Maybe they were made by an animal, a bear tearing away the fleshy surface of the evergreen, yet they look oddly clean and straight. Slit into the wood by the sharp blade of a knife.
A marker, a sign—a warning.
The scent of lilacs fills my nostrils again. This is where Maggie entered the forest, rot and green and black interior. After five years, she might still be alive, somewhere within this mountainous terrain. Or I might discover her body coiled and stiff at the base of a tree, having gotten lost, knees drawn up, autumn leaves and a thick layer of snow her only burial. Eyes frozen open.
But I’ve found worse.
I steer the truck closer to the mark cut into the tree, snow falling in sheets now against the windshield, and discover another half-hidden road—an old logging road maybe, back when this mountainside was clear-cut for timber—and it winds up into the forest. I feel another itch at my spine. An uncertainty. A need.
Redemption.
I’m going to see this through.
I’m going to find Maggie St. James.
* * *
My talent might be considered a disease, a thing suffered among generations, passed down through a family tree.
There were always stories about my ancestors, about Aunt Myrtle who wore long abalone shell earrings that touched her shoulders, and had a habit of lighting matches at the dinner table to rid the room of nosy, lingering ghosts who should have moved on by now. Aunt Myrtle saw things in the objects she touched. Just like her uncle Floyd before her, and a great-great grandmother who immigrated from Dundalk, Ireland.
We were a family of uncommons.
When I was nine or ten, I thought I was seeing flashes of the dead, pale shifting forms, effigies, traces of those who were long buried in the earth. It frightened me, the threat of seeing ghostly apparitions in anything I touched. But my dad—always efficient with his words, and having seen the quiet, distant look in my eyes in the months previous, the way I paused whenever I touched objects around the house—patted me on the shoulder one morning while I sat over a bowl of frosted cornflakes and said, “You have the gift, kid. Tough luck. My advice would be to ignore it, don’t go making a show of it or people will think you odd. Better to stuff it down.”
So I did for a time, careful not to touch anything that didn’t belong to me—I was a hands-in-pockets kind of kid—but there were slip-ups, unintended moments when my fingers found themselves retrieving some item that wasn’t mine: a unicorn barrette slipped free from the honey hair of a girl seated in front of me in history class, my father’s reading glasses left on the kitchen counter that he asked me to retrieve.
In these brief errors, I glimpsed the jerking, shuddering moments from a past that belonged to someone else: the golden-haired girl brushing her hair that morning before school, carefully clipping the barrette into place while her parents argued downstairs, their voices rattling up the hallways, making the girl wince. Or my father, removing his eyeglasses and placing them on an olive-green tiled kitchen counter that wasn’t our own. A woman that was not my mother, round hips and freckled skin, standing before him, her lips on his.
I saw things I didn’t want to see. It was a talent I didn’t want, an ability I didn’t ask for. But it was one I couldn’t give back.
It wasn’t until years later I learned to focus this skill, to use it to find things that had been lost—to find people. If I knew what I was looking for, if I had the image of someone I needed to find, I could locate the town or street corner where they last boarded a bus or got into a stranger’s car. I could see the argument they had with a spouse, the knife they slipped out from a kitchen drawer. I could see the things they had done, even if they were still alive. Even if they weren’t dead yet.
In college, Ben worked as a private detective, and he hired me on the side to help him with a few cases: stolen pets and stolen lovers and a few stolen credit cards. It was shit work. Driving around at night, rooting through people’s garbage, snapping dark, out-of-focus photos.
But after we graduated, he referred me to someone he knew at the Seattle PD and they asked me to come in and help with a missing person’s case. At first, they didn’t tell me much—they didn’t trust me, and I couldn’t blame them. I was in my early twenties, and looked like I could just as easily commit the crimes they were in the business of preventing. But when I found a fourteen-year-old kid who had vanished from his home a week earlier, camped out in a tent in the woods behind his school—a runaway—the police asked me to look at a few other cold cases.