Chapter 3
I take the country curves slow despite the rising urge to press on the pedal until I can feel the speed in my chest.
There’s nothing like rushing down a rural road on a summer day with cicadas singing in the trees above you.
The whole world is humming. It’s invigorating.
Especially after a week spent in the city in an office with people who won’t stop talking about personal development and the powers of herbal tea.
Wind whips through the car. It strips the cloying frustration that’s built up in my body.
I feel lighter, cleaner, less weighed down than I have in days. Weeks, actually.
Has it really been weeks since I felt this good?
For a brief, intense moment, I’m overcome with the memory of driving through Hocking Hills with my mom.
She loved living in the country. She loved the fog that drifted through the trailers in the morning and the deer that wandered through the homes at dusk.
Don’t get either of those in the trailer park we moved to the summer before college so I wouldn’t have to pay for campus housing.
Affording tuition even with scholarships and student loans and a million summer jobs was a struggle. Would it have been possible? I’d have to work nonstop, but yeah. My mom insisted that in the end it’d be worth it.
She was right. Her moving out of the country and to Columbus so I could live at home and commute to classes saved me literal thousands. I had to be grateful. I was grateful. That didn’t stop the gratefulness existing hand in hand with guilt that she sacrificed another thing for my sake.
Her love of being outside is the reason I started drawing in the first place. She’d take me to a park—not with swings and slides and Astroturf, but one where the woods were thick, and the creeks ran quick and clear.
Most of the time my eyes were down to look for cool rocks or weird sticks or feathers plucked from a bird’s wing and hidden in the underbrush. By the end my pockets were full and my stomach was squirming in anticipation of giving them to her when we got home.
I was always trying to give my mother something.
A report card with all A’s; a rock with a hole through the middle; a clean house for her to come home to after a long shift; a meal she didn’t have to cook; a safe place to talk about the things that hurt her, about the things she never told anyone else.
Eventually, the things I tried to give her after our walks were too much.
“How ’bout you just pick one and draw it when we get home,” she said. The forest debris from that day was laid out on our peeling laminate table. Her hair was slicked back in a tight ponytail that she hadn’t taken down since she got home from work. “One special thing I can keep. Okay?”
I kept it up, and she kept them all. I had the drawings bound into a book for Mother’s Day the year I graduated high school. Having the finished product in my hands inspired the children’s book I’ve been trying to illustrate since my first-semester art class.
One Special Thing, a mother and daughter’s relationship as told through drawings of the objects found on their walks through the woods.
There’d be no more walks in the woods until she was feeling better. Maybe not even then. She’s almost sixty now. Being an STNA had wrecked her body at a pace that none of my cubicle coworkers would ever experience.
I don’t really want to think about that, so I don’t.
The hills open up into a valley pockmarked with one-story ranches.
The homes disappear entirely after the directions prompt me to turn onto Harmon Road.
It’s a one-lane dirt-and-scattered-gravel excuse for a thoroughfare.
Leaves from last year’s fall litter the stormwater ditches along either side.
The air smells dark and earthy—the good kind of decomposition.
No maggots squirming in eye sockets, no flesh melting off brittle bones, just leaves falling to bits and wood turning dark and tender.
It’s fifteen minutes on Harmon Road before a house appears. It’s tucked into the low point of forested hills. A roof that’s more moss than shingle, and a sagging wood porch that’s been bleached by the sun peek through the trees.
The road goes up a hill tall enough I can’t see who might be coming up the other side. I slow and move over as much as I can without sliding into the ditch to my right. Cresting the hill reveals another hill beyond.
A half mile later, there’s another home. This one is newer. Robin’s-egg blue siding, a gleaming dark gray metal roof, a brand-new Jeep in the driveway without a single spot of dirt on it.
We go another mile up soft, nameless hills, bumping through mud puddles, with not a single house in sight. Finally, the road curves to reveal a brilliantly red gate stretching the width of the road.
I park six or so yards away and turn to Ripley. “Ready for a walk?”
She perks up at the W word and presses her nose to the passenger-side window, leaving a cloudy smear. Bringing my dog for an inspection is not allowed. We’re in the middle of nowhere though. Who’s gonna know?
The air is thick with the scent of growing things and sun-warmed earth. For the first time in weeks, I’m not just some shape floating through space, but actually connected to the world.
Ripley is practically vibrating when I open the passenger-side door. My water bottle goes into my backpack, I drape her slip lead across my shoulders, and a note with my information and reason for being here goes on the dashboard.
“Break.” I give her release word. Ripley leaps out, does a big stretch, and sets off sniffing the edges of the forest.
She wouldn’t be allowed off leash in a more populated setting.
Not because of her, but because of untrained people and their untrained dogs.
I’ve spent hours upon hours socializing and training Ripley.
Any extra money or time I managed to scrape together went to trying new things with her: dock diving, lure chasing, scent work.
But who has the time, let alone the money, to pursue any of those things consistently? Not me.
All that work means I now have a well-balanced, responsive dog that’s indifferent to other animals, fully ignores new humans, and can be trusted to snuffle around in the woods.
The truck beeps when I lock it once, twice, three times, because what if the first two didn’t work? You never know. Gotta make sure.
“Ripley, here,” I say when I get to the gate.
She abandons snorting around a clump of grass and runs to me. In a rush of white teeth and a pink mouth, she takes a treat from my hand.
The gate is composed of thick metal painted red. A shiny chain wrapped in snaking loops around the middle keeps it closed. Cicadas’ exoskeletons dangle from the red metal. Thickets have grown over the barbed wire fence at each end of the gate.
I’m about to tug on the chain to see if it’s open like Ellis said when I see it.
See them.
There’s something on the gate, mostly obscured by overgrowth, and I have to move a bit of the brush aside to see clearly.
There are … things … hanging from the rusted bars. Things woven from dried grass and thin sticks, threatening and jagged.
Three circles, each with two sticks intersecting in the center.
It’s the Zodiac Killer symbol, or what the Zodiac symbol was meant to be: crosshairs.
Two small, hollow pieces of wood hang from each of the crosshairs.
They’re attached by thin twine and make a soft tock, tock, tock sound when they knock together.
This doesn’t feel like someone’s weird little arts and crafts project. It feels like a threat.
I should get in the truck and drive away. Every true crime podcast ever and Emma’s voice tell me that I really, really should.
I take out my phone to call her. No bars. The phone itself is hot, which means that in about a week it’ll randomly turn off and never turn on again.
I stare at the gate, and it stares back.
Emma would say this job isn’t important enough to risk getting serial-killed or assaulted by a weirdo in the woods.
Except … isn’t it though? This job was supposed to save us. This job was supposed to be the rope I used to climb my way out of generational poverty and bring my mom with me. Ellis is giving me a second chance, one that I will not get again if I choose not to walk through this gate.
I dig the small hatchet out of my backpack. It’s so sharp that it’s hard to focus my eyes on the edge. I give it an experimental twirl, then stick it in an outer loop on my backpack.
If anything weird happens, we can turn back.
“Okay,” I say, and Ripley looks up at me, no less excited this time. “Let’s go.”