“Haley, can you tell me what you saw?” he asked her, bending down to her height.
The little girl nodded, her head bobbing up and down inside the oversized neck of the coat.
“Can we begin when you were out on the trail with your mommy?”
Again, she nodded.
“Can you tell me what you told your mommy you saw?”
She began fiddling with the sleeve of her coat before raising her thumb to her mouth to nibble on her nail.
“We were walking,” she began, her voice barely audible. I could hear it just fine, although Harris was straining to hear. As though sensing his difficulty, Jake turned up the volume.
“We were walking to go on a picnic,” Haley said.
“And who was there?”
“Mommy, Daddy and Pop-Pop.”
“That’s her grandpa,” added her mom.
“Ah,” replied the officer. “So it was just the four of you?”
“Uh huh . . . ” replied the little girl. She began fidgeting with one of the buttons on her coat.
“And you were walking. Can you remember the name of the trail?”
“Yeah! It’s got a funny name; Pinkie Pie Trail,” she replied. “We go there every Sunday.”
“Well done for remembering,” said the officer, scribbling in his notebook. “From the sounds of it, you know this Pinkie Pie trail well.”
“Yep.”
“And do you like the trail?”
“I like it a whole bunch,” she smiled back, pulling down the coat from her face.
Now I could see just how young she was with chubby cheeks and brown pigtails.
“But I love all of the woods,” she continued. “My favorite tree to climb is the oak because the branches are really strong.”
“I used to love to climb trees too when I was your age,” said the officer. “And did you climb trees on this day?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I never got the chance. We were just walking on the trail and then I saw the little man so I couldn’t climb the tree.”
“The little man?”
“Yes. The little man,” she confirmed with a vigorous nod.
I could feel a nervous energy build in the room. I glanced over at Harris and saw he was staring deep into the screen with that passion still on fire in his eyes. I followed his gaze back to the officer who was now leaning even further forward to the point that he was almost falling off his seat.
“Can you tell me what the little man looked like?” he asked, his pen poised over his notebook.
“Smaller than me,” she said.
“Smaller than you?”
“Yes. This tall.”
Sliding off her seat, she held up her hand to show his size compared to her. By her description, he was no higher than her shoulder. The uneasiness that had already been washing through me intensified. Something told me that I knew what she was going to say next.
“Haley, can you remember his face?” asked the officer.
“Ugly,” she replied.
“How ugly?”
“Like reeeeally ugly! He had these big ears like this,” she said, flapping her hands at the side of her face. “And this big long nose that was pointed at the end. And his eyes were completely green.”
“Shit,” I whispered to the room.
That was all I needed to hear to know exactly what we were dealing with.
“You know what she’s talking about?” asked Harris.
Jake slammed his finger on the mouse to pause the tape.
“That sounds like a goblin to me,” I said.
Jake frowned in confusion, but Harris gave a silent nod.
“Roll the tape,” he ordered and Jake reached for the play button once again.
I watched as the girl’s mom pulled her back onto her seat and held her tight.
“Sweetie, you have to tell the sheriff the truth.”
“But, Mommy I am telling him the truth! That’s what the little man looked like!”
“I’m sorry,” said her mom to the officer. “She has a vivid imagination. She watches a lot of cartoons.”
“No, it’s okay,” he replied. “I’d like to hear more about what she has to say.”
He gave the girl a warm smile and continued to scribble in his notebook.
“So you saw the little man, and he was ugly,” he continued. “Where did he come from?”
“He popped out of a tree!”
Her mom, looking a mixture of exasperated and embarrassed, lowered her head into her hands.
“He popped out of a tree . . . ” repeated the officer. Until now, he had been able to hide his skepticism, but now he couldn’t stop it seeping out his voice. Miraculously, he wrote down what Haley said.
“Was he hiding behind it? Or in the bushes beside it? Or did he climb down from it? What exactly do you mean when you say he popped out of it?”
“He just popped,” replied the girl. “There was a hole at the bottom of the tree. I thought it was just filled with leaves at first, but then I saw his face and he sort of popped up out of it.”
“Okay . . . ” The officer paused to make a few more notes. “And your parents were there?”
“Sort of,” said the girl. “I was walking way in front of them.”
“We were right behind her,” the mom quickly added. “No more than ten feet away. I knew where she was.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Brown,” said the officer. “I’m not suggesting you were neglecting your daughter.”
The mom, relaxing a little at hearing this, sat back in her seat and took a deep breath.
“So could your Mommy and Daddy see this little man too?”
“No, I don’t think so. There were bushes in the way.”
“Okay . . . ” The officer, bless him, scratched his head before continuing his interrogation. “So the little man popped out of the tree. Can you remember what happened next?”
Haley’s eyes grew wider.
“He told me we were going on an adventure!”
“Oh, he did, did he? What kind of an adventure?”
“He said I had to follow him into the tree.”
The little girl’s mom grew distressed again and began crying silently into her sleeve.
“You had to follow him into the tree,” said the officer, flipping his notebook to jot down some more notes. “Are you sure about that?”
“Uh huh.”
“Completely sure?”
“Yes!”
“And did you follow him into the tree?”
“I did,” Haley said with an emphatic nod of her little head. “He held my hand and led me towards the hole in the tree and we took one big step and then we were inside!”
“You were inside the tree?”
“No, we were inside his kingdom.”
It felt as though my stomach was about to bottom out. Suddenly I regretted my breakfast of Mountain Dew, Sour Patch Kids, and Scotch.
“Chief . . . ” I said. “This is so much worse than I could have imagined.”
“Keep watching,” said Harris. “It gets weirder.”
Resting a hand on Jake’s shoulder, I gestured for him to move away so I could take his seat. Lowering myself into his place, I leaned forward until I could feel the light from the screen burn my retinas. I needed to take in every single detail.
“You were taken into the little man’s kingdom,” said the officer. “Can you tell me what it looked like?”
“It looked magical,” replied the girl without missing a heartbeat. “Everything was green and shiny and so pretty! And it was filled with more little people. Maybe a hundred billion jillion of them! And they were all smiling at me.”
It looked as though the officer was trying his best to remain calm but the look on his face said he was ready to burst out of his skin.
“What happened now you were in this kingdom?”
“The little man took me to this place. He said it was called a court. And there
were all these tiny people in long dresses sitting on sparkly glass chairs. There were really big mushrooms everywhere . . . they were bigger than Daddy’s golf umbrella!”
The girl was growing more and more excited. She didn’t appear to be the traumatized victim of some terrifying abduction. She sounded as though she was talking about a trip she’d taken to Disneyland.
“Little people sitting on glass chairs beneath giant mushrooms,” the officer repeated to himself as he scribbled in his notebook. “Okay. Got it. What happened next?”
“They said I was never going to see my Mommy and Daddy again. They said I was going to meet the Queen and then I had to say goodbye to everyone up above the ground forever.”
The mom grew even more distressed at hearing this and began to sob heavily.
“They said you’d never see your parents again?” asked the officer. “If that’s what they said, then how come you’re here right now? How did you get back up above ground?”
“They asked what was in my backpack.”
The officer, looking confused, cocked his head to the side.
“And what was in your backpack?”
“Treats,” replied the girl with a smile. “It was my job to take the desserts for the picnic so I had the chocolate chip cookies in my bag. When the little men saw the cookies, they got really excited. They said I could return to the surface world if they could have all of my cookies.”
“And what did you tell them, Haley?”
“Well,” she kicked her legs, swinging them back and forth before turning to look at her mom. “I didn’t want to live with them forever. I wanted to see Mommy and Daddy again. I gave them my cookies, and they brought me back up through the tree. But when I popped out it was nighttime.”
“Was it?” asked the officer. “I thought this happened on Sunday morning?”
“That’s when she disappeared,” the mom chimed in. “She was missing for almost twelve hours. By this time I called you, I’d called everyone in the neighborhood. There had to be nearly fifty people out looking for her at this point. But she keeps saying she was only gone for a couple minutes.”
“Time slip,” I said under my breath.
A moment later, Harris leaned over my shoulder and shut off the tape.
“Time slip indeed,” he said. “What do you make of this?”
“From the sounds of it, I’d say she encountered a goblin.”
“And what is a goblin?”
“The bad guys of the Fae world,” I explained. “They’re tiny chaos causing bastards who’ll ruin the life of anyone they cross. They wouldn’t think twice about taking a child.”
“Are they known for taking children in particular?”
“That and a lot more. But I gotta say, if all these disappearances are linked to goblins, then they’re taking kids at an unprecedented rate. It’s unheard of for them to operate at such a large scale.”
Jake, who was now leaning against the wall with sweat pouring down his face looked as though he was trapped in a room with two crazy people. He was new to the OCD, and like most of the other agents in the division, he was on a need-to-know basis. He didn’t need to know all the details about the faerie realm that shadowed his world. Only a privileged few were privy to such information.
“Do you really think all these cases are connected?” I asked Harris. “Is there enough similarity between each disappearance?”
“It’s starting to look that way,” he said with a shrug. “If it wasn’t for Haley, we’d never have known where they went. That’s if what she’s saying is true.”
“I’d bet my life she is. I’ve been to these courts. I know firsthand that goblins are exactly like how she described.”
“But you really think they’d swap her for some chocolate chip cookies?”
“Um . . . have you seen my desk?” I replied. “Nothing can win faeries over more than sugar. An entire package of cookies down there would be like finding a suitcase of cash up here.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Harris said, still looking skeptical. It didn’t deter me from elaborating further.
“Throughout history there have been countless stories of people making deals with faeries by leaving out treats for them. It’s usually honey, but faeries love anything sweet. Hell, some even like booze.”
I winked and took a liberal gulp from the bottle in my hand. Jake’s eyes grew wide like saucers as he backed himself into the corner.
“The cookies are what saved Haley’s life,” I said. “She’d have disappeared into the fae underworld forever if it wasn’t for that bargaining chip.”
“If you know that’s how to stop the abductions, will you be able to stop any more from happening?” asked Jake.
“That’s Rivera’s assignment,” Harris replied before turning to me. “You leave Monday.”
“Sir, I’m happy to go,” I said, rising from my chair, “but with hundreds of kids missing, it’s going to take me a while to figure out what’s going on.”
“I realize that,” he said, sitting down and returning to his work.
And then, to my sheer and utter horror, he told me of his genius plan to help me solve the case.
“Seems about time you had a partner.”
2
Logan
“Holy shit, Logan! Senior special agent.” My dad swallowed hard, trying not to get too choked up. “I couldn’t be more proud.”
“Thanks, but it’s not that impressive. When you were my age, you were already in FBI management.”
“Pfft . . . When I was your age, the world was a different place,” he assured me with a laugh. “Rising through the ranks is just plain harder these days.”
He slapped my back so hard it knocked the wind out of me, but I smiled anyway. I may have been right about him ranking higher than me, but that didn’t stop the pride swelling up inside my chest.
I’d worked my ass off the last few years to graduate from a humble field agent to where I was today. And there were so many times when I thought it would never happen. The cutthroat office politics, the long hours, the exhaustion, and the competition. Sometimes it felt like I’d have more luck pulling a sword from a stone. But here I was at long last, a senior special agent. And with it less than a week after my thirtieth birthday, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Having a plan and sticking to it got me to this point. Hell—I had friends from high school who were still trying to ‘figure themselves out.’
Maybe when you’re a freshman in college. But at thirty?
No way.
Not me.
There was only ever one path for me in life—to follow in my father’s footsteps. I’d always been the most driven student among the rest of my classmates, finishing high school with a perfect GPA of 4.0. I worked part time for the college police and managed to graduate at twenty-one with degrees in Political Science and Russian. Then I went to Quantico and finished at the top of my class.
So yeah. I knew how to put my nose to the grindstone. Special agent by twenty-four, senior special agent by thirty. Married at thirty-two, first kid by thirty-four, second by thirty-eight, and middle management at the bureau by forty.
I was already engaged. Now that I’d just been promoted, everything was falling perfectly into place.
“Your mom would be so happy if she could see you today,” said Dad, walking over to the fridge to grab a beer.
I clenched my jaw but said nothing. Why did he have to mention her? For a second there, I was walking on air. Now I was barreling towards Earth.
“Don’t look like that,” he said, sliding a beer across the kitchen table towards me.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re all miserable and shit, like one of those emo kids.”
“I’m not miserable,” I shrugged. “I’m just . . . like you said, Mom would’ve been really happy.”
“Yeah, she would have. She knew how much you wanted to join the FBI when you were a kid. If she could see you right now, she’d be so proud
.”
Now he was the one that looked miserable. For a second, he looked as though he was going to cry, but then he took a deep breath, blinked a few times, and swallowed a mouthful of beer.
I took his lead and chugged some down as well. I would’ve preferred something stronger, but all Dad ever kept in the house was beer.
“You know, you look just like her,” he said, setting his bottle down with a clunk.
“I do know. You don’t stop telling me.”
“And you should be grateful for it,” he said, grinning as if he were about to impart some sage wisdom. “My side of the family wasn’t exactly blessed in the looks department.”
That was definitely true. I had an uncle we called Tater because he had the face, charm and complexion of an actual potato. As I looked into Dad’s face, I could see a hint of his brother’s looks.
The large forehead, the long jaw, the bulbous nose. I always wondered what attracted Mom to him when she was younger. She could’ve had anyone—was a legit beauty queen. The year I was born, she was crowned Miss Ashland County.
I looked for similarities between my own face and Dad’s but saw nothing except the same brown hair color. It made my blue eyes stand out. People—usually women—always felt the need to comment on my eyes. They’d say it made me look mysterious, but I always thought blue eyes were boring. I’d much rather have the deep chocolatey shade of brown like my mom had. When I was a kid she’d tuck me in bed and sing me to sleep. Those big eyes of hers would shine in the dim glow of my Teddy Ruxpin nightlight. When I was getting bullied at school, I remember her telling me that she was a bear too. A momma bear. And nobody messed with a momma bear’s cub.
The bullying stopped shortly after that confession.
Sadness welled up inside me again as I made that trip down memory lane, and I swallowed more beer to stifle it. I made a mental note to get a bottle of Scotch to keep at Dad’s house for times like these, when beer just didn’t cut it.
“Anyway,” said Dad, reaching over to grab a bag of potato chips off the counter. “You got any big celebration planned for tonight?”
Wiretaps & Whiskers (The Faerie Files Book 1) Page 2
