There weren’t many leads in the St. James case, and the local police found themselves pacing this length of road with little to go on. Cases go cold this way. They grow stagnant, lose momentum. Without a body, without any blood or sign of a struggle, Maggie St. James might have simply wanted to vanish—just like the woman at the gas station suggested. No crime in that.
I reach into the backpack on the seat beside me and pull out the tiny silver charm. My ears begin to buzz. The charm is shaped like a small book, with thin metal pages and a narrow spine, and it’s no bigger than my pinky nail.
When Maggie’s parents gave it to me, they explained that the charm once hung from a necklace that Maggie always wore. There were five charms on the necklace—five tiny silver books—one for every book in the Foxtail series. And each one had a number engraved on the front.
The one I hold in my hand is number three.
The charm was found by police a few feet from the trunk of Maggie’s car. Which was the only indication that there might have been a struggle: someone who pulled Maggie from the driver’s seat, kicking and clawing, and during the fray, the charm was torn free from her necklace and fell to the gravel beside the road. But there were no hair fibers found, no broken fingernails, no other clues to support this theory.
I close my eyes and clench my hand around the charm, feeling its sharp corners, its delicate weight in my palm—imagining it suspended at the end of a silver chain, against the warmth of Maggie’s chest, pressed between four other identical charms. The air pulses around me: cotton in my ears, a tightness in my throat, and I imagine sitting in Maggie’s green Volvo, just as she did, the idle summer breeze through the open window. The radio is on, playing an old country song, Waylon Jennings: “She’s a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timin’ man. She loves him in spite of his ways that she don’t understand.” The music rattles from the speakers, sailing out the open windows—like a memory plucked from the trenches of my mind. Except this memory doesn’t belong to me. It’s a slideshow, distorted and marred with tiny holes, like an old film through a sputtering projector.
I open the truck door and step out into the snow.
And even as the cold folds itself over me, I feel the warm afternoon sun against my skin, the hot pavement rising up beneath my boots. I feel what Maggie felt.
It’s been five years since she was here, but the memory replays itself across my mind as if I were standing beside her on that quiet afternoon. We all leave markers behind—dead or alive—vibrations that trail behind us through all the places we’ve been. And if you know how to see them, the imprints of a person can be found—and followed.
But like all things, they fade with time, become less clear, until finally they are washed over with new memories, new people who have passed through here.
I squeeze my fist, knuckles cracked and dry in the cold, drawing out the memory of Maggie from the small charm. She has brought me here. Dust and fluttering eyelashes beneath the midday sun. Memories shake through me, and I walk several paces up the road, to the exact place where she stood. A bird chatters from a nearby pine, bouncing from limb to limb, back to its nest. But when I open my eyes, the bird is gone—the trees covered in snow. No nests. No roosting jays and finches. All gone farther south for the winter months.
I glance back up the road—my truck parked in the snow just off the shoulder. There are no other cars, no logging trucks wheeling up into the forest. But in summer, surely there was more traffic. A family heading into the mountains for a weekend camping trip at one of the remote lakes, locals driving into town to fill up on gas and beer.
Yet, no one saw a woman slip from her car. No one saw a thing. Or if they did, they aren’t saying. Silence can hold a thousand untold stories.
The Alexanders’ porch light winks against the snow that has collected on the railing and front steps—the house itself giving the impression of sinking into the earth, doing its best not to collapse completely. I can hear Maggie breathing, the beat of her heart beneath her ribs—she wasn’t panicked or afraid. Her car didn’t break down like the police report had suggested. She stood on the side of the road and stretched her arms overhead, like she had merely stopped to work the tension from her joints after a long drive. Her eyes blinked against the sun and she drew in a deep breath, tilting her face to the sky.
She wanted to be here; she came with a purpose. But she didn’t turn for the Alexander’s house. She may have peeked at it briefly, observed it in the same way I do now, but then she shifted her focus toward the barn. Walking to the edge of the road to stare up at it.