The Forgotten Girls

by Owen Laukkanen

  Mathers leaned closer. “Say again?”

  “I said her name was Ashlyn,” Sixkill said. “Ashlyn Southernwood.”

  28

  Windermere checked her phone.

  “Damn it, partner,” she said. “Still no reception. I feel like I’m back in the Stone Age.”

  Across the table, Stevens checked his phone, too. No dice. Tried to remember the last time he’d had bars, figured it was somewhere near the state line on the train last night. Wondered if they’d missed anything, out there in the world. Wondered when he’d get a chance to reconnect.

  It wasn’t likely to be soon, not with this storm moving in. The snow had begun falling in earnest just as night fell in Butcher’s Creek, and though Stevens and Windermere had hoped to follow Sheriff Parsons back to the county seat in Libby, ninety miles to the southeast, the worsening weather had changed their minds fast.

  “Can’t make the drive down in the dark,” Deputy Finley told Stevens and Windermere. “Not in this weather.”

  Which was fine, Stevens thought. He’d white-knuckled the ride out to Jim Benson’s ranch, in daylight and sans flying snow. Driving those roads in the dark sounded like a suicide mission, and the weather was only going to get worse. Another foot of snow was coming with this new storm, and from what Stevens could tell, that meant they’d missed their window. He and Windermere would be stuck in Butcher’s Creek until the storm passed and the roads cleared, however long that took.

  In the meantime, they would have to live without cell service, though from the sound of the wind picking up outside, they’d be lucky to have power through the rest of the night.

  Stevens and Windermere had holed up at the Gold Spike in a corner booth, Hank the bartender casting shade in their direction from the taps. He’d grudgingly cooked up a handful of chicken fingers and a pile of lukewarm fries and brought them both bottles of Rainier, but it was clear he wasn’t enthused about the idea of a couple of federal agents moving in. As far as Stevens was concerned, the feeling was mutual.

  It was maddening, being stuck here, the snow all but arresting what little progress they’d made. For all the locals’ bleak pronouncements about weather and nature and Sheriff Parsons’s “drunk Indians,” women were dying here, and Stevens wanted to know why.

  Windermere set her bottle down. “What’s on your mind? You’re zoning out on me.”

  Stevens blinked back to the here and now. “Sorry,” he told her. “It’s this storm, I guess. I don’t like sitting around when we could be on the job.”

  “I feel you.” Windermere looked around the bar. “I don’t know if it’s just Hank over there or what, but this whole situation is giving me the creeps.”

  “You feel it, too, huh?”

  “Like there’s something weird going on around here,” Windermere said. “And we don’t know the half of it yet.”

  Stevens picked at his fries. Didn’t reply. Figured they would talk themselves into hysteria if they kept at this tack. He was just about to ask Windermere if she thought they should head back to the hotel when the front door to the Gold Spike swung open and Kerry Finley walked into the bar, trailing swirling snow and icy wind behind her.

  The Lincoln County deputy scanned the empty bar, found Stevens and Windermere in the corner, and walked over. She was carrying a stack of files, and she dropped them on the table beside the remains of their chicken fingers.

  “Chuck Truman isn’t the only one who pays attention to rumors,” she said. “And despite what Sheriff Parsons thinks, not everyone in Lincoln County is willing to write these women off.” She gestured to the files. “I took these from the sheriff’s detachment when I heard you were coming. Figured you might like a little reading when I dropped you at the hotel in Libby tonight, but I guess this bar will have to do.” She gestured around the Gold Spike. “I guess this bar will have to do.”

  Stevens reached for the top file. It was a plain manila folder, filled with newspaper printouts and photocopied police reports. “What is this stuff?”

  “This is every unexplained disappearance along the High Line that I could find,” Finley told them. “You want to go hunting bogeymen, here’s your material.”

  Outside, the wind gusted—strong. The lights flickered, and the Gold Spike seemed to shudder on its foundation. The young deputy slid into the booth beside Stevens. “Heck, I might even join you,” she said, reaching for a file. “It’s not like there’s anything else going on in this town tonight.”

  29

  What I don’t understand,” Agent Mathers said, “is why you didn’t just come to us in the first place. I mean, this is what we’re here for.”

  Ronda Sixkill was still on the Skype call with the Minnesota FBI agent. She’d told him about Ashlyn Southernwood, about how her friend on the railroad crew had found the body, sent her the picture. How she’d sent it to Mila when Mila insisted on proof.

  And then Ronda Sixkill had told him more. She’d told him about the High Line, how train hoppers steered clear. She told him why.

  “Bad things happen there,” she said. “Women go missing, year after year. It’s a suicide run, riding up there alone. It’s an invitation to get yourself murdered.”

  “So why did Ashlyn go?” Agent Mathers wanted to know. “Surely she must have known.”

  “She did.” Ronda paused, seeing Texas Johnny in her mind—gaunt, pale, dying before her eyes. And Ash, who knew the risks, taking her chances just to say her good-byes. “She knew. She had to get out west, though, and fast. She had no other choice.”

  Agent Mathers chewed on this. “So, okay,” he said. “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just come to us in the first place.”

  Ronda Sixkill took a long time to respond, so long that Mathers was afraid the connection had dropped. He was about to repeat the question when she spoke.

  “I was married once,” she said. “I was young and I didn’t know any better. He was the first man who ever really took notice of me, and I imagined that meant he loved me. And since he loved me, I imagined I should try to love him back.”

  Her gaze went distant a moment, back in some long-ago memory. Then her eyes hardened and she focused on Mathers again.

  “He was a jackass,” she said. “A real piece of work. I got used to the name-calling and the black eyes and the bruises. It was the broken bones I couldn’t quite reconcile. I was still young enough that I could see my life ahead of me, and I was dumb enough to think that if I spoke, somebody would listen.”

  Mathers could already see where this was going. “Yeah,” he said.

  “The police came to the hospital where I was laid up, two of them,” Sixkill continued. “Men about my husband’s age, much older than me. White men. They asked what had happened, and I told them, every last detail. They didn’t write it down. They pretended to listen. Then they asked me if I’d had anything to drink that night.” She laughed a little, a hard-edged kind of laugh. “They asked me what I’d done to piss him off.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mathers said.

  “Why? You didn’t do anything.” Sixkill shrugged. “Nobody laid charges. Lovers’ quarrel, they said. Domestic spat. Bad luck I fell the way I did, but I’d brought it on myself. They walked out, I went home, and it wasn’t two weeks before it happened again.”

  Sixkill reached offscreen, came back with a glass of water. She drank, and then she looked back into the camera.

  “I’m not the only woman with a story like that, Agent Mathers, not where I come from. So you ask why I didn’t call the police; I’ll tell you. Indian women have been dying in this country for years, and the next time a white policeman lifts a hand to put a stop to it, he’ll be the first I’ve heard about.”

  “We’re trying,” Mathers said. “I can’t speak for your friends, or for the rest of the women who’ve disappeared on that High Line—”

  “Murdered. T
hey were murdered, Agent Mathers. Let’s call it how it is.”

  “Okay. Murdered. I don’t know what’s being done in those cases, or who’s investigating, but I can assure you, the FBI takes Ashlyn Southernwood’s murder very seriously. So if you have any information that could help us find the killer, I promise you, we’ll put it to use.”

  “I don’t know much but what I’ve already told you,” Sixkill replied. “Except that if there is a rider killing women on that High Line, all the snow and cold don’t mean anything to him.”

  She waited for Mathers to ask why. He did.

  “The big trains through the mountains, they have remote-controlled engines in the middle and in back. Nobody rides in them, but they have cabs and seats and windows like any other locomotive. And protection from the elements. If you’re looking for the ghost rider, that’s where you’ll find him. And . . .”

  She stopped. Looked at Mathers through the camera, looked at him hard, like she was searching for something in his face. Finally, she continued.

  “And if you’re looking for Mila Scott, you’ll find her there, too. I told her about the remote-controlled engines. Gave her a universal key to every Northwestern locomotive before I sent her on her way.”

  Mathers was already reaching for his phone, typing with his free hand into an Internet search window, looking for contact information for whomever was in charge of the Northwestern High Line.

  “Let me ask you one more thing,” Mathers said as his search results loaded. “What happened to your husband in the end?”

  On his screen, Sixkill laughed again. “You should know,” she said. “You read my file, didn’t you?”

  Mathers looked back at her and realized she was right. Realized he knew what had happened, wondered how he’d forgotten.

  But Sixkill told him anyway.

  “I killed him,” she said. “I stabbed that old bastard through the chest. Did eight years in the Mission Creek women’s pen for it, and you know what, Agent Mathers?”

  He met her eyes. “What?”

  “I would do it all over again,” she said. “I’m not sorry about it at all.”

  30

  They sifted through Kerry Finley’s cold cases at the Gold Spike, and when Hank kicked them out—with undisguised relish—they took their act back to the Northwestern Hotel.

  Outside, the snow fell thick, the wind bitterly cold and fierce, rocking the windowpanes. Windermere took the bed by the door, spreading her files out on the bedspread and forcing herself not to speculate about the last time the innkeeper changed the sheets. She had other things to think about.

  Deputy Finley had brought an encyclopedia of unsolved cases. Every dead or missing woman from the Cascades to the Rockies, suspected foul play or not, for the last decade. Windermere counted sixty-five different files.

  “Of course, not all of these are going to be murders,” Finley said. “And not every homicide is going to be the work of the same guy. People kill each other up here: domestic disputes, robberies—heck, people come here to escape. It stands to reason you’d have a few bad apples.”

  “So how do we pare this list down?” Windermere asked.

  “Proximity to the railroad, for starters.” This was Stevens, who had a map open on his bed of Butcher’s Creek and the surrounding environs. He’d been studying it for a while.

  “Sheriff Truman’s Jane Doe was barely ten feet from the tracks when they found her,” Stevens said. “And look here.” He held up the map, pointed. “That’s the Benson ranch. Behind it, that line there is the forestry road where Kelly-Anne Clairmont was discovered.”

  Windermere looked at the map, got the point quickly. The forestry road curved away from the Benson ranch, dropped down toward the creek itself—and the Northwestern main line. “I remember,” she said. “You think the tracks are the connection?”

  “It’s not just the tracks. There’s a passing siding there, see? It’s like a stoplight; trains wait there to let other trains by. Mila’s friend Warren mentioned stories about a ghost rider up here, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Windermere said. “He also said the killer wasn’t human.”

  “Human or ghost, if our unsub is a rider, he could have ditched Kelly-Anne Clairmont’s car and her body, made it look like she’d wandered off into the woods, and he could have hiked down to the tracks, waited for a train to stop, and climbed aboard and vanished. The storm would have covered up his trail.”

  “It also would have killed him,” Finley said. “Riding a train in that blizzard? There’s not much protection on those freight cars. You’re exposed to the elements. Below-zero temperatures, and that wind? You wouldn’t survive a mile.”

  Windermere looked at Stevens for an answer. She could tell by his expression he didn’t have one. “Sure,” he said, “but humor me here. We have sixty-odd cold cases and all night on our hands. If this pattern doesn’t fit, we’ll look for another.”

  The wind gusted and the lights flickered momentarily. “What do we have to lose?” Stevens said. “From the looks of that storm, we’re going to be here awhile.”

  31

  The train slowed. Then it stopped completely. Inside the locomotive, Mila Scott stirred awake.

  They were in a town somewhere, a big town, but Mila couldn’t tell where. It was light out again, morning, and the rain had turned to snow outside. She’d been on the train all night.

  She’d run from Ronda’s house until she was sure she’d left the police behind her. Then she huddled in the rain outside a Starbucks, stole the Wi-Fi, and looked up the Northwestern Railroad’s main yard online. It had taken her an hour and a half to walk there. She had to keep ducking under awnings and into shadows whenever police cars drove past.

  The Northwestern’s train yard was huge. It took her a long time to orient herself. There were no campfires around, no signs of any hobo jungles. Nobody to ask for directions. Mila hiked along the tracks to the north end of the yard. Crouched down in a ditch and watched the trains come and go.

  The ditch was muddy. The rain never stopped. She was soaking wet and dirty within ten minutes, and it took another hour before she saw what she was looking for: a long train of coal cars, all of them empty, headed back into the mountains to pick up more coal. Mila waited as the twin engines on the front of the train passed. Watched the endless string of coal cars. You could ride in an empty coal car; she’d done it before. It was a cold ride, even in good weather.

  The coal cars seemed to stretch on forever. Then the throb of a diesel engine got louder again, and Mila saw another locomotive in the string, sandwiched between the cars. There was no light on in the cab. Its headlight was off. This was what Ronda was talking about.

  Mila stood up from the ditch, slipping in the wet grass. She ran, ducking low, across the empty storage tracks, the locomotive grinding toward her. She reached the train just as the locomotive was passing, caught the grab irons and pulled herself onto a stepladder in front of the wheels. The noise was tremendous.

  The metal was slippery. Mila held on tight, afraid to move, until she heard the train’s whistle and saw a crossing ahead, cars lined up at the gates. She climbed the steps onto the end platform. There was a door in the nose of the engine, a heavy lock hanging from it. Mila tried her key and felt the lock turn. She pulled the door open and stepped inside.

  Suddenly, the air was warm again. The rain was gone, and the noise inside was much quieter. Mila poked around the nose, found a bathroom and a little hot plate. Then she climbed up into the cab itself, where there were seats and big windows and a dry floor to sleep on. She watched the city pass by for a little while. Then she made a bed on the floor of the cab, lit a cigarette, smoked it, and tried to rest.

  Now, the next morning, it didn’t look like there was a train yard outside. There were no storage tracks beside the train. There was just a road parallel to the tracks and the town on the o
ther side—warehouses, gray and industrial.

  The engine was still running. Mila could hear it, feel it rumbling. She could hear something else, too, just faintly. After a moment, she realized she was hearing voices.

  Mila peered out the rear window of the locomotive. There was a railroad truck parked in the snow beside the tracks and two men standing beside it. As she watched in horror, one of the men walked to the front steps of Mila’s locomotive and swung himself aboard.

  They were checking the train. The second man hung around by the truck, staring up into the cab. Mila ducked down instinctively, her heartbeat accelerating. Knew the first man would come in through the nose of the locomotive in seconds.

  There were two doors at the rear of the cab, one on either side of the train. As quick as she could, Mila scrambled to the far door. She pushed it open and hurried out onto a narrow walkway along the side of the engine. She pulled her packsack out behind her, praying she hadn’t left any signs, and caught the door before it slammed shut. Then she slipped under the guardrails and dropped down to the trackside, a longer drop than she’d expected. She hurried through the snow toward the line of warehouses, hearing the engine spool up again behind her, the coal cars clanking together as the train started to move.

  Damn it. Guess I’m staying here awhile.

  Twenty minutes later, she found a coffee shop near the train yard, a warm mug of coffee and a seat by the heater. She was in Wenatchee, Washington, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains from Seattle.

  Mila’s phone was dead, the battery sapped by the cold, but she charged it in the coffee shop and connected to the Wi-Fi. She found an email from Ronda. Call me. Was about to write back, tell Ronda she’d look for a pay phone, when she noticed another email, a response on the rider forum. I’m looking for the ghost rider on the High Line, she’d written. Point me in the right direction, if you can.