by Ben Farthing
Instead, she said, “I’m handling it. Kate’s a smart girl. I just gotta go remind her of that.” If I can find her.
“You want me to come with you? Or get Missing Persons involved?”
“No. Just tell me what’s in those emails.”
“I’ll do a wellness check and sweet talk management to unlock the door.”
Cessy zipped her bag. “Right. That makes more sense than breaking in.”
“In case management gets curious, remind me what Kate looks like.”
Cessy texted him a photo she’d taken when they’d moved Kate into her first D.C. apartment. Kate was sweaty from hauling boxes. Her permanent smile had a tired lilt on the edges.
“I forgot how young she is,” Landis said. “She could be your daughter.”
“I’d have been a thirteen-year-old mom. But thanks for pointing out how old I look.”
“Is that why you’ve been skipping your get-togethers? Not enough in common?”
“How’s that relevant to finding those emails?” The truth was, Cessy loved hearing Kate babble about her first “real” job, and how much good she’d be able to do. She enjoyed advising her little sister on the surprisingly tricky basics of adulthood like setting up a home security system, or negotiating salary. She’d only missed their lunches because of work. She didn’t understand why Kate didn’t confide in her that Jackson had called.
“It was just a question. I’ll help you out. If you do our paperwork the rest of the year.”
“The rest of the month.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“Fine. Call me when you get those emails.”
They ended the call.
Cessy resisted the urge to call him back. She would handle this on her own. She had no evidence Jackson was dangerous, and she’d be accused of being an irrational woman if she reported a missing person who’d obviously gone to rekindle an old flame.
She’d had enough of those comments from her colleagues after Pat had divorced her. He told Cessy she “tried too hard to be normal,” as if that were the reason he was getting blowjobs from college girls at the 24-hour gym. She’d become short-tempered at work for a couple months, and five years later, still had the reputation.
Cessy checked through her bag one last time. Everything she’d need for a few days. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be that long.
She filled extra bowls with food and water for her cat, and texted her neighbor to ask him to check in.
Cessy took another look around the empty house. It was peaceful, being able to leave everything after just a phone call and a text message.
Sad, Kate would argue.
Cessy shushed the imagined insult. Her life was fine. The world was chaotic around her, but Cessy did her part. She charged in, did what needed doing, and then retreated back home where she was isolated from the chaos.
She carried her bag to the truck. Traffic rumbled from the highway a quarter-mile away. Her street was a tightly-packed row of brightly lit houses. The cloudless sky was blank charcoal, light pollution drowning the stars.
Cessy started the engine.
Time to charge in, talk some sense into Kate, and then retreat back home.
And if Jackson had hurt Kate, well, then Cessy would do what needed doing.
3
At 4 a.m., Cessy still drove like a caffeinated bat out of hell to reach a town of people who wouldn’t spit on her if she were on fire.
Exhaustion now flavored her guilt, and together they tasted like anger.
If Jackson had just kept to their backwater hometown, and left her baby sister alone, Cessy would be home asleep with her cat curled up and purring between her ankles.
And who thought it was a good idea to block the one road into Hamlin, West Virginia?
Cessy braked to a stop. Her one working headlight shone a tight tunnel of light over cracked asphalt. It reflected off a yellow and orange barrier.
Cessy groaned. She couldn’t catch a break. How often could there possibly be maintenance on Mud River Road? But the one time she needed it, it was closed.
Okay. She’d had her pity party. Time to solve the problem.
She couldn’t drive around the barrier. The steep mountainside and wild forest made that impossible.
Really, since this was the only road over the mountain and into Hamlin, the barrier didn’t make sense. Unless someone was laying a trap for a carjacking.
Cessy laughed at the thought. Carjacking on a backwoods West Virginia highway. Outside a town of two thousand people. At four in the morning.
That’d be the luckiest carjacking ever.
Unless they had a specific target in mind. If Jackson knew Cessy was hunting him, he’d know she’d take this road.
Cessy opened her door. Cool mountain air chilled her. Cicadas shrieked from the dark forest that surrounded the road.
She hopped down out of her idling 4Runner to investigate.
What better way to find this asshole than to spring his trap?
Her shoes squelched into mud, releasing a scent of rotting earth that mingled with the engine’s burnt oil. Her stomach flinched. With only gas station coffee and Ranch sunflower seeds to sustain it, Cessy’s gut wasn’t happy. And worry for Kate was the icing on the stomachache cake.
Her weak headlight revealed a thick copse of young trees encroaching on one side of the pavement, and a steep gulch on the other. At the edges of the light, old West Virginia oaks towered over the lonely road.
Cessy peered into the darkness between tree trunks. If Jackson was out there, Cessy was an easy target. Maybe she shouldn’t be so bold.
Except the shitstain she was chasing was too cowardly to be dangerous to anyone willing to fight back. Cessy wasn’t in danger.
Her little sister’s cheery demeanor had become genuine in the five years since Kate left their hometown. Reason number one was getting away from Jackson.
If Cessy had to haul Kate back to D.C. in handcuffs, she would. She wasn’t going through another three years of convincing Kate that Jackson’s smug grin concealed a dangerous manchild.
But a closer look at the ROAD CLOSED barrier told Cessy that this wasn’t an ambush planned by a 20-something drug dealer. She walked towards it. Her gut relaxed, grateful to step away from the rotting mud her shoes had disturbed.
The barrier was mounted on thick posts that plunged down into the asphalt. Gray splashes of cement around the posts said that this was a long-term blockade.
Cessy couldn’t imagine what road hazard warranted such a permanent solution.
Hell, this cut off Mom and Dad and their neighbors from Walmart. They should be rioting.
Cessy rapped her knuckles on the post. Too solid to drive through. She headed back to the truck.
She froze. Someone was talking.
A muffled male voice hung in the forest air, an angry undertone to the screaming cicadas and the raspy V6 engine.
She only caught fractures.
“-lazy vermin, who turn our home into-”
Cessy froze. The hairs on her neck stiffened. She jerked around, trying to pinpoint where the voice was coming from. In the dark woods, the animal corner of her brain insisted that whichever direction she faced, the man was directly behind her.
“Jackson?” she demanded.
The voice continued, still muffled like it was coming through a rag. “-we don’t deserve this, not after we’ve worked so hard-”
Cessy whipped around again.
That wasn’t Jackson. Kate was the same age as her ex--not yet twenty-five. The man somewhere here in the night had a raspiness to his anger. He sounded closer to Cessy’s age--pushing forty.
Cessy wasn’t afraid of Jackson. The nasally teenager she’d met had verbally abused her little sister, but been too afraid to look Cessy in the eyes. She suspected he’d now be willing to raise his hand against Kate--but Cessy would love for the little shit to try it with her.
This older man whose voice surrounded her, he was an unknown.
<
br /> She strained to hear his steady ranting, but the cicadas drowned him out.
Cessy became very cognizant of the fact that she’d left her gun in its holster on the passenger seat.
If she dashed back now, would the ranting man reach her first? Where would he emerge from? She couldn’t see what hid behind slender tree trunks and low branches.
But the man didn’t sound that far away. He sounded within arm’s reach, only muffled by the cicadas.
She caught another piece of his rant.
“-do they deserve the charity that we’ve offered? I think you know the answer to-”
Cessy inched back to the truck. At every movement she waited for him to burst from the trees.
The cicadas’ screeching grew quiet.
The furious, still-muffled voice surrounded her, suddenly fully audible.
“We built it with our blood and our parents built it with theirs. It gets under my skin, the vermin’s audacity, their entitlement, their disrespect.”
Cessy ducked, spun around, certain the man had left his hiding spot to finally attack.
“But we’ve called the rat catcher and the rats are drowning, ladies and gentlemen. Their little babies cling to their vermin mothers’ backs and they all go down together.”
The street was empty. Nobody was attacking her.
“Water in the lungs. It’s a burning shame, but they do it to themselves.”
Cessy looked down. The man’s choked rant came from beneath her feet. From beneath the asphalt.
The cicadas picked up again, from above her in the trees. They drowned out the voice underneath.
Her queasiness grew. Pressure up her esophagus. She swallowed.
Jackson in the woods she could deal with. An unknown man in the woods was more dangerous, but she could handle dangerous.
Cessy didn’t know how to react to a voice from under the ground. Unprecedented situations by definition couldn’t be prepared for. Couldn’t be defended against.
She crouched down to hear better.
The cicadas’ din still made his rants unintelligible.
She pressed her ear against the cold asphalt. Bits of gravel stuck to her cheek.
She caught only a few words, “-day after tomorrow-”, but clearly heard the hate that dripped from his voice.
The narrow trunks of young trees swayed in the wind. They looked sideways with her cheek against the ground like this.
Cessy suddenly felt vulnerable. Her back was exposed, and some sort of insanity was happening beneath the ground.
She considered whether stress and worry and exhaustion were making her hallucinate.
Her phone rang.
The electronic xylophone tune was disjointed in the dark woods.
Cessy jumped to her feet and jogged to the truck.
It was Kate.
Relief flooded through Cessy. A week of unreturned calls, and finally some confirmation that Kate was okay. She answered.
A now-familiar tinny shriek erupted from the phone. It pierced Cessy’s ears, cutting her off from the cicadas and the muffled monologue. Again, a warbling like a train passing, and again, with a gurgling and scraping like it was dragging wire behind it.
Cessy doubled over. She jammed her palms against her ears.
This time, the sound wasn’t just coming from phone.
The earth beneath her shoes vibrated. It shook in sync with the pulsing of the shriek.
She staggered toward the truck.
The forest grew darker, even though her truck’s single headlight stayed strong.
The sense of a train passing subsided. The keening whistle continued.
Cessy forced the phone in front of her face, reached for the end call icon, and then he spoke.
“-sneaking into our town like they didn’t try to burn it down years ago-”
The same angry voice, no longer muffled, now yelling from her phone, even though Kate’s name was still on the screen.
“-but we remember who’s vermin and who’s not-”
Her head throbbed near to bursting, but Cessy now had a target for all the stress and fear of the past night. She yelled back into the phone. “Who the fuck are you? Where’s Kate?”
He didn’t acknowledge her.
“-we take care of our own, more generously than-”
Cessy closed her eyes, breathed cool air deep into her lungs, and made the most honest threat of her life. “Anything you do to my little sister, I’ll do ten times worse to you.”
She ended the call.
The whistling ended. Her head stopped throbbing. Her ears felt empty. Her heart still pounded.
“Kate,” she whispered.
A breeze rustled the pine needles behind her.
The voice had gone quiet. The cicadas, too.
The forest was still. Dead.
Cessy tried to think, but she couldn’t get that noise out of her head. The warbling, whumping train had somehow carried the same hate as the man.
Cessy squeezed her eyes shut then opened them.
She was overreacting. The only thing to fear here was still Kate’s disappearance after Jackson contacted her.
She jumped into the driver’s seat and shut the door. She felt safer.
Inside the truck, it was easier to convince herself that someone had hacked her phone. Jackson had made some smart friends, older, with deeper voices. He’d known that Cessy would follow Kate. This was his attempt to scare her off.
That explanation didn’t ring true. Jackson wasn’t that clever. But Cessy stopped her thoughts from exploring that path.
Her priority was still to find Kate.
Someone had blocked off the only paved road over the mountain and into town? Cessy had enough run-ins with the Sheriff twenty years ago when she’d been the town’s favorite teenager to hate. She knew the back ways: Fire access roads over the mountain, and down into the valley.
Cessy put the truck into gear, turned around, and headed for the town she’d fled after high school: Hamlin, West Virginia.
4
It took Cessy half an hour to find the fire access road.
She remembered it hidden between two houses on the mountainside. One of those had been razed since she was a teenager. The other was now boarded up, the roof caved in.
She almost drove right past the dirt road before she noticed the red rusty gate. That was standard for fire access roads. The shiny new chain holding it closed was not.
Someone really didn’t want anybody reaching Hamlin.
Cessy had a hacksaw in her toolbox in the back, but her 4Runner could get around the gate easily enough. The forest was thinner here, and there was no gulch.
Before she took off up a neglected dirt road up a jagged West Virginia mountain, Cessy reached for her phone. She should check in with Detective Landis.
It was four thirty in the morning. Her partner would have been up for half an hour already, tinkering with his fishing boat before heading back inside to make his daughters breakfast, and then heading out for the day to deal with the criminals of Fairfax County.
She called him as she pulled off the road and around the gate. Her shocks squeaks and the truck rocked. Dead branches broke under her tires.
The phone rang twice, then Landis answered. “I don’t have the laptop yet. I was up until eleven dealing with paperwork from our arrest.”
“You mean you spent the night sleeping instead?”
“After I filed the missing persons report on your behalf. Any news?”
“I’m just checking in.” She explained the roadblock. “I know a back way over the mountain.”
Cessy drove back onto the dirt road and pointed her headlight uphill.
“Whoa there.” A tool clanked in the background. “Isn’t there another paved road into town?”
“It’d be a two-hour drive. I’m exhausted as it is. This’ll be fine.”
“If you thought that, you wouldn’t have called to check in.”
Cessy rolled her eyes. Sometim
es she appreciated the fatherly care he started showing after her divorce. Now was not one of those times.
Cessy looked back at the chained gate. Fifteen years with the department had trained her to always plan a quick exit route. After she crossed this mountain, there’d be no quick exit out of Hamlin.
“It’s not the offroading that has me worried.” She headed up the mountain. “When I was checking out the barrier, it was... weird.”
“Because it was cemented into the ground? I can call West Virginia’s DOT and ask about that. Might not be official.”
“No, I’ll do that.” The truck bumped over a rut. She rounded a curve, and was swallowed by the woods. “There was a speaker or something underground. Like a talk radio host angry about something.”
“They usually are.”
“Underground?”
“Angry. You think someone buried a radio? That’s what has you freaked out?”
“Not just that. I got a call from Kate’s phone.”
She knew Landis well enough to hear him freezing with concern. “But not from Kate?”
“No, it was the radio show. And that noise again.” Her ears hurt and her head throbbed just thinking about it.
“You think someone hacked your phone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or someone has Kate’s phone.”
Cessy didn’t want to think about that. “Or Jackson spoofed her phone number to fuck with me.”
Landis signed. “It’s a mess, that’s for sure. Once the office opens, I can pull some strings to get a warrant for her cell carrier. Get a location on the phone.”
“Thanks.”
“Cessy,” Landis said with too much compassion, “what if Kate didn’t go willingly?”
Then she might not be alive. Cessy couldn’t consider it. It’d taken her a whole week to notice she hadn’t heard from Kate. Then another week of unreturned phone calls and text messages before she finally went to investigate. She was a shitty big sister. If anything had happened to Kate, it was her fault.
Her tire skidded in loose dirt. The other three compensated and she kept on up the mountain.
“Willingly or not, my job’s the same,” Cessy said. “I’ll see if my parents want to change their story about not hearing from Kate.”
