Outside the wind has picked up, rattles the window frame.
“The girl whose body they mistook for yours, she was the same age, her whole family gone. No one in town knew her or her parents. So I called in a favor with a guy in Records.”
He says it like it’s nothing. Truly, it was fraud. Maybe it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.
But this is The Hollows and the usual rules don’t apply. This town takes care of its own. Sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing here. The Hollows will keep your secrets.
“We gave you her birth certificate, her Social Security number,” says Jones. “We let you choose your own name, and we legally changed it. We never filed a death certificate for her. But we filed one for Robin Carson. So Robin Carson died that day.”
“Doesn’t a minor need a guardian to change her name?”
He gives me a look. I take his point. I don’t ask for any more details about how he did what he did.
It strikes me as terribly sad. A girl, just like me, gone without a trace. We illegally erased her name and it’s as though she never existed. Funny how our whole identity comes down to a few sheets of paper, how a sleight of hand, a forged document, can erase an existence, create a new one.
“I chose Wren Greenwood.” A bird name, like my mother would have wanted. The name my imaginary friend gave me. And the image that gave me the most peace, green trees moving in the wind.
He offers a thoughtful nod. “It suits you.”
“What was her name? The girl who died?”
He hesitates. More details he doesn’t want to discuss. Maybe it’s better for him if the past stays buried. Maybe he doesn’t want to say her name. Finally, he hands over the file.
“Everything is in here.”
“Does anyone else know what we did?” I ask.
“The man who helped me in Records has passed on,” he says, a note of finality to his voice. “Miss Lovely is gone, too.”
Miss Lovely, the woman who took me in, gave me a safe and comfortable home.
“I guess that leaves Joy Martin.”
Joy Martin. The librarian at The Hollows Historical Society, and Miss Lovely’s closest friend. She knows everything about this town; but she is a keeper of secrets.
“Sometimes it’s better to leave old selves, old lives, old mistakes behind,” he says.
“I tried. It’s caught up with me.”
He looks down at the article.
“What did you tell Bailey Kirk?” I ask.
“I told him what was in the public record. Nothing about you or what we did. But I got the feeling he already knew. What we did, maybe it only could have happened in a small place like this, without the eyes of the outside world on us. If the ATF or the FBI had been involved, it would have been impossible. But the case was small; it never made national news. Still, if you looked closely, dug through paperwork, it probably wasn’t hard to figure out.”
“He’s looking for connections between me and the missing women. His trail to Mia Thorpe is cold.”
Jones offers a thoughtful nod.
“And what do you think the connection is?” he asks.
“Loneliness, a dating app we all used called Torch, trauma in our pasts. One of the missing women also lived here, Melissa Farrow. Did you know her or her family?”
He squints into the middle distance.
“The name rings a bell. Was there a fire? Yeah—that was it. Her parents were killed. She went to live with her grandparents. Tragic—a long time ago.”
“Do you have access to any of the old files from the incident?”
“I can ask the chief. He might let me take a look. There’s only one other person alive who knows the whole story of what happened there that night. Who knows about you, and what was done to protect you.”
My throat goes dry, and I can’t find my voice.
“Your father.”
My father.
Out the window, that northern cardinal perches on the fence. I focus on his bright red body. I wish I was a bird and could fly away.
My father is alive. Dead to me. But still drawing breath.
“Have you talked to him?” he asks when I say nothing.
I shake my head. My father. The man who killed my brother and my mother. The man whose actions are responsible for the deaths of so many others, including a nameless girl who, thanks to me, was neither born, nor died, but who existed just the same.
My ghost. Or am I hers?
“There’s nothing to say.” My voice sounds tight and small.
“I understand,” he answers, letting the silence expand. Then, “My father wasn’t a good man either. We were estranged for most of my life.”