by A J Rivers
“In every other situation, every time one of our girls was late on her curfew by five minutes, or I heard sirens going even vaguely in the direction where I thought she was, I thought something was wrong. I just automatically thought the worst. And John would reassure me everything was fine. And it always was. But that day, he was immediately upset. He was immediately worried, and I was the one who said there had to be an explanation. That it was fine.”
“Why would you think that?” Dean asks.
“Because it always had been,” Misty says. “Because I couldn’t wrap my mind around something so terrifying as my daughter being missing in that huge park by herself. As I said, she had gone there before. Several times. It wasn’t a completely new area to her. Ashley had never been an easily confused, distracted child. She wasn’t one to get lost. Sometimes she got flustered or anxious about things, but when that happened, she hunkered down. She didn’t wander away or run off in a fit.
“There would be no reason the three girls would deliberately separate in the park, and even if for some reason they had accidentally gone different directions, Ashley would have been able to find her way. Or she would have called for help.”
“Sherando Ridge has awful cell phone reception,” I point out. “I know that for a fact because I was just there and barely able to connect with anybody, even with a dedicated source. I can’t imagine the reception would have been any better five years ago. Couldn’t she have gotten to a place where there would be no cell phone reception, and she was unable to call for help?”
“I didn’t think about that until later,” Misty admits. “It wasn’t until it really sank in that Vivian and Allison didn’t know where she was, and that she wasn’t there with Vivian’s family, that what I know now was just denial faded away. I had to come to terms with what was actually happening.”
“When did the girls admit they weren’t with Vivian’s family?” I ask.
“That day,” John says. “Soon after Allison showed up at the house with Ashley’s backpack, we got a call from the police. She had gone to Vivian to tell her Ashley wasn’t home. They genuinely believed she was. They explained that they were all together, they went to the park by themselves to walk around, and Ashley got mad at them. According to the girls, she said she didn’t want to be there with them anymore and she stomped off. They knew we would pick her up without a second thought, so they decided to give her some space and let her leave.”
“What happened after your conversation with the police?” I ask.
“They started down the runaway route pretty much immediately. There was a fairly cursory search of the park and the surrounding area. They tried to call her phone. It was either off or dead, so there wasn’t any way to talk to her or to use the signal to locate her. It seemed as though for the first couple days, they put some effort into finding her, then they pretty much told us that they would keep looking, but that she would probably show up on her own by the end of the week,” Misty says.
“If she had no history of running away, why would they be so confident that was an option?” Dean asks.
“They said because of her age and the fact that her friends admitted to arguing with her, it put her in a prime situation to want to get away. Letting her go somewhere like the park gave her an inflated sense of independence and self-reliance, so she felt she could go off on her own and let off some steam. Or maybe even make people feel guilty and miss her. That age is impulsive and irrational a lot of times. They feel so grown up and also feel they’re completely invincible. But they’re still very much children. Most don’t have the capacity to think their way through being out on their own. So, they spend a day or two drifting around, then they go home.”
“So, they told you to wait,” I say.
Both parents nod.
“That was all they said. Just to wait. It was literally all the help they would give us,” John says. “Just wait and she’ll show back up on her own. But she never did. We’re still waiting.”
“How has the investigation progressed since then?” I ask.
“They did a couple more searches in the few months after she went missing. They interviewed the girls. They found as many security cameras in the area as they could and watched them to see if they could see her leaving or catch her with anyone. We asked them to search Vivian’s and Allison’s homes,” Misty says.
“Why would you ask them to do that?” Dean asks.
“We were desperate. We were trying to think of absolutely anything we could that might explain where she had gone or what happened. We thought maybe she was hiding out at one of their houses. I know it sounds ridiculous. Of course, their families would notice, but we were grasping at straws.”
“Did they search?” he asks.
“Yes,” Misty says. “Both families were completely forthcoming and let the police search every inch of their homes. Of course, there wasn’t a trace of her. And there hasn’t been since. As I said, when we heard about the murders at Arrow Lake, there was some hope. We thought finally there were going to be answers. They weren’t the ones we were hoping for, but there would be something. We would finally know what happened and be able to move forward.”
“Are you absolutely positive one of those bodies isn’t Ashley?” John asks.
“Yes,” I say. “The motivation and method behind the murders was based on a very strong shared delusion between mother and son. They chose their victims based on their ages, and if they thought they would be compatible with Aaron, the younger son who drowned when he was little. The ages of the victims always closely coincided with what his age would have been at the time. To within a range of about two years. In one of her interviews, Laura Mitchell explained she always encouraged Aaron to have many different kinds of people as his friends, but they stayed in the same age group, so they were on the same level.”
“And there’s no way they were lying? Trying to get themselves out of other charges?” John asks.
“No,” I say. “First, it would be futile to try to lie about something that specific but also that easily provable. Second, they had already taken responsibility for the deaths. Laura cannot comprehend what happened. She still doesn’t believe she and Rodney murdered those people. She wouldn’t have the capacity to lie about it.”
He nods. “Then where do we go from here?”
Ten
He called her Thirteen.
She had a name, but he didn’t care. He never said it and he never let her say it.
Maybe one day she would forget it. It didn’t matter anymore, anyway. She didn’t need it. She hadn’t for a long time.
He figured he could call her whatever he wanted. She was his, after all. Wasn’t that how it worked? People named what belonged to them. As soon as she was in his hands, she was his. No one else who had ever touched her or held her or seen her face mattered anymore.
She was his.
She didn’t want to respond to it. He could tell every time he said it. But that didn’t matter, either. Some things took time to get used to. She was strong. A fighter from the very beginning. It might take her longer to respond, but she would. One day, she would accept it and no one would ever know her as anything else ever again.
Thirteen.
Eleven
Usually, in an investigation like this, the first step would be to collect all the available information from the media, primary sources who were involved at the time, and anything the police were willing to provide. Dean had already gathered up everything he possibly could, and Ashley’s parents filled in a lot of the blanks with the information they collected over the years.
The police won’t provide us with the files, citing a still-open case. That makes me angry. Clearly, they aren’t doing anything to justify calling it still open. They turned off the display of concern a long time ago, and other than having her name still on their website as a missing person, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of progress being made on the case. But they still wouldn’twon’t hand over the info
rmation.
Which means Dean and I have that much more ground to cover.
The next day, we’re back at my father’s house, searching for the friends Ashley was with the day she went missing. Xavier and my father are in the backyard with two long shelves my father constructed. They’ve lined up various objects, and the last time I looked out the window, Xavier was running by and knocking them off with one arm, then turning around and repeating on the other side. I haven’t seen a cooler or any bag ties coming into play, but this is Xavier. I’ve learned to never assume until all has been revealed.
“I think I found them,” Dean says as I’m making a cup of coffee.
“Yeah?” I go back into the living room and sit beside him.
“Allison has a different last name now, so I guess she got married. Garrett, this has to be them.”
He turns the screen toward me slightly and I see two smiling teenagers, their arms looped around each other’s waists as they pose on a beach. They aren’t pressed up against each other. Instead, they’ve left a gap between them. Ashley’s absence in it is almost tangible. I nod.
“That’s them. Reach out. See if they can talk in a couple days when I’m there,” I say.
Dean types a message into the social media platform and it takes only seconds for it to alert him to a response.
“Allison is willing to talk,” he says. “She wants to know if we want to do a video call rather than waiting until we’re down there.”
“Absolutely.”
He sends another message. This time the wait before a response is longer. I wonder if she might be checking with Vivian to see if she will participate. Finally, another message pops up.
“She says she’s at work until tonight, but will be available then,” Dean says.
“Fine with me. Set it up,” I say.
With that settled, I gather my files and notes from the other cases I’m working and spread them out so I can keep digging. Ashley’s case has caught my attention and I want to focus on it, but there are other tangles I still need to unravel. Until those are done, I can’t just put them aside.
“Did I tell you Millie’s attorney finally got back to me about her will?” I ask.
Dean shakes his head. “No.”
“Yeah. He was dragging his feet because he says it still hasn’t been resolved. She left everything to her brother,” I say. “So, it hasn’t been resolved for obvious reasons.”
“Her brother?” Dean asks. “Isn’t that a little strange?”
I shrug. “I never heard her talk about parents. She wasn’t married. I don’t know of any particularly close friends she had. I guess she went with the only option she had other than choosing a charity to leave it to. But here’s my question—which brother?”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“No. He said it’s confidential until the matter has been resolved. But he did very specifically say ‘brother’ and not ‘brothers’.”
“That’s interesting,” Dean says.
“Maybe. What about Lilith Duprey’s house in Saltville? Has anything come of that?” I ask.
“There’s been so much red tape to get through because of Mason Goldman living in the house before he faked his death. The house belongs to Lilith, but the investigators still have it tied up,” Dean says. “They know what happened. They know Mason faked his death. But they still won’t release access. It’s considered an ongoing investigation.”
“It is, technically,” I admit. “We know what happened. But Mason disappeared with the rest of The Order members. We can’t prove he’s alive or that he committed murder to fake his own death. Until we’re able to track them down and he’s among them, they still have to investigate as if that body by the side of the road was him. Noah White has petitioned the courts to compel his ex to submit DNA from his child so that they can test it against the corpse. It was pretty horrifically damaged, but they should be able to make enough of a comparison to prove it’s not him. But she’s not cooperating.”
“But there could be so much in that house that could help us understand what happened,” Dean sighs.
“Maybe,” I say. “But, I don’t know. Members of The Order are extremely careful about protecting the secrecy of the organization and everything that implies, especially to the rogue Harlan chapter. I don’t think he would keep details of shady dealings sitting around the house.”
“I’m more interested in what Lilith might have left behind. If there’s an attic or a basement. Even a crawl space, I want to get in there. She’s made a couple of comments that there are answers at the house, but she won’t get into any more detail than that. She’s still afraid of what they’re capable of, even when they aren’t in town.”
“Like Xavier said, the walls have eyes,” Dean says.
“That’s true,” I say. “We know there were connections with the prison and the facility Xavier was kept in during his trial. The most challenging part is that Lilith isn’t just afraid for herself anymore. The last time I visited with her, she told me she is thankful I saved her. She’s grateful to be alive and that she has a chance to see the men who tortured her and killed so many people brought to justice. But she’s still terrified. She’s afraid of what they could do to her, but she’s more afraid of what they could do to me. She wants to help but is afraid. She doesn’t want anyone to possibly overhear her sharing details and be able to feed that information back to The Order.”
“I guess I can understand that. I just wish there was a way to circumvent the investigation. It seems as if Noah should be able to grant us access,” Dean says.
“It’s not his jurisdiction. He’s cooperating with the Saltville department since the entire bigger picture straddles both areas, but that particular issue is up to the detectives in that department. He can’t override them,” I say. “For now, we have to figure out what we can from a distance.”
“Xavier and I have to head back tonight after the video chat. I have to meet with a client in the morning, but after that, I might head over to Saltville and see if I can talk some sense into the police department,” Dean says.
I want to discourage him, but there’s no point. He’s going to do it whether I think he should or not. At least they’re used to us.
“Is it an interesting new case?”
“Probably not,” Dean says. “Just a guy who thinks his wife might be cheating on him with her yoga instructor.”
“I think I read that book,” I say.
Dean nods. “In all honesty, he could figure it out for himself, but if it makes him feel better for me to follow her around and take pictures, who am I to say no? It’s an easy case to pad my bank account a bit without having to put a lot of time into it. That way I can focus on Ashley without feeling as though I’m missing out on something.”
We both know even if he stopped taking paying clients completely while he was investigating Ashley Stevenson’s disappearance, he’d be fine. Not only would I never let my cousin struggle, but he has Xavier. We’re not entirely sure why, but Xavier has more money than he knows what to do with. It’s not something he talks about, which leads me to believe he either has always had that much money and is just used to it, or doesn’t realize how much he actually has.
Either way, he owns the house he and Dean live in and has given Dean access to his money to help him with things like paying bills and going grocery shopping. Those are the kinds of things Xavier’s best friend Andrew used to do for him before he was brutally murdered as a part of an Order initiation ritual that sent Xavier to prison for eight years.
As a contingency of his release pending his new trial, the judge required Xavier to have someone to help him reintegrate into the world he had trouble with before he was kept out of it for almost a decade. Dean had already connected with Xavier and stepped in. Since then, the two have developed a strong bond that is really amazing to see. They understand each other in a way I’m not sure anyone else does, and Xavier is fiercely protective of Dean. He knows Dean i
s supposed to be the one taking care of him, but as Dean once told me, they saved each other.
But that doesn’t mean Dean is willing to just let Xavier support him. He wants to continue to work and contribute, even if that means squeezing in awkward reality TV-esque cases between bouts of investigations he cares more about.
Twelve
My father and Xavier have just stalked purposefully through the living room and out the front door, my father with keys in hand. I’m not sure how I feel about whatever is going on between the two of them.
Actually, I do. Ominous. Ominous is how I feel about it. This is where things can start to go sideways. Not that I want to think two of the most important men in my life would actually go down a destructive path, but accidents happen.
My phone rings and I reach for it without checking the screen. My heart has already jumped into my throat and I’m starting to get up, expecting to hear Eric on the other end of the line.
“Hello?”
“Griffin.”
That is not Eric. That would be Creagan.
“Yes,” I say, dropping back down onto the couch.
“Maybe you should straighten up your attitude when you’re speaking to me,” he says.
“We’re not in the office, Creagan. You called my personal number when I am not on duty,” I point out.
It aggravates me to no end when he says things like that to me. Some of the things I’ve heard the guys on the team say to him and to each other would be unfit for public airwaves, but he’s never called them out on it.
“That’s right. You’re not. Yet I hear you’re poking around the disappearance of that girl,” he says.
“You’re going to have to narrow that down a little. Unfortunately, there are a lot of girls who go missing,” I fire back, even though I know exactly what he’s talking about. I just enjoy chipping away at his arrogance.
Creagan is the type of man who likes to think everybody around him is so invested in what he thinks they will scramble to anticipate his priorities.
