“So, what? Now you think she ran away, too?” He gave me a disappointed look.
I took a sip of beer. “Beats me.” I was done sharing my theories with this kid. The son of a cop.
He came over and sat down at the picnic table. He eyed the six-pack, like he was waiting for me to offer him a beer. “Are you going back to the cove? ’Cause I could, like, go with you. Do a monster stakeout kind of thing.”
I laughed an are you kidding me right now? kind of laugh. I was about to tell him to get lost.
“We’d just have to be really careful. My dad’s been patrolling the sanctuary nearly every night lately. Ever since the fire in the tower.”
The skin at the back of my neck prickled. “Wait? The tower?”
I thought of the message the Monster had left for me:
An old dream, a dream of endings and beginnings.
A dream of fire.
Of a lever pulled and a world of bright white light, crumbling ruin.
A single line spoken: “We belong dead.”
Do you share the same dream?
Do you dream it with me?
A reference to Frankenstein’s Bride. The movie me and my sister watched at the drive-in so long ago.
That line at the end the monster spoke: We belong dead, just before he pulled the lever and blew up the tower.
Could the tower be where she’d been hiding?
“Tell me about the tower,” I said, my voice a little too frantic.
“There’s this old stone tower in the wildlife sanctuary. My dad’s always telling me how it’s historic ’cause the Civilian Conservation Corps built it back in the 1930s or whenever. They did work all over Vermont in parks and stuff: built dams, bridges, towers. They put in stone steps in the wildlife sanctuary—you probably noticed the ones going down to Loon Cove, right?”
I nodded.
“They also built this stone tower—it’s kind of an island landmark. There’s a replica of it on the town green. And my uncle’s even got it on the campground sign. You didn’t notice?”
“I thought it was a lighthouse,” I admitted.
“Kind of a lighthouse-looking tower, I guess? I think it was originally built as a fire tower—you know, to keep an eye out for smoke in the woods around the lake? It’s pretty tall—maybe fifty feet or so. But it’s in bad shape. They’ve been trying to get funding in place to rebuild it, fix it up because it’s a historic landmark and all that. Right now it’s all boarded up. But people still sneak in. My dad goes out there pretty regularly to kick people out. Just last week, someone lit a fire up at the top.”
“A fire in the fire tower?”
He nodded. “They must have been setting off fireworks up there or something, because people heard an explosion, then saw flames. They saw it all the way across the lake.”
“Where exactly is this tower?” I asked.
“Do you wanna go out there? You think maybe the tower and the fire have something to with Rattling Jane? With what happened to Lauren?”
I shrugged, trying to play it cool.
He thought for a minute, rubbing his chin. “You know, I think the fire was right around the time Lauren disappeared. Like the day before? Or the day after, maybe? I can’t be sure.”
I remembered working on a page on monster hunting for our book. The two of us writing: When you look for monsters, there are obvious places: dark woods, caves, old castles and towers. Monsters love towers.
Monsters love towers.