Lori held out her arm and he secured it to her wrist.
“Now, you’ll never lose your way.”
Ben chatted as they drove to Baldwin. Lori offered directions, but couldn’t manage much small talk. Cold sweat broke along the back of her neck.
“This is it,” Lori whispered as Ben coasted to a stop on the grassy fringe of Tanglewood Drive.
The forest awaited her, unchanged despite the passage of years.
“Ready?” he asked.
Lori’s mind blanked. She thought panic might seize her and render her incapable of stepping from the car.
“Hey.” Ben took her hand.
She looked at him, the fugue cleared, and she nodded.
Lori stepped from the car and stared at the trees. Nothing about them appeared threatening, but goosebumps prickled along her arms as she walked closer.
Ben met her, taking her hand a second time. "No big deal. Just an afternoon stroll in the woods."
Lori swallowed and allowed him to lead her down the embankment and into the trees. Nothing extraordinary happened. The witch did not swoop from her hiding place to devour them. Hector Dunn did not step from behind a tree with an axe clutched in his hands. Of course, even in the horror flicks, there was some build-up to the horror, some period of tranquility before the creature struck.
"So far so good?" Ben asked.
"Yes.”
They walked on, Lori searching for familiarity amid the trees.
"It's strange,” she murmured. “I don't remember which tree Bev climbed. I thought it'd be seared in my memory, the location and the tree itself, but…" She shook her head. "They all look similar. I can't remember anything distinct about it."
“Shall we climb one?” Ben asked.
He released her hand and jumped onto a low branch. Lori's breath caught. He'd scurry up the tree and disappear. She’d be left to make her way alone out of the woods.
He turned. "Come on. We'll do it together."
"I'm not great with heights."
"We'll go slow. The minute you want to stop, we'll climb back down."
Lori nodded, remembered the shame of not being able to get into the tree as a girl, and took his hand. The first branch was low enough to step on. The others were spaced close and their girth large, so she could easily move from one to the next, following Ben up the tree as if it were a clunky spiral staircase. Fifteen feet off the ground, the branches grew narrower and leafier.
“Here, sit on this one,” Ben said, patting a thick limb, “straddle it, back against the tree. I'll hold open the leaves, so you can look out."
Lori sat, dropping a leg on either side and squeezing the branch to keep from falling. As Ben peeled open the branches, she saw the slope of trees beyond them, the flock of green that reached the horizon. She caught her breath. No orange-pink sunset lit the sky, but the blue of the world above was punctured by hundreds of voluminous white clouds. They looked like mountains in the sky.
"It's stunning," she murmured.
Ben gazed out at the sky, but turned back to watch her. Her heart thumped against her breastbone.
He let the leaves fall into place and straddled the branch so that he faced her, their knees touching. "I think if I kiss you right now, it will help to rewrite this place. Give you a new memory, a bit like what the dream doctor described."
"If it's a therapeutic suggestion, how can I say no?"
He leaned into her, braced his hands on the trunk behind her and pressed his mouth against hers.
She hadn't kissed another man besides Stu in years. Ben tasted like cinnamon gum and his lips were soft and inviting. He didn't smash his mouth against her face the way Stu had. The kiss left her breathless, and when Ben pulled away, Lori glanced down and teetered before Ben righted her.
They both laughed.
"That was a very memorable first kiss,” she said.
Ben held her legs, squeezing her thighs. "I look forward to the ones on the ground."
"Why do you like me? Not saying that you do, but—" Lori started, warmth creeping up her neck.
"I do."
"You do?"
He smiled. "Yes, I do. I did just kiss you."
"Okay, but why?"
"You can't see yourself, Lori. A lot of people can't. You're real. That's what I like about you. You don't pretend to have everything together, to have the world figured out. I like that."
"Except you seem to have the world figured out."
He laughed. "Hardly. I'm just a stubborn ass who refuses to follow the rules."
Twigs cracked beneath them and Lori stiffened. "Did you hear that?"
Ben leaned over and looked down.
"Adrian!" someone yelled.
Ben glanced back at Lori, offering his hand. She took it and followed him down, still breathless, feeling the lingering warmth on her mouth from his.
"Adrian!" a man's voice yelled again.
"Hey," Ben called out as they descended from the tree.
The sounds of crunching twigs stopped for a moment and then started again. A man moved toward them. He was older than them, but not by much, early forties. He wore sweatpants and a Detroit Tigers t-shirt.
"I'm searching for my friend's daughter. Her name is Adrian. Did you see anyone come through here?"
Lori lurched back and tripped over a root in the ground. Ben caught her elbow before she fell. "No, we haven't seen anyone. Where'd she go missing?"
The man turned back the way he came and gestured. "A mile back probably. I've been walking for over an hour. We can't find her anywhere. It's the strangest thing."
Ben's hand had slipped from her elbow to her hand. Lori's was slick and cold. She wanted to scream.
"How old is she? Adrian?" Ben asked.
"Fourteen," the man told them. "She's a little under five feet tall, long blonde hair. My daughter Diane said she's wearing shorts and a t-shirt, tennis shoes."
"What were they doing in the woods?" Ben asked, and Lori heard the strain in his voice, fear and disbelief.
"Beats me—hiking, talking girl stuff."
"We’ll help you look," Lori blurted.
Ben nodded.
"I'm Percy," the man offered.
"I'm Ben, this is Lori."
35
Somehow Ben got separated from Lori and Percy. They'd been holding hands and then he'd stepped away to look inside a dead tree that had half-fallen. The hollowed-out trunk was large enough to hold a hiding girl, but only if she was tiny. Only ashy bark lay in the center.
"Lori?" he called, looking behind him. No sign of her.
He ignored the nagging sense of déjà vu, and the voice in his head reminding him this had been his idea and now he was separated from Lori in the woods that had terrified her since she was fourteen.
Ben walked, listening as the leaves rustled in the breeze. The wind was picking up as the day dissolved into evening. He heard another rustling sound as he moved forward and paused. Rather than leaves, it sounded distinctly like paper.
He continued on, the sound growing louder. Ben stepped into a clearing of trees. In the center stood the strangest-looking tree he'd ever laid eyes on. It was short and fat with twisted branches jutting in every direction. The bark appeared faded, as if the tree had died many years ago and been slowly bleached by the sun.
He started toward it and then paused, eyes drawn to the trees surrounding the clearing. It wasn't the trees he stared at, but what had been nailed onto the trees.
Hundreds of missing person's posters hung from the trunks. They flapped and scraped with the wind. As he stepped closer, he saw the faces beneath the big block words ‘MISSING.’ Summer's face was the first to register. Summer with her golden hair and inquisitive eyes, with the dimple on only one side of her smile. And then his eyes trailed to the other faces and he knew he was looking at the girls who had disappeared in the Manistee National Forest. Beverly Silva, Peyton Weller, Bella Palmer and others he didn't recognize.
Ben’s heart thundered in
his chest and he forced his eyes to the ground. He studied the blades of grass, the fanning leaves of the ferns. When he looked up, the posters would be gone, merely a figment of an overactive imagination. He lifted his head. They weren't gone. Instead, they seemed to have multiplied. The trees beyond the clearing flapped with the posters. The wind lashed against them, threatening to tear them away.
Someone had done this. Here in this desolate place, someone had gathered all of the girls’ missing posters and nailed them on bent and rusted nails. The wind intensified and the pages flapped harder. One ripped free and struck Ben in the back of the head. He jumped and jerked the paper away, watching it disappear into the forest.
Ben turned and ran, lungs catching as his feet pounded the soft ground. "Lori," he yelled.
Tree branches lashed against his face and the wind roared in equal measure with his blood.
He wanted to get a grip, to stop panicking, but his body had bypassed his brain. It refused to calm down. He ran until his legs burned and sweat poured into his eyes.
"Ben!"
He heard Lori and skidded to a stop, momentarily off-kilter at the sudden calm in the forest. The wind had simply died. Ben stared at Lori, his breath erratic. He knew he looked wild by the expression in her eyes.
"What?" she said, face paling as she looked past him, behind him as if expecting something pursued him, something with razor teeth and dead eyes.
Ben took a deep breath and hitched a thumb over his shoulder. "I found something totally screwed up."
"What was it?" She'd taken a step or two away from him back in the direction of the road. At least he thought it was the direction of the road, but he realized standing there he'd gotten turned around. His usual stellar sense of direction eluded him.
"Come with me. You need to see it."
"Oh…" Lori swiped a hand across her stomach, again peering past him. "I don't know. Tell me first. Okay?"
"Where'd he go? Percy, the guy?" Ben asked, staring beyond her, wondering suddenly if he'd imagined the whole ordeal—the man, the posters, all of it.
"He's at Tanglewood Drive, it's just back there. He went to meet more searchers." Lori crossed her arms over her chest as if chilled.
"There's no wind," Ben muttered. "Was there? Just a few minutes ago?"
"Wind?" Lori shook her head. "No, not that I noticed."
"There's a grove of trees back there covered in missing person's posters. I mean covered, like ten on each tree and they're… the girls. It's posters of our missing girls."
Lori reached a hand for Ben's and tugged him back toward the road. "Let's go. Okay? Let's just get out of here."
"It was all the girls, Lori. All of them. That means someone else has connected them, someone came out here and hung those posters up."
"But why would they do that? Why would they put the link out there knowing it could get them caught?” She turned quickly to look behind her.
"You have to see it. I need you to see it."
"I don't think—"
"Please," he insisted. "Please. I need… It's important for me that you see it." He didn't add because it felt unreal, like a nightmare he'd temporarily slipped into. He needed validation that it was real.
"Okay," she sighed, following him slowly.
Ben led her back toward the grove of trees, searching for the familiar sound of the wind passing through paper, but only the crunch of twigs under their feet met his ears.
"Maybe this way," he said, turning abruptly after they'd already walked a hundred yards in the direction he thought the trees lay. "I really thought they were this way, but maybe…" He turned again, backtracking and taking another direction. "They were here, I swear to God."
"I believe you," she murmured.
Something in her tone unnerved him and he turned to look at her. She was pale and her forehead was slick with sweat.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I don't know. I'm not feeling well all of a sudden."
"It's him. It's Hector Dunn," Ben muttered. "He's fucking with me. I know he is. He put the posters up." He continued searching the trees, spinning in circles.
"Please, let's just go," Lori murmured. "I think I might be sick."
They trudged out of the woods, meeting Percy and another group of searchers walking in. Lori apologized for not helping search, saying she didn't feel well, and Ben could see that she didn't. Her skin had grown warm and feverish.
"Lean your seat back," he said when they climbed into his car.
Lori hit the lock button before she reclined her seat and closed her eyes.
Ben started the car, but watched the forest for several long moments, wondering if Hector Dunn had gone into the forest that night to hang the posters and walked out with another girl.
Ben parked at the curb in front of Lori's mother's house. "You could stay with me tonight," he said.
Lori wanted to. She wanted to spend the next eight hours with Ben wrapped around her, but she shook her head. "Not tonight. Some night, I hope. But not tonight."
He angled across the seat and kissed her. She leaned into the kiss, but pulled away before the kiss turned into more.
"Thank you for today."
He laughed dryly. "I'd hoped for something memorable, but not so strange."
"It was memorable and it wasn't entirely strange."
"Call me tomorrow?" he asked.
"I will." She opened the car door and climbed out, waving goodbye before disappearing into the house.
Ben didn’t drive home. He steered his car west for Luther, Michigan.
It was dark when he arrived at Hector Dunn’s house. Lights blazed behind the covered windows.
Ben parked at the same seasonal road he’d driven on days before. He slipped from his car and crept through the woods, alert for the sounds of a girl’s screams. As he drew closer, he heard voices and broke into a run.
At the side of the house, he slowed and snuck to a window. Blue light spilled out from a television. The window was mostly covered, but the bottom right corner offered a limited view of the interior. The room he looked into was dark except the television. He studied the shapes in the room, a couch and other furniture. A distinctive silhouette reclined on a chair. It was a large man, and though he couldn’t make out his features, Ben was sure it was Hector Dunn.
The voices had come from the television. There was no girl in the room with Dunn unless she was hidden from view.
Ben snuck around to another window. This one looked into the kitchen. Again, Ben found a gap in the fabric covering the window. He made out a table and three chairs. A clump of browning bananas sat in the center of the table. Dishes lay piled in the sink and on the surrounding countertops. The trashcan was overflowing with garbage, a pizza box resting on top.
As Ben scanned the space, movement caught his eye and he ducked lower as Dunn walked into the kitchen, shirtless, scratching at his groin.
The man opened the refrigerator and stood staring at the contents for a solid minute before selecting a can of beer. He popped the top and guzzled it, tossed it toward the trash, where it bounced off the pizza box and rolled across the linoleum floor toward the window where Ben stood.
Ben slipped away from the window, moving around the house, listening. He could see the small rectangular windows that looked into a basement, but when he got on his belly and tried to peer inside, they were covered with something thick and dark. He tapped lightly on the glass, hoping if a girl were trapped inside, she’d hear him and call out.
Silence.
36
Lori drove home from her mother’s house the following morning. She fed Matilda and then powered on her computer to check her email. She had a message from Irene Whitaker.
Dearest Lori,
I enjoyed our meeting the other day and hope you have uncovered more intriguing paths to follow in your hunt to find the witch.
As part of my ongoing research into mysterious figures both known and unknown, I keep an email where people su
bmit their stories.
One arrived yesterday that I thought might be of particular interest to you.
A man by the name of Hank Loomis sent me a message about a strange figure he has captured on his trail camera in the Manistee National Forest. He describes this person as a ‘bag lady.’ Perhaps you are interested in following up with him?
His contact information is below.
Best of luck to you.
Kind regards,
Irene Whitaker
Lori grabbed her cell phone and dialed the phone number listed for Hank Loomis.
"Heller?" a man answered.
"Hi, is this Hank Loomis?"
"Yeppers."
"Hank, my name is Lori Hicks. I'm calling about the email you sent regarding the image on your trail camera."
"Huh, ain't that a hoot. Had to trek down ter the library to send it. Ain't never sent an email in my life."
"Well, if you're open to it, I'd like to see the video."
"I'm as open as a box with no lid. Come on by."
"Can you tell me where you're located?"
"Yessum, right on the Loomis Junkyard, south side of Furback Trail in Idlewild."
Lori jotted down directions and ended the call. She dialed Ben, but her call went to his voicemail. She texted him.
Lori: Hey, I'm going to see some guy who has a video of something odd in the Manistee Forest. He lives in Idlewild. Want to join me?
After his trip to Hector Dunn’s house, Ben had returned home the night before and stayed up until nearly midnight writing a detailed summary of Hector Dunn’s connection to the missing girls. He thought of Adrian, the one who’d vanished the evening before. He hoped she was an anomaly, a strange coincidence, and she’d already returned home safe and sound.
He drank coffee and changed into his cycling outfit, wheeled his bike out of the garage and onto the road. His head was a cyclone of thoughts and voices all fighting to be heard. He needed to turn it off, but as he climbed on his bike, another voice cut in, this one reminding him of the posters in the woods. Stay away from the Manistee Forest, it seemed to say.
Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel Page 24
