“No, I’m telling you it’d be lovely if Celeste could stay with me for a bit longer to help me unpack boxes.”
His head listed back, his chin going into his neck and shunting a bit to the side.
And then he said, “Why didn’t you just say that?”
I didn’t have the opportunity to answer that question.
His shoulders rotated, his arms dropped, his neck twisted, and my breath caught.
I heard my phone ring in the other room.
My skin tightened.
Bohannan pivoted around and marched out.
Quickly, I followed him just as another cop-knock sounded at the door.
Just clearing the path to the great room that led under the stairs, Bohannan halted so quickly, I nearly ran into him.
I sidestepped him.
I saw Celeste was pale again, frail again, staring at her father with huge, terrified eyes.
She was also standing at the front door. A door she’d opened.
A man in a beige sheriff’s uniform was lurking there.
His name badge read Moran.
“Alice?” Bohannan grunted.
The deputy’s hard face hardened more.
“Alice,” he confirmed.
Five
Letter to the Editor
I fought it.
I did.
Unimpressed by my virtual soliloquy, Bohannan sent his daughter home.
He left with the deputy.
I made myself finish the bookshelves, stack the spent boxes in the mudroom, and then allowed no excuse but to tackle the reading room, which took hardly any time at all. I therefore gave myself permission to kick my own behind considering I could have had that sanctuary the last few days.
Only then did I make a pot of tea and go get my laptop.
I curled into the chair that dominated that small space precisely how I’d envisioned, sipped tea, pulled up Google and typed in Alice Misted Pines.
I was alarmed to find, with that vague and wide-open search criteria, that I did not have to dive any deeper.
The first link was for an article in the Tri-Lake Chronicle.
The title for the article was “Girl Missing: Police Have No Leads.”
Tasting something sour at the back of my tongue, I pulled up the article.
I read it.
And all the related ones.
And anything at all I could find that had to do with the case.
What I learned was that Alice Pulaski, the bright, red-headed, freckle-faced, eight-year-old daughter of Dale and Audrey Pulaski, had a slumber party for her birthday.
This party had occurred the evening of the first night I spent in Misted Pines.
Upon pulling up a map, I found that Dale and Audrey lived much like I and the Bohannans lived.
Goldilocks.
Not too far from town, not too close.
Not too far from their neighbors, and not too close.
In the woods, not alone, but not populated.
Alice’s friends, as girls were prone to do, had decided to be naughty, and when they should have been sleeping, they snuck out of the house to go play some game in the woods in the dead of night.
When they returned to the house, they did so waking Alice’s mother and father, seeing as the girls were panicked and hysterical.
Because, as they reported to Alice’s parents and later to the police, once they’d noticed something amiss, they’d spent some time looking, but no matter how hard they tried, they could not find Alice.
A search by Dale and Audrey, as well as Alice’s big brother, seventeen-year-old Will, who was Dale’s son by his first marriage, was to no avail.
Now also panicked, they called the police.
The sheriff and his deputies had arrived promptly.
At that time, they instigated a preliminary search.
When hours went by and this proved fruitless, they brought in a K-9 unit.
This did not prove fruitless. However, Alice’s trail, as followed by the dogs, abruptly and mysteriously stopped somewhere deep into the woods.
As time wore on, temperatures dipped up and down, and Alice’s continued disappearance was beginning to spell out an unpleasant outcome, the sheriff’s department organized a volunteer search force made up of off-duty deputies, police from other counties, fire department personnel and ordinary citizens.
All told, well over a hundred people came forward to help search.
They combed the woods.
Hide, nor hair, of Alice was found.
No ransom was requested.
No odd characters were seen about town.
An animal attack was ruled out as she might have been carried off, but the dogs would have discovered that trail and any location of attack.
Meaning no animal could make a child disappear into thin air.
But a human could.
Interviews with family, friends, teachers, neighbors, acquaintances all came up with the same thing.
Alice was a good kid. Sweet. Smart. A regular eight-year-old girl with no enemies or anyone who might wish to cause her harm. She was popular, her family was close, they were good stock, frequented church and involved with the community, and she was beloved by her parents and her big brother.
It came in a letter to the editor.
That little combination of a few of the myriad puzzle pieces that were floating in my mind fitting together before falling to the board.
A resounding censure of Sheriff Leland Dern, for his entire tenure, most recently his handling of the missing girl, Alice Pulaski.
The letter’s final line?
It’s time to call in Bohannan.
Six
Nightmare
When I woke from the nightmares, I didn’t do it like I suspected no one on earth did it.
Gasping in horror and sitting bolt upright in bed.
That was Hollywood’s interpretation of a nightmare.
Mine was sudden consciousness and deep paralysis, caused by extortionate amounts of fear.
I didn’t move a muscle.
See a shadow.
Hear even silence.
Taste a thing.
Was he there?
In that room?
Like the dream told me.
Or was he close?
Did he know where I was?
Could he get to me, without sensors blaring, his approach caught on camera, me being able to get to one of the seven panic buttons in the house, or behind the steel door that now protected my bathroom?
As the fear subsided and I was able to assess my environs and then found the courage to add sight to sense and sound, I got on an elbow, looked around the darkness of my room and saw nothing.
No one.
I was alone.
I was safe.
I rolled, threw off the covers and twisted out of bed.
It was cold. I had the habit of turning the heat down before bed. I liked to burrow, settle under the weight of more than one cover.
I moved across the room, reached for the throw across the armchair by the French doors that led out to my personal balcony and pulled it around my shoulders.
I then stood at the doors, gazing out.
The moon was behind some clouds.
The shadows ran deep.
I had not yet become accustomed to the landscape, but I saw dark outlines of pines, a muted shimmer on the water.
The very far away, diminutive triangle that was slightly lighter against the black shadows of the night.
The only bit of Cade Bohannan’s roof visible to me.
It’s time to call in Bohannan.
I had not only been a mother to teenage girls.