I put the truck in park, and walk through the snow to the chimney, the headlights gleaming over the carcass. I place my hand against the brick.
The chimney is cool to the touch, and I glimpse the vibrating image of a porch swing and a little girl in army-green rain boots pumping her legs into the summer wind, sending herself up higher and higher. The next burst of memories is of someone screaming, a woman wailing from an upstairs bedroom while tears spilled down her strawberry cheeks. She died in childbirth, left her daughter motherless. A quick slideshow flashes through me, decades of time in half a blink: a man waving goodbye to someone on the porch, his hands work-worn and trembling; a curtain flapping from a kitchen window where a girl is crying softly, writing a letter at the dining table; a boy with autumn-brown hair and deep-set eyes, jumping from the roof and breaking his arm at the elbow when he hit the ground. He never wrote his name right after that, never could bend the arm without causing pain.
Several families, several lives existed within this house.
Click click click, and then it’s finished.
I yank my hand away. I don’t want to muddy my focus, to chase these images deeper and deeper until I know the details of all these lives. I wheel my eyes away from the crumbling chimney and look to the trees beyond the house. Maggie didn’t stop here, she didn’t encounter some villain in the shadows like in her fairy tales, who snuck out from the dark and choked the life from her, silent and still. She isn’t buried beneath the rocks and soil and soot that clot the area around the chimney.
She kept going.
She slipped through the trees. Deeper, deeper, into the woods.
At this point, I would usually call Maggie’s family. Let them know that I might have a lead. That their daughter had not wandered over to the Alexanders’ place like the police report had surmised. She came here intentionally, to this old barn, this burnt-out house in the Three Rivers Mountains of northern California. And second, she brought a backpack and supplies with her, then locked her car and strode off the road into the forest. She knew where she was going—she had a plan.
Rarely do I phone the local police—I let the family who hired me make that call, if they want to convince the nearest jurisdiction that I’m worth listening to, that they should come out and take a look, follow me into the forest in the middle of the night. Only if I find hard evidence do I call it in. I don’t want my prints on anything. Don’t want to give anyone cause to suspect the only reason I found this evidence is because I put it there myself.
Keep your hands clean, Ben told me some years ago. And I’ve stuck to it.
But I don’t call Maggie’s family. Or the police. Because my cell hasn’t had a signal since I left Highway 86 a few hours back. And I haven’t found any hard evidence, no stray boot tossed into the hollowed-out house—a size seven, same as Maggie’s. No clump of hair yanked from her pale white skull. No solid clues that Maggie came this way. Only the memory of her I can see in my mind—a woman who slipped into the trees and disappeared.
No proof of anything yet.
When I took this case, I told myself it was a favor to Ben. And I needed the money. Maggie St. James’s father wrote me a personal check for 50 percent up front—standard with all my cases. The remainder due only if I find Maggie, dead or alive.
But there is another reason I took this case.
My sister.
A nagging in my solar plexus, a black rotting pit in the deepest hollow of my stomach. If I can find Maggie St. James, maybe it will be like rescuing my sister, the one I didn’t get to in time. Maybe it will fill the hole that’s been trying to swallow me up, and I’ll be able to sleep without seeing her pale arms, palms to the ceiling, mouth slightly open, as if she tried to say something at the end but ran out of time. Finding Maggie will be like finding Ruth.
It will set something right.
When I took this job, I also told myself if I found nothing, if there were no remnants of Maggie St. James along this stretch of road, I’d call Ben like a coward and tell him to notify her parents that it was a dead end. I wouldn’t have the courage to do it myself—to admit that I failed. And then I’d resume my own disappearing act, I’d continue north into Canada and then Alaska. I’d vanish and maybe I wouldn’t come back.
Back in the truck, I peer out at the line of trees, trying to steady my focus on Maggie. But out in the dark… my eyes catch on something, and I lean forward against the steering wheel, headlights illuminating the trunk of a tall fir tree.
Three straight gashes are cut vertically into the bark.