by Joanna Bell
"No," I cut in, not eager to introduce any more delays into the process. "I can actually bring it myself – I have, uh, I have a bit of free time right now. I can drive down there this week if you want. How about Wednesday? Or Thursday? My mom can watch my daughter on those days, if I'm late getting back."
The sound of papers being shuffled around followed my question, and then a series of muttered 'darn-its' and then, finally, William Foxwell confirmed that he was free on Wednesday afternoon, after 2. I immediately agreed and he gave me directions to get to his office before we hung up.
I drove down to Grand Northeastern less than 24 hours later, with the little remnant I'd found in the woods on the Renner property tucked neatly into a sandwich bag in my purse. I followed the professor's instructions to get to his office, walking slowly and with what must have been a slightly awed look on my face down wide, high-ceilinged halls with shining marble floors and dark, rich woodwork framing the windows and doors. Students walked past me deep in conversation with their friends or with their eyes glued to their phones and I got that feeling you sometimes do when you suddenly realize you're in a space where you don't quite belong. I could have gone to college, if I'd wanted . My grades were technically good enough – maybe not good enough to get into an institution like Grand Northeastern – but good enough to get in somewhere. But there was no money for it, and then I got pregnant with Ashley and it just became one of those things that other people – people who weren't me – did with their lives.
Dr. Foxwell's office was on the second floor, with tall windows that looked out over the tall, stately trees of one of Grand Northeastern's quads. Dr. Foxwell himself was your typical mad professor – gray hair sticking up in all directions, a tendency to talk with his hands and a desk covered in seemingly endless piles of paper and books. He shook my hand firmly before ushering me into his office and taking the little plastic sandwich bag out of my hands with the kind of gentleness one must develop after a lifetime of handling very old, very small, very precious things.
"Ah," he said, when he finally held it. "Ah. Mm-hm. Right. Yes. Interesting."
It continued like that for a little while, as he opened a drawer and took out what looked like a jeweler's loupe. He turned it this way and that, turning the little broken piece silver over and over in his fingers, bringing it right up so it was almost touching the loupe.
Finally, after what felt like quite a long time, he set the loupe and the trinket on his desk and turned to look at me, his hands clasped on his lap. He had one of those hang-dog faces you sometimes see on older people, all sad-looking jowls and bags under the eyes. Somehow, it worked for the professor.
"Now," he said, addressing me directly. "Where did you say you found this? River Falls?"
I nodded, pleased that he hadn't just declared the piece worthless and untraceable. "Yeah, the woods. I was, um, I was going for a walk. I tripped and I just felt this under my hand. Is it strange that I found it in River Falls? Barry O'Dell asked me the same question."
"If it's what I think it is, Ms. Foster – or Sophie – do you mind if I call you Sophie?" I shook my head and the professor continued. "Yes, good, alright then – as I was saying, Sophie, if the piece is what I think it might be, then it is rather an extraordinary place to find an item of such a... provenance, let's say, in a small town in New York State."
"And what do you think it is?" I asked eagerly, leaning in, sensing that some new information was about to be revealed.
William Foxwell paused before replying, and picked up the damaged piece of jewelry again to stare at it once more. "I can't be certain of this until I have a closer look at it, you understand – it could be some kind of extremely well done replica, after all – but from everything I can see right now I must say it looks very much like a portion of an Anglo-Saxon brooch."
"A brooch?" I asked, focusing on by far the least important part of what Dr. Foxwell had just told me. "And – what did you say? Anglo Saxon?"
I had only the vaguest idea of who the Anglo Saxons were. White people from Europe, was that it? Rich white people? Or were they some older group, some tribe lost to history?
"Anglo Saxons," the professor replied, "are the people who inhabited what is now England from around the 5th century. One of the Germanic tribes."
"The what?" I asked, confused as to what some 5th century Germanic tribe living in England had to do with what I'd found in the woods on the Renner property. "The 5th century? I'm sorry, professor, but how does that relate to the brooch?"
Dr. Foxwell ran his fingers down the length of his beard. "Well, Sophie, what a 5th century people has to do with your piece is that it looks like they made it. The etchings, the patterns – as I said, this is either an exceptionally well made replica, the likes of which I have never seen before, or it's real. And I have to say, if it's real I have no idea how it got into the woods in New York in 2018. Dropped by someone who didn't know it's value, most likely – but even then, where did they get it? Pieces like this are exceptionally rare – rare enough to be found only in museums and some private collections. Regular people don't just walk around wearing Anglo-Saxon jewelry without knowing it."
I sat back in my chair, thoroughly confused and, at least at first, a little disappointed. Sure, it was interesting if there were pieces of ancient jewelry in the woods on the Renner property. But I didn't see a way it helped advance the case – especially given the fact that it had almost certainly been dropped or lost very recently, and by someone who wasn't directly relevant to it.
"Well how do you think it got there?" I asked, noticing how excited the professor was and not wanting to be dismissive or rude.
He ran a hand through his unruly hair and grinned. "Someone must have dropped it, because as far as I know, there's rather a dearth of Anglo-Saxon burial sites in New York State. I'm hoping you wouldn't mind if I keep it for a little while? I'd like to take a closer look, maybe run some tests on the some of the soil embedded in the detailing? I promise I'll keep you up to speed on anything I might find."
I agreed to let the professor keep the broken piece for as long as he needed – it didn't have much use to me unless I could tie it to the investigation into the missing girls, after all.
Seven
Sophie
Winter turned into spring in River Falls, and I was still on leave. I would drop by the office every now and again, ostensibly to pick up something I'd forgotten in a desk drawer, or just to chat with Dan – but the real reason was so I could try to keep an eye on whether or not they knew of any new developments in the investigation. The FBI was in charge of most aspects of it, but I figured it couldn't hurt to keep Jerry and Dan familiar with my face – and with the idea that I would be back, and as soon as possible. The date appeared to be April. Or May. Jerry wanted me to jump through some hoops, confirm I wasn't going to rock any boats.
I kept looking into things on my own, of course. After Katie Wallis and the piece of jewelry from the Renner property didn't seem to pan out I moved online, trawling through post after post on true crime forums, trying to discern if there were any amateur, internet-based sleuths who actually had any plausible ideas. It was though this late-night surfing that I discovered I wasn't the only one who wasn't buying the kidnapping narrative – nor the only one who had started to speculate about other, seemingly more likely circumstances. It seemed the cult narrative was popular among the more hard-headed of those looking into the case themselves.
Perhaps, a lot of posts suggested, both girls had run into a particularly persuasive cult leader – someone who was not only able to lure them away from their families but, in Paige's case, to lure the family themselves away. It would explain the sudden change of heart in the Wallis family, to believe that they'd been informed that their daughter was alive, and safe. It would explain it even further if they'd been threatened somehow, forced into silence.
I went to far as to join some of these communities, under the handle 'concernedcitizen838,' and would ofte
n find myself hunched over my laptop after Ashley's bedtime, my face illuminated by the pale glow from the screen. I got to know who was who in the biggest communities following the case, and to discern the smart and serious members from the more conspiracy-minded ones.
It was in one of these online communities – True Crime Online or TCO for short – that I ran into someone I was about eighty percent sure was Katie Wallis. The username was male – 'JimmyOcean' – but whoever it was behind the internet persona, they seemed at times to have an uncanny amount of knowledge not just about the case but about Emma herself. And when I looked into their comment history I was able to see that the dates of the earliest comments lined up perfectly with the Wallis family's return to the UK.
JimmyOcean was extremely sensitive to even the slightest hint that Emma Wallis might have been up to no good, or may have intentionally left her family in the dark. 'He' showed up quickly whenever anyone dared to speculate about Emma's motives, or to suggest that perhaps her relationship with her family hadn't been as wholesome as it had been portrayed.
"She left England to study in the US, didn't she?" One comment from another poster asked, late on a Thursday night. "If you love your family so much, why would you move halfway across the world to get away from them?"
Amongst the many responses from people who had done just that, and not because they hated their families, JimmyOcean's popped up within ten minutes:
"Emma gets along just fine with her family. To suggest otherwise is baseless speculation, Please check your facts before you go spouting off about a topic you have no personal knowledge of."
Two minutes after that comment was posted, it was edited so the first sentence read: "As far as we know, Emma got along with her family just fine."
The tense was changed, and the wording, to make it sound more like JimmyOcean was just another commenter. I saw the same thing happen multiple times over the course of a few weeks, up to and including their participation in a newly posted speculation thread wondering if there was a portal to another world located somewhere on or near to the Renner property.
JimmyOcean typed the following comment three minutes later: "You might be surprised. :)" And two minutes after that, it was deleted.
I was certain, by then, that JimmyOcean was Emma Wallis. But I still wasn't at a point where I could look at that statement – 'You might be surprised' – and truly give the possibility that something deeply and completely strange was afoot a chance in my mind. It was still off-limits, outside the realm of reality.
And then, as the personality-disordered days of early April – the ones that never know if they want to be chilly or mild – turned into the real warm days of late April, and Jerry Sawchuk began to make noises about letting me come back to work just as soon as I saw the counselor, Professor Foxwell called me one day in the middle of the afternoon.
"Hello?" I said, not really expecting any useful information and too preoccupied with the grocery shopping I was in the middle of to pay too much attention. "Professor Foxwell? How are you?"
We went quickly through the preliminary small-talk and then I asked him, because I still had to go to the bank and the pharmacy and I was in a bit of a rush, if he'd found out anything about the piece.
"Well," he replied, pausing the way one does before delivering interesting news. "I actually have. It's really – Sophie, it's really quite extraordinary."
I didn't know William Foxwell very well. I didn't know if he was the kind of man to exaggerate or dramatize. "What's that?" I asked. "Did you find out what the piece comes from? Is it a –"
"We still think it's part of a brooch," he replied. "Silver, so it will have belonged to someone of means. But the finding that I have to admit I'm actually having some trouble believing has to do with the soil we tested, found on the piece itself."
"Oh?" I replied, plucking a gallon of milk off a shelf and putting it in my shopping cart. "What did you find?"
"Well," Dr. Foxwell continued, "we had it – the soil – radio carbon dated. We did it twice, when the results the first time seemed impossible to believe. But they came back just the same the second time. It would seem, Sophie, that the soil on that piece of broken jewelry you brought me dates back to the 8th century. Well, 8th or 9th – possibly even the 10th, but –"
"The 8th Century?" I asked, still slightly too distracted to properly take in what I was being told.
"Or the 9th, possibly even the 10th," the professor repeated, waiting for a response to what he clearly considered to be astounding news.
I grabbed a container of strawberry flavored yoghurt and put it in my cart, and then went over what he'd just said in my mind. And then I stopped in my tracks.
"What?" I asked. "I'm sorry, I think I misheard you – I'm in the middle of some errands right now. It sounded like you said the soil on the brooch comes from the – the 8th century?"
"Yes," Dr. Foxwell replied. "Around then."
"But," I started, furrowing my brow and dragging my cart to the side of the aisle when an older man sighed audibly at my being in the way, "how is that possible? How can something I found in the woods in River Falls in 2018 have soil from so long ago on it? That's – the 8th century? Isn't that over a thousand years?"
"It is."
"So how did it – how did it get onto the brooch? How did –"
"I have absolutely no idea. I'm calling to tell you what we found, but I'm also calling hoping maybe you can shed a little more light on the situation."
I chuckled, shaking my head. "I don't know about that – I just found it. I don't know anything else about it – that's why I brought it to Barry O'Dell in the first place. Are you sure the test was accurate?"
"I had it tested twice. I've ordered another test, on a different soil sample from the brooch, but these things are usually very accurate. Can you remember when you found it – was it buried? Or did you just find it lying on the ground?"
"Lying on the ground," I told him, remembering back to the strange light-headed episode I'd had in the woods and the feeling of the jewelry piece, cold against my palm, when I placed my hand on the ground. "It wasn't buried at all. It was just – lying there."
"Amazing," the professor said. "It must – someone must have dropped it. But I can only imagine the kind of person who would be carrying around a seemingly freshly excavated piece of Anglo-Saxon silver."
"How about someone like you?" I suggested, unable to come up with an alternate explanation while I was standing in the middle of the dairy aisle. "A professor, I mean? An academic?"
"That's the only thing I could come with myself," Professor Foxwell replied. "But even then, these pieces are usually cleaned before being taken anywhere – especially before being sent abroad to a conference or something like that."
Extraordinary soil findings or not, I had errands to complete and the professor had work of his own to get back to. We talked for a few more minutes before hanging up but neither of us could come up with any remotely plausible reason for a piece of Anglo-Saxon jewelry, with soil from the same time period stuck in its grooves, to be lying in the woods in New York in 2018. None that didn't involve absentminded professors dropping precious research items in the middle of the private property at the center of a massive investigation, and even that felt far-fetched.
That evening, over dinner of baked chicken breasts and broccoli salad, my daughter asked why I wasn't listening to the story she was telling me about one of the other kids in her class throwing up in the coat closet that day.
"I'm sorry, Ash," I apologized, feeling guilty because she was right – I wasn't really listening. "I have a lot on my mind right now."
"Is it the case?" She enquired, stabbing a piece of broccoli with her fork. "Is it that man in the woods?"
Ashley was obviously too young to be told about the gory details of my job, but I did try to tell her as much as I could. I didn't want to raise her completely insulated from the real world – or from the fact that sometimes, bad things did happen.
I'd told her about the man in the woods – not that he'd tried to come after me, or that I'd had to shoot him – but just that he had been there, in his strange furs, and that he'd seemed particularly interested in a car that had happened to be driving by at the time. She'd thought it was funny, laughing at my description of his expressions and his outfit. I hadn't mentioned him for a few weeks, though, so my ears perked up when she brought him up during dinner that night.
"The man in the woods?" I asked. "We haven't talk about him for weeks, Ash. Mommy's not in any danger, you know. He can't do anything to –"
"I know. I was just thinking."
"Oh were you?" I smiled. "Well that's enough of that, kid. Finish your broccoli first, then we can get back to thinking."
"Mom!" Ashley laughed. "I am eating my broccoli. I can do two things at once, you know."
We kept eating, but I was still distracted. It was just as I was about to ask her if she wanted frozen yoghurt for dessert when she looked up at me, a thoughtful expression on her face, and asked if the man in the woods was a Viking.
"A Viking?" I replied, taking our cleaned plates into the kitchen and chuckling at my daughter's quirky imagination. "What makes you say that?"
"Well you said he was wearing furs, right?" She called after me as I rinsed the dishes and took the frozen yoghurt out of the freezer. "And you said he had a sword, too?"
"Yup," I called back. "A big sword – so big I don't even know how he was carrying it."
"Well we're learning about the Vikings in class," my daughter continued. "They wore fur and they had big swords. And they –"
"I don't think there are any Vikings in New York, sweetie."
" – lived over a thousand years ago, mom! A thousand years! That's a really long time, isn't it?"
