by Raven Snow
Aunt Lydia didn’t apologize but she did back off. “How long has the little witch been missing?”
Rowen didn’t think Lydia meant ‘witch’ in an endearing way. “Just since yesterday, but her family says this is uncommon. They can’t reach her on her phone or anything.”
“It sounds like they need to give their baby girl some space,” scoffed Tiffany. “She probably just needs to spread her wings and fly. That family of hers certainly looks suffocating enough.” It was no surprise that was Tiffany’s opinion. She had never been one to stay in one place for long. She couldn’t stand the idea of being caged and was unable to comprehend how anyone could stand staying in one place for long periods of time.
“Her family says it’s not in her nature,” Rowen stressed. “Even if she did pick up and leave town because she was sick of her family, it would be nice if her family heard about it.”
“So, what do you want us to do?” Aunt Lydia asked. “Do the Stonewalls even know you’re coming to us for help?”
“No, and they don’t need to. Helping our own kind in this sort of situation is what we should do.” Rowen motioned them all to the table. “We should all sit down and focus together to see if we can locate her.”
“I thought I could just do this investigation the normal way. I thought I would just visit her last known locations, but trying magic first can’t hurt.” Eric sighed as if resigned to this plan. “I’m not sure what good it will do. The Stonewalls already tried and failed.”
The idea of Stonewalls failing at something piqued Lydia’s interests. “Well, I don’t see why we can’t give it a shot.” She went to get some extra chairs for the table. “But Norman is staying out front. I’m not losing profits over this.”
Seats were arranged around the table. Rowen was forced to switch with Eric during the initial shuffling of chairs. He refused to sit next to Clarence. Rowen didn’t much want to sit next to him herself right now. He smelled like cheap weed. It was more than a little distracting. “How do we want to do this?” Rowen asked, looking at the circle of them now gathered around the table.
“We close our eyes and picture her,” said Aunt Lydia. She looked at the others as if to gauge their opinions on the matter. “That seems like the most straight forward and likely way to get results.”
Tiffany nodded in agreement. “Join hands everyone.”
Rowen took Eric and Clarence’s hands into her own. She closed her eyes when the others did the same, giving Eric’s a little squeeze as she did so. She knew he always felt weird during these sorts of things. Try as he might, he never seemed to quite get used to this sort of stuff. At least he didn’t complain about it anymore. He did his best to lend his energy to the circle, even if there wasn’t anything else that he could do for them.
Rowen pulled her thoughts from Eric. She centered herself and focused instead on Amber. She pictured her face. She pictured the blond hair and freckles. She pictured the t-shirt and track pants she had been wearing when she last saw her. She tried to focus on her aura.
It was difficult to see much. Rowen got a vague impression of people laughing and talking, but that could be anywhere she volunteered. She tried to focus on other aspects of it, but it was so foggy and the smell of cheap pot in the room was becoming overwhelming.
Rowen opened her eyes to find that Aunt Lydia was doing the same. She was frowning across the table at Clarence and Tiffany, her nose all scrunched up. Gradually, everyone else opened their eyes as well. “Well?” Rowen asked, eager to hear whether or not the others had found anything of use.
“I didn’t really get anything,” Eric answered when no one else spoke for a while.
“It was difficult to concentrate,” said Aunt Lydia, still looking pointedly at her sister and Clarence.
“I heard people,” said Tiffany, either ignoring or oblivious to Lydia. “And I smelled weed.”
Lydia snorted. “No kidding?”
“Hmm?” Tiffany frowned, like she wasn’t sure what Lydia was getting at.
“You and your boyfriend kind of… smell like you’ve been smoking.” Rowen looked at the table as she spoke. Even around family, her mother’s hippie antics really embarrassed her sometimes.
“Oh, this wasn’t like that,” said Tiffany, apparently unconcerned with what the rest of the table thought of her or her boyfriend. “This smelled different. It smelled familiar… Like somewhere I’d been before.” She frowned and looked at Clarence. “Do you know the place I’m thinking of?”
Clarence looked at Tiffany. He shook his head. “I know a lot of places that smell like that,” he offered rather unhelpfully.
“But do you know any around here?” Tiffany urged, like the name of the place in question was right on the tip of her tongue. “What’s the date?” She checked her own phone. “That’s it! That whole bonfire thing is this weekend! How the heck did I forget about that?”
“Bonfire thing?” Eric repeated, pulling out the pad of paper he used for taking notes. “What kind of bonfire thing?”
“Oh, a bunch of people out in the country get together and start up a bonfire. Lots of people come up from Lainswich and Tarricville and all over. It’s like our own tiny little Burning Man. Lots of old souls coming together to commune and have fun. A lot of them are there to create art too. Fascinating stuff. Definitely smells like weed, though I can’t say that’s the only drug floating around up there.”
Rowen cringed. She didn’t like hearing this. She was less worried about Amber and more troubled that this sounded like an event her mother regularly attended. “How many have you attended?” she asked, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.
“Oh, I never missed one when I was a teenager,” Tiffany said with a fond smile. Her eyes had gone distant, like she was remembering happier days. “After I moved away, they got harder to remember to come back for. I was off having my own adventures, after all. I’d say I came back for one or two. Maybe three. It’s hard to say. Those weekends are kind of a blur.” Tiffany laughed then, annoying everyone in the room but Clarence. He looked fascinated. “Have you ever been?” she asked him.
Before Clarence could answer, Lydia stepped in. “You think Amber is at some druggie festival?” she asked. “Amber? The Stonewall’s precious daughter who still lives at home and spends all her free time volunteering.”
Tiffany shrugged. “That’s the impression I got. Lots of voices. Lots of laughing. Strong smells. Isn’t that what everyone else got?”
“That’s what I got,” Rowen said with a nod.
Aunt Lydia couldn’t seem to help herself. “Well, I’ll be. Their family isn’t so perfect after all, is it? It looks like one of them has flown the coop.”
“Flint already flew the coop,” Rowen reminded her Aunt. “And plenty of Greensmiths have flown this coop of yours. Can you stop trying to one-up the Stonewalls for maybe a minute? They haven’t even done anything to you recently.” Rowen didn’t mention that one of them had murdered Grammy. That would open up a whole new can of beans. Right now, she needed them focused.
“Do you have directions to where they normally hold this bonfire?” asked Eric, looking at Tiffany.
“Sure.” She reached for the pen and paper, which he handed her. She drew out a map for him. “Of course, being a bonfire, it’s most active during the night. There should still be a bunch of people out there, though. It’ll begin again tonight.” She looked at Clarence. “Maybe we should swing by.”
“No,” Rowen and Lydia said in unison.
Tiffany shot her family a dirty look. “I’ll have you know I’m a grown woman who can do as she pleases.” Still, she sounded sufficiently dissuaded from going. “You know, it wouldn’t hurt you or Nadine to loosen up a bit sometimes, Lydia.”
“I think you’re plenty loose enough for the both of us,” Lydia shot back, standing and being very prim about pushing her chair back in. She headed back to the front of the store.
Eric ignored all the drama entirely. He was
too busy plugging the address into his phone. He pulled up a map. “Says here it’s two hours away.” He showed the map to Rowen but Tiffany leaned in to take a peek as well.
Tiffany nodded. “That looks right. It always was quite a ride out there. It had to be if you wanted to keep clear of the police.”
Rowen heaved a sigh. “You know, Mom, I would prefer it if you kept your illegal activities to a minimum.”
“Who’s to say what should and should not be legal?” Tiffany’s question received an astute nod of agreement from Clarence.
“The police.” Rowen stood. “We have to get going.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” Tiffany asked in a way that implied she was up for the kind of fun this bonfire had to offer.
“You promised you would do divination while you were here, didn’t you?” Rowen asked her as they headed back out through the front. “I wouldn’t want you to have to go back on that promise of yours.”
“Good luck,” Lydia called to them on their way out the door.
“I have no idea what’s going on, but I’m with her. Good luck!” Norman called as well.
“Your mother is probably going to be at that festival as soon as the sun goes down and we aren’t there anymore,” Eric said to Rowen once they were in the car.
“Yeah,” Rowen agreed with a sigh. It wasn’t like she had ever been able to control her mother in the slightest. That had never been the way things worked between them. “I’m trying not to think about it.”
Chapter Fourteen
The drive was a long one. Two hours and it felt like every minute of it. “If she’s not out here, I’m never going to let my mom live it down,” she complained, leaning back in her seat. The countryside passed by in a green blur. Cars sharing the road with them became fewer and farther in between. The radio stopped picking up all but one station that played the same three country western songs on a never-ending loop. “Did we die?” asked Rowen. “Were we magically murdered too? Is this purgatory?”
“I’d hope I wouldn’t need to stop and use the bathroom in purgatory. If you don’t see a rest stop in the next thirty miles, this might be the other place.” Even though he didn’t enjoy it much, Eric got them to their destination like a champ.
The address they had plugged into the phone led them to a long, rocky driveway. It wasn’t too difficult to follow the trail of cars from there. “Should we park and walk up?” Rowen wondered aloud, but her husband kept on driving. “All right. Just don’t run over any hippies.”
As it turned out, running over hippies was a genuine concern. Once the smoldering view of a bonfire was within their sight, the crowd of people was also apparent. There were at least a dozen tents. Some people were in sleeping bags, huddled up on the dirt. Even more people were milling about, talking or eating. Rowen tried to gauge how many people were here. A hundred? It could easily be a hundred.
Eric parked the car. He was blocking several people in, but they would undoubtedly be leaving before anyone else here did. “Is this really your mom’s kind of thing?” Eric asked, wrinkling his nose as a rather hefty man with copious amounts of body hair and no clothing walked across their range of vision.
“This is totally my mother’s kind of place,” Rowen said with a sigh. “I’m happy to say that I never joined her at one of these things. I never felt the urge.”
“But you think Amber felt the urge?” Eric opened his car door.
“Maybe.” Rowen certainly hoped so. She would hate to find out that the lengthy drive up here had been a waste. “Maybe living under your family’s thumb for your whole life does that to a person.”
“I lived under my family’s thumb. I never felt the urge to get high and dance naked around fire.”
“Different strokes for different folks. Come on.” Rowen walked right into the thick of things. She had to step over a few wriggling sleeping bags. She picked her way between people chatting while sharing cigarettes and… other, less legal things. She tried to feel around psychically for a sense of authority but there wasn’t one. She was finally forced to stop and ask a curvaceous sunbathing woman. She was wearing big heart-shaped sunglasses and nothing else. “Excuse me?” said Rowen, trying to get her attention.
The woman looked up. She nudged the sunglasses down to the end of her nose. “Yes?” she asked with a warm smile.
“Is there someone in charge here?”
The woman laughed. “In charge? No. There’s no one in charge here.” Suddenly, her laughter stopped. “Why? You aren’t the police, are you?” Several other surrounding people looked up at the mention of the police.
“No,” Rowen assured her, though she couldn’t quite tell if everyone around them believed her or not. At the very least, Sunglasses Woman seemed satisfied.
“There is some guy who owns the place, I guess,” said Sunglasses Woman. She pointed to a small log cabin a ways away from the fire. “He’s in there a lot during the day. Big guy, brown hair. I don’t see him out here, so I think that’s where he is.”
“Thanks for the help.” Eric led the way to the cabin. Rowen hadn’t spotted it at first. It was so small, it could have been a shed. People parted as they made their way toward it. It seemed talk of police had spread quickly. It might not be long before they had a field full of very high and very paranoid druggies on their hands. It probably wouldn’t be in their favor if they all just up and left. Rowen tried her best to scan their faces as she walked, but she didn’t recognize Amber among them.
Eric got to the cabin door and knocked. Much to their surprise, it swung open. The cabin was about as spacious inside as it looked on the outside. Indoors, there was only the one room, a dresser, and a mattress on the floor. The mattress was the focus of the room. It was covered in furs and pillows. On top of it, a man and two women were sleeping naked.
“Oh, good.” Rowen fought the urge to throw a hand up over her eyes or turn away out of politeness. If these were her mother’s kind of people, they almost certainly didn’t care about being seen.
Eric seemed more uncomfortable. He turned to one side before clearing his throat. “Sorry to just barge in.”
The man on the bed stirred, as did one of the women. He blinked up at the two people standing over him and stretched. “What time is it?” He looked at the window. “Uncool, man. It’s still, like, midday.”
“Sorry,” Eric said, making an obvious effort to sound like he meant that.
The man must have noticed he was making Rowen and Eric uncomfortable. He sat up all the way, covering himself with furs so that he was a little more decent to look at. “What’s this about? You guys cops or something?”
“Private investigator,” said Eric.
“Well, I’m Jeff.” Jeff looked like he was alright with the idea of a private investigator barging in. Maybe that sort of thing happened a lot. This was definitely the sort of place a teenager would disappear to rebel. “Why don’t you guys wait around back. I’ll join you in a minute.”
Eric was only too eager to do as Jeff asked. Rowen followed him around to the back of the cabin. She went ahead and pulled up the picture of Amber on her phone. Flint had sent it to her this morning when she had asked.
True to his word, it couldn’t have been much more than a minute when Jeff showed up. He had thrown on a t-shirt and some faded blue jeans. He really was a big guy, at least a head taller than Eric. “So, who are you looking for?” he asked. Rowen showed him the picture. Jeff took the phone from her. He looked down, frowning at the image for a while.
“She looks familiar,” said Jeff, not sounding completely certain of that. There was a cigarette between two of his fingers. He brought that to his mouth and took a slow drag. “What’s her name?”
“Amber Stonewall,” said Eric.
Jeff smiled. “What a pretty name. I think I’d remember a name like that.” He looked back at the picture. “I do think I remember the face, though. Maybe I just didn’t catch her name.”
Rowen tried not to get too
optimistic. “Is she still around?”
“I’ve been asleep,” said Jeff, pointing out the obvious. “I wouldn’t know. She could be.”
“I’ll go ask around.” Eric took the phone with its picture away from Rowen. He motioned for her to stay put. There were more questions to be asked. He trusted her to know which ones.
“Have you seen her around here more than once?” Rowen asked Jeff, continuing her line of questioning.
Jeff laughed. “My memory of these things isn’t the best. We really go all out, you know?” He shook his head and took another drag. “I think I recognize her from last night. Before that, I couldn’t say.”
“Assuming it was her, do you remember what she was doing?”
Jeff fell silent. He stared into the distance. It was hard to tell if he was contemplating her question or just spacing out. “She was high as a kite. No surprise there.”
