The Forgotten Child

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  The air was a little nippy, but the sun shone bright in the cloudless blue sky. The crisp scent of spruce and flowering plants helped clear Riley’s head. The place was beautiful. She could see why Porter Fredricks had bought the place to try and strip it of its awful past.

  Riley tried to focus on the present: the smell of trees, the sound of twittering birds, and the rustle of wind through the leaves. It was possible that after tonight, if the place was truly as haunted as she feared, the beauty of it all would pale to the fear it brought her.

  A faint trace of music drifted past her. A piano, maybe? She stopped so suddenly, Pamela almost crashed into her back.

  “What’s up?” Pamela asked.

  Riley’s head cocked to the side, gaze focused past the trail they were on and into the denser forest beyond. “Do you hear that?”

  Rochelle, Pamela, and Brie were huddled behind her now, clearly straining to hear something.

  Jade backtracked. “Hear what?”

  “It’s like … an orchestra now. But far away?”

  “What, like a clan of musicians have set up in the forest to play an impromptu concert?” Then Jade gasped. “Ghost musicians? Has anyone read reports about that? Music in the woods?”

  All three women behind Riley shook their heads.

  Then the music abruptly stopped. “It’s … gone.” Goosebumps sprang up on her arms.

  Pamela and Rochelle gave full body shudders.

  “Way to creep everyone out, Ry,” Jade said, smiling, then turned and kept walking.

  Hushed conversation resumed behind her, but she could tell everyone was straining to hear what she had. Riley didn’t hear it again.

  Once they’d made it back to the trail mouth just before noon, Riley spotted the team out in the small parking area.

  Rochelle walked beside her. “Oof, that guy does something to me.”

  “Which one? Derrick?” It was a shot in the dark; Riley wasn’t entirely sure which one had the “sweet goatee” and which sported the “luxuriant mustache.” She hoped it wasn’t the mustachioed one.

  “No. Xavier.”

  Biting the inside of her cheek, Riley eyed the team leader. He had a dad bod and almost no hair. “He’s, like, twice your age.”

  “Don’t judge me,” she said, gaze focused on Xavier. “I have a thing for mature gentlemen.”

  Riley snorted.

  As their group passed the team, Nina looked over and immediately sought out Riley’s attention. Gaze focused on the ground ahead of her, Riley trudged right by. She knew she was being childish, but this was how she rolled.

  “Hey, ladies!” Xavier called out, then made a dramatic show of checking his watch. “Guess it’s about that time, eh?”

  Rochelle swooned beside Riley, the girl letting out a guttural grunt that was one-hundred-percent embarrassing.

  “Pull yourself together!” Riley hissed at her.

  “Look at his ass, though.”

  “Oh my god. He doesn’t even have one. It’s like one of those concave asses.”

  “Exactly.”

  Riley laughed. “You’re so weird.”

  “Thank you.”

  At ten past, the whole group gathered near the dining table again. The goateed guy pulled items out of the two duffel bags, while the mustachioed one laid them out in neat rows on the table’s surface. As they did that, the group of guests stood huddled around Xavier and Nina.

  “Since there have been so many instances of the little boy—” Nina fluttered her lashes at Xavier, “—in the kitchen at night, that will be one of our prime EVP locations.”

  Michael slowly inched his way toward Riley from the edge of the group. She’d been watching his movements from the corner of her eye. As he got closer, Riley took a couple steps back to stand beside him.

  “How was your walk?” he whispered.

  “It was nice,” she said. “You excited for tonight?”

  His gaze roamed her face for longer than was considered a casual glance, and she bit her lip. “Should be interesting. I can’t decide if I want this place to be haunted or not.”

  Riley knew how he felt.

  “Now, since each of us has a different specialty, we’ll be rotating you between leaders tonight,” Xavier said, drawing Riley’s attention back. “But whatever smaller group you’re put into tonight will be your group for the entire evening. Some of you will be paired with people you don’t know for the sake of creating even groups. There are twelve of you, and four of us, so each group will have three.”

  “Your math skills are quite impressive, boss,” said Goatee Guy from where he and the mustachioed one were still arranging equipment on the table.

  “Mario is the resident smart ass; I apologize in advance,” Xavier said, though he was trying not to smile. “Groups are as follows …”

  Riley was paired with Michael and Pamela. Donna and Carla were paired with the guy who got handsy with the dowsing rods. The remaining three of that group stayed together. Which left Jade paired with Rochelle and Brie.

  Riley had a sneaking suspicion Nina was behind her group, at least; she wanted the two skeptics together. That, or she wanted a skeptic paired with the person who had the best chance of actually experiencing something. She probably liked the extra challenge.

  Equipment tutorials followed. They listened to EVPs as a group, the majority of the listeners gasping and oohing and ahhing at the disembodied voices.

  “Did you catch that?” Xavier would ask, then rewind and play the sound over and over. The guesses called out rarely matched what Xavier claimed the spirit said. It mostly sounded like gibberish and static to Riley.

  Huddled around a small camera, several people—Jade and Brie included—almost lost their minds over the apparent proof of an apparition. All Riley saw were shadowy, vaguely human-shaped figures that flitted across the end of dark hallways.

  By the time they wrapped up the lesson, Riley’s stomach growled something fierce.

  “Your late lunch should be served soon,” Xavier said, as if he’d heard it. “We recommend trying to take a nap, as the real work of the investigation will start at midnight and often runs until at least five or six a.m. You’ll be on a vampire schedule the next two days. If you have any further questions, feel free to come ask. Enjoy your lunch and we’ll meet you back here around ten.”

  The tables along the wall had a metal tub full of iced drinks, two large salads bowls with tongs poised on the edges, and half a dozen platters covered in sandwich fixings.

  Riley finished crafting a sandwich roughly ten feet high and was about to follow Jade to the dining table when she heard, “Want to eat on the patio?”

  Michael.

  “Yes, she does,” said Jade.

  Riley, mortified, watched Jade’s face, whose gaze was clearly fixed on Michael over Riley’s shoulder as he walked toward the front door. When her friend’s attention shifted back to her, Riley whisper-shouted, “I can speak for myself!”

  “No one is debating your ability to form words, babe,” Jade whisper-shouted back, holding a plate with a considerably smaller sandwich than Riley’s. “I’m questioning your ability to not screw this up.”

  “How dare you.”

  Louder, Jade said, “She’s right behind you!”

  “You’re the worst.”

  “This is what sisters do,” Jade said. “Now get out of here. He just walked outside.”

  Riley threw her head back and groaned. “He’s going to want to talk about stuff.”

  Jade faced her head on, raised an eyebrow, and cocked her head.

  “Fine. I’m going.”

  As Riley headed that way, she caught part of a conversation between Donna, Carla, and Brie, who were clustered around the end of the table. The couple were vegetarians and asked Brie about her opinion of quinoa burgers.

  “I have this amazing recipe using sweet potato as a binder—totally to die for,” Brie said, her deadpan delivery as lacking in emotion as ever.

 
; When Riley stepped outside, she found one of the Skinny Jean Quartet couples sitting outside too, but Michael had claimed a table and chairs on the other end of the wraparound wooden deck. It wasn’t far from the spot where Riley had felt something—or someone—yank on her jacket.

  Blowing out a breath, she placed her food on the small, round table.

  “Do you plan to eat that or use it as a pillow?”

  Without replying, she placed her hand on the top slice of bread and pressed down. Mayonnaise and mustard trickled down the sides. She then took a very large bite and angled a smile at him with bulging cheeks.

  “Man, you’re lucky you’re so damn adorable …”

  She just barely managed not to choke as she laughed, hand over her mouth. Washing it down with a swig of soda, she sighed contentedly as her stomach settled.

  Shaking his head, Michael tucked into his side salad.

  “So, Mr. Roberts,” she said, wiping a blob of mustard off her thumb, “do you believe in ghosts?”

  She wanted both to catch him off guard and to get this conversation over with. If he thought people who believed in “the other” were insane, then they clearly had no future and Jade would stop harassing her and Riley could return to her hermit, celibate life in peace.

  “Zipping right on past the small talk, are we?” He sat back, his mouth bunched up a little in one corner as he thought. “Yes and no.”

  “All that time for a noncommittal answer!”

  “Don’t rush me, woman,” he said, tossing his wadded-up napkin at her.

  It hit her in the nose. Laughing, she lobbed it back.

  Snatching it out of the air, he kept it in his fist, absently worrying a piece of the napkin between two fingers. “I say yes because I’ve heard enough stories from my family over the years to think there’re lingering energies or what-have-you. I can’t say those things are ghosts, exactly, but I believe there’s some other, I don’t know—force?—out there.”

  “And you say no because?”

  “Because I haven’t experienced anything personally.”

  Riley nodded, attention on her food, not him.

  “What about you?”

  She knew he would ask. It was a logical counter question. But she’d never told anyone other than the Greens and her parents about Mariah.

  “I’m a reluctant believer,” she said before she had a chance to think about it. She kept her focus on her plate, picking apart a corner of her bread like a shamefaced little kid. “I’ve experienced enough weird stuff that it’s impossible not to believe. But I’d much rather pretend this kind of thing didn’t exist.”

  She fell silent, knowing she probably had an expression akin to “Every person I’ve ever loved has perished simultaneously,” but she didn’t know how to control that.

  He reached out and gently touched her elbow. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “You’re going to think I’m nuts,” she said.

  “That ship already sailed, sweetheart.”

  She snorted.

  Just tell him. You have to tell someone. Might as well be a stranger, right?

  Blowing out a deep breath, she told him about seeing Mariah as a kid—minus the bit about the Ouija board and the creepy things that followed. One step at a time.

  “That’s … amazing,” he said when she finished.

  Biting her bottom lip, her gaze flicking to him. “That’s not the word I thought you’d use.”

  “It’s actually pretty similar to something that happened to my cousin,” he said. “Ever since she was little, she’s talked about voices in her head. Her parents worried it was schizophrenia and had her tested, but there was no medical explanation for what she said was happening. And, aside from the voices, she didn’t act like someone with schizophrenia.

  “As she got older, she would tell certain people what the voices said, and her parents eventually figured out she was hearing spirits. She was eight and knew things very few people knew; things an eight year old definitely couldn’t have known.

  “She helped find a long-lost ring that disappeared in our grandma’s house fifteen years before. My deceased great-aunt—who none of the children in the family met, since she died when my grandma was a teenager—was the one who told my cousin where to find it.”

  “Wow,” Riley said. “Are you close to your cousin?”

  “I don’t see her that often. She lives in England. Works as a professional psychic. Medium? Which is the one where you talk to dead people?”

  “Medium.”

  “Okay, yeah, that one.”

  “That’s pretty cool,” she said, her stomach in knots. “I’ve never told anyone outside my family about Mariah.”

  His eyes widened. “What made you tell me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’m flattered, for what it’s worth.”

  She managed an awkward shrug.

  They talked about mundane things after that. Jobs. College. Family. He worked at an advertising firm and had majored in mass communications.

  “How do you like being a waitress?”

  “Eh. It’s a job. Not something I want to do forever, but it’s good for now.”

  “What would you want as a forever job?”

  “Still trying to figure that out.”

  When a gust of cool air swept past her and she shivered, she looked around, realizing the sun was setting, the semi-cloudy sky tinged pink just beyond the tips of the surrounding pine forest.

  “Whoa, what time is it?” she asked.

  He glanced at his watch. “Nearly six.”

  “Yikes,” she said. “I should probably attempt a nap.”

  There was another one of those just-past-polite stares going on and she flushed. She hadn’t blushed this much since her first crush. In elementary school.

  “That’s likely a wise decision,” he said.

  Standing, she stretched, her shoulders popping softly. She reached for her empty plate.

  A hand on hers stopped her. “I’ve got it.”

  Nodding, she nervously pulled her long sleeves of her cardigan over her hands. “Thanks. I mean … not just for the dishes. But … for listening.”

  He smiled, that single dimple making a brief appearance. “And thank you for letting me.”

  Lord help her.

  “I’ll see you later tonight, partner.”

  “Looking forward to it.” He smiled, but she thought it looked a little sad, like he couldn’t quite muster a full one.

  Maybe he was feeling the same thing she was. That she wanted to say to hell with the ghost hunt and just stay out here talking to him until it was pitch black and they were swarmed by mosquitos.

  But she was getting ahead of herself. She couldn’t get lost in the first eligible man she’d talked to in six months just because he was nice to her.

  And gorgeous.

  “Goodnight, Mr. Roberts.”

  “Goodnight, Ms. Thomas.”

  She hurried off to her room then, refusing to look back at him, even though she could feel his eyes on her every step of the way.

  1960

  Though Orin deeply resented that his studies were limited to animals and anatomy books—rather than human subjects as he would’ve preferred—he devoted himself to learning all he could. He developed a particular interest in anatomists of old. His life changed the day he found a book in a local used bookshop about a Scottish surgeon named John Hunter.

  In the early 18th century, John Hunter became the father of modern surgery. Between his curiosity about the inner workings of the human body—and his desire to please his brother, William, who ran a successful anatomy school—John was willing to do whatever necessary to make sure the school—and himself—had a steady supply of bodies to study. John knew the importance of hands-on anatomy. Knew that the only real way to learn about organs and bones and muscles was to have them strewn out before you.

  But John Hunter, unless he worked on ailing live patients, exclusively performed his anato
my studies on cadavers. He only had a window of a week—assuming it wasn’t in the heart of summer when his studies had to stop, lest he be overwhelmed with the stench of rotting corpses—before the body would no longer be useful. Then he had to go out and fetch more bodies. So much work for so little time with his deceased patients.

  While it was admirable that John was willing to pay graverobbers—his “Resurrectionists”—to procure his test subjects, it meant John had little say in who ended up on his dissection table. When he could, he sought out oddities who suffered from deformities—he even got his hands on a giant. He searched for children—teenagers, toddlers, even fetuses. If he was lucky, he’d get a pregnant woman so he could study a child still growing in the womb.

  Yet, more often than not, John was stuck with what his Resurrectionists brought him.

  How much more could Hunter have learned if he had living specimens—specimens he hand-selected for himself? Live patients who could be poked and prodded and broken, then put back together to see the results.

  Orin, with a few patients, could learn more from one body than he ever could from the two-dimensional pages of an anatomy textbook. One live patient could provide months of study before they were fully cut open to explore.

  Orin would take extensive notes of his case studies, just as John had. Organs and tissues would be preserved, bones and muscles dried. His collection of preparations, thorough notes, and careful drawings would be his legacy. This portfolio of work would make him a shoo-in for medical school. They’d fall over themselves apologizing for rejecting his applications.

  When they saw how devoted he was to his craft—how similar to the brilliant John Hunter—how could they possibly turn him away?

  PRESENT DAY

  CHAPTER 7

  Riley crashed through the forest like a thing possessed, swatting branches out of the way and ducking under others. Pine needles whipped her in the face, but she kept moving. She had to find him.

  Rounding the side of a massive ponderosa pine, she came to a sudden stop, chest heaving, in the middle of a forked path. Both sides of the fork were crude, the paths shallow.