“Do you feel safe here?” she says instead.
“Yes.”
She pulls away. “Okay.” Then she follows her family out to the car. I watch them leave from the shadows and wonder why she thinks I wouldn’t feel safe.
Episode 45:
The Queen of the Flies
The compound was stationed close to the PCT, on the border of California and Oregon. At the height of the summer, the cult members would drive out to the trailhead and wait for hikers to pass by, exhausted and half crazed with hunger. They wouldn’t take just anyone. They targeted women, women who traveled alone. They drove them to the compound, where they offered them a feast. They let them eat their fill and then they feasted on their flesh.
As I walk back to my cabin, my stomach roils with your mother’s food, which is like nothing I have ever tasted before, like she invented a new cuisine. I tell myself there is no reason to believe it’s going to make me sick, that I’m not the only one who ate it, but then I think of the bottles lined up in the greenhouse: the reeds like hair, the white slices of fish bones. Surely your mother would know better than to put something like that in her food?
I wander through the ranch with the lights out, so the guest cabins cower, the horses move like phantoms in the shadows. I feel like I am running out of time, like I am an hourglass with a hole at the bottom, emptying, with no chance of turning it all around. It’s not a feeling that is specific to you, although this time you are at the heart of it.
It’s the first night I have noticed the stars, and I gaze up as I walk slowly toward my cabin. There is a blanket of them, wildly flecked, like paint splatters across the sky, and I regret that I didn’t see them before.
I wonder how I got here. How I’m over thirty and, instead of living, I’m disappearing. The idea of life has always been, I thought, that as you got older, your life multiplied, that you became bigger and bigger, more and more, not less. But I think about you (Missing? Murdered? Conspiracy?) and I realize the place I thought I was going, the place I thought we were all going, has scattered like the stars away from us.
I walk along the duck pond; I can see the rough battle of Jed’s feet, diving in and out of the water. I observe the thin layer of surface, and I fantasize about finding your skull, wish so hard I can almost see it glimmer, see your crystal bones. Like the bones of Lynn Messer found in an open field two years after she went missing. Lying out in a cow pasture, and nobody saw her, search parties and police dogs, even her own family—for years. And her husband remarried and her kids’ heads spun and her body was out there with the cows, drying in the sun, rotting in the dark, and no one noticed. I won’t let that happen to you. I won’t leave your bones waiting.
My stomach lurches. You are out here somewhere. Are you drowning in the water or are you baking in the sun and why does nobody care? Why is nobody looking? Why has everyone accepted your vanishing? Why don’t you matter? Why don’t we matter? Because the truth is, Rachel, growing up out here in a population of four, you are just as missed as I would be, solved like a problem that could never be fixed any other way: She disappeared.
She was crazy, she was a bitch, she was alone. You never fit, and so you make more sense as a mystery, a disappearance. And maybe that’s why I was drawn to you in the first place. Maybe we always knew that we would disappear and no one would care; maybe that was why we cared so much about the people who disappeared before us.
I reach into my pocket and take out your list. What is the secret? What is the tie between the names? Four girls, four girls who used to be friends. Four girls who haven’t been friends for a long time.
I follow the perimeter of the lake, still looking for your bones. I pass by the promised pet cemetery, tucked under a tree. Names are scrawled on homemade tombstones: Lulu, Gigi, Grace. And in front of Grace’s, a bundle of discordant wildflowers. I shiver in surprise. Isn’t that Jed’s wife’s name? Maybe the family pet shared the name. Maybe Grace, in the week that she was here, made a grave for herself, for fun?
The ground drops out from under me. Bile rises in my throat. I think of Jed’s muddy boot. He was up here, leaving flowers. Maybe he made a headstone for his own wife, but why? And then it strikes me: What if she never left? What if Jed was lying? But it doesn’t make sense, that he would murder her, then bury her out in the open, where anyone could see—but then, who would see? Who would ever know but your mother and your father? What if they are all in on it, everyone at that dinner party? And my stomach lurches, and I hear Addy tell me, We’re so happy you’re here and Homer say, Rachel and I were very different—“were,” past tense, like he knows you are never coming back. What if they are all planning to kill me? I think how easy it would be, to pluck people off, out here, in the middle of nowhere, in Apathy County, where no one cares.
I move away from the river, following Jed’s weird footpath until it disappears on the packed dirt road. I almost trip over another dead cat, stretched long across the path, like it was flying, like it fell from the sky. I hear a strangled call and look up. I search for the vultures—do vultures sleep, or do they just circle? Do they feed off the sleep of the dead?
Up ahead, I see the greenhouse glitter in the dark, a mirror for the moon. I feel the witchy food turn in my stomach, and I brace myself against a tree, cough once, then watch it pour out of me.
It looks the same on the ground as it did on the plate, and then I hear heavy panting, the trot of footsteps, see the glint of yellow nighttime eyes, and your mother’s dogs appear, surround me like a pack of wolves. They approach slowly. I call to them but they ignore me. They gather at my feet, and then they lap up my vomit from the ground.
* * *
—
The next morning, I finish feeding the horses and arrive back at the tack room to find Jed saddling two horses.
“Addy said I could take you up to Eagle Rock today,” he says, lifting a saddle onto Jewel’s back. “It’s the all-day trail for advanced riders. Probably take all morning, if you want to bring a sandwich or something.” He doesn’t look me in the eye. I think of the grave in the pet cemetery.
I hesitate, realizing we will be up there alone. I can say no. I can refuse to go. But then I think of you. You weren’t afraid to put yourself at risk. You weren’t afraid of being “crazy.” You weren’t afraid of pushing, when everyone else let go.
I can drop out. I can quit, like I quit everything. Or I can be fearless. I can be the person you assumed I was, in every episode, whispered in my ear. Told me grim secrets because you knew I could handle it, that I wasn’t like other people. You believed in me. You knew I would save you, if you ever needed to be saved.
“I’ll be okay.” I step in to finish tacking up my horse. It’s quiet for a few minutes, except for the flap of tack and the huff of our breath, the occasional nicker of our horses. And then we mount and ride out past your mother’s house, along switchbacks up the steep mountain, deep and deeper into the woods.