by H. P. Bayne
Japanese on her father’s side, Ara was as exotically stunning now as she had been when Dez had last seen her two years ago. Her long, dark hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun, a few strands hanging loosely around her petite, pretty features. She might have been wearing a little mascara and some colour on her lips, but Dez would have banked on it she had otherwise kept her face clean of makeup.
Ara’s expression—wide dark eyes and slightly parted lips—mirrored what Sully’s must have been just a few moments ago.
“Dez?” she said.
“Hey, Ara. How are you?”
Skipping a verbal answer, she closed the distance between them and wrapped her arms around his middle. “It’s so good to see you. I’ve always wondered how you were doing, but I didn’t know if I should call after….”
The way she trailed off was rich with meaning, and Dez read the sorrow in the way her eyes left his to fall to her boots.
“Yeah,” Dez said. He didn’t know what else to say.
She returned her gaze to his face and managed what looked like a feigned smile. “So how are you doing?”
“It’s been a rough couple of years,” Dez said. It was an honest answer and, he realized regretfully, possibly the only honest answer he’d be able to give. “How about you?”
“Same. Sully… he’s a hard guy to get over.”
“Yeah. Yeah, he is.” It seemed like a good time to get off that topic and onto something safer. “So what are you doing here? You couldn’t have missed all those no trespassing signs out there.”
“You’re here too.”
Dez flashed a few teeth. “Good point. But I’m a private investigator now, and I’m looking into a missing person case. What’s your excuse?”
“Actually, as it happens, I’m looking for a missing person too.”
It wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting. “What missing person?”
“Emory Davis. He’s my….” She paused mid-thought again, and Dez felt compelled to finish the sentence for her.
“Your boyfriend? It’s okay, you know. You’re permitted to have a life.” Whether Sully would be as accepting remained to be seen.
“Yeah. We’ve been seeing each other since shortly after… you know. Anyway, he and I were here overnight, and he left for what I thought was a few minutes. Now I can’t find him.”
“I didn’t see any cars outside.”
“We drove it in behind some bushes. We always park there. We know we’re not supposed to be here, but it’s what we do.”
“What do you mean, it’s what you do?”
Ara leaned in behind the door and retrieved a backpack. Unzipping it, she reached inside and pulled out a small videocamera. “We have a YouTube channel and a blog. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit this to some people, but we’re paranormal investigators. We actually have a really good following. The two of us and a couple of other people started the Kimotan Rapids Paranormal Society back in university. Since we’re out of school and working, we weren’t sure we’d have the time, but we have so many followers, it makes us want to keep going with it. We post a new video every week. We’ve been to Loons Hollow a bunch of times, but we still get a lot of views whenever we come. There are actually a lot of buildings left, so we can explore different places in each video.”
“So what happened to this Emory guy? When did he go missing?”
“We were camping out in the old bar, and he went outside to pee. It was about five thirty in the morning; I’d checked the clock on my phone. I waited for what felt like a long time, but he didn’t come back. At first, I thought maybe he found something interesting, but he usually texts me to let me know. I didn’t hear anything from him so I tried texting him. He didn’t respond, and he didn’t answer his phone when I tried calling him a bunch of times. It keeps giving me that message he’s unavailable or out of the service area. I’ve been looking for him for the past few hours, but I can’t find him anywhere.”
Without warning, Ara’s face crumpled, and she brought a hand to cover her eyes as the tears started.
“Whoa, hey,” Dez said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sure everything’s fine. It might be he just stepped in something somewhere. He could have broken his phone, or he might be somewhere he has no reception. Believe me, I’ve been there. Listen, if you want, I can give you a hand looking for him.”
“Thank you,” Ara said through a smile more genuine than the last.
With Dez having signed on for an impromptu ground search for his brother’s ex’s new squeeze, that left the problem of what to do about Sully.
“Hey, Ara. Give me a minute, all right? I actually came here with a buddy of mine, and I want to give him a call, clue him in. Maybe he can keep an eye out for Emory too.”
Dez removed himself to the front step of the bank and pressed the call button next to Sully’s contact info.
“Is it her?” Sully asked by way of greeting.
“Yep. Sorry.”
“How is she?”
Dez decided Sully needed a clue as to why they couldn’t have this conversation right now, and used his fake name as a hint. “We can talk about that later, Oliver.”
“Oh,” Sully said. “I gotcha. So what’s up?”
“Girl here says her—” He quickly thought through how best to phrase it. “—friend went missing after he went out for a leak around five thirty this morning. They’re paranormal investigators and were filming something for their YouTube channel overnight.”
“He? A guy friend?”
“Um, yeah. His name’s Emory Davis. Can you and your dog go have a look around, see what you can see? Only stay close, huh? You know, just in case.”
“Is this a boy friend or a boyfriend?”
“Can I refuse to answer?”
Silence on the other end suggested Sully was either deep in thought or too perturbed to answer. Given the situation, Dez was banking on the latter.
“Oliver?”
“I’m on it.”
Sully hung up without further reply, and Dez returned to Ara.
“He’ll give us a hand,” he said. “So this Emory guy. You’re sure he’s not playing some sort of joke on you?”
“He wouldn’t do that. He knows I wouldn’t find it funny.”
An unwelcome thought occurred to Dez: another young man missing in the same area haunted by Faceless Flo. This had to be more than a coincidence.
“Should we split up?” Ara asked.
“I think we should stick together,” Dez said. If that ghost was around here somewhere, Dez didn’t want Ara on her own. Then again, given the ghost’s reputed track record, it was more likely he’d be the one at risk.
Together, they scoured the main street, picking through the buildings before trudging through the tall grass and shrubs to get to the next road.
“Any idea how many buildings are actually left in this town?” Dez asked.
“We documented a few less than eighty. Not all of them are standing, but a lot of them are, at least well enough for us to go inside a little way. That’s why it’s taken me all this time to try to search for him. I have a lot of ground to cover.”
“Any spots you know of he might’ve fallen into? Maybe a well or an old storm cellar?”
“That’s kind of the problem. The grass is really tall, and there’s a lot of stuff you can’t see until you’re right on top of it. He might have fallen somewhere, and I wouldn’t be able to see him.”
Dez checked his watch. “It’s coming close to noon. In all this time, you didn’t think it might be a good idea to call the police?”
“Like you said, there are all those no trespassing signs. We knew we’d be in trouble. We don’t show our faces on the channel, so no one knows it’s us. If the police found out we’ve been coming here, we’d get shut down and probably lose our day jobs too.”
“I hate to tell you, but the police have ways of figuring those things out, faces or not. I’m thinking if we don’t turn anything up
within the next hour, we’d better call 911, have them start a ground search.”
“I know. I was coming around to that. I don’t think we’re going to find him, are we?”
“If he thought he saw something, how likely would he be to go off on his own?”
“Highly likely. He takes chances sometimes, stupid ones.”
“Even taking into account the stories about the nearby ghost?”
“You mean Faceless Flo? Especially her. He would have been beside himself with excitement if he managed to see her.”
Dez decided this was a good time to get a few answers about Flo, being with an actual ghost hunter. Dez had heard a story or two, but since they’d come more than a decade ago from a bunch of jerks he’d gone to high school with, he wasn’t convinced he had the true story.
“What do you know about her?” he asked.
“She’s supposed to haunt the road on the way in. Haven’t you heard the story? I thought everybody had.”
“I’ve heard something. But I’m not sure how much stock to place in it based on my source. Seems to me you’d have a more accurate version.”
Ara smiled, and Dez knew he’d said the magic words. “The story goes that Flo was a resident of Loons Hollow back in the nineteen twenties. She was the daughter of an ultra-religious family, and she was expected to follow the doctrine of that religion without question. The problem was she’d fallen in love with a boy who lived on a nearby farm. She was only seventeen at the time, and her family forbade her to see him. But it wasn’t just about the religion. Her family actually wanted her to marry someone else, a farmer who’d inherited a bunch of land from his wealthy father. The boy she loved had little money, and even less prospect of more. She didn’t care. All she wanted was to be with him.
“They used to meet out in the woods near Loons Hollow. Or they’d go for rides together. She’d tell her family she was going for a walk down the road, and her boyfriend would come out in his father’s old cart and pick her up. Eventually they’d pull over and head into the woods to spend time together.
“One night when they were supposed to meet, the man her family wanted her to marry showed up at her house, wanting to see her. Her family told him she’d gone for a walk. But they also told him they were concerned she was seeing the other boy, so the man set off to find them.
“He spotted the cart from the roadway, and walked into the woods to look for them. He found them eventually, walking back toward the road. The man confronted them, and he and the boy fought. It’s said he brought a knife with him and stabbed the boy, killing him. Flo, distraught and terrified, took off toward the road, intending to run back home.
“Afraid she was going to tell everyone what he’d done, the man rushed back to his truck and sped after her. According to the legend, he hit her with the truck, leaving her badly injured. She wasn’t dead, so he took a shovel from the box of his truck, and hit her in the face repeatedly until she died. Then he dragged her off into the bush and buried her before returning to the boy’s body and doing the same. No one ever found either of them. Some people thought the two of them must have run off together to elope, knowing her family would never bless their marriage. But then the haunting started. People saw her on the road, but when they tried to talk to her, she’d disappear. Others would get close enough to see her properly, and they came back to town with the terrifying story she had no face. The man who people say killed her supposedly left town shortly after, terrified she’d come back for him. That’s how the legend was born.
“Once in a while, a young man would go missing, and it always got blamed on her. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But the questions are still there, and men still go missing from that road.”
As Ara had talked, her anxiety had appeared to fall away until she sounded like she was telling a ghost story around a campfire. It seemed to Dez she’d momentarily forgotten about Emory, at least until she got to the last line. At that point, she took a shaky breath.
“You okay?” Dez asked.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “All the time I’ve been doing this, I think part of me thought it was fun, that it wasn’t real. I always said I believed in ghosts, but I don’t know that I really did. But what if that’s what happened? What if Emory isn’t just hurt or trapped somewhere? What if she’s real, and she got him? What am I supposed to do then? They say they don’t find any of them. What if he’s gone, and it’s my fault?”
“Why would it be your fault?”
“I’m the one who got him into ghost hunting. He only started because I talked him into it. I think he thought it would impress me. What if this is my fault?”
“No offence to him, but if he took off without telling you, that kind of makes it his fault, not yours. Maybe coming here and tempting fate all this time wasn’t a great move, but you weren’t doing anything loads of other people don’t already do. Most people come and go from here without any problem. You wouldn’t have had reason to expect any different.”
“Even so. I can’t help feeling like he’s my responsibility.”
Dez smiled, but didn’t bother trying to inject any humour into it. The topic he was about to launch into was far from funny. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with Sully, would it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I suffered a hell of a lot of guilt after what happened to him, thinking up all the ways I could have maybe made things better for him. You spent a lot of time visiting him at Lockwood. I just thought maybe you felt the same, like maybe you’re wondering if you could have done more. Now that you’ve got Emory, you’re doing everything you can to take care of him in all the ways you tell yourself you failed Sully.”
Ara’s mouth popped open, and the colour drained from her face. Dez had hit the nail on the head.
“I’ve got news for you,” he said. “First off, you aren’t responsible for Sully, for anything that happened to him. If anything, you’re one of the only reasons he was able to keep going in there. You were there for him, Ara, right beside Mom, Eva and me. And second, you aren’t responsible for Emory. People make their own choices, and sometimes nothing you do will ever make a dent. One way or another, we’ll find Emory. After that, you can kick his ass.”
He was relieved by the hoot of laughter that erupted from her. She was on the small side, but she packed a powerful laugh when she was surprised by something funny. Dez couldn’t return Sully to her, but if he could give her this much, he’d be happy.
“You know what?” she said. “I feel like you’ve taken a weight off my shoulders. I never thought about it the way you explained it. I think you’re right. I’m transferring, aren’t I?”
Dez shrugged. He was no psychologist, but he’d heard his mother use that word. Dez had grown up doing it himself, using Sully to fill the void left by Aiden.
“I really appreciate you and your friend helping me look for Emory,” Ara said. “But I’m thinking I should probably accept defeat and call 911. We’re covering a lot of the same ground I already did. He probably went off into the woods somewhere.”
Dez thought through how that would play out. “I’m wondering, do you think you’d be all right here on your own until the authorities come? I’d imagine they’ll send in some conservation officers as well as the police. COs would have better knowledge of the area. Anyway, I’d rather be gone when they get here.”
“Why?”
Dez thought fast, the truth about Sully not one he could share. He fell back on something he hoped was a believable alternative. “First off, I’m in the middle of my own investigation, and I’ve got to follow some other leads now that I’ve had a look around here and found no sign of my target. The other thing is, like I was saying, the place is supposed to be off limits. If anyone finds out I was digging around here, I’ll have some questions to answer I’d rather not have to.”
Ara nodded. “I understand. I’ll be totally fine by myself. It’s not so scary here in daylight. And I won’t say anything about you bei
ng here. Thanks for helping me look.”
Dez passed her one of the cards Lachlan had given him. Naturally, it bore Lachlan’s name, not his own. “That’s my boss, but it’s my number written on the bottom. Give me a call and let me know how you make out. You sure you’ll be okay by yourself until the police come?”
“Flo never goes after women. Just men. I’ll be fine.”
Sully stood inside the semi-collapsed structure of what was once a hardware store, watching the conversation between his brother and his former girlfriend.
Although he’d thought about her, she hadn’t been at the forefront of his thoughts as often as she probably should have been; the various personal crises he’d had on his plate the past couple of years had done plenty to get in the way of happier thoughts. But with her in his sight, the tug of attraction hit him all over again.
She’d been one of the few truly good things life had handed him, bringing with her the chance for him to find companionship, acceptance and the sort of affection—love even, if he dared to use the word—that required no explanations. She’d taken him as he was. Sure, she’d asked questions, and she’d known there were things he refused to share with her. But although he knew it hurt her that he didn’t tell her everything, she’d never given up on him.
Only she had.
She’d moved on with her life, had accepted the one thing about Sully he realized he didn’t want her to. She’d accepted his death. And she’d accepted she would have to carve out a new life without him in it.
Part of him wanted to hate her new boyfriend out of principle. Part of him, to be honest, did hate him, whoever and wherever he was. But hate didn’t come naturally to Sully, and he decided to help find the man, if for no other reason than erasing the worry from Ara’s face. She’d tried so hard to ease Sully’s when he was a prisoner in Lockwood Psychiatric Hospital; he owed her the same now. He owed her so much more than that.
The fact was she wasn’t betraying Sully by moving on with her life. Betraying a dead man was impossible, after all.
Dez stepped away from Ara and pulled out his phone to dial. A moment later, Sully’s cellphone rang in his pocket.
