The Forgotten Girls

by Owen Laukkanen

  Someone had written back. I can.

  32

  You already know this is a bad idea, so I won’t try to change your mind, the message began. But you should know that you’re probably going to die.

  The writer was someone named Lazy Jake, a woman, according to her profile. She’d written Mila a private message after replying to her thread, and Mila had ordered another coffee and sat back down to read.

  I saw the rider, Lazy Jake wrote.

  Or if he wasn’t the rider, he was some other creepy-ass dude. I ran into him last summer in Glacier Park, August sometime. I’d been bumming around in East Glacier Park Village for a couple months and I was headed back to the coast. Caught on an empty boxcar on a junk train headed westbound, and he hopped on in Essex, about midway through the park. I watched him climb onboard a few cars down from mine. He saw me, too; we made eye contact briefly. There were a couple other riders in my boxcar, young guys, but I don’t think the rider saw them.

  Anyway, the train didn’t stop again until Whitefish, in the yard there, and we’re all hiding out in the boxcar, keeping our heads down, when I hear something moving outside the doors. I think it’s the bulls, so I push as far to the back of the car as I can, and then all of a sudden this face pops in through the open doorway and it’s him. It’s the rider who caught on in Essex, and he’s looking at me like I’m dinner.

  The guys were talking about getting off in Whitefish, exploring for a few days, but as soon as this guy climbed into my boxcar, I started begging them to stay around. I didn’t want to be left alone with this guy. He just gave me the creeps.

  So the guys thought about it and decided to stay, and the train started moving again, the three of us at one end of the boxcar, the weirdo rider at the other. He was just huddled up in a corner, wrapped up in his filthy clothes, stealing glances my way, trying not to let on, but every now and then I would catch him, and his eyes would dart off again, fast, like he was trying to pretend he hadn’t just been totally eye-fucking me.

  This went on for at least an hour before the train finally slowed down at some siding in the middle of nowhere. Then he gathered his stuff and just stepped off the train; didn’t say a word, just disappeared into the forest like a ghost. And me and the guys all watched him go, and then we talked about how weird he was, all the way to Spokane.

  Mila lowered the phone. It was a creepy story, sure, but there were lots of creepy riders on the rails. What made Lazy Jake so sure that this creep was the creep?

  But Lazy Jake had anticipated the question. You’re wondering how I know it was him, she’d written. You’re thinking I’m probably crazy, or imagining things or just weird. And you might be right. I thought about it later, and I kind of felt stupid. But then I heard about this:

  She’d attached a link. It was a news article from the Flathead Beacon, dated September 16. BODY FOUND IN ESSEX RAVINE, read the headline. Below was a picture of a dark-haired young woman.

  33

  Kasha Graham, twenty-three,” Windermere read. “Kitchen staff at the Summit Inn, Essex, Montana. Went missing August twenty-fifth of last year, body found in a ravine just outside town on the fifteenth of September. Autopsy inconclusive due to advanced decomposition, but in the absence of any firm signs of foul play, the coroner ruled she’d probably just fallen.”

  Windermere looked up. “Essex is apparently a big railroad town,” she told Stevens and Deputy Finley. “Just about every train going over the Rockies stops there to change crews. Judging from this map, the railroad’s about all it’s got going for it, that and the Summit Inn.”

  She passed the file across the bed to Stevens, who flipped it open and examined the picture inside. A candid shot, probably downloaded from Facebook, of Kasha Graham and three other young people posing outside the Summit Inn. They wore kitchen whites and big smiles; the background was blue sky and high mountains. Kasha had dark hair and fine features. She looked happy.

  “Did they question these people?” Stevens asked, more to himself than to Windermere. “Her coworkers?” He flipped through the thin file, the missing persons report, the results of a rather cursory autopsy. The Flathead County sheriff’s department had questioned the staff at the Summit Inn, but nobody knew anything. Kasha had disappeared on her day off. She’d told her coworkers she was going for a walk, which wasn’t abnormal; it was a beautiful day, and there really wasn’t much to do besides walk. She hadn’t come back.

  Stevens put down the file. Rubbed his eyes. Outside, the blizzard continued, blowing snow and howling wind. It was morning now; Stevens, Windermere, and Finley had been sorting through the stack of files for hours. They’d pared the stack down to twenty-five or so cases that looked like they might fit the pattern.

  Young women, many—but not all—of Native American descent, all gone missing or found dead within a mile of the Northwestern main line. Roughly half of the women had never been found. Of the rest, five or six of the deaths had been ruled homicides. The remainder were deemed accidental.

  Kasha Graham. Kelly-Anne Clairmont. Lucy Baker. Gale Fowler. Alberta Chipman. Nicole Germain. They were waitresses, gas station clerks, runaways. Some were unemployed. Some had criminal records; some were reportedly prostitutes. Some of the women hadn’t been identified. They were itinerants, vagrants, some of them train hoppers. None of their disappearances had raised much of a fuss.

  Stevens had forced himself to be cautious as he reviewed the cases, knew he was already biased. Knew the deaths of Kelly-Anne Clairmont and Mila Scott’s rider friend had colored his opinion, had him looking for ghosts. Now, though, armed with this stack of twenty-five dead or missing women, Stevens was ready to believe there was something afoot.

  It was just a damn shame they couldn’t do anything about it. The phone lines in Butcher’s Creek had gone down in the night. Cell service was still a pipe dream, ditto an Internet connection. Until the storm abated, Stevens and Windermere were stuck in dark territory and it didn’t sit well with Stevens.

  He stood. Paced to the window, looked out at the storm, a Northwestern coal train grinding eastbound just barely visible in the flying snow. Stevens watched until the last car was gone. Then he turned back to the others.

  “Let’s figure this out. Sooner or later, this storm is going to blow over, and I want to be ready when it does. We need to get in contact with every sheriff’s department responsible for those cases,” he said, pointing to the stack. “We’re going to need to reopen every investigation, take it from the top. See if we can’t put together a profile on this guy.”

  “We’re working blind,” Windermere said. “If there’s really one killer, we don’t know a damn thing about him except he likes vulnerable women and apparently hops freights.”

  “That’s a start,” Stevens said. “We’ll run the fingerprints Sheriff Parsons lifted from Kelly-Anne Clairmont’s car and work through the coroner’s reports for any DNA evidence, signs of sexual assault, or a preferred murder weapon, whether he’s strangling them all or otherwise.”

  “This is going to be tough,” Finley said. “Some of these cases are three, four years old. I get what you’re trying to do, but trails run cold, don’t they? Memories fade, evidence disappears. Heck, some of the sheriffs you’ll want to talk to have probably been voted out by now.”

  “We’ll talk to them anyway,” Windermere said. “We’re the FBI, Deputy. You all like to play up this bumpkin routine, but I’m not buying it. I refuse to believe there aren’t competent investigators in these mountains and that they won’t want to help us solve this thing.”

  Finley looked her in the eye. “I’ll help you,” she said. “We’ll get it done.”

  “Good.” Windermere gestured out the window, the snow nowhere near slowing. “Now all we have to do is hope Mother Nature cuts us a break sometime soon.”

  34

  Ashlyn Southernwood.

  Mathers couldn’t ge
t through to Windermere or Stevens. He’d tried through the night after ending the Skype conversation with Ronda Sixkill, and he’d tried Carla’s number in the morning, as soon as he woke up. Still nothing. Straight to voicemail. Wherever they were, they were deep out of range.

  Mathers watched the Weather Channel as he prepared for work. Turned up the volume when the national forecast came on—the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains. The meteorologist was talking about cold ocean temperatures, the jet stream. He was saying that this was a significant weather event, this frigid, snowy winter; how global warming, paradoxically, was only going to make it worse. There was another storm in northern Montana and the Idaho panhandle, he said, the second big blast in just over a week.

  Mathers watched the weather map, the news footage from northern Idaho. The mountain passes closed, the towns inundated. The blizzard expected to rage another day, at least.

  And Stevens and Windermere were somewhere in the middle of it. Mathers turned off the TV. The thought of Carla out there was unsettling.

  He kept trying Windermere’s cell. Tried the sheriff’s department in Libby, Montana, but could only find out that the FBI agents were holed up with a deputy in some place called Butcher’s Creek, so small it didn’t have a police force. When Mathers tried the hotel there, he couldn’t get a connection.

  The goddamn storm. Mathers forced himself to switch focus. Ronda Sixkill had given him plenty to work with; no sense sitting around waiting for Stevens and Windermere to solve the case by themselves. He set out to find Ashlyn Southernwood.

  The search took most of the morning, and when Mathers finally tracked down Ashlyn Southernwood, he found she wasn’t a Southernwood at all. She was a Corbine, Ashlyn Corbine, from the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin.

  “Southernwood was my mother’s last name,” Nicole Corbine told Mathers when he reached her by phone. “That girl was crazy about her grandmother, I’ll say that about her. It was just after she died that Ash took off out of here.”

  If Nicole Corbine was upset by the news of her daughter’s death, she wasn’t showing it. “It’s not like I’m happy about it, mind you,” she said, sighing. “It’s just not all that unexpected. That girl’s been gone a long time, and we weren’t all that close to begin with.”

  “When did she run away?”

  “Just after my mother died, like I said. That would have been, what, five or six years ago. Ash was fifteen.”

  Fifteen, Mathers thought. And you didn’t lose your mind looking for her?

  Nicole Corbine must have interpreted his silence as a question. “I had four other kids to raise,” she said, though not defensively. “Ash was her own girl, bright and stubborn as hell. She wanted off the reservation, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her. It was only her gran keeping her around. When she died, like I said . . .”

  “You ever hear from her?”

  “Oh, sure. She sent a couple letters to her brothers, a postcard or two. Sometimes she called, if it was a big holiday. Sometimes she didn’t. She seemed happy, so I tried not to worry. Wasn’t much good worrying would have done, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Mathers said, “I guess I do. You mind if I send you some pictures of her? You can confirm it’s your daughter?”

  “Go ahead, if you have to. I guess it’s standard procedure in something like this, huh?” She paused, and when she continued, her voice hitched, just a little. “It was bad, wasn’t it? What they did to her, was it bad?”

  “It was bad,” Mathers said, suddenly feeling like he had an anvil on his chest. “I’m sorry.”

  Nicole Corbine was quiet for another beat. When she spoke again, her voice was small. “Do they know who killed . . . who did it?”

  “We’re working on it,” Mathers told her. “Two of our best agents are on the case.”

  “So you don’t know.”

  “Not yet, but we’ll find him. I’m sure we will.”

  “I guess you have to say that,” Corbine said. “These kinds of situations.”

  “No, I don’t,” Mathers replied. “I mean it.”

  The line went silent again. Then Corbine cleared her throat. “I wish she hadn’t gone, you know? Like, I know I couldn’t have kept her here with a team of horses, but it’s still . . .” She trailed off. “I miss her.”

  “I’m sorry.” The words seemed insignificant, minuscule. “I really am.”

  “Yeah. Well, send those pictures if you have to.” Corbine’s voice was stronger again. “And good luck finding whoever did it.”

  “I’ll keep you posted,” Mathers told her. “We’ll get him.”

  “Yeah,” Corbine said. “Okay.” Then the line went dead, and she was gone.

  35

  It was supposed to be like a vision quest,” Ash said. She laughed. “Not that I believe in that shit, but, you know, it’s supposed to be like an Anishinaabe tradition, a rite of passage or whatever. So I kind of told myself that’s what I was doing when I left, trying to find myself.”

  Mila gripped the grab irons, dangled her feet off the side of the reefer car. Watched the Everglades pass, miles of endless swamp. The reefer car was like a boxcar, except it had a little cubby on the end for the freezer unit. Ash and Mila had climbed inside the cubby somewhere in southern Florida. They were headed north.

  Sometimes the reefer unit would kick on, every half hour or so, drowning out the rest of the noise and making it impossible to talk. Then they would just laugh and sit at the edge of the cubbyhole and stare out at the world as it passed.

  But the reefer had shut off again, and Ash was talking, and Mila was asking questions she’d asked a hundred times before, but that she asked again anyway because, well, there was nothing else to do. And Mila liked to hear Ash talk.

  “My grandmother died and my mom was busy with my brothers,” Ash said. “And I looked around at my friends and they all seemed, you know, happy to be stuck in Diaperville—no joke, that’s the name of the town—for the rest of their lives. And I didn’t want that. I wanted to be like my grandmother. I wanted to travel and see things and actually be somebody. So I climbed on a freight train headed for Duluth, and I haven’t really stopped for long ever since.”

  “So was it worth it?”

  “Was it worth it?” Ash gave Mila a look. Smacked her on the shoulder a little. “Look around, girl. We’re freaking free. No responsibilities. Nothing to do. We can go where we want, and nobody can stop us.”

  Mila followed Ash’s gaze, out the cubbyhole and across the passing scenery. She still felt cowed by this life, like she didn’t quite belong, like sooner or later she would screw up and do something awful, something she would regret forever. But Ash didn’t seem to care about any of that. Ash seemed born to hop trains.

  “Do you ever miss home?” Mila asked her.

  “I miss my grandmother, sure. I miss her stories and I always miss her cooking. I wish she wasn’t gone, but at the same time, I don’t. If she was alive, I wouldn’t be here right now.” She cocked her head. “And you’d probably be dead, girl. Nobody to show you how to survive in the jungle.”

  “I would have survived,” Mila said, though she knew it wasn’t true. “But do you ever miss your family? Like your mom and your brothers?”

  Ash’s smile disappeared. She watched the scenery pass, her eyes distant. “I mean, of course I do. They’re my family, aren’t they?”

  “Would you ever go back?”

  Ash didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know. I think about it sometimes.”

  “And?”

  “And?” Ash blinked back to the present. Smiled, but kind of sad. Started to say something else, but then the reefer unit kicked on, drowning her out, and there was nothing to do but laugh and ride on in silence.

  —

  Mila awoke suddenly, out of breath, her heart pounding. Sat up and looked around
the cab of the locomotive, tensed, sure she’d heard voices. Sure someone was coming to find her.

  But there weren’t any voices. The train rumbled on. Mila pulled herself up to the driver’s seat and looked out the window. The snow was still falling, but it had eased up a little bit. She could see the moon above the mountains—or a bright patch through the clouds, at least.

  She was back in a remote-controlled engine. She’d caught on at the outskirts of Wenatchee, resolved to stay alert, watch out for bulls and other train people, cover as much ground as she could and hope she didn’t get caught.

  The woman on the forum, Lazy Jake, had given Mila a destination. The siding where he jumped, she’d written. It was just north of some town called Anchor Falls, a ways north of Whitefish. Mountain country. We passed the little post office, and I remember one of the guys saying the name. Anyway, the siding was north of there, in the middle of nowhere. I have no idea why he chose to jump off the train at that spot, but he sure looked like he knew where he was going.

  Mila rubbed the sleep from her eyes and watched out the window. Waited for a town, a siding, some kind of sign. Brought up the map on her phone and tried to estimate how far the train had gone while she’d slept. Outside was just forest, never-ending trees.

  And then the train slowed at another small town, another crew-change point, someplace called Bonners Ferry, a railroad truck waiting by the tracks. Mila had just enough time to look across at the town—a gas station, a handful of restaurants and a couple dingy bars, a few houses and railroad buildings—before she had to duck away so the railroad men wouldn’t see her.

  Five minutes later, the engine loaded up again and the train inched back out onto the main line. Mila stayed low until she was sure the town was behind her. Then she climbed up into the driver’s seat again and closed her eyes, tried to sleep, as she waited to make Anchor Falls.