"Moronic? No. It sounds kind of sweet actually, but I bet you could find a bay window that doesn't have a beer-swilling actual moron occupying the space beneath you."
She laughed. "Why do you live in Clare? It's nice, I mean. That's where my mom and grandma lived and where we lived after we moved from Baldwin, but it doesn't seem like it fits your personality."
"Why is that?"
"Oh, I don't know—tattoos, dressing in drag, the list goes on."
"I love small towns," he admitted. "And I like that about myself. Do I also like to escape the small town and get a taste of the rest of the world? Hell yeah. But there's nothing like coming home after a weekend of mayhem, opening my front door and stepping into my place. The hush that takes me in, quiets the chaos I've been submerged in. It's the best of both worlds. I like walking two blocks to Moonie's Diner and grabbing a cup of coffee and a jumbo cinnamon roll after a long ride and having Sadie or Wanda—those are the regular servers—hassle me about how I'm never going to produce heirs if I keep cycling so much."
Lori laughed. "They actually say that to you?"
"Oh, they don't just say it, they shout it. They're downright hecklers, those two. They make the peanut gallery look like actual peanuts."
"That doesn't bother you?" she asked.
"Not even remotely. I love it. They're great and they don't mean any harm and who knows? Maybe they're right, but producing kids isn't high on my list of priorities anyhow." He caught a flicker of sadness on Lori's face. "How about you? Five candy-smeared, screaming mini-yous in your future hopes and dreams?"
Lori looked back toward the bay window. "I don't know. That kind of life seems to exist in a separate world from the one I'm currently living in."
"True. That's why if you want it, you've got to pack your bags and relocate to that other world. Standing still is a good way to ensure it never happens. You said you've been with your boyfriend for four years? You guys never talked about kids?"
"No, not at all. I never even really thought about it."
"Lori." They both looked toward the voice. A man stood at the side of the property, behind the chain-link fence. His eyes darted toward Ben and narrowed.
Ben surmised this was the cheating boyfriend. He held a single cheap rose in his hand, the kind you buy from the plastic cup at the gas station. His button-down shirt revealed a t-shirt beneath it, something with a surfer catching a bright blue wave.
"Can we talk?" He directed his words at Lori, opening the gate and stepping into the backyard.
Lori stood and took a step toward Stu and then shook her head. "Just leave, Stu. We have nothing to talk about."
"Really? Four years together and that's it? One slip-up and I'm out of the picture?"
"It's over, Stu."
Stu opened his mouth, but Ben could see he wasn't about to grovel. Instead, he looked mad, mean even. "Don't pretend this is some great betrayal. You never let me in. Never." He dropped the rose on the ground and crushed it beneath his tennis shoe.
Ben noticed the way Lori's mouth twitched at Stu's accusation. It was an unconscious confirmation.
But that didn't change what the guy had done. Ben stood, took a few steps across the yard, and bent down, picking up the garden hose.
Stu glared at Ben. "I hope you didn't think you've landed a catch here, man. Look up ‘frigid bitch’ in the dictionary and you'll see a picture of Lori Hicks."
Ben clicked the nozzle to jet and aimed it at the surfer on Stu's stupid t-shirt. He pulled the lever. A stream of water shot from the nozzle and struck Stu in the chest. Stu staggered backward, yelping in surprise. Shock gave way to fury on his face.
Lori looked equally surprised, but she released a laugh and didn't bother covering her smile.
Stu held up his hands, serving only to deflect the spray into his face. He leaped sideways, but Ben followed him with the stream.
For a few seconds, Stu looked ready to charge, but he shot a final disgusted look at Lori and turned and sprinted back through the gate.
"Yell something at him," Ben called to Lori, releasing the hose nozzle.
"What?" She looked at him, confused.
"Don't let him get the last word."
"Thou art a boil, a plague sore!" she shouted.
Ben looked at her. The absurdity of her words hovered in the warm summer day.
She slapped her forehead. "Shit. That was stupid."
Ben laughed. "I don't know what that was."
Lori turned away from the fence, no longer watching her ex-boyfriend's departure. "A friend of mine at work got me a desk calendar for Christmas. Each day has a new Shakespearean insult. I think that one was from King Lear."
Ben dropped the hose on the ground. "Well, at least it's an insult he won't soon forget."
Lori smiled, but her shoulders sagged when she sat in the patio chair. "What does it say about me that I dated that guy for four years?"
"That you're a glutton for punishment. Forget him. Tell me about your weird theory."
"Yeah, okay." Lori dragged her fingers through her long, wavy hair. Ben noticed her fingers trembling and wished he'd sprayed the asshole ex in the face.
Lori grabbed the blue canvas bag she'd sat on the deck, drawing out two books. Ben saw the copy of Strange Michigan. She flipped through the pages and then held the book open for him to see.
"‘The Witch in the Woods?’" he asked, reading the title aloud.
"Here, just skim the story."
Ben took the book, eyes trailing over the words of the creepy old woman who stole children in the woods. "Okay, basically a Hansel and Gretel retelling."
"In the Manistee Forest, two children in each story, always a girl child that gets taken." Lori grabbed the second book, flipping it open to a page held by a crimson bookmark. She slid the book to Ben.
This time he read the title silently: ‘The Manistee Hag.’ Again, he read the stories of a frightening old woman who stole children from the forest. This book offered an origin story for the witch that included murdering and eating her own sister.
Ben frowned. "Disturbing."
"Yeah, and look." Lori pointed a finger to a red circle around the word ‘bell.’ "She was wearing a dinner bell. Bev was wearing a bell on her necklace and Summer had the tambourine bracelet."
Ben glanced up at Lori to gauge if she was serious. She stared back at him intently.
"Umm... so you think a witch took Bev and Summer?"
"I know it sounds crazy. I do, but... what happened to them was crazy. It defies logic, Ben. Maybe the reason it was mysterious is because... because something supernatural took them."
Ben rubbed his knuckles and tried to choose his words carefully. "Lori, these are urban legends, tall tales. They're not—"
"But they are real. These are people's actual stories. Just because they're not published in a newspaper doesn't mean they're false."
"Don't take this the wrong way," Ben said, "but I have a theory about your theory."
"Okay."
"You said you minored in folklore and mythology in undergrad."
"Yeah."
"Have you considered this suspicion you have about the supernatural stuff might be born of all that stuff you put in your head?"
"You think I'm making this up because I took a few classes about folklore."
"No. I think maybe it's primed you to see things in a different light than you would if you hadn't studied that stuff."
"Do you think working in a medical profession and turning your nose up at anything not explained by science is why you're convinced a person is behind this?"
He sighed. "Don't get pissed."
"I'm not pissed. Why isn't my question as valid as yours?"
"Seriously? Because you're talking about mythical witches and goblins and I'm talking about something we all see on the news every day."
"I never said anything about goblins."
"Lori, a guy did this. A man. If we get sidetracked going down this dead-end road, we'll
never get any closer to the truth."
Lori pressed her lips tightly together and closed the books.
"Please, don't get upset. I'm not trying to dash your hopes here, I just… this path"—he gestured at the books—"feels hopeless. But the path that ends with a guy in handcuffs leading the cops to bodies, that's something real. That's something we can work towards."
She sighed and met his gaze. "Okay, you're right. I just read those stories and they sounded so similar."
"I agree. They do, but let's exhaust the logical options first. Then we can start walking into the woods and leaving our trail of cookie crumbs to get back out."
"Very funny. The birds will eat them. We have to leave a trail of stones."
20
"Warren, you got a second?"
Warren looked up from the chart he'd been studying, squinting at Ben and then nodding slowly. "Yeah sure. These eyes need a rest." He took off his glasses and rubbed his fingertips into the concaves of his eye sockets.
Ben eased the door shut behind him and took the chair opposite Warren's desk. "Busy tonight?" Ben asked.
Warren put his glasses back on. They magnified his dark eyes. "Is it a full moon?" Warren gestured at the window where Ben could see little more than their reflections in the glass.
"Yeah, us too, but we're having a rare quiet hour, so I figured I'd pop over."
"Rather than hit the cafeteria and slam coffee and energy drinks with your fellow graveyarders?"
"I'm coffeed out. Trying to cut back, actually."
"Well, I salute you. I've been trying to cut back since I was sixteen and working on my grandpa's cattle farm. Nothing gets you addicted to coffee like four a.m. in the barn on a frigid February morning.”
"I'm curious about something," Ben said.
Warren smiled. "And you thought I'd be curious about it too?"
"I rather hoped you might know something about it. The thing where you buy a Volkswagen and suddenly you see Volkswagens everywhere."
"The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also called the frequency illusion. Though I'm not sure what you'd like to know."
"It has a scientific name and everything?"
"Most things do. Human beings love their labels."
"Yeah. Well, I'm wondering... let me put it this way. Let's say I once dated someone and then we split up and someone mentions her name to me and suddenly I'm... I'm encountering things that remind me of her. Not just random things either, very specific things. I'm thinking I see her. Songs that we once listened to are playing on the radio. Jewelry that disappeared years ago suddenly reappears."
Warren leaned back in his chair. It squeaked loudly. "Thinking about Taylor?"
Ben scrunched his face. "No, not at all. This isn't about Taylor."
"Not Taylor, eh? Probably for the best, considering the complications of dating within the workplace. I dare say it's a tad late for that conclusion." He laughed. "When considering the frequency illusion there are two major points. The first is that when we encounter something that we term significant, our memory codes that information. Let's use your Volkswagen as an example. I buy the Volkswagen and the process of looking at cars and choosing this particular car and seeing this car every morning in my driveway makes it relevant. I've primed myself to notice the Volkswagen more. The bias occurs when I encounter the Volkswagen in the world and I convince myself that it has appeared largely because of my earlier encounter with it rather than accepting that I simply didn't notice it before."
"You're saying it's there; it's always been there; we just suddenly pay more attention and notice it more."
"Exactly."
"But... what if it wasn't there? Like in the jewelry thing. A necklace that I gave this girl disappeared twenty years ago and then suddenly reappears at the same time all these other things are happening."
"Meaning what? That by thinking of the girl you caused the jewelry to reappear? To miraculously arise where it had not been?"
"Yeah. Have you ever heard of anything like that?"
"That sounds like magical thinking."
"Which means what?"
"At a very basic level it means you're searching for a magical connection between things that are merely simple science. When we are reminded of a person we haven't spoken to in ten years and they call us the next day we might tend toward a magical explanation. It's a simple and very common phenomenon that is in truth merely a coincidence. The odds are against it and that's why it rarely happens. But as superstitious beings who evolved from thousands of years of worshiping all manner of deities and gods and whatnot, it's not surprising that we modern humans still cling to a few of those old beliefs."
"But what about the necklace?"
"The necklace?"
"The jewelry, the thing that appeared."
"I'd imagine you unconsciously took it out of hiding and left it where you'd notice it."
"I couldn't have taken it out of hiding. I literally did not have it anymore. It... it disappeared twenty years ago with a girl who disappeared at the same time."
"The one who got away?"
Ben sighed. "No, she literally disappeared, vanished while walking in the woods with my sister. Gone. She's never been found."
Warren frowned and tilted his head. "That's a traumatic memory. Have you ever spoken with anyone about that?"
Irritated, Ben stood. "Thanks for your help."
"Ben, don't rush out like that. Perhaps we can examine this further."
Ben waved a dismissive hand as he pushed out of Warren's office into the hallway. He didn't know why he'd gone to Warren to begin with. He had a nickname around the hospital—Windbag Warren.
Ben had always liked the psychiatrist. He'd shown up in a pinch on more than a few occasions in the ER on nights such as the one they were currently in. Full moon, a perfect night for crazy-making. But Ben had only ever spoken with him in passing as a colleague. He hadn't liked the way Warren looked at him, his probing questions. Ben felt sure Warren wanted to get him on his couch.
As he rounded the corner back toward his own floor, he ran smack into Taylor. Her coffee crumpled and she shrieked as the hot liquid burned her hand. Ben grimaced as he felt it scatter scalding droplets on his stomach and legs.
"Ugh, damn. Taylor. Shit. I'm sorry. Here." He rushed into the nearest bathroom and retrieved a wad of paper towel, swiped at Taylor's white coat, now mottled with brown-yellow stains.
"It's fine," she said, shoving his hand away and wincing. He saw the glistening red skin on her right thumb.
"I can get you something for that," he told her.
She glared at him. "I'm a doctor, Ben. I can get something for myself."
She stalked off down the hall. He squatted and cleaned up the last of the spilled coffee. He'd heard from more than a few of the nurses that she was still pissed, but not seeing her had given him a sliver of hope that she'd moved on, maybe even forgiven him. Apparently not.
Judy and Kenya stood at the nurse's station. Kenya was sipping from a jumbo energy drink with neon-green font that stated 'Turbo Energy.' Judy stared at the double doors to the emergency room with a deep crease between her eyes.
"Calm before the storm," Kenya murmured.
"Yep. It's coming. I can feel it," Judy agreed.
And come it did. It began with a group of five college students suffering from severe food poisoning. The nurses had gotten only one student into a bed when three more started projectile-vomiting in the waiting room.
Five minutes later an ambulance rolled into the parking lot with a victim of a head-on collision that had occurred on Highway 127. This tragedy was followed by a woman wheeling in her husband, who'd been stabbed by their next-door neighbor.
It was nearly three a.m. when the mayhem subsided enough for Ben to notice the greenish stains down his scrubs and the rancid smell of puke wafting up from them. Besides the vomit, blood coated the hair on his wrists and forearms from the stabbing victim.
Judy looked even worse. Puke stains ra
n from her shoulder to her waist. Kenya had stayed relatively clean save her once-white sneakers, now vomit-covered with another darker color Ben suspected was feces.
"Fuck all," Ryan Kimner, another ER nurse, grumbled, sagging forward on the nurses' station, head resting on his hands. "I knew I shouldn't have picked up this shift."
"Change quick if you're going to," Kenya said. "This night isn't over yet."
Ben ran to the staff room, stripped out of his scrubs, and crammed them into a laundry bin. He pulled on clean scrubs and started back toward the door, pausing when he saw the girl at the end of the hall, the same girl he'd seen before with her long wheat-colored hair and her red and white striped shorts.
"This one's coding!" Zander, the paramedic Ben had seen at the bar a couple nights before, shouted as he pushed a gurney through the emergency room doors.
Ben spun away from the girl, sprinting to assist.
It was four a.m., and Ben hadn't eaten for his entire shift. Light-headed, he hurried toward the nurses' station, where Judy kept a stash of granola bars. His gaze slipped into room number nine. He saw the teenage girl who'd been brought in during the day shift. A suicide attempt. She'd tried unsuccessfully to slit her wrists. She sat up in bed, staring with oddly glittering eyes straight at him.
Ben slowed and turned into her room, glancing at the chart where her name was displayed. "Everything okay in here, Amanda? Do you need something?"
"She's in the woods, Ben," Amanda whispered, wide glassy eyes locked on his.
“I’m sorry, what—” Ben’s words died on his lips as he registered the scissors she lifted toward her neck. Before he could move, she’d jammed the sharp point into her throat.
Blood spurted from the red gash that blossomed on her pale neck. It rained onto the white sheet and the gray linoleum floor, stopping inches away from Ben's tennis shoes.
He didn't freeze, didn't pause at the horror unfolding before him. He lunged across the room, stuffed a palm over the wound and clamped it tight with one hand while flinging the scissors away with the other. They skittered across the floor. He slammed his hand against the emergency call button.
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