The Forgotten Child

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  I need to get the hell out of this place.

  “Did you need anything else?” Angela asked, as if seeing dead children was nothing to fuss over. “I need to get a few things ready for this evening.”

  “I’m fine,” Riley said. “Sorry for the trouble.”

  “No, it’s great! This is a new story to add to the website.”

  Riley stared at the closing door, Angela having already disappeared through it. Had any of that actually happened?

  Grabbing the bag of marshmallows, she started to walk back to her own mug when she saw them. The streaks left by little fingertips on the surface of the metal table. As she watched, they slowly disappeared, like the foggy handprint of a warm palm pressed against glass.

  Riley put a heaping handful of marshmallows in her hot chocolate, her back to the spot where Pete had been. She’d need the sugar; she sure as hell was never sleeping again.

  A tink sounded behind her and she turned. She nearly dropped her mug. The spoon swirled slowly in the mug, mixing the powder into the milk and bumping gently against the sides. Tink, tink, tink.

  Riley stood transfixed as she watched the milk turn from white to tan to brown. Then the spoon stilled in the mug. She held her breath for something else to happen. But it didn’t.

  “Pete, if that’s you,” she said, voice wavering and tears welling in her eyes. “I’m sorry for what happened to you.”

  The spoon gave another tink, tink against the side of the mug.

  There was a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. He’d looked so real. How had he ended up here?

  Don’t get invested, don’t get invested, the voice in the back of her head chanted. The more invested she got, the stronger her connection to this place, to Pete, would get. It would open that door she’d been trying so hard to keep closed.

  She stared at the melting marshmallows in her mug. The marshmallows Pete had so clearly wanted to eat, and would never be able to again.

  The memory of him alive and frustrated about slow, leaf-eating donkeys warred with the sickly boy who’d been in those woods. Who had been chased down and killed like an animal.

  Who had he been? How long had he been wandering the grounds, waiting for someone who could see him?

  Don’t get invested, don’t get invested.

  But what if she just did a quick internet search? Just to see if she could find him. There was no harm in that, was there? Her true-crime-obsessed self was drawn to the idea of researching him solely out of curiosity. Nothing more.

  She hoped Angela’s computer had modern internet speeds out here in the wilderness. Lord, what if she needed to use dial-up? Perish the thought.

  Just before pushing open the kitchen door, mug in hand, Riley looked over her shoulder at the other mug sitting on the counter. It had moved to the end again, just like last night. Though the hair rose on her arms, Riley felt less terrified now that she knew who’d moved it.

  “Enjoy your cocoa, Pete.”

  Tink, tink.

  CHAPTER 8

  Angela stood behind the reception desk. Riley wished she could sate her research desires on the privacy of her phone, but lack of reception made that impossible.

  The Skinny Jean Quartet loitered in the lobby now, huddled in a little circle before the fire. Riley caught one of the girls elbowing her boyfriend—the dowsing rod guy—before pointing at Riley. The whole group looked at her and then quickly turned away. Which meant Angela had already told them about the “sighting.”

  Angela clearly couldn’t be trusted with secrets.

  “Hey, Angela?” Riley placed her folded arms on the counter and got up on her tiptoes to see over it. “Is your computer hooked up to the internet?”

  The woman glanced up and smiled wide when she realized who the voice belonged to. “Sure is. Connection is slow as dirt, but it’s a connection.”

  “Do you think I could use it for a little bit?” Riley made a show of glancing over at the quartet behind her, then turned back to Angela, leaning toward her and lowering her voice. “I had a dream about that same boy just before I came down here.”

  “No!” she whispered back, eyes bright.

  Riley nodded. “I’m a little rattled, to be honest. I was thinking I could try to do some research.”

  Angela subtly cocked a brow. The expression very clearly said, “Research on what?”

  Riley let herself remember the fear she’d felt in the dream when she was literally rooted in place. How she’d tried to scream for the boy—for Pete—but no sound came out. Tears welled in her eyes.

  Angela glanced around, then lowered her voice even further. “I’m not really supposed to let guests use it—viruses and things, you know. But, given your ordeal tonight, if you keep it to an hour …”

  “Oh, that would be great,” Riley said.

  Waving Riley over to Angela’s side of the desk, Riley watched as she jiggled the mouse on its nondescript black pad, causing the monitor to flicker on. Wallpaper of the ranch’s welcome sign popped up behind the password prompt box. Unfortunately for Riley, the password wasn’t something easy like “password” or “1234,” but some long, complicated nonsense with upper and lowercase letters and random symbols. The folks here were serious about potential viruses.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” said Angela, gathering up some loose papers and stuffing them into the guest services binder. “I need to get coffee and cookies ready anyway.” After awkwardly patting Riley’s shoulder, she hurried off with her binder clutched to her chest.

  Blowing out a deep breath, Riley positioned herself in front of the monitor and keyboard. She pulled up a search engine and waited for it to load. Slow as dirt, indeed.

  Her gaze flicked up. The girl who had elbowed her boyfriend quickly looked away. Riley couldn’t tell why the girl was intrigued by her—was she convinced Riley had made up whatever Angela had recounted to them? Or was she jealous it hadn’t happened to her?

  In her peripheral vision, she saw something on the screen change and she glanced back down. The cursor blinked in the box. What exactly was she supposed to look up? “Little boy named Pete who died”? She didn’t know his full name, age, where he lived, his mother’s age, or what year it was when he died. It could have been in the 1940s, for all she knew. Though she supposed his style of dress would have looked less modern, even if he’d only been wearing pajamas. Plus, Scooby Doo wasn’t around in the ’40s.

  As she replayed her conversation with him in her head, she remembered he’d used “groovy” un-ironically. Did that make him a child of, what, the 1970s?

  She knew “Missing children Pete” would get her nowhere fast, even if she limited it to the state of New Mexico.

  “Um … hello?”

  Riley snapped out of her thoughts. The leather-jacket member of the Skinny Jean Quartet stood in front of her. When the girl just stared at Riley, unblinking, Riley said, “Hi?”

  “Oh! Hi. I … I’m sorry if this is super weird, but Angela said you saw a … ghost?” She whispered the last word as if it were a great secret.

  “Yeah. Well, I mean I’m assuming that’s what I saw.”

  Eyes wide, she said, “What did it look like?”

  “He looked like a little boy.”

  “A boy,” she repeated. “Like what Nina said. What did he do? Like just float around?”

  Riley cocked her head. “We talked for a little bit; I thought he was actually a boy who wandered over here from the dude ranch. Said he was looking for his mom. One second he was there, and the next, he was gone. Like he was never there at all.”

  The girl visibly shivered. “That’s so creepy.”

  Riley managed a smile. “Isn’t that the kind of thing you’re here for?”

  “No. I mean, yes,” she said, shaking her head. “The idea of actually seeing a spirit kind of scares the hell out of me. I mean, what if his spirit’s been trapped here even longer than Orin Jacobs’ Girls? That happened in the ’70s and ’80s. Over thirty years ago. Wha
t if he’s been looking for his mom for even longer than that? That’s so sad.”

  The hollow feeling in Riley’s stomach worsened. What happened to you, Pete? When did it happen?

  “Well, sorry to bother you …” the girl said, starting to turn away.

  “No, it’s no problem. The whole thing just freaked me out a little,” she said. “I’m Riley, by the way.”

  The girl smiled, clearly pleased to be accepted. “Heather.” She turned to the three people watching them from the fireplace. “That’s Mark, my boyfriend—” the dowsing rod guy waved, “—Sarah, and Dave.”

  Riley awkwardly raised a hand in greeting.

  “Just wanted to say hi, I guess,” Heather said. “Not even sure why.”

  “Nice to meet you. And, uh … good luck tonight?”

  Heather laughed, but it was more of a choked sound. She hurried back to her group.

  The blinking cursor in the search bar taunted Riley. She chewed on the inside of her cheek. It would be a little pathetic if her one hour of research time was spent gnawing a hole in the lining of her mouth.

  Staring at the empty spot where Pete had stood, she could still picture him with his hands bunching up the hem of his Scooby Doo shirt. The shirt with the weird, not-quite-right image. The flopping ear where the picture had detached from the fabric.

  Was there a reason why he’d come to her in pajamas tonight, rather than in the checkered jacket from her dream? Was he trying to tell her something? Give her information, even if it wasn’t directly?

  On a whim, she typed “Scooby Doo original air date” in the search bar and waited for the internet connection to cough up her results. The show first aired in 1969, but the merchandising part of it hadn’t really kicked off until 1973. One such product was iron-on decals.

  The year lined up with the era of “groovy,” too.

  Riley tried “Pete missing child New Mexico 1973.” Between the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children website, and one for North American Missing Persons Network, Riley scribbled down half a dozen names. She chose the dates between 1969 and 1975, looking for boys named Peter who had been between the ages of seven and ten when they disappeared. All the boys had gone missing in New Mexico.

  After clicking on each one, she was able to knock out the first two—one Asian boy and one Hispanic one, as “her” Peter was white. Some of the photos, enhanced with age advancement technology, offered a picture of what the boys would look like now. But she needed a young Peter.

  Peter John Howard was too plump in the face to be the boy who had sat in the kitchen with her.

  Peter Jonathan Paulson had tight, blond curls—not the right boy.

  Peter Bonney’s eyes were too close together.

  Peter Vonick … Riley gasped, a hand to her mouth as the image of “her” Peter came up on the screen. His half smile, his dark brown eyes, his shaggy, brown hair that curled a little near the nape of his neck. Scooby Doo’s slightly askew head peeked out from the bottom of the picture, where it cut off across Pete’s chest.

  His profile listed his stats. Age: 9; weight: 65lbs.; height: 53”; hair color: dark brown; eye color: dark brown; race: white; gender: male.

  The details of his disappearance stated that he’d been shopping with his mother at a department store and had run off when she wasn’t looking. He had been quiet for nearly two minutes before she’d realized he was gone.

  Riley wondered when and how this ranch played into Peter’s disappearance.

  She did a search for Peter Vonick and eventually found listings for both his parents: Janet Wesley and Gregory Vonick. They’d divorced in the 1980s. Riley wondered if the horror of losing a child had been too much of a strain on the marriage. The father, Gregory, had died in the early 2000s, but Janet was still alive and very active in missing children groups, especially in Phoenix where she lived. The woman was pushing 80.

  In death, the boy had never stopped looking for his mother, and in life, she had never stopped looking for her son.

  With a pit forming in her stomach, Riley keyed in “Orin Jacobs.” It was something she’d done several times in the past, but was doing so now with a purpose in mind.

  His first victim, Gabriella Ramirez, had been abducted in 1978, five years after Pete’s disappearance. The dude ranch hadn’t opened up at this location until after Orin’s death in the ’90s. What was a nine-year-old boy doing out here in the woods alone? If he’d gone missing while hiking with his mother, wouldn’t his missing person’s profile have stated that in his “details of disappearance” section?

  Did Pete’s spirit hang around the dude ranch and watch the animals? Had he been stuck here so long that the memories of his own life and death blurred together?

  Orin Jacobs’ six victims had all been girls … but what if Pete had been his first, not Gabriella? What if Pete had been the catalyst that started Jacobs’ years of kidnapping and torture?

  She searched for pictures of Orin next—most of which she’d already seen. Two photos were used almost exclusively in news articles and documentaries. One was Orin’s mugshot at fifty-five, after Mindy Cho’s escape led to a raid on the property. The other was Orin as a twenty-something guy smiling at the camera. He sat at a small, yellow table with two windows on either side of him. Bright sunlight poured in, highlighting his light brown hair with streaks of gold. A breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast sat on the table, and Orin held a fork like he couldn’t wait to tuck in.

  Then she found another picture of Orin as an adult, maybe when he was thirty or so, standing beside a much shorter woman—his mother, she assumed. Did she know what he was? He was tall—well over six feet. Just like the man from her dream.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself.

  Riley stared at his camouflage jacket. One arm was slung over the woman’s shoulder, the other stuck out at a playful angle. They were both laughing. He was wider through the shoulders as an older man. Likely from all the work he would have done daily to keep the ranch in order. And, on his elbow, where his arm was propped up on his hip, stretched an all-black patch stitched with dark thread—just like in her dream.

  Shit.

  Flashes of news articles and shows about Orin Jacobs’ Girls flashed through her mind. Torture. Disemboweling. Mutilation.

  According to Mindy, in the one detailed interview she’d given a couple of years after the raid, Orin hadn’t been into sexually assaulting the girls. He’d made them strip naked, but not to touch them—not like that, anyway. He sketched them in detail, would hit them and prod them and break bones, but did so in order to see how trauma to the outside affected what was underneath. To see how the body healed itself.

  Mindy claimed Orin wanted to be a doctor—they were his “patients”—but he’d been rejected time and time again from every med school he’d applied to. He aired his life’s grievances with his victims, knowing they’d never share them with anyone. Because they’d never leave the ranch.

  Not until Mindy, anyway.

  Riley guessed the med school interviewers sensed the man wasn’t well and had no business being in a profession where people’s lives were in his hands.

  Of course, that then meant he had to find patients to study, and used his hands to end their lives. What on Earth the man thought he was doing in the name of science was beyond her.

  Riley had a rising certainty that Peter Vonick had been patient one.

  Had he lingered here because his body was still buried on the property? The bodies of the five girls had been found and removed. But not Pete—because no one had known to look for him here. He’d been forgotten by everyone except his now-elderly mother.

  Riley knew the whole theory—and how she’d come about it—sounded insane. This wasn’t something she could go to the police with, not without physical evidence. A creepy dream, a run-in with a ghost child, and an hour-long internet search didn’t make her a detective.

  But how the hell was she supposed to prove it? And what good would it do? Pete a
nd Orin were both dead.

  Don’t get invested. It doesn’t matter. You can’t help him. Don’t get invested.

  Janet Wesley, Peter’s mother, however, was not dead. Maybe such knowledge would bring a grieving mother peace. Or maybe it would shatter her hope that her boy survived after some forty-odd years, not that he’d likely been killed mere days after his kidnapping. But closure was closure, even if it wasn’t what you wanted.

  “How’s it going?”

  Riley yelped, drawing the attention of the mostly full lobby. When did they all show up? She placed a hand over her racing heart. Angela stood beside her, sans binder. “Pretty much done, actually.”

  Hurriedly, she closed out her tabs and cleared her search history. It wasn’t NSA-proof, but at least Angela wouldn’t know the extent of her research—Riley didn’t want to talk about it yet, and she surely didn’t want Angela speculating about it and then posting her theories on the ranch’s website. “Thank you for letting me use this,” Riley said, motioning to the computer. “I feel much better even though I’m still jumpy.”

  Angela reached out to pat Riley’s shoulder again but changed her mind at the last moment and struggled for an awkward few seconds, unsure of what to do with her hand.

  “Well, I better go meet up with my group.” Brie and Pamela—and several others—were helping themselves to the coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies laid out on the serving tables opposite the large dining one.

  Riley left her mostly untouched hot chocolate on Angela’s desk. The melted marshmallows left a thick, sugary, white skin on the now-cold drink. She had a feeling she wouldn’t have an appetite for hot cocoa for a while.

  Rounding the desk, Riley headed for Brie and Pamela, but Angela stopped her with, “Oh, and Riley?”

  She turned.

  “Once you’re a little more comfortable, would you like to offer us a testimonial about your experience here? Future guests would love to read it!”

  Riley wanted to smack her. “Sure.”

  Angela beamed.

  After exchanging a few quick hellos with Pamela and Brie, Riley hurried to their room.