With that, Hitch opened the scrapbook.
Kris stepped up beside him and peered down at the first page.
Beneath a shiny layer of contact paper, four faces stared back. She recognized one of them instantly. It was the same school photo she had seen online: the innocent, smiling face of Poppy Azuara. Beneath her picture, handwritten on a strip of paper in an elegant script, was her name. A name accompanied each of the other photos. Ruby Millan. Sarah Bell. Megan Adamson. Except for their ages and their shared hometown, there was no obvious connection to make by simply looking at the girls.
Taking a step back, Hitch motioned toward the scrapbook.
“Please,” he said.
Kris ran a finger over the edge of the page, digging a fingernail beneath it to lift it up from the others. She hesitated, unwilling to turn it just yet. She took one more look at the faces of those little girls, burning them into her mind. They would be this age forever. They would never grow old, never experience a first kiss, never graduate high school, never have families of their own. Kris thought of the crooked road of her own life and felt guilty for having lived even her worst days.
She turned the page.
Trapped under the contact paper were yellowing newspaper articles. These were not printouts from the internet or copies Hitch had found on microfiche at the Pacington library. He had cut these out by hand from the actual newspapers and meticulously arranged them in his scrapbook.
“Where did you get these?” Kris asked.
Behind her, Hitch was only a voice. “I tried something a little out of the box: I called the newspapers. You’d be surprised how eager they are these days to connect with actual readers. They dug up old copies of the dates I requested and mailed them straight to my door.”
Kris leaned in closer to the page. Here and there, a word or sentence was circled in pencil. She thought of Hitch at the counter downstairs, methodically writing prices onto the title pages of used books. She glanced between the articles and found that several circled words appeared in all of them. “Woods.” “Forest.” “Near Lost Lake.” “No evidence of foul play.” “Young girl.” “Child.” “Only child.” “Parents.” “Father.” “Mother.” “Gone.”
She ran a finger lightly over the clear cover protecting the articles.
“Do these mean something?” she asked.
“Everything means something,” the voice of Hitch insisted.
Kris turned the next page and saw the first two words—Woods and Forest—written in large block letters at the center of a sheet of paper.
The next few pages overflowed with articles and photos, some photocopied, some cut from books and newspapers, as well as random thoughts jotted down at odd angles in a feverish scribble.
“The woods. That’s where this all begins, wouldn’t you say?” Hitch’s voice boomed in the small bedroom, echoing between the walls until it seemed his words were her own thoughts as she flipped through the scrapbook. “The forest was here before our little town existed, and it will be here when we’re nothing but a memory in the Almighty’s mind. And every now and then, the woods like to remind us that we are mere guests. Hikers lose their footing and tumble into ravines. Hunters get a bit too excited about bagging a pheasant and shoot themselves in the leg. Drunks wander away from midnight revelries only to come face-to-face with a mountain lion. Usually these mishaps result in minor injuries. But sometimes the forest demands that a greater price is paid.”
Kris turned the next page to find a map of the woods around Pacington, courtesy of the Kansas Forest Service. Down one side of the page was a handwritten list of every type of tree known to grow in the area. Three red Xs marked spots in the section of forest south of town. Kris did not need a key to know what these Xs represented. In her mind, she connected them like a navigator charting a course—from the canyon to the oak tree to the meadow at the edge of the lake. At the bottom of the page, a large question mark had been written in the same red ink and then traced over and over until the paper beneath had begun to tear.
Images flashes across the screen of her mind, so bright and unexpected that she winced as if they had hurt her eyes. Krissy running through the tree. Krissy hiding in the hollow of a gargantuan tree. Holding her breath as someone crept closer. Pale fingers curling around the bark as a voice sang, “Found you!”
As quickly as they appeared, the images were gone, her mind thrashing wildly to get away, to leave them in the darkness.
“Anyone who does even the slightest bit of digging would know that this land never should have been settled.” There was pride in Hitch’s voice, a need to brag about his accomplishment. “Now I know you are familiar with Napoleon Blanton. After all, he gave your hometown its name, after a coin toss of all things. Left up to chance. The same chance, perhaps, that led him through our little neck of the woods, if you’ll pardon the pun, in 1871.” There was a pause, and then the voice behind Kris said, “That’s your cue to turn the page, my dear.”
It reminded Kris of the read-along books she enjoyed as a child, the ones with the cassette tape that played while she followed along in the book, the narrator saying, “At the sound of the chime, it will be time to turn the page.” But this was not a children’s book. What she held in her hands was an obsession. Still, she did as she was told and found, secured under a wrinkled piece of contact paper, a chapter from an unknown book describing surveyor Napoleon Blanton’s journey through Southeast Kansas.
“He loaned his name to us as well,” Hitch explained, “for the limestone canyon we call “Blanton’s Pass.” But what most people don’t know, what most people don’t bother to learn, is that Blanton also gave us a warning. He knew there were things in this countryside that could not be explained.”
Without warning, a long finger slithered out onto the page. Kris’s body stiffened as she realized Hitch was standing directly behind her, reading over her shoulder. He traced a finger over cutout illustrations of what Kris assumed to be supernatural or mythical beings. Under each one was a name written in Hitch’s precise penmanship. Dryad. Faun. Wendigo. Acheri. He tapped a spectral ball of light.
“Will-’o-the-wisp. Blanton claimed he followed one through the forest until finally he and his men watched as it sank into the muddy waters of the Verdigris River. He thought it was an omen.”
She could feel his chest pressing lightly against her back as he ran his too-long fingers over the contact paper, as if caressing the pages of his beloved scrapbook.
“But we didn’t listen, did we? No, not only did we insist on living here, we tried to thrive.”
His fingertip slipped under the edge of the page and turned it. A new chapter, the following pages filled with what Kris assumed was similarly disparate research. Near Lost Lake was another collection of history, water-related accidents and creatures said to dwell in lakes and swamps.
Hitch was so close that she could smell his breath over her shoulder, a foul waft of smoke and decay, like wet ashes. She wanted to push away from the desk, to send him toppling backward. But what if there were answers buried here? She told herself that she could tolerate Hitch for a bit longer, just enough time to reach the last page.
Fortunately, at that exact moment, Hitch stepped away, his voice retreating farther back into the room. Kris breathed in the fresh air left in his absence. When she looked down, she found herself staring at the same photos she had seen in the Pacington book she had flipped through that first day in the Book Nook. Only these had been ripped from their spine and preserved under clear plastic like cherished photos in a family album. Here were the men from the Army Corps of Engineers with their cranes and steam shovels, grinning proudly as they prepared to reshape the river to their liking.