“No.” I scratch at my beard, along the jaw. It’s starting to feel too warm inside the little store—humid, boxed-in.
“Then why’d you come all the way out here in the middle of winter, asking about that woman? You a boyfriend or something?”
I shake my head, a staticky hum settling behind my eyes—that well-known ache trying to draw me into the past. I’m getting closer to Maggie, I can feel it.
The woman’s mouth makes a severe line, like she can see the discomfort in my eyes, and I take a quick step back from the counter before she can ask me what’s wrong. “Thank you for your time,” I tell her, nodding. Her mouth hangs open, like the maw of some wild animal waiting to be fed, and she watches as I retreat to the front doors and duck out into the night.
The sudden rush of cold air is an odd relief. Snow and wind against my overheated flesh.
But my head still thumps with the heavy need for coffee, for sleep—but also with the grinding certainty that I’m getting close. This gas station was the last place Maggie St. James was seen before she vanished, and my ears buzz with the knowing.
I climb back into the truck and press a hand to my temple.
I could use a handful of aspirin, a soft bed that doesn’t smell like industrial-grade motel detergent, the warmth of anything familiar. I crave things I’ve forgotten how to get. An old life, maybe. That’s what it really is: a need for something I’ve lost long ago. A life that’s good and decent and void of the bone-breaking pain that lives inside me now.
The truck tires spin on the ice, windshield wipers clacking back and forth, and I swerve out of the gas station parking lot back onto the road. I glance in the rearview mirror and see the woman watching me from the window of the little store, her face a strange neon-blue glow under the shivering lights.
And I wonder: Did Maggie St. James see that same face as she sped away five years ago? Did the same chill skip down her spine to her tailbone?
Did she know she was about to vanish?
* * *
The truck headlights break through the dark only a few yards ahead, illuminating the icy pavement like a black, moonless river, and casting ribbons of yellow-white through the snow-weighted trees that sag and drip like wet arms.
I drive for an hour up the same road that Maggie St. James followed, passing only one car going in the opposite direction, and a scattering of small, moss-covered homes.
Until at last, through the tall sentinel pines and sideways snow, a red barn appears.
What’s left of it.
The woman at the gas station had been right, the entire left side is caved in, a heap of splintered wood and old nails now buried in snow. But a metal weathervane still sits perched at the highest peak, the moving pieces locked in place by the cold or rust. It’s the same barn I saw in a police photograph that Maggie’s parents showed me. But in the photo, parked in the foreground, was a pale green, four-door, newer model Volvo: Maggie’s car. She had parked here alongside the road, gotten out of the driver’s seat, took her purse and her cell phone, then vanished.
I ease off the gas pedal and pull the truck onto the shoulder of the road, stopping in the very same place where she did.
It was midsummer when Maggie was here, the leaves on the trees a healthy, verdant green, the sun crisp and blinding overhead, and it must have warmed the inside of her car. Perhaps she had the windows rolled down, smelled the sweet scent of green manzanita and wildflowers growing up from the ditch beside the road. Perhaps she closed her eyes for a moment while she sat in her car, considering her options. Perhaps she even thought back on all the things that led her here: the faraway moments, the fragmented pieces of her life that only come into focus in times like this.
She was building a story in her mind, just like the fairy tales she wrote, but this story was her own—the ending not yet written. Or an ending only she foresaw.
Ahead of me, the mountain road makes a sharp left turn and a small solitary house—the only one for miles—sits tucked back in the pines, a porch light on, illuminating the gray front door. Mr. and Mrs. Alexander live there. They’ve lived in the squat, single-story home for forty-three years—most of their lives—and they were there when Maggie’s car was found. The police spent quite a bit of time interviewing the Alexanders. From the report, it’s obvious the detectives had their suspicions about Mr. Alexander, and they even dug up parts of the Alexander’s backyard, searching for remains: a thighbone, an earring, any clues that Maggie might have met her fate inside the Alexander’s home. One of the detective’s theories was that Maggie’s car may have broken down—even though it started right up when the tow truck came to haul it away—and maybe she wandered over to the Alexanders’ hoping for refuge, for help. But perhaps instead Mr. Alexander dragged her into his garage and bludgeoned her to death before burying her out back. They found a hammer in his garage with blood splatter marks on it, that was later determined to be rodent blood. He had used the hammer to end the suffering of a mouse caught in a trap. But that didn’t detour the police from keeping Mr. Alexander as their main—and only—suspect.