“When was the last time you saw her?”
“I guess around Easter, maybe.”
“What day specifically? And what time? How did she seem?” I wish I had a tape recorder, a calendar, some way to quantify exactly when and how you disappeared.
His voice shallows. “You seem pretty invested in a stranger’s story.”
I debate telling him the true reason I am here. He is just as likely as anyone to be involved in your disappearance. But in spite of this, I want to trust him—maybe only because I have no one else to trust. And the truth is, I’m not getting anywhere on my own. I need someone on the inside, someone who was here when you disappeared. I need someone.
“I listened to her podcast.” His hips slide forward on the horse, but I can’t see his face. I look for clues in the line of his broad shoulders. “Before she disappeared. That’s why I came out here. To find out where she went.”
“You’re shitting me,” he says, but not to me. He speaks out into space, as if speaking to you. Then he ducks his head and lowers his voice. “Let’s just keep on with the trail.”
He quickens his horse, directs it toward a copse of trees. My lower back stiffens. Where is he taking me? Is this really the trail? Or have I trusted the wrong person? Is he taking me into the woods to cut me up? (Forty-six stab wounds in the face, so we know it was personal. The bullet entered her head at her temple, no exit wound. Signs of struggle. The first place to look for DNA is under the victim’s fingernails.) Did his wife really go back to Texas? Has anybody verified it? Or did he murder her and bury her in the woods? Did you find out? Did he kill you too?
He leads me away from the beach, along a lilac-strewn path. In spite of your mother’s warning, I am not carrying a gun, but I consider all the weapons at my disposal:
I could gallop away on my horse. (He could gallop faster.)
I could wrap the reins around his neck and choke him to death. (He could cut them with the knife sticking out of his pocket.)
I could charge him on horseback. (He could clothesline me, tackle me to the ground.)
I could use his knife to slit his throat. (He could turn it on me, thrust it in my neck so my blood would spit warmly on his fingers. What would it feel like to die that way? Would the pain sharpen or would it feel like a gradual loosening, like all the knots in my nerves were untied?)
And I think: Trust. I have to trust someone.
We reach the woods. He doesn’t say a word. And after a while it becomes clear that he’s not going to kill me or tell me your secrets. He’s not going to do anything at all.
“I need to find out what happened to her.” I squeeze the reins between my fingers.
“Why?” he says, genuinely confused.
“She did for all those people, on her podcast. She cared enough. To look. To find out. To try to save them. I have to do the same for her.”
“She didn’t save anyone.” He reins his horse up. “She lost herself.” Satisfied with his conclusion, he continues up the trail.
I let my horse jog to catch up. “What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I mean, she saw murder everywhere, ill intentions. She got lost in her own stories. Thought everyone was out to get her.”
“Like her mother does?”
“Rachel is nothing like Addy; don’t you say that.” Anger flashes through him. I can see what he would look like in the killer role. Because he is angry. Beneath his cool, slow words, his anger is aimed, always at your mother. So why does he stay? Is tax-free money really enough to burn alone in isolation? Or is there something else that keeps him here?
He sees that he has let himself out too much, and I watch him enforce a new relaxation, rock with his horse, flick his reins and lean back. “You don’t understand what it’s like out here. What it gets like. Even leaving for a couple days, like I done, you start to see things clearly you just weren’t seeing before. It was just the four of us out here for a long time. And Addy’s a psychopath, and Emmett’s a nut, and Rachel, she was chasing crazy, or maybe she was running from it, but either way, she was so close, things started to overlap.” He cranes back in his saddle. “You know how they say, ‘You can’t see the woods for the trees’?”
“Yes.”
“Stay here long enough, you’ll know what they mean.”
“But where is she? Where is Rachel?”
“She left. Lucky girl.”
“Her mother thinks she’s dead.”
“Her mother—” His accent sours on the words, and he corrects it. “Her mother thinks whatever happens to work best for her at the time.”
“But Rachel loved it here.” He seems surprised I know so much about you. “On her podcast, she used to talk about keeping an MMC Pack.”
“MMC?”
“Murder, Missing, Conspiracy. It sounds stupid when you say it,” I add off his look. “But it’s information a person keeps with someone they trust. Information that might help locate them in the event of their disappearance. Medical files, names of close friends, jobs, education, anything that might—”
“I don’t know anything about all that.”
“Did she have a close friend? Was there anyone she trusted?”
He seems irritated by my questions, and I can’t help thinking that’s a clue. Why doesn’t he want to find you? Why doesn’t he seem to care? He has the bitterness of someone who once cared too much.
“Rachel? Ha. It was a point of pride, to her, not to trust nobody.”
“But she must have left clues.”
He looks at me like I’m a child—no, he looks at me like I’m an adult acting like a child. “She didn’t leave clues because nothing happened. Simple as that.”
“So you just think she’s gone. Just up and left with no explanation?”
“You didn’t know Rachel.”
“I did too know her.” I want to say I knew you better. I knew your heart. I knew the real you, the secrets you confessed in the middle of the night in my bedroom. The words you whispered in my ear.
“You’re making more of this than there is. Her parents are crazy. They drove her crazy. She left. She doesn’t want to be found.”
“What about the police? What do they think?”
“The police?” he asks like it’s a dirty word.
“You never told the police? That she just disappeared?”
“She didn’t vanish into thin air; she walked out. Goddamn, I admired it. I wish I had the gumption.”