The Darkest Thread

by Jen Blood

  Which meant it really would be good experience for Bear and Ren, both of whom were chomping at the bit for another chance to get out in the field. A search like this, as horrible as it was for those directly involved, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us.

  I still wasn’t able to completely dismiss the unease crawling beneath my skin, but I put it out of my mind. Ahead, I nodded toward a darkened land mass that loomed above the water. “All right, we’re here. If you can keep yourself out of trouble for twenty minutes, I’ll get everything pulled together and we’ll get out of here. We’re used to gearing up fast.”

  He nodded. For a moment, our eyes caught. He managed a naked smile. “I really am glad to see you, Jamie. I should have called sooner, but it will be good to work together again.”

  I shrugged, trying to ignore the blush that climbed my cheeks. “It’s my job, Jack. This is what I do.”

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  JUST UNDER TWO HOURS LATER, we left the Owls Head Airport in a private charter with Jack, McDonough, Bear, Ren, and me, along with our three dogs: Casper, Minion, and Phantom. We landed in Bennington at noon that day. William H. Morse State Airport consisted of a single airstrip, a complex of modular buildings, and a virtually empty parking lot. A trim, athletic-looking woman with coal-black hair met us in a cargo van. McDonough gave her some orders I didn’t hear, then excused himself and drove away in a black SUV the size of a tanker.

  “Jamie, this is Agent Rita Paulsen,” Jack said once McDonough was gone. “She’s assisting me on the case.”

  “Good to meet you, Agent Paulsen,” I said. Her handshake was firm and her gaze keen as she greeted me, and I got the sense she didn’t miss a lot. Not surprising, I supposed, given her line of work.

  “Rita, please,” she said. “Agent Paulsen was my mother. I went ahead and booked a couple of rooms at the inn where we’re all staying—they take dogs, so it shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not fancy, but it should be a good enough place to lay your head.”

  “Thanks. I’m sure it will be fine,” I said.

  “Thank you for coming out. Jack’s said great things about your work. Anything we can do to bring Melanie and Ariel home safely, I’m in favor of.”

  Melanie and Ariel. It was the first time I’d heard the names of the missing girls. It had the impact I suspected Agent Paulsen had intended: for some reason, nameless faces are so much easier to forget. The simple act of giving these young women identities apart from victim instantly drew me in deeper.

  “We’ll do whatever we can,” I said. It was hardly a promise, but Agent Paulsen still looked pleased. She helped us with our gear, and a few minutes later we were on the road.

  Since Glastenbury is set among thick woods and a whole lot of mountains, there’s no easy way to reach the town from the airport. We followed Route 9 to 71, traveling winding highways where mountains rose in all directions, and ultimately ended up on a pitted dirt road all but washed out thanks to the heavy rains over the fall. The trees closed in around us on that dirt road, and a pall seemed to hang over the vibrant colors that surrounded us.

  The vehicle was a simple cargo van, with no actual seats apart from the ones up front. I sat on a cast-iron bump over the wheel well. Jack stood beside me, his hand fisted around the Jesus handle in the roof of the van as we drove. Bear and Ren sat across from us. The dogs were already wired at the prospect of a search, Casper and Minion both pacing in their crates as we rolled on. Phantom alone seemed peaceful, alert but apparently at ease.

  “They call it the Bennington Triangle,” Ren announced a few minutes after we’d hit the road, reading from her phone. “Glastenbury is supposed to be at the apex.” Bear looked over her shoulder, and I resisted the urge to push the hair from his eyes. There had been talk at one point of him joining the Marines after graduation. I couldn’t deny that I was grateful that talk had lapsed in the past year. A haircut wouldn’t have killed him, though.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Why is it called the Bennington Triangle?”

  “Five disappearances, between 1945 to 1950,” Ren said, in the musical Nigerian accent that’s become a familiar—and welcome—part of my world over the past few years.

  Unlike Jack and me, Bear and Ren shared the wheel bump on their side of the van, the two of them so comfortable sharing space that they looked literally joined at the hip.

  “They never found the people who disappeared?” Bear asked.

  “This is a heavily forested area,” I said. “And my guess is that those searches weren’t done the way we conduct searches today. Things have changed a lot in the past sixty-five years.”

  “The FBI was brought in to look for the second girl who went missing—Mary Wieland,” Agent Paulsen said, glancing over her shoulder with the words. “The Vermont State Police were actually formed as a result of her disappearance.

  “She was last seen wearing a red sweater,” Agent Paulsen continued. “And a young boy in a red jacket disappeared in 1950. After that, it was said that it’s bad luck to wear red within the Bennington Triangle.”

  Ren looked down at the deep red jacket she wore and frowned. “Now you tell me.”

  We lost our cell and internet signals shortly after that, but Agent Paulsen went on to tell us about Bigfoot and UFO sightings in the area; ancient structures built into the mountainside; mysterious lights and ghostly apparitions and voices whispering in the darkness. I watched Bear as she told the stories and couldn’t help but wonder what he thought about all this. Of all of us, he was the only one who truly had something to fear. If there were ghosts to be seen, Bear was the one they would find.

  He always is.

  From the time he was a baby, it’s been clear that Bear doesn’t live entirely in this world. I first started hearing voices that no one else heard shortly after we lost my sister. At first, I thought I was going crazy… Later, I realized those voices meant me no harm, and had no hidden desire for me to do harm to anyone else. They are part of both my inner landscape and the world around me, and I’ve learned to deal with them as best I can.

  Bear, on the other hand, doesn’t just hear voices. He sees faces. Meets people. Makes friends with ghosts who’ve been walking the earth for decades, sometimes longer. It’s a burden he’s handled well over the years, but I know it’s taken its toll.

  Nearing our destination, Rita drove toward what looked like an abandoned nineteenth-century church at the end of a long dirt road. As I always do before a search, I found myself thinking of my little sister, and the men, women, and K-9s who pitched in trying to find her more than twenty-five years ago. And, just as always, I sent up a silent prayer that this search would end better; that we would provide a resolution, good or bad, for the family left waiting for their girls to come home.

  Then, I got down to business. “You guys go ahead and get unloaded,” I instructed Bear and Ren as Rita stopped the engine. “Let the dogs stretch their legs a little, but don’t leave this area. We’ll solidify the game plan once I talk to the muckety mucks running the show.”

  Jack, Paulsen, and I left the van and stepped into what must have passed for sunlight around these parts, and I took a moment to take in the scene.

  Upon closer inspection, the building Paulsen had driven us to was indeed an old church, with peeling white paint, a bell tower, and rotting wooden steps that sagged dangerously in the middle. Forest grew thick around it, and the parking lot—if it could really be called that—was run through with pits and boulders never extracted from the cold, hard ground.

  It may have been rundown, but right now it was hardly abandoned.

  Three black SUVs with government plates lined the pitted parking lot, while pickups and SUVs with the VTK9 logo lined the road alongside Blazers from the Vermont Forest Service and cruisers from the state and local police. Two white news vans had been relegated to a far corner, practically swallowed by the forest itself.

  “You weren’t kidding,” I said to Jack. “Definitely a thr
ee-ring circus.”

  Rita overheard and nodded. “That’s a nicer word than most people use.”

  Jack said nothing, just remained beside me in staunch silence. He’d relaxed a little over the course of the trip, but now he looked strung as tight as a drug dog in a poppy field.

  “This will be headquarters,” he said. “It was the closest we could come to a central command post out here.”

  A trim, overly made-up blond woman with a microphone in hand beckoned to Jack, her cameraman in tow as she sped up to reach him.

  “Jack,” the woman began. There was an odd tightening in my chest at her familiarity.

  “No comment, Angie,” he said, before she could get any further.

  The woman was shorter than me, but with a fuller chest, bigger hair, and a mouth full of gleaming white teeth that shone when she smiled. “Have a heart, Jack,” she purred. “I just want to know what you’re doing to find the girls who’ve gone missing.”

  “Everything we can,” he said briefly. I could tell even those few words weren’t appreciated by Rita, however, who glared at them both.

  “Is there any truth to the rumor that this is someone copying the murders that took place in 2009?” the reporter pressed.

  “The girls are missing,” Rita said. “That’s all.” The reporter had gotten in front of us by now, blocking our way into the church. She was either very brave or very, very stupid. “If you’ll excuse us—“

  “Dean Redfield has suggested that the FBI is to blame for these disappearances—”

  “I thought I told you to stay out of the way, Angie,” Paulsen said. There was a dangerous glint in her eye.

  “This is public property, I’m well within my rights—”

  “Not if you get in the way of my investigation, you’re not,” Rita cut her off. “You obstruct this search or write a story intimating the disappearance of these girls is tied to the 2009 killings, and I’m sending your tight little spin-aerobicized ass to jail.”

  “Jack—” the reporter began, appealing to him one last time. He shook his head.

  “You’re not getting anything from any of us,” he said. “Sorry, Angie. Maybe some other time.”

  The reporter scowled, nodded to her cameraman, and retreated. Once she was gone, Rita glanced at Jack.

  “That’s not going to be a problem right?”

  “No,” he said briefly. “It won’t.”

  I’d seen the way the reporter looked at him, though—the familiarity there. Combine that with Jack’s tension now, and I knew Rita wasn’t imagining things. Clearly, there was something between him and the reporter. Even though she was gone now, the tightening in my chest didn’t loosen.

  “Like this search isn’t hard enough,” Rita continued, “we’ve already got them spinning rumors that’ll get the Redfield camp completely up in arms.”

  “The Redfields were already thinking the same thing, though, weren’t they? That the FBI is involved?” I asked. “I thought that was the reason Dean Redfield wanted me in on this in the first place.”

  Rita considered the question for a beat, fatigue clear in her eyes, but she didn’t comment. Instead, she switched gears abruptly. “We should get to work. The other search teams already have topo maps and GPS inside. Just let us know what else you’ll need and I’ll make sure you have it.”

  “We carry our gear in with us, so we’ll be fine,” I said. I looked around our thickly forested surroundings. “I’m assuming cell phones are a lost cause out here.”

  “Yeah, everything’s run on satellite,” she agreed with a nod. I noted a large generator at the side of the building, its hum as alien as the roar of a waterfall in the Sahara. “You won’t have much luck with anything else.”

  “And the other handlers are out with the dogs right now?” I asked.

  “They are,” she confirmed. She glanced at her watch. “Have you connected with Cheryl?”

  “Madden?” I asked. Cheryl Madden was the director of Vermont K-9, and had been for the past decade. “Yeah, I talked to her this morning. She told me to bring a slicker, boots up to my ass, and a dog with gills.”

  Rita laughed. “Sounds about right. As long as she’s on board, I don’t think anyone will have a problem with you being out there with them. Come on in and I’ll make introductions.”

  I followed her up the worn wooden steps, and she held open one side of the oversized double doors. They led to a surprisingly spacious inner sanctum with wooden pews still in place. Dirty stained glass windows allowed a few beams of filtered sunlight through in shades of blue and gold. A digital whiteboard was set up at the front of the worship space, and a dozen men and women from various law enforcement agencies were seated in the first few pews.

  They looked up as Rita, Jack, and I walked down the center aisle toward them. McDonough stood beside the whiteboard at the head of the room. In the front pew were half a dozen men in khakis and LL Bean gear, all of them looking ill at ease—Jack’s peers with the FBI, I assumed. Jack made introductions, but the names and faces quickly ran together. I have a hard time remembering anyone who doesn’t have four legs and a wagging tail, so quickly gave up trying. Farther back in the room were a few hearty-looking, frowning men and women in weathered outdoor gear. The forest service. I already knew Wade Wright, the head of the Vermont Forest Service, so I went to him as soon as the others in the room began fighting amongst themselves over who should be doing what.

  “Welcome to the CF,” he said with a scowl. Wade was in his sixties, well past retirement age and resisting with everything he had. He had a ruddy complexion and angular features, his hair a sandy color fading to white, his teeth yellow. His body was both too tall and too lean to look natural inside.

  “CF?” I asked.

  “Clusterfuck,” he said in a more hushed tone. “How the hell’d they pull you in?”

  “Father of the missing girls,” I said without elaborating. “What’s your take?”

  “Runaways more than likely,” he told me. “That’s my best guess, anyway. The family won’t talk to any of us—there’s an old guy in charge of the lot of ‘em, seems to think the FBI went in and took the girls. Not that I can blame him, considering what they went through before—you heard about that?”

  “The murders back in ’09?” I asked. He nodded. “Yeah, I heard.”

  “Right. Well, according to him we’re all in cahoots, of course. If they asked for you, maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  “What’s Cheryl say about all of it?” I asked, knowing he and the head of Vermont K-9 had worked together frequently over the years.

  “She doesn’t give a rat’s ass so long as she gets to stay out in the field. Leaves me to deal with the assholes and the imbeciles.”

  I heard the church door open behind me.

  “Speak of the devil,” Wade said. He nodded toward the door. I turned to find Cheryl Madden standing there in waders to her thighs and a slicker dripping rain, a cattle dog beside her with a notched ear and a bright yellow raincoat.

  McDonough started to approach her, but Cheryl ignored the man in favor of Wade and me. Festus—the cattle dog, whom I’d met on searches before—trailed alongside her, paying no more mind to McDonough or the other law enforcement than his handler had.

  “You sure you want in on this thing?” she asked me. “I saw your dogs out there—they all look so damn dry. Not too late to back out.”

  McDonough had followed Cheryl over. He didn’t look happy at the suggestion.

  “I think it is, actually,” I said. “It’s all right, we’ll be fine. The dogs won’t melt with a little rain; neither will we.”

  “All right then, let’s get you up to speed,” Cheryl said. She was a sight you didn’t see every day: six feet tall, with thick gray curls she usually wrangled into a braid. Her front tooth was cracked, and her personal style seemed pulled directly from the field manual she’d used for the better part of her twenty years of service in the United States Marines.

  �
��You want to show her, or you want me to?” she asked McDonough. There was an underlying hostility there that wasn’t surprising—Cheryl’s never been known for her deference to authority figures, particularly when they’re men. And men like McDonough… Forget it.

  “Why don’t you,” McDonough said. “You know the area better than most people here.”

  Cheryl glanced at Wade, who shrugged at her. It was the truth.

  She led me to a long folding table loaded with topo maps along the back wall. I’d already gotten a good feel for what we were in for, but the maps confirmed it: This promised to be a hell of a search, testing the dogs’ skill and both their and my handlers’ endurance.

  At a word from Cheryl, McDonough brought up a digital map on the whiteboard, enlarging it with a sweep of his hand. Cheryl took the lead from there.

  “Melanie and Ariel were last seen here.” She highlighted an area at the center of the screen. “That’s where Dean has set up camp.”

  The elevation on the peak was roughly 3500 feet. Photos came up to the left of the map, showing an old log cabin atop what looked like a sheer wall of granite.

  Jack had given me the basics of what he already knew, which I reviewed internally in light of the new information: The missing girls were Ariel and Melanie Redfield, sixteen and eighteen, respectively. Both were daughters of Dean Redfield, patriarch of the Redfield clan. According to Dean, they’d last been seen at 6:30 Saturday morning, when they told one of the men in their camp that they were going for a walk. They’d been wearing light clothing, nothing fit for an actual hike in rough terrain, and according to reports, they’d had no gear or food with them.

  None of these things boded well.

  “Are you sure they didn’t fall?” I asked Cheryl. “It looks like it would be easy enough, especially if they aren’t familiar with the area. Where have you looked?”