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Synopsis
Still recovering from the shocking revelations they uncovered deep in uncharted territory in the Grand Canyon, American myth and legend investigator Nolan Moore and his team take on a new mission, investigating a rumoured case of witchcraft and possession. Nolan hopes their new case, in a quaint village in the middle of the woods, will prove much more like those he and his team investigated prior to their trip to Kincaid's cavern. But as the residents accounts of strange phenomena add up, Nolan and company begin to suspect something all too real and dangerous may be at play. A force that may not be willing to let them escape the village unscathed. From the author of The Anomaly comes the second installment in The Anomaly Files, a series in the tradition of James Rollins of a team investigating American myths and legends. “Crackles with claustrophobic tension that had me holding my breath.” SARAH PINBOROUGH, on The Anomaly.
Release date: July 23, 2019
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Print pages: 384
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The Possession
Michael Rutger
Prologue
She walked along the side of the road, and she walked fast.
Her legs were stiff, her arms crossed tight. Her head hurt. Badly. As if a metal band was clamped around her temples. Tightening. Her cheeks were stinging. Her neck felt naked and hurt around the back like a burn. Her best sneakers and her new jeans were getting soaked from the wet grass, and the gray-black mass of sky said there was more coming. Let it.
Everybody she saw was ugly. She had never felt more alone in her life.
And none of this was her fault.
She kept stomping homeward but after a while started to slow down, feet turning heavy and miserable. Her head ached worse than ever and her cheeks were wet now, too. And none of this was fair. She’d been so happy. She’d climbed such a big wall and all she wanted to do was share the view on the other side—not discover that somebody else thought they already owned it, that it wasn’t hers.
Her vision was blurred with angry tears, but she’d walked this way so many times she could have done it with eyes closed. She didn’t even notice the man sitting on the bench until she was level with him.
“Hey,” he said.
Old guy. Gaunt face, black hair, bags under his eyes. She knew who he was immediately. Had seen him a hundred times. He’d been in their house, stood by the fireplace talking with her dad, drinking one of his beers. He’d always been in the background of her life like a dusty piece of someone else’s furniture, but she didn’t want to talk to him now. Him or anybody else.
She kept going.
“You okay?” he asked. He stood, started walking with her. Not right beside. But at the same speed.
“I’m fine,” she said, keeping her head down, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. It was probably too late, but she didn’t want him to see she’d been crying. She was fourteen. That’s not a child anymore, whatever dumbass old people might think. Parents and teachers, everyone—but friends most of all. All they ever want to do is keep you small. They’re scared of who you’re becoming.
Of what you know. Of who you are.
“That’s good,” the man said. “Just being neighborly. That’s all. I wouldn’t want your dad to think I’d seen you out here, upset, and not checked if you’re okay.”
“I am totally okay, thank you.”
“Is it a boy thing?”
She stopped walking, stared at him, hands on hips. “Uh, that would be none of your business.”
He stopped too, looked apologetic. “Sorry. You’re grown now. I get that. You got your own world. And I don’t mean to intrude.”
“So don’t.”
“But it’s cold. It’s going to rain. Probably before you get home. I’m just saying why don’t I get you there. You look like you’re having a bad day, is all.”
“I don’t need help.”
“I know. Look, fine, I’ll leave you to it. But I’ll tell you one thing before I go, and you should believe me. Okay?”
“What is it?”
“Tomorrow’s another day. And there’s always a chance it’ll be a good one.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but closed it, suddenly feeling very tired. And dumb and guilty and small. She wanted to be at home, and warm, and dry. To start working out how she was going to fix this. Make it so she could start feeling happy again.
“Where’s your car?”
She knew as soon as he made the first turn that something was wrong. This wasn’t the way home.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I want to walk.”
He didn’t look at her but she saw him smile, and she knew she’d made a mistake and it was too late to do anything about it. That it would always be too late.
She was his now.
Chapter1
You have reached your destination.
Kristy pulled gratefully to the curb and peered out the window. “Thank God for that.”
She was alone and so said it quietly. The vehicle made no response. Kristy hadn’t bonded with it yet—a loaner while hers was in the shop—not least because it adamantly refused to deal with her iPhone. On the eight-hour drive north the built-in navigation system had twice tried to lead her off the freeway, then retreated into panicked rerouting, before abruptly changing its mind and pretending the whole incident never happened. The car smelled pleasant and yet odd, as if doused with a scent designed to be an averaging out of the entire world’s conception of “fresh,” rather than pleasant to any single person or culture in particular. It was like being trapped in an elderly person’s guest bathroom. Having the windows open above forty miles an hour caused an unbearably percussive whap-whap-whap sound. There was a blind spot on the left that hid overtaking cars in a way that seemed specifically designed to cause accidents.
It was a dumb car. Right now it seemed confident of one thing, however.
Destination: 243 Shasta Avenue, Birchlake, CA
It struck her how often we refer to machines not merely for information but also reassurance, as we once would have with a parent, and put a pin in the observation for a short think-piece at some point, or maybe never.
She got out of the car, wincing. It was dark and cold outside her cocoon. Both sides of the street were lined with buildings, few above a single story high, most fronted with wood and all weathered in old small-town style. Trees dotted along the sidewalks, leaves thinned into late-fall mode. A dim streetlight on the corner revealed a small but aspiringly upmarket grocery store. Beyond that, another couple blocks, a liquor store, then town kind of ran out.
Closing the car door sounded loud.
Birchlake looked pretty much as she’d expected. Thick forest on one side, river on the other, with further forest beyond. The narrow highway entered over a bridge at the southern end of town, passing an old motel and gas station. At the other end the road followed the river further into the mountains. The kind of place you’d blow straight through on a road trip without noticing, unless you were desperate for coffee, a sandwich, or the restroom.
243 Shasta Avenue was dark.
One of the handful of two-story buildings, the street-level space had fairly recently been an antique or bric-a-brac store, now shuttered. Originally the building looked like it had been a general store. The business next door was a hipster-style coffee shop, complete with intricately hand-chalked price boards and ironic hashtags, closed for the night. Convenient for the morning, though.
Kristy walked up to 243, stretching her arms and back. Three-quarters of the building’s wide frontage was taken up by display windows flanking an old glass door, all of which had been whitewashed into opaqueness from the inside. On the right was a featureless wooden door with a large deadbolt. 243a. It looked secure but hardly welcoming. All reassuringly recognizable from the Airbnb listing, though a good deal less enticing at nine thirty on a dark, chilly night, a long way from home.
She pulled up the confirmation email on her phone, already wishing she’d booked into the B&B at the north end of town instead.
Pick up key from Stone Mountain Tap—ask for Val.
Kristy turned and scanned the other side of the street.
The Tap looked like it had been a bar for a long time and knew its business and had few regrets. There was a dedicated drinking area on the left, stools along a counter, and a long and low-ceilinged restaurant section on the right, with heavy chairs and tables, booths along the side, and maybe twenty people spread among the seating. The floor was battered wood, the walls randomly dotted with tarnished mirrors and neon beer signs and murky retro advertisements in frames. The lights were low. The music was not. Right now it was Joni Mitchell—who always sounded to Kristy like a cat trying to communicate that it was dying, and sad about it. Shelves behind the bar held bottles of every hard liquor known to mankind. There were a dozen beers on tap, too, half from the local microbrew and called things like pInePA and Cold River. It was the kind of place her ex-husband would like, Kristy knew.
There’s a rare, fine line between anodyne and sketchy, he would have said. And this is it.
A lean woman in her early fifties stood behind the bar. Cropped gray hair, nose stud, wearing a T-shirt that revealed tan, muscular arms dotted with Celtic-style tattoos. She had the loose, easy stance of someone who’d done years of non-dilettante yoga, and gave Kristy an appraising look as she approached.
“Are you Val?” Kristy asked. “I’m looking for—”
“Dangit,” the woman said. “Thought my luck was in.” She glanced at a scrap of paper thumb-tacked to the bar behind her. “I am indeed Val. Kristy?”
“That’s me.”
“Okay, so. Normally I’d let you in and give you the tour, but the Crown Prince of Uselessness didn’t show up tonight, and so I’m holding the fort by myself. I imagine it’ll be self-explanatory. You look like a grown-up.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
The woman took a while fishing a key out of her jeans. In the meantime Kristy cast a glance around to see if anybody was eating, and whether it looked edible. Nobody was. A tall, gaunt man in his sixties sat on a stool at the end of the counter. There was no glass in front of him.
He turned to look at her. Cloudy gray eyes, bags that spoke of a liver past its best, unnaturally dark hair scraped back from a high forehead. He looked so much like the kind of guy you always see in small-town bars that for a moment it almost felt as if she knew him from somewhere. Kristy realized she wasn’t in the mood for a solo meal even if it was an option.
“So what brings you to B-lake?” Val asked, as she finally produced a key. Kristy could imagine her asking the same question, in the same knowing way, of every stranger who walked in the bar.
“Just exploring.”
“Ha. Hope you brought something to read, because exploring will use up all of ten minutes. If you take your time. And to answer your next question, the kitchen closes at eight thirty on weeknights out of season. Sorry. The food’s not bad, though, for future reference.”
“Good to know,” Kristy said, as she took the key.
“All part of the service. And don’t lose that, cos I can’t find the spare.”
The door to 243a opened onto a narrow stairwell. Kristy found the light switch and carried her bag upstairs.
The apartment looked exactly how it had online, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but they didn’t always. A five-second tour confirmed it had a small kitchenette and a desk and a door to the bedroom/bathroom—which had looked nice on the website and was an area on which Kristy wouldn’t compromise. The furniture was old, but both it and the rug and pictures had been selected well enough to pitch the place convincingly toward shabby chic, rather than merely shabby. A bay window. Good enough.
She dropped her bag and went back down to the street. A woman was pulling in the sidewalk sign outside the grocery at the corner, but thankfully it hadn’t closed yet. Organic vegetables. Local honey. An excessively wide selection of artisanal vinegars. The problem with seeing a lot of places is they all start to seem the same, especially the ones that are trying to be different. Kristy gathered up milk, snacks, a pre-made sandwich from the cooler. It featured an unnecessary amount of alfalfa sprouts, but she believed she’d be able to struggle through. A middle-aged woman with thick glasses took Kristy’s money and gave her a bag without recourse to speech.
By the time Kristy stepped back out onto the street it had started to drizzle. The road was deserted, or so she thought at first. Then she saw a figure on the other side. Tall, thin. Hands hanging down by his sides.
He was lit, then unlit, by the flashing sign of the Stone Mountain Tap, and it took Kristy a moment to realize that he’d started crossing toward her.
He stopped a few feet short of the curb. His head still had to tilt to look down at her. Kristy was barely 5′4″ and slim of build. Which was why, in situations like this, she always spoke first. “Can I help you?”
The man said nothing.
“You were in the bar, right?” She phrased it as a question only because most humans are straightforward animals and a trick that simple usually got them to respond more quickly.
Not this guy. He sniffed, wetly, looked away down the street. Remained silent. Kristy was not afraid. There was a dozen feet between them and her reactions were fast. She’d worn her running shoes for the drive. It seemed unlikely this man ran at least a 5K every day of the year, as Kristy did, or that he’d be able to do it anywhere near as fast. She was watchful nonetheless. You just never know, and there was something about this man that she didn’t like.
“You’re here about her,” he said. His voice was quiet, unthreatening.
“Who?”
“The missing girl.”
“Like you probably overheard me say: I’m just exploring.”
“People sometimes disappear for a reason.”
“What kind of reason?”
“You’d be better off leaving in the morning, exploring some other town. But I don’t suppose you’ll listen.”
The man turned away, and started to walk back across the street. Stopped after a couple of paces, half-turned back. He paused a moment, lips pursed, looking at her.
“What?” she said.
“Sometimes it’s better if they stay gone.”
When he got to the other side, he turned left and disappeared around the corner.
Chapter2
It’s still early,” Molly said.
“It’s really not.”
She checked her watch. I’d done the same thing, less than a minute before. And a few minutes before that. “It’s not eight yet. Your slot’s until half past.”
“Tell me, Moll. Have you observed the ebb and flow during the last hour, and been able to come to any conclusions regarding changes in the population density of customers in this retail establishment over time?”
“It’s…less busy than it was?”
“There are exactly three people here, not including the comatose clerk at the register or the one hiding in the cooking section.” I turned in his direction. “I know you’re there,” I said, loudly.
Molly swatted me. “Shh, Nolan.”
“Two customers wandered past without glancing at my book. The third picked up a copy and had a long, hard look, before putting it back as though worried about contagion. He’s currently browsing the photography section, presumably in quest of artsy pictures of naked ladies. If I get any more bored I’m going to go give him the good news about the invention of the internet.”
Molly made a face. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I hate to embarrass you, that’s all,” I said. “I know you pulled a favor to even get me in here.”
Posters on the walls showed that Bookshop Santa Cruz’s events generally featured literary A-listers, bestselling genre scribes, or winsome-looking people who’d written one achingly awesome short story and won a shit-ton of awards for it. I am none of those things. Normally their events involved an audience and a Q&A and wine. I’d been given a table behind the local history section from seven until eight-thirty, which on a drizzly Wednesday evening in late October is the bookstore equivalent of exile to a labor camp in Siberia.
Molly grew up in Santa Cruz and knew somebody in the store. Perhaps anticipating that my event might not lead to a long line of excited customers snaking away down the street, she’d volunteered to come along for the ride on the pretext of hooking up with some old friends.
“I’m not in the least embarrassed,” she said. “People are stupid. Come on, nuts to this. Let’s go get a drink.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Wait though. Didn’t she buy a copy earlier?”
A young woman had come back in the store from the street, and was headed our way. “The copy, yes.”
I smiled when she got to us, reaching for my pen. “Decided you’d like it signed after all?”
“Well no, actually,” the girl said, looking awkward. “It was for my boyfriend. He’s really into unsolved mysteries and stuff? But I just gave it to him and he said he only likes to read things by actual experts, sorry.”
She held the book out to me diffidently.
“You’d like a refund?”
“If that’s okay.”
“And he sent you back to do this?” Molly asked.
The girl shrugged.
“You’ll have to take it to the register and deal with them,” Molly said. “Oh, and FYI? Your boyfriend’s a dick.”
The girl backed warily away.
Molly helped me put the books back in the box and then in my car, after which we went and got pretty drunk.
Or I did, anyway.
Molly had a single beer and then went for a late dinner with her friends. I kept meaning to leave the bar and kept failing to follow through. I remembered after a while that I’d got drunk in the same establishment, years ago, when passing through town after visiting my parents up in Berkeley. The bar hadn’t changed much. Neither, it appeared, have I.
Eventually I managed to go, and eleven o’clock found me on a lounger by the tiny swimming pool of my motel, smoking in front of the no-smoking sign and drinking from a large bottle of local beer that I seemed to have purchased along the way. The drizzle had stopped but it was pretty cold. The motel was called the Bayview, despite not having one and in reality being situated a brisk five-minute walk from the ocean.
I was sufficiently inebriated by that point to find this glumly metaphoric for something or other.
Hi. My name’s Nolan Moore. You may have heard of me from…
Who am I kidding. Of course you haven’t. Unless you ran across me in my previous life as a journeyman screenwriter in LA, my sole claim to fame is being the host of a very slightly popular YouTube show called The Anomaly Files, which investigates unsolved mysteries. The problem being that though it briefly looked like we were going to move up to cable, it fell apart for extremely complicated reasons that I won’t get into right now, and so we’re back on YouTube.
The problem with that is people who’re interested in the subjects we cover don’t go to YouTube, because it’s the province of youngsters who want to watch other young people jabbering on about their inconsequential days. I’m aware that makes me sound old. I don’t care. My point is most people go to the site to see their pre-existing worldview reflected safely back, not to have their eyes opened to new things, or be shown what’s going on in the shadows.
And this, as my producer/director/friend Ken has pointed out, more than once, is why our business model sucks.
In an attempt to generate PR for the show (and to bump my income to the level where I could continue to pay for the apartment in Santa Monica that had been home since I separated from my wife) I’d written up some of our previous shows. These had just come out in a large-format book from a real publisher, and that’s what I’d been trying to sell tonight. The net result—after the reversal with the girl with the shitty boyfriend—had been zero (0) sales.
There were a dispiriting amount of zeros in the book’s sales ranking on Amazon, too. I honestly hadn’t realized there were that many books in the world. It seemed altogether possible that books that didn’t even exist had sold more copies than mine. After spending a few confused minutes trying to figure out whether asking the publisher to withdraw the book from sale might push me higher up the bestseller list, I realized I’d drunk more than enough and should call it a night, especially if I was hoping to drive Molly and me the six-plus hours back to LA tomorrow.
I dislodged my phone from my jeans pocket during the process of standing, but managed to catch it before it crashed to the floor, somehow also avoiding flipping it into the pool. Buoyed by this evidence that I was in fact totally at the top of my game, I noticed I’d missed a call.
It was from Kristy. My ex-wife. Or, as it hadn’t quite got to that point (and we’d recently been cautiously experimenting with walking back from the split) the woman from whom I was presently separated.
Our current policy of playing it cool meant neither of us expected the other to leap straight onto calling back. We’d had a few good evenings together in the last couple months, including one when we’d added each other back to the Find Your Friends app, as a cocktail-fueled declaration of…I don’t know. Openness to a future. Or something. The fact that I’d not felt drawn to use the information, however, nor entitled to, showed there was still distance to cross.
It was late. I could have left it until I got back to Los Angeles. But I didn’t. Despite the hour, and having been no stranger to alcohol, I went up to my room, made some very bad coffee, and called Kristy back.
Mistake.
Chapter3
I wasn’t worried about waking her. Kristy switched to no-ring mode when she was done with the day. Not worried, either, that the delay in her picking up (necessarily) meant she was electing not to take my call. Kristy makes a point of leaving her phone on the other side of the room, usually somewhere precarious, to show how non-addicted she is. I’ve pointed out this shows she’s thinking too much about her phone, but my wisdom fell upon unresponsive ears, as it so often does.
I waited patiently, picturing how she would lever herself up out of her chair and pad quietly across whatever space she was in, tucking her hair behind her ear in readiness. It’s weird how someone not-answering their phone can remind you how much you know about them.
“Hey,” she said, eventually.
“New phone, who dis?”
“Nolan, that doesn’t work. You called me.”
“I know. That’s why it’s funny.”
“Pretty experimental use of the word funny, but let’s move on. How did the booksigning go?”
“Really badly.”
“I did warn you it might.”
“I know. But I wasn’t sure whether that was genuine concern or merely you being mean to me for sport.”
“Bit of both, if I’m honest. Well, that’s disappointing.”
“I’ll survive. So, what?”
“Huh?”
“Before I called you, you called me, remember? Where are you anyway?”
“Town called Birchlake. Forty miles from Shasta.”
“Okay. Why?”
She didn’t answer, and in that pause I heard an echo of previous pauses. Most of them good—the everyday beats of silence in a relationship that’s past (or before) the “somebody has to be talking or it’s not working” phase. Others not so good, like the hesitation of a person choosing whether to tell the truth, and if not, which untruth—something that would be consistent with previous untruths. You never understand those pauses for what they are at the time. Only in retrospect. And once you’ve learned that bad things live in the gaps, and the world may not be as it seems, it can make you paranoid.
“Ten days ago a girl called Alaina Hixon disappeared,” Kristy said, and I realized all she’d been doing was marshaling information. “Fourteen. From Birchlake.”
“Name rings a bell,” I said. “The town, not the girl.” And it did, now I’d heard it a second time.
“Can’t imagine why. It’s Nowheresville. Alaina lived a mile up the road. She and a couple of girlfriends went walking in the woods after school. It started getting dark and one of them turned to Alaina to suggest they head home. She wasn’t there. They called out and looked for her, but got freaked and bailed.”
“Nice.”
“They didn’t know what else to do, Nolan. And they went straight home and got their dad to call the police, so…The county sheriff and his guys were there fast. Then the Feds, and dogs. Nothing after five days of ground search. Nothing since. Nothing on social media. No contact with family or friends. Just plain gone.”
“I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it.”
“Bad timing. The day before she disappeared was that Walmart shooting in Chico. ‘Only’ four died, but—”
“There was that huge manhunt, right. That I do remember.”
“Exactly. Very bright and shiny. Took twenty-four hours until they pinned the guy down and blew his head off, then there were days of media analysis and handwringing after. Alaina missed her spot in the news cycle. She fell between the cracks.”
I tried to imagine what it must be like to have your child disappear like that, and realized it was nowhere I wanted to go inside my head. “Don’t they say that…”
“The first day is critical, yes. If a child turns up deceased, in three-quarters of cases death occurred within three hours. Movies are all about hidden cabins and the drawn-out playtimes of evil geniuses. In reality it’s a panicky act committed by someone who’s broken and vile, and it happens fast. But we shouldn’t leap to that anyway. About eight hundred thousand people are reported missing every year.”
“Seriously?”
“But eighty-five percent are under the age of eighteen, and the vast majority resolve quickly. People operate on a hair-trigger, understandably. Most of the time the kid’s just late, or at a friend’s, or goofing off. They come home, everybody shouts at each other, then someone calls for pizza and it’s have-you-done-your-homework.”
“What about the rest?”
“Family cases are often custody-based and more likely to involve children under six. The probability of harm increases markedly from family to acquaintance to stranger, of course, but in the end only one in ten thousand missing children are not eventually found alive.”
“Dying is not the only deeply shitty thing that can happen to missing kids.”
“Of course. And those dangers are higher with acquaintance or stranger abductions, which also become more likely if the missing child is female. Like Alaina.”
“But why are you on this? It’s terrible, of course. But you’re not a detective.”
“I was researching a piece on cyberbullying.”
“Hasn’t that been done?”
“Yes, it’s been ‘done,’ Nolan. But, bizarrely, that didn’t make the problem instantly disappear. And it’s not only kids. Students do it to teachers, too—setting up sites to hassle them. It happens even more outside the school system. You don’t want to see my mentions on Twitter any time I write something a teeny bit critical of the patriarchy, or suggest not having so many assault rifles in circulation might be a cool experiment.”
“Well, you know my theory about that.”
“Remind me.”
“People are assholes,” I said. I’d gotten to the end of the pot of coffee and couldn’t decide whether it would be a good idea to make another, especially as the first seemed to have stirred ominous harbingers of tomorrow’s hangover.
Instead I left the room and lit a cigarette on the walkway, looking over the wet parking lot. A homeless guy lurched along the road outside, shouting vaguely at someone who wasn’t there. “So—is this girl’s disappearance related to cyberbullying?”
“It wasn’t,” Kristy said. “Though I called the sheriff yesterday morning and suggested he look into it. Because, check this out.”
My phone pinged. She’d texted me a picture. A pretty young girl. Pale skin. Long dark hair. Black jeans, black hoodie. She was standing in front of birch trees, with thicker forest behind. “That’s her?”
“Yes,” Kristy said. “Keep looking.”
The image she’d sent was a screen grab, much taller than it was wide. I scrolled past the image. It’d been posted by “htilil♥2005” and had received precisely one like. I did the math and worked out that 2005 would have been Alaina Hixon’s birth year. “What’s with the white space underneath?”
“Somebody, or more likely two people, have posted comments. That’s what those random sets of letters on the left side signify. But the comments are blank.”
“That’s a little strange. Unless it’s just some pointless thing the young folks are doing this month.”
“Not that I’m aware. On her other account there are normal comments. I’ve traced those posters back to kids at her school. But these? No idea. And keep scrolling.”
The blank lines of empty post went on for a couple of inches of screen space. I was finding it hard to see this as cyberbullying worth the name (or Kristy’s time), and was about to say so, when the comments changed. One of the same random-character accounts had posted a single word.
Witch
“Huh,” I said. I kept scrolling. Something—the cold and dark, or a more atavi. . .
She walked along the side of the road, and she walked fast.
Her legs were stiff, her arms crossed tight. Her head hurt. Badly. As if a metal band was clamped around her temples. Tightening. Her cheeks were stinging. Her neck felt naked and hurt around the back like a burn. Her best sneakers and her new jeans were getting soaked from the wet grass, and the gray-black mass of sky said there was more coming. Let it.
Everybody she saw was ugly. She had never felt more alone in her life.
And none of this was her fault.
She kept stomping homeward but after a while started to slow down, feet turning heavy and miserable. Her head ached worse than ever and her cheeks were wet now, too. And none of this was fair. She’d been so happy. She’d climbed such a big wall and all she wanted to do was share the view on the other side—not discover that somebody else thought they already owned it, that it wasn’t hers.
Her vision was blurred with angry tears, but she’d walked this way so many times she could have done it with eyes closed. She didn’t even notice the man sitting on the bench until she was level with him.
“Hey,” he said.
Old guy. Gaunt face, black hair, bags under his eyes. She knew who he was immediately. Had seen him a hundred times. He’d been in their house, stood by the fireplace talking with her dad, drinking one of his beers. He’d always been in the background of her life like a dusty piece of someone else’s furniture, but she didn’t want to talk to him now. Him or anybody else.
She kept going.
“You okay?” he asked. He stood, started walking with her. Not right beside. But at the same speed.
“I’m fine,” she said, keeping her head down, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. It was probably too late, but she didn’t want him to see she’d been crying. She was fourteen. That’s not a child anymore, whatever dumbass old people might think. Parents and teachers, everyone—but friends most of all. All they ever want to do is keep you small. They’re scared of who you’re becoming.
Of what you know. Of who you are.
“That’s good,” the man said. “Just being neighborly. That’s all. I wouldn’t want your dad to think I’d seen you out here, upset, and not checked if you’re okay.”
“I am totally okay, thank you.”
“Is it a boy thing?”
She stopped walking, stared at him, hands on hips. “Uh, that would be none of your business.”
He stopped too, looked apologetic. “Sorry. You’re grown now. I get that. You got your own world. And I don’t mean to intrude.”
“So don’t.”
“But it’s cold. It’s going to rain. Probably before you get home. I’m just saying why don’t I get you there. You look like you’re having a bad day, is all.”
“I don’t need help.”
“I know. Look, fine, I’ll leave you to it. But I’ll tell you one thing before I go, and you should believe me. Okay?”
“What is it?”
“Tomorrow’s another day. And there’s always a chance it’ll be a good one.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but closed it, suddenly feeling very tired. And dumb and guilty and small. She wanted to be at home, and warm, and dry. To start working out how she was going to fix this. Make it so she could start feeling happy again.
“Where’s your car?”
She knew as soon as he made the first turn that something was wrong. This wasn’t the way home.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I want to walk.”
He didn’t look at her but she saw him smile, and she knew she’d made a mistake and it was too late to do anything about it. That it would always be too late.
She was his now.
Chapter1
You have reached your destination.
Kristy pulled gratefully to the curb and peered out the window. “Thank God for that.”
She was alone and so said it quietly. The vehicle made no response. Kristy hadn’t bonded with it yet—a loaner while hers was in the shop—not least because it adamantly refused to deal with her iPhone. On the eight-hour drive north the built-in navigation system had twice tried to lead her off the freeway, then retreated into panicked rerouting, before abruptly changing its mind and pretending the whole incident never happened. The car smelled pleasant and yet odd, as if doused with a scent designed to be an averaging out of the entire world’s conception of “fresh,” rather than pleasant to any single person or culture in particular. It was like being trapped in an elderly person’s guest bathroom. Having the windows open above forty miles an hour caused an unbearably percussive whap-whap-whap sound. There was a blind spot on the left that hid overtaking cars in a way that seemed specifically designed to cause accidents.
It was a dumb car. Right now it seemed confident of one thing, however.
Destination: 243 Shasta Avenue, Birchlake, CA
It struck her how often we refer to machines not merely for information but also reassurance, as we once would have with a parent, and put a pin in the observation for a short think-piece at some point, or maybe never.
She got out of the car, wincing. It was dark and cold outside her cocoon. Both sides of the street were lined with buildings, few above a single story high, most fronted with wood and all weathered in old small-town style. Trees dotted along the sidewalks, leaves thinned into late-fall mode. A dim streetlight on the corner revealed a small but aspiringly upmarket grocery store. Beyond that, another couple blocks, a liquor store, then town kind of ran out.
Closing the car door sounded loud.
Birchlake looked pretty much as she’d expected. Thick forest on one side, river on the other, with further forest beyond. The narrow highway entered over a bridge at the southern end of town, passing an old motel and gas station. At the other end the road followed the river further into the mountains. The kind of place you’d blow straight through on a road trip without noticing, unless you were desperate for coffee, a sandwich, or the restroom.
243 Shasta Avenue was dark.
One of the handful of two-story buildings, the street-level space had fairly recently been an antique or bric-a-brac store, now shuttered. Originally the building looked like it had been a general store. The business next door was a hipster-style coffee shop, complete with intricately hand-chalked price boards and ironic hashtags, closed for the night. Convenient for the morning, though.
Kristy walked up to 243, stretching her arms and back. Three-quarters of the building’s wide frontage was taken up by display windows flanking an old glass door, all of which had been whitewashed into opaqueness from the inside. On the right was a featureless wooden door with a large deadbolt. 243a. It looked secure but hardly welcoming. All reassuringly recognizable from the Airbnb listing, though a good deal less enticing at nine thirty on a dark, chilly night, a long way from home.
She pulled up the confirmation email on her phone, already wishing she’d booked into the B&B at the north end of town instead.
Pick up key from Stone Mountain Tap—ask for Val.
Kristy turned and scanned the other side of the street.
The Tap looked like it had been a bar for a long time and knew its business and had few regrets. There was a dedicated drinking area on the left, stools along a counter, and a long and low-ceilinged restaurant section on the right, with heavy chairs and tables, booths along the side, and maybe twenty people spread among the seating. The floor was battered wood, the walls randomly dotted with tarnished mirrors and neon beer signs and murky retro advertisements in frames. The lights were low. The music was not. Right now it was Joni Mitchell—who always sounded to Kristy like a cat trying to communicate that it was dying, and sad about it. Shelves behind the bar held bottles of every hard liquor known to mankind. There were a dozen beers on tap, too, half from the local microbrew and called things like pInePA and Cold River. It was the kind of place her ex-husband would like, Kristy knew.
There’s a rare, fine line between anodyne and sketchy, he would have said. And this is it.
A lean woman in her early fifties stood behind the bar. Cropped gray hair, nose stud, wearing a T-shirt that revealed tan, muscular arms dotted with Celtic-style tattoos. She had the loose, easy stance of someone who’d done years of non-dilettante yoga, and gave Kristy an appraising look as she approached.
“Are you Val?” Kristy asked. “I’m looking for—”
“Dangit,” the woman said. “Thought my luck was in.” She glanced at a scrap of paper thumb-tacked to the bar behind her. “I am indeed Val. Kristy?”
“That’s me.”
“Okay, so. Normally I’d let you in and give you the tour, but the Crown Prince of Uselessness didn’t show up tonight, and so I’m holding the fort by myself. I imagine it’ll be self-explanatory. You look like a grown-up.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
The woman took a while fishing a key out of her jeans. In the meantime Kristy cast a glance around to see if anybody was eating, and whether it looked edible. Nobody was. A tall, gaunt man in his sixties sat on a stool at the end of the counter. There was no glass in front of him.
He turned to look at her. Cloudy gray eyes, bags that spoke of a liver past its best, unnaturally dark hair scraped back from a high forehead. He looked so much like the kind of guy you always see in small-town bars that for a moment it almost felt as if she knew him from somewhere. Kristy realized she wasn’t in the mood for a solo meal even if it was an option.
“So what brings you to B-lake?” Val asked, as she finally produced a key. Kristy could imagine her asking the same question, in the same knowing way, of every stranger who walked in the bar.
“Just exploring.”
“Ha. Hope you brought something to read, because exploring will use up all of ten minutes. If you take your time. And to answer your next question, the kitchen closes at eight thirty on weeknights out of season. Sorry. The food’s not bad, though, for future reference.”
“Good to know,” Kristy said, as she took the key.
“All part of the service. And don’t lose that, cos I can’t find the spare.”
The door to 243a opened onto a narrow stairwell. Kristy found the light switch and carried her bag upstairs.
The apartment looked exactly how it had online, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but they didn’t always. A five-second tour confirmed it had a small kitchenette and a desk and a door to the bedroom/bathroom—which had looked nice on the website and was an area on which Kristy wouldn’t compromise. The furniture was old, but both it and the rug and pictures had been selected well enough to pitch the place convincingly toward shabby chic, rather than merely shabby. A bay window. Good enough.
She dropped her bag and went back down to the street. A woman was pulling in the sidewalk sign outside the grocery at the corner, but thankfully it hadn’t closed yet. Organic vegetables. Local honey. An excessively wide selection of artisanal vinegars. The problem with seeing a lot of places is they all start to seem the same, especially the ones that are trying to be different. Kristy gathered up milk, snacks, a pre-made sandwich from the cooler. It featured an unnecessary amount of alfalfa sprouts, but she believed she’d be able to struggle through. A middle-aged woman with thick glasses took Kristy’s money and gave her a bag without recourse to speech.
By the time Kristy stepped back out onto the street it had started to drizzle. The road was deserted, or so she thought at first. Then she saw a figure on the other side. Tall, thin. Hands hanging down by his sides.
He was lit, then unlit, by the flashing sign of the Stone Mountain Tap, and it took Kristy a moment to realize that he’d started crossing toward her.
He stopped a few feet short of the curb. His head still had to tilt to look down at her. Kristy was barely 5′4″ and slim of build. Which was why, in situations like this, she always spoke first. “Can I help you?”
The man said nothing.
“You were in the bar, right?” She phrased it as a question only because most humans are straightforward animals and a trick that simple usually got them to respond more quickly.
Not this guy. He sniffed, wetly, looked away down the street. Remained silent. Kristy was not afraid. There was a dozen feet between them and her reactions were fast. She’d worn her running shoes for the drive. It seemed unlikely this man ran at least a 5K every day of the year, as Kristy did, or that he’d be able to do it anywhere near as fast. She was watchful nonetheless. You just never know, and there was something about this man that she didn’t like.
“You’re here about her,” he said. His voice was quiet, unthreatening.
“Who?”
“The missing girl.”
“Like you probably overheard me say: I’m just exploring.”
“People sometimes disappear for a reason.”
“What kind of reason?”
“You’d be better off leaving in the morning, exploring some other town. But I don’t suppose you’ll listen.”
The man turned away, and started to walk back across the street. Stopped after a couple of paces, half-turned back. He paused a moment, lips pursed, looking at her.
“What?” she said.
“Sometimes it’s better if they stay gone.”
When he got to the other side, he turned left and disappeared around the corner.
Chapter2
It’s still early,” Molly said.
“It’s really not.”
She checked her watch. I’d done the same thing, less than a minute before. And a few minutes before that. “It’s not eight yet. Your slot’s until half past.”
“Tell me, Moll. Have you observed the ebb and flow during the last hour, and been able to come to any conclusions regarding changes in the population density of customers in this retail establishment over time?”
“It’s…less busy than it was?”
“There are exactly three people here, not including the comatose clerk at the register or the one hiding in the cooking section.” I turned in his direction. “I know you’re there,” I said, loudly.
Molly swatted me. “Shh, Nolan.”
“Two customers wandered past without glancing at my book. The third picked up a copy and had a long, hard look, before putting it back as though worried about contagion. He’s currently browsing the photography section, presumably in quest of artsy pictures of naked ladies. If I get any more bored I’m going to go give him the good news about the invention of the internet.”
Molly made a face. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I hate to embarrass you, that’s all,” I said. “I know you pulled a favor to even get me in here.”
Posters on the walls showed that Bookshop Santa Cruz’s events generally featured literary A-listers, bestselling genre scribes, or winsome-looking people who’d written one achingly awesome short story and won a shit-ton of awards for it. I am none of those things. Normally their events involved an audience and a Q&A and wine. I’d been given a table behind the local history section from seven until eight-thirty, which on a drizzly Wednesday evening in late October is the bookstore equivalent of exile to a labor camp in Siberia.
Molly grew up in Santa Cruz and knew somebody in the store. Perhaps anticipating that my event might not lead to a long line of excited customers snaking away down the street, she’d volunteered to come along for the ride on the pretext of hooking up with some old friends.
“I’m not in the least embarrassed,” she said. “People are stupid. Come on, nuts to this. Let’s go get a drink.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Wait though. Didn’t she buy a copy earlier?”
A young woman had come back in the store from the street, and was headed our way. “The copy, yes.”
I smiled when she got to us, reaching for my pen. “Decided you’d like it signed after all?”
“Well no, actually,” the girl said, looking awkward. “It was for my boyfriend. He’s really into unsolved mysteries and stuff? But I just gave it to him and he said he only likes to read things by actual experts, sorry.”
She held the book out to me diffidently.
“You’d like a refund?”
“If that’s okay.”
“And he sent you back to do this?” Molly asked.
The girl shrugged.
“You’ll have to take it to the register and deal with them,” Molly said. “Oh, and FYI? Your boyfriend’s a dick.”
The girl backed warily away.
Molly helped me put the books back in the box and then in my car, after which we went and got pretty drunk.
Or I did, anyway.
Molly had a single beer and then went for a late dinner with her friends. I kept meaning to leave the bar and kept failing to follow through. I remembered after a while that I’d got drunk in the same establishment, years ago, when passing through town after visiting my parents up in Berkeley. The bar hadn’t changed much. Neither, it appeared, have I.
Eventually I managed to go, and eleven o’clock found me on a lounger by the tiny swimming pool of my motel, smoking in front of the no-smoking sign and drinking from a large bottle of local beer that I seemed to have purchased along the way. The drizzle had stopped but it was pretty cold. The motel was called the Bayview, despite not having one and in reality being situated a brisk five-minute walk from the ocean.
I was sufficiently inebriated by that point to find this glumly metaphoric for something or other.
Hi. My name’s Nolan Moore. You may have heard of me from…
Who am I kidding. Of course you haven’t. Unless you ran across me in my previous life as a journeyman screenwriter in LA, my sole claim to fame is being the host of a very slightly popular YouTube show called The Anomaly Files, which investigates unsolved mysteries. The problem being that though it briefly looked like we were going to move up to cable, it fell apart for extremely complicated reasons that I won’t get into right now, and so we’re back on YouTube.
The problem with that is people who’re interested in the subjects we cover don’t go to YouTube, because it’s the province of youngsters who want to watch other young people jabbering on about their inconsequential days. I’m aware that makes me sound old. I don’t care. My point is most people go to the site to see their pre-existing worldview reflected safely back, not to have their eyes opened to new things, or be shown what’s going on in the shadows.
And this, as my producer/director/friend Ken has pointed out, more than once, is why our business model sucks.
In an attempt to generate PR for the show (and to bump my income to the level where I could continue to pay for the apartment in Santa Monica that had been home since I separated from my wife) I’d written up some of our previous shows. These had just come out in a large-format book from a real publisher, and that’s what I’d been trying to sell tonight. The net result—after the reversal with the girl with the shitty boyfriend—had been zero (0) sales.
There were a dispiriting amount of zeros in the book’s sales ranking on Amazon, too. I honestly hadn’t realized there were that many books in the world. It seemed altogether possible that books that didn’t even exist had sold more copies than mine. After spending a few confused minutes trying to figure out whether asking the publisher to withdraw the book from sale might push me higher up the bestseller list, I realized I’d drunk more than enough and should call it a night, especially if I was hoping to drive Molly and me the six-plus hours back to LA tomorrow.
I dislodged my phone from my jeans pocket during the process of standing, but managed to catch it before it crashed to the floor, somehow also avoiding flipping it into the pool. Buoyed by this evidence that I was in fact totally at the top of my game, I noticed I’d missed a call.
It was from Kristy. My ex-wife. Or, as it hadn’t quite got to that point (and we’d recently been cautiously experimenting with walking back from the split) the woman from whom I was presently separated.
Our current policy of playing it cool meant neither of us expected the other to leap straight onto calling back. We’d had a few good evenings together in the last couple months, including one when we’d added each other back to the Find Your Friends app, as a cocktail-fueled declaration of…I don’t know. Openness to a future. Or something. The fact that I’d not felt drawn to use the information, however, nor entitled to, showed there was still distance to cross.
It was late. I could have left it until I got back to Los Angeles. But I didn’t. Despite the hour, and having been no stranger to alcohol, I went up to my room, made some very bad coffee, and called Kristy back.
Mistake.
Chapter3
I wasn’t worried about waking her. Kristy switched to no-ring mode when she was done with the day. Not worried, either, that the delay in her picking up (necessarily) meant she was electing not to take my call. Kristy makes a point of leaving her phone on the other side of the room, usually somewhere precarious, to show how non-addicted she is. I’ve pointed out this shows she’s thinking too much about her phone, but my wisdom fell upon unresponsive ears, as it so often does.
I waited patiently, picturing how she would lever herself up out of her chair and pad quietly across whatever space she was in, tucking her hair behind her ear in readiness. It’s weird how someone not-answering their phone can remind you how much you know about them.
“Hey,” she said, eventually.
“New phone, who dis?”
“Nolan, that doesn’t work. You called me.”
“I know. That’s why it’s funny.”
“Pretty experimental use of the word funny, but let’s move on. How did the booksigning go?”
“Really badly.”
“I did warn you it might.”
“I know. But I wasn’t sure whether that was genuine concern or merely you being mean to me for sport.”
“Bit of both, if I’m honest. Well, that’s disappointing.”
“I’ll survive. So, what?”
“Huh?”
“Before I called you, you called me, remember? Where are you anyway?”
“Town called Birchlake. Forty miles from Shasta.”
“Okay. Why?”
She didn’t answer, and in that pause I heard an echo of previous pauses. Most of them good—the everyday beats of silence in a relationship that’s past (or before) the “somebody has to be talking or it’s not working” phase. Others not so good, like the hesitation of a person choosing whether to tell the truth, and if not, which untruth—something that would be consistent with previous untruths. You never understand those pauses for what they are at the time. Only in retrospect. And once you’ve learned that bad things live in the gaps, and the world may not be as it seems, it can make you paranoid.
“Ten days ago a girl called Alaina Hixon disappeared,” Kristy said, and I realized all she’d been doing was marshaling information. “Fourteen. From Birchlake.”
“Name rings a bell,” I said. “The town, not the girl.” And it did, now I’d heard it a second time.
“Can’t imagine why. It’s Nowheresville. Alaina lived a mile up the road. She and a couple of girlfriends went walking in the woods after school. It started getting dark and one of them turned to Alaina to suggest they head home. She wasn’t there. They called out and looked for her, but got freaked and bailed.”
“Nice.”
“They didn’t know what else to do, Nolan. And they went straight home and got their dad to call the police, so…The county sheriff and his guys were there fast. Then the Feds, and dogs. Nothing after five days of ground search. Nothing since. Nothing on social media. No contact with family or friends. Just plain gone.”
“I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it.”
“Bad timing. The day before she disappeared was that Walmart shooting in Chico. ‘Only’ four died, but—”
“There was that huge manhunt, right. That I do remember.”
“Exactly. Very bright and shiny. Took twenty-four hours until they pinned the guy down and blew his head off, then there were days of media analysis and handwringing after. Alaina missed her spot in the news cycle. She fell between the cracks.”
I tried to imagine what it must be like to have your child disappear like that, and realized it was nowhere I wanted to go inside my head. “Don’t they say that…”
“The first day is critical, yes. If a child turns up deceased, in three-quarters of cases death occurred within three hours. Movies are all about hidden cabins and the drawn-out playtimes of evil geniuses. In reality it’s a panicky act committed by someone who’s broken and vile, and it happens fast. But we shouldn’t leap to that anyway. About eight hundred thousand people are reported missing every year.”
“Seriously?”
“But eighty-five percent are under the age of eighteen, and the vast majority resolve quickly. People operate on a hair-trigger, understandably. Most of the time the kid’s just late, or at a friend’s, or goofing off. They come home, everybody shouts at each other, then someone calls for pizza and it’s have-you-done-your-homework.”
“What about the rest?”
“Family cases are often custody-based and more likely to involve children under six. The probability of harm increases markedly from family to acquaintance to stranger, of course, but in the end only one in ten thousand missing children are not eventually found alive.”
“Dying is not the only deeply shitty thing that can happen to missing kids.”
“Of course. And those dangers are higher with acquaintance or stranger abductions, which also become more likely if the missing child is female. Like Alaina.”
“But why are you on this? It’s terrible, of course. But you’re not a detective.”
“I was researching a piece on cyberbullying.”
“Hasn’t that been done?”
“Yes, it’s been ‘done,’ Nolan. But, bizarrely, that didn’t make the problem instantly disappear. And it’s not only kids. Students do it to teachers, too—setting up sites to hassle them. It happens even more outside the school system. You don’t want to see my mentions on Twitter any time I write something a teeny bit critical of the patriarchy, or suggest not having so many assault rifles in circulation might be a cool experiment.”
“Well, you know my theory about that.”
“Remind me.”
“People are assholes,” I said. I’d gotten to the end of the pot of coffee and couldn’t decide whether it would be a good idea to make another, especially as the first seemed to have stirred ominous harbingers of tomorrow’s hangover.
Instead I left the room and lit a cigarette on the walkway, looking over the wet parking lot. A homeless guy lurched along the road outside, shouting vaguely at someone who wasn’t there. “So—is this girl’s disappearance related to cyberbullying?”
“It wasn’t,” Kristy said. “Though I called the sheriff yesterday morning and suggested he look into it. Because, check this out.”
My phone pinged. She’d texted me a picture. A pretty young girl. Pale skin. Long dark hair. Black jeans, black hoodie. She was standing in front of birch trees, with thicker forest behind. “That’s her?”
“Yes,” Kristy said. “Keep looking.”
The image she’d sent was a screen grab, much taller than it was wide. I scrolled past the image. It’d been posted by “htilil♥2005” and had received precisely one like. I did the math and worked out that 2005 would have been Alaina Hixon’s birth year. “What’s with the white space underneath?”
“Somebody, or more likely two people, have posted comments. That’s what those random sets of letters on the left side signify. But the comments are blank.”
“That’s a little strange. Unless it’s just some pointless thing the young folks are doing this month.”
“Not that I’m aware. On her other account there are normal comments. I’ve traced those posters back to kids at her school. But these? No idea. And keep scrolling.”
The blank lines of empty post went on for a couple of inches of screen space. I was finding it hard to see this as cyberbullying worth the name (or Kristy’s time), and was about to say so, when the comments changed. One of the same random-character accounts had posted a single word.
Witch
“Huh,” I said. I kept scrolling. Something—the cold and dark, or a more atavi. . .
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