Chapter 1 #2
“Those not handling the crime scene at the Gallagher home are looking for Juliana’s and Ray’s daughter. We’re prepared to launch a search if needed. We also have a staff member trying to track down her son,” the younger patrolman said.
“Are your people willing to search at night?” Mac asked.
Patrolman Wilson hesitated before shaking his head, gaze flicking toward the trees. “Not in the forest.”
Pelham didn’t exactly shut down when it got dark, but people tended to stay within the town’s perimeter, driving between their homes and Red’s Diner or the lone bar if they felt the need to hang out.
Stories about lights were still told to children and travelers passing through town, and ingrained superstitious habits were hard to break.
People didn’t walk alone after dark, and they certainly didn’t go traipsing through the forest if they could help it. Rangers did because that was their job.
What the locals knew, and which rangers made sure all visitors were aware of, were the forest paths that led to tiny, one-room cabins dotting the wilderness surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir.
The path to each one was designated by what locals called witchmarks carved into trees, carvings that Cillian had memorized as a child during summer camps.
The cabins themselves weren’t meant for camping but for safety, a long-standing tradition that could be traced back generations, to a time even before the reservoir existed.
Cillian wondered if maybe Aisling had run to one of those cabins in the terror of whatever she might have experienced.
He hoped so. It was better than the alternative.
Cillian mentally mapped where he knew her home to be against the forest with its hidden cabins.
A cabin might have been close enough for her to reach, but he wasn’t sure she’d go into the forest if the threat had come out of it.
“I’d like to head over to the Gallagher home and coordinate with the patrolmen about Aisling,” Cillian said to Mac.
Mac nodded. “I’ll go check on the Gallaghers’ Shoppe. Reports came back that nothing seemed amiss over there, but we can’t rule anything out. If we haven’t found signs of Aisling in the next hour, we’ll start an official search.”
No one asked about Bran, Juliana’s oldest child and only son.
As far as Cillian knew, Bran had left for Boston after high school, leaving the running of his family’s Ye Olde Curiosities Shoppe to his mother.
He’d come back to Pelham a few times, but Cillian never heard of his visits until after Bran was gone again.
He no longer had Bran’s phone number and would have no idea how to locate him without breaking some laws when it came to accessing a search program.
Sometimes he thought about trying social media, but never did.
He still missed Bran with an ache that hadn’t ever really gone away. Cillian had tried to fill that absence with other friends over the years, but even now, it still felt like he was missing half of himself.
“We’ll take it from here and keep you updated. The CSU team was instructed to start with this crime scene first. Don’t want to be wasting daylight,” Patrolman Wilson said. Cillian and Mac said their goodbyes to the patrolmen before returning to their trucks.
“Cillian,” Mac called out.
Cillian paused in climbing into the driver’s seat. “Yeah, boss?”
“Be careful. Keep your iron on you.”
Cillian nodded and hauled himself the rest of the way inside his truck.
He closed the door and buckled up, grimacing at the reddened, raw-looking skin on the palm of his right hand where the iron disk had sat.
He flexed his fingers, wincing at how his skin pulled.
It looked and felt like a burn, an allergic reaction he had lived with all his life.
His fellow rangers didn’t know about it, or anyone else for that matter outside medical providers, except his mother. He always forgot to mention it.
Shannon Dunne had raised him as a single mother, and her frustration with doctors when he was younger was what had caused her to become a nurse.
Cillian had always been a little sickly growing up, with the doctors saying he might outgrow the allergy someday.
He hadn’t, even though his immune system had gotten better at fighting off illnesses.
He leaned over to open the glove compartment, pulling out a small, dark jar of the ointment he’d used since he was a child.
He stared down at the faded sticker on the lid, the Gallaghers’ Shoppe trifecta logo printed on it.
It was the only stuff that had ever been able to heal the allergic reactions he experienced.
His mother had been skeptical the first time Bran’s mother had brought up the healing ointment she sold in her Shoppe.
Eventually, Shannon had bought a jar and used it, thinking it wouldn’t work, only it had.
Cillian had been five years old at the time, but the warning his mother had told him at such a young age was one she still spoke in the quiet moments just between them, mindful of everything and everyone around them, even the whispers on the air.
Never trust a witch.
She’d allowed his friendship with Bran, mostly because Bran had been his only friend growing up.
His mother had never softened much around Juliana despite the years of knowing the other woman, even when she gave up on clinical medicine and bought the healing ointment from the only Wiccan in Pelham.
Cillian never understood the distance between his mother’s words and her actions, but he loved her, and he still used the ointment she’d found to heal his hurts.
He wondered, in that moment, if this was the last jar he’d ever get to buy now that Juliana was dead.
“Fuck,” he muttered quietly.
He unscrewed the lid, dabbed a bit of the ointment on his palm, and rubbed it in.
Then, he put the jar away, the itch already fading from his mind, started the engine, and turned his truck around to head back to town.
The trees on either side of the dirt road rose up like a high wall of greenery, leaving only the sky visible.
Cillian could see Mac’s truck farther up the dirt road, and the chatter on the radio channel the Rangers used kept him company on the drive out of the forest.
Once he made it to the two-lane US Route 202, he turned left, crossing the double-yellow line to head south.
The Gallaghers’ home wasn’t located in what passed as the center of town.
Like their Shoppe, it was on the outskirts.
When Juliana had married Ray, she’d moved out of the two-bedroom apartment above the Shoppe into the home she and Ray had bought amid the trees and which everyone had always referred to as hers.
The Gallaghers had always had a peculiar reputation in town, regarded with a sort of polite deference by the older generations.
There wasn’t much of a younger generation these days, what with everyone moving to the cities.
Cillian had stayed. Once, years ago, Bran had promised to stay as well. Considering what had occurred today, it was probably for the best he’d left Pelham. Cillian had mostly survived Bran’s leaving. He knew, even now, after seven years of silence, he’d never survive Bran dying.
State Route 202 only had a few turnoffs and a couple of long drives leading to homes set far back from the road, deeper in the forest. Few homes were built directly adjacent to the road.
Mostly, it was bordered by trees and the telephone poles stretching down one side, birds perched on the wires every few hundred feet.
Cillian didn’t need the GPS to take him to the Gallaghers’ home; he still knew the way. Which meant his eyes were on the road, not on the screen of his phone attached to the hands-free cradle on the dash. That was the only reason he saw the flash of white amid the trees to his left.
He slammed on the brakes, seat belt cutting into his shoulder and locking from the force of his stop.
Cillian yanked the steering wheel to the right, driving onto the shoulder to get off the road.
He pulled up the emergency brake, put his hazards on, and reached for the rifle secured in the rack behind the two front seats before getting out.
The summer sun beat down on him as he stared across the road at the expanse of trees there and the soft shadows that lingered beneath the branches.
The greens and browns of summer nearing its peak filled his eyes, that flash of white nowhere to be seen, but Cillian knew something had been moving there between the trees.
Not lights—if the stories were true—but someone.
“Aisling?” Cillian called out as he crossed the road, cradling the rifle in both hands, finger resting over the trigger guard. “It’s me, Cillian. I promise I don’t mean you any harm. You have a lot of people worried about you.”
He reached the other side, stepping over the guardrail, careful of the slight incline below it.
The only thing in front of him was trees, some ferns, and a few bushes, all of it blocking the view deeper into the forest. The wind blowing through the branches made the leaves rustle, the soft susurration not quite loud enough to hide the delicate sound of a twig breaking.
Cillian raised the rifle, bracing the buttstock against his right shoulder as he stared down the rifle sights into the forest. “Aisling?”
Mac always said one couldn’t trust what came from the forest, but Cillian trusted his own eyes.
He stayed right where he was, staring into the forest, willing for it to give up the lost. Seconds that felt like hours passed, and that flash of white he’d seen while driving finally resolved itself into the slim figure of a young teenage girl who crept out from behind a tree.
Aisling looked nothing like her mother and father, nothing like her brother, with their dark hair and dark eyes.
She stood out and always had with her startling white-blonde hair and deep blue eyes he remembered looking almost black in the shadows, like right now.
Aisling’s appearance hadn’t changed much since the last time Cillian had seen her a few months ago in passing.
She was tall for thirteen, skinny and pale, standing before him barefoot in bloody clothes, looking as if she’d seen a ghost.
Or a nightmare.
Cillian lowered his rifle and let out a heavy breath. “Aisling.”
She didn’t respond, only watched him with those big eyes of hers, body stiff in a way that spoke of being primed to flee.
Cillian didn’t know how long she’d been out there in the forest, but it had been long enough to make her want to run.
Cillian trekked through a bit of vegetation to reach where she stood, going slow so as to not spook her.
“Let’s get you out of here,” he said quietly, offering her his hand. She stared at it for a long moment, shivering in a way he didn’t like. He wiggled his fingers at her, trying to ignore the way his heart beat hard against his ribs. “Come on, Aisling. I’ll keep you safe.”
She grabbed his hand with shaking fingers, and the moment she touched him, her expression crumpled.
Her lips trembled badly as tears welled up, but she didn’t make a sound as she cried.
Cillian carefully guided her out from the tree line and back toward the road.
Once in the sunlight, the cuts and scratches on her legs became more apparent.
Her bare feet were dirty and bleeding in areas, and her sleep clothes looked as if she’d rolled down a couple of hills in them.
He needed to get her somewhere safe.
“My truck is right there, and I’m going to take you back into town.”
From the time he’d stopped his truck to when he got Aisling situated in the front passenger seat, not a single vehicle had driven by.
It was just the two of them out on State Route 202, the next house maybe half a mile down the road, so that didn’t explain why the hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood on end.
Aisling finally made a sound, a breaking sort of whimper as her hands gripped his, her ragged fingernails biting into the rash stretched over his palm.
He noticed her fingernails were painted robin’s-egg blue, but the polish was all chipped now.
The beaded bracelet she wore seemed to be intact.
She wasn’t looking at him but back the way they’d come, face going as white as her hair.
Cillian carefully caught her chin, turning her head around to focus on him. “Look at me, not the forest.”
She was breathing so hard her entire body shuddered from it.
But her gaze returned to him, no longer lingering on whatever she thought she saw in the trees.
Cillian wasn’t going to check. He buckled her in, wrapped an emergency foil blanket around her, and then hurried around the front of the truck to get into the driver’s seat.
He racked his rifle, then started the engine, intent on getting back to Pelham.
He didn’t reach for the radio receiver until he was already driving down the road well above the speed limit, heading north.
“Dispatch, this is Ranger Seven. Aisling Gallagher has been located alive and in need of medical assistance. I’m bringing her in, over.”
Beside him, Aisling tucked her head beneath the edge of the emergency foil blanket and curled up in a ball beneath it, as if she could hide from whatever she had suffered through in the last twenty-four hours.
Cillian watched the road, and he watched Aisling, and he watched the forest out of the corners of his eyes, hoping to see nothing there in the shadows of the woods.
Hoping the stories about lights weren’t true.