Sometimes there would be questions: Do you know yet? Why I do what I do? Have you guessed?
And sometimes, just taunting: You were so close, but again, you missed so much.
I’d printed copies of every email from MNSTRGRL and these were in the file too. I flipped through them now and looked at the last one I’d received, about three months ago:
Do you ever get tired of it? The cat and mouse game we play? The hunter and the hunted. Only, which is which, sister? Which is which?
I shut the folder, shoved it into my bag.
I went into the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and got out my thermos. Not that I felt the need for coffee now—I was keyed up, on edge—but I’d need the caffeine for an all-night drive. While I waited for it to brew, I pulled out my phone, knowing I shouldn’t, but longing to hear my brother’s voice.
“Hey,” he said when he picked up.
“Hey, yourself,” I said back.
“How’s Louisiana? Any sign of your swamp monster?” The words were a little mocking. He didn’t believe in monsters anymore.
“I’m not in Louisiana.”
“I thought you were there for the rest of the week. Where are you now?”
A lump in my throat warned me not to tell him.
But I longed to tell someone, to confess, and who else would I tell? Who else could possibly understand?
“I’m home,” I said. “but I’m heading out soon.” I paused, then made myself finish: “I’m going to Vermont.”
He fell silent, so quiet I thought the call had dropped.
At last he said, “Why?” his voice a little higher than usual. A littleboy voice that took me tumbling back through time. I closed my eyes, pictured a too-skinny Eric, his tube socks pulled up to his knobby knees, curly hair sticking up at strange angles. A boy who was always cradling an animal, trying to tame something wild, to fix something broken.
“I think she’s there.” I didn’t need to say more. Didn’t need to tell him who she was. “There’s another missing girl,” I explained, offering up my evidence. “Taken on the full moon. From a place with a monster. It fits the pattern.”
Eric, member of the Monster Club, illustrator of our book, would have understood this.
More silence. But I could hear him breathing, a soft wheeze that worried me a little. He sounded like an old man. Behind the sound of his breath, I heard a TV. A baseball game. His beloved Tigers, no doubt. The sound dimmed, and his breathing got louder. He was walking, moving out of earshot of Cricket and the girls. I heard a door close.
“Lizzy, listen to me,” he said, voice sharp and no-bullshit, but still barely above a whisper. He didn’t want anyone to hear. “You’re grasping at straws. Seeing patterns that aren’t there. You’ve lost all perspective.”
“I have not.” I prided myself on my perspective. In my podcasts, I was the devil’s advocate, playing the role of skeptic when I interviewed eyewitnesses, asking questions like “If this creature is really out there, how do you explain the lack of physical evidence?”
I held tight to the phone, listening. Eric （Charlie!） was the only person I’d shared my theories with. The only one who knew about the missing girls, the monsters, and full moons. The only one I’d told about the emails I sometimes got from MNSTRGRL.
“Lizzy, please. I’m asking you to stop.”
“I can’t. You know that. She’s got another girl.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know it’s her.”
“Yes, I do. I can feel it.”