. It was like the damn thing had elbows of its own.
“So… Misty Dawkins…” Allie said. “She got fat.”
“Don’t be a dick,” Charlie said.
“See? That’s why I’m never having kids,” Allie continued. “Seen it a hundred times.”
“Stop.”
“You pop out some crotch fruit, and your hips and thighs stay doughy until the end of time.”
Charlie’s silence only seemed to egg Allie on.
“Hey, you’re the one who talks to her dead sister instead of having real friends. Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, right?”
Charlie closed her eyes, trying not to listen to her sister prattle on.
For a dead girl, she sure never shut up.
With Misty Dawkins gone and the office empty once more, a cold feeling settled over Charlie—that bone-deep chill that belonged to the deepest, darkest parts of winter. Even as she worked—setting up interviews with Kara Dawkins’ friends and family and running basic background checks—her mind lingered on Allie’s disappearance all those years ago. Creeping gray memories flashed through her mind.
She saw Allie as a cackling toddler, cookies crammed into her sticky little fists. She’d pushed a dining room chair into the kitchen to commandeer the sweets in the highest cupboard for her and Charlie. So long ago now.
Next, she saw Allie as a teenager, perpetually smirking, her hair chopped short and dyed pitch-black for that one year—the year she hated everything, as Allie herself later described it.
Allie would have been sixteen that year. Only two years before she’d disappeared, and yet she’d changed so much in such a short time after, changed and changed again. Every year seemed so much longer at that age, the personality shifts coming hard and fast every three months or so.
And then, jumping to the time after Allie had vanished, Charlie saw the empty bed where Allie was supposed to be, her sister’s half of the room taking on a hushed reverence during the time she was missing. A quiet place, somber, it felt more like being in church than a bedroom, felt terribly empty without her.
They searched for nearly three weeks, and during that time, everyone kept holding on to the hope that she was still alive. That’s what they kept saying, anyway. “She’s out there somewhere.”
Until her sister’s foot washed up on one of the public beaches. No one pretended she was alive after that.
Charlie saw the funeral, all the people draped in black. Uncomfortable. Muted. Her mother sobbing the whole way through. The visitations. The service. The wake. Rituals stripped of meaning, reduced to a blur of strangely formal images in her memory.
Each of these memories conjured ancient feelings, awakened them, brought them back fully fleshed out, just as intricate and potent as they were back then. The level of detail in each one bewildered Charlie. Together they overwhelmed her.
Charlie moved to the coffee machine in the corner of her office, the too-hot burner there slowly cooking decent coffee down into a thick gloop. She poured herself a cup. Drank. The coffee still tasted good enough for now—only faintly burned—but the scalding liquid couldn’t touch the cold feeling that had settled over her. Maybe nothing could.
The investigation into Allie’s disappearance had focused heavily on a local hermit, Leroy Gibbs, who did odd jobs around town, but the evidence was circumstantial, and despite a media frenzy upon his arrest, the charges were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence. The crime was never solved, the wound never closed. And while the town moved on and mostly forgot as the years crept by, the Winters family never recovered.
The grief killed Charlie’s father rapidly, taking him out by way of a stroke just two years later at forty-nine. It drove her mother to madness, a series of mental breakdowns that shuffled her in and out of the hospital and on and off various medications.
It was during Allie’s funeral that her voice first made an appearance. Charlie couldn’t stop staring at the closed casket.
“You think it’s in there?”
Charlie’s gaze swept to the right, to where she’d heard the voice. There was nothing there but a table with an antique-looking lamp and a vase of tulips.
“The foot, I mean,” Allie’s voice clarified. “My foot. Can they embalm just a foot? Do they put makeup on it? I hope they gave it some polish at least. Nice pop of color.”
Charlie blinked, certain she was going crazy but feeling completely calm about it.
The voice never left after that. Her sister was her constant companion now, sarcastically commenting on everything that happened.
Whether Allie’s presence was psychological or supernatural, Charlie couldn’t say, but she was in no hurry to fix the problem. Even if Allie only existed in her imagination, she didn’t want to lose her again.
Charlie went to take another sip of coffee but found her mug empty. She moved to the kitchenette in the room beyond the office. Rinsed her mug. The warm water felt good on the tips of her fingers.
She still couldn’t believe she was back here on Salem Island, working in the office her uncle Frank had set up decades ago: A1 Investigations. He’d worked the standard private investigator jobs for all those years—cheating spouses, background checks, a touch of surveillance now and again. With him out of commission due to cancer and her stepping in, it was as though she’d inherited the family business by default—the prodigal niece returning to fulfill her destiny—even if Frank was still hanging in there for now, going through chemo treatments, looking quite hairless at the moment.
But this wasn’t Charlie’s destiny. She wasn’t supposed to be here, didn’t belong here at all.
With what had happened to Allie and her parents, Charlie had taken her first opportunity to flee Salem Island. She’d planned to get far from here and managed to accomplish it pretty well, making it the full 2,395 miles from the east coast of Michigan to the Pacific Ocean.
She’d worked the last eight years as an investigator for a law firm in Seattle. There she did real investigative work—nothing like the menial cases Uncle Frank worked around Salem Island. Corporate fraud, pollution cover-ups, political espionage, hacked elections, embezzled charity money, all the sordid trappings one would expect in a world as corrupt as this one.
Approaching these through the civil side rather than through criminal law, her law firm never really achieved justice so much as they made some small group of the crooks pay. They couldn’t stop these crimes. They couldn’t even slow them down, but they could sock each bully in the nose a couple times, bloody them up, and make them pay a few million in punitive damages. Justice? Not really. Vengeance? Yes. That blurred line between vengeance and justice made sense to Charlie, fit the way she saw the world. It made it something like her dream job to be part of it.
But. . .
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