Chapter Twelve Ashley
TWELVE ASHLEY
Ready?” Malcolm called as he came in the front door. Ashley was in the hall with her suitcase packed, and beside it the old wooden steamer trunk.
“Absolutely,” she said, a confident smile plastered on her face.
He’d been worried about her since the episode in the lawyer’s office on Friday. She told him she’d just felt lightheaded and overwhelmed. She hadn’t let on that she’d had another hallucination. The first one since getting out of the hospital.
It didn’t take much persuading to get Mal to make the trip to Boone’s Ferry.
He was anxious to see the property they’d inherited, excited about the possibilities for his potential business.
They could meet this Josephine Banks, Gram’s mysterious tenant whom they’d also inherited, try to learn more about their “unusual arrangement,” as the lawyer had called it.
As much as she was dreading it, Ash had suggested they bring the trunk along.
Look through it together, on this strange pilgrimage.
And while they were there, Ash thought, they could try to retrace their mother’s steps, find out what she was doing in Boone’s Ferry just before her disappearance. Of course, she made no mention of this to Malcolm.
“Listen, Ash, are you sure you’re up for this?” he asked now. “If it’s too much, we don’t have to go.”
Ashley remembered the vision of her mother in Reyes’s office.
Listen.
Suddenly her stomach lurched and the whole thing felt like a very bad idea.
She shook the feeling away. “I’m fine, Mal. Stop looking at me like I’m made of glass, okay? It’ll be an adventure,” she said with an unconvincing smile.
Ash had taken the week off from the café—she only worked twenty hours a week anyway.
She hadn’t been able to work more because she needed to be home with Gram.
But now that Gram was gone, she’d have to make some decisions.
Could she work at the café full-time? Find a second job, or a different job altogether?
Would she finally get her shit together and go back to school?
Keep living there in Gram’s house—her and Malcolm’s house now, she reminded herself.
Would he move in? Would they sell the house, split the proceeds?
And what about the house in Boone’s Ferry?
Every time she tried to think about all the decisions that needed to be made, and logistics that would have to be hammered out, she felt dizzy and nauseated.
She tried to quiet her mind for this moment, deciding she’d think things over on the drive up.
They loaded the trunk and Ashley’s suitcase into the bed of Mal’s pickup and set off.
“I got you a coffee,” Malcolm said, when they’d settled into their seats. She picked hers up and took a sip. Extra cream and two sugars—perfect. Her brother knew her well.
“I also got some maple bacon sticky buns,” he said with a grin, pulling a white paper bag off the dashboard and handing it to her. Mal knew how much she loved the huge sticky buns from the diner near his apartment, loaded with maple frosting and bits of crispy, salty bacon.
“This is my kind of road trip already,” Ash said, pulling out a bun and taking a big chewy bite, feeling the tension slip away as Malcolm pulled out of Gram’s drive, heading for the highway that would take them north, all the way up to the very edge of Vermont.
Malcolm helped himself to the second bun, the crumbs and sticky icing making a mess in his beard. Ashley laughed at him, handed him one napkin after another.
Being with Malcolm was easy and comfortable in the way that being with someone who’d known you your whole life was comfortable.
They talked, then they didn’t. They shared memories of when they were kids: the time they went as Batman and Robin on Halloween, the time they built a raft out of sticks and old lumber and set sail in Myers Pond, only to sink two minutes into the journey, the constant searches for buried treasure and bigfoot out in the woods behind their house.
They talked about Gram’s pecan pie and the gross drink Mom used to make with Swiss Miss (with the marshmallows!), instant coffee, and Baileys Irish Cream.
They followed the directions on the GPS unit Mal had clamped to his dashboard, and Ashley checked it against the map and directions she’d printed out online. She was pretty sure cell service would be spotty, so she didn’t want to rely on phones.
Malcolm started playing his latest audiobook, insisting that the content was “life-changing,” so Ashley tried. She listened as the voice droned on about manifesting your destiny, how everything you’d ever dreamed of was out there waiting, you only had to ask, to focus, to draw it to you.
Ashley reached over and turned it off. “You actually believe all this?” she scoffed.
“Absolutely.”
“So you think you can get whatever you desire by just thinking about it?”
“There’s more to it than that, Sis. You need to have a burning desire for it, then you need to focus, to really visualize it, to see yourself already in possession of what it is you want, to believe that you already have it.”
Ashley laughed.
“You should try it,” he said. “Think of something you want, something you really, truly want, and see yourself getting it. Focus on it when you first wake up in the morning and when you go to bed each night. Do it for seven days. I guarantee you’ll get results.”
She sighed. “Right now, what I want most is another cup of coffee. Some french fries and a sandwich maybe.” They’d been on the road nearly three hours.
Ten minutes later, Malcolm put on his turn signal. “See, it worked. You manifested a diner,” he said with a smile as he pulled into the parking lot of a place called Three Little Pigs Diner.
Ashley laughed. “Amazing,” she said.
“I’ll make a believer out of you yet,” he promised.
They headed inside, made their way to a booth, and both got the day’s special: a chicken Caesar wrap with hand-cut fries.
They drank coffee and each had a slice of pumpkin pie.
The pie wasn’t anywhere near as good as Gram’s, and Ashley only finished half of hers, giving the rest to her brother, who scarfed it down.
“You folks out taking in the sights?” the waitress asked them. She was an older woman with freshly permed white hair. “Shame you missed the peak foliage. It was beautiful here a couple weeks back. Storm took most of the leaves down last Friday.”
Malcolm nodded, flashed her a smile. “We’re actually heading up to Boone’s Ferry,” he said. “We’re about an hour away, right?”
She looked at him quizzically, as if she’d never heard of the place. “Not sure how far it is. Can’t say I’ve ever been.”
There was another customer in the place, a man in blue work pants held up with red suspenders. He was working on his coffee and pie at the counter. “Boone’s Ferry? Whaddaya want to go up there for?” he chimed in.
“We actually just inherited a house there,” Malcolm said. “It’s where our family is from.”
The man turned, looked at Malcolm, then Ashley, his eyes small and beady in his round red face. “Is that so?”
Ashley lightly kicked Mal’s leg under the table to signal not to tell this stranger their whole life story, as he was sometimes prone to do. Mal shot her a puzzled look, and the stranger opened his mouth like he was going to say something more, but then spun on his stool and went back to his food.
They paid their check, left a good tip, and headed out.
“Guess Boone’s Ferry isn’t exactly a tourist attraction, huh?” Malcolm said.
“Hell no. It doesn’t even show up on most maps. It’s not even an incorporated town.”
“But people do live there, right?”
“Population was two hundred seventeen according to the last census.” Ashley had spent the weekend doing what research she could on the place and taking notes. “There’s one motel, the Deer Run, that’s where we’ll be staying.”
And where Mom must have stayed too, she thought.
“There’s at least one little general store. A post office. There’s a clothespin factory that’s been running since the late eighteen hundreds.”
“Clothespins? For real?” Mal laughed.
“Yeah. The old wooden ones. It’s one of the last manufacturers of wooden clothespins in this country. They started making wooden toys too, back in the late sixties. Guess the clothespin market isn’t what it used to be.”
“Exciting,” he said as he started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot.
“Oh yeah,” she said with a smile. “I bet some of our distant relatives worked in that factory at some point or another.”
They drove on, Ashley confirming their route on her printed map.
The old Chevy Silverado climbed up, higher and higher into the mountains.
The engine smelled slightly of burning oil and sputtered a little here and there, but Malcolm coaxed the truck onward and upward.
There was little traffic; then, as they got farther out, there was no traffic at all.
They passed a sign telling them they were entering a state forest. More signs warning of steep descents, of switchback turns.
Up and down they went, twisting and turning like a slow-motion roller coaster.
Ash thought of her mother driving these same roads alone, and her heart sank.
She reviewed the timeline and facts she knew in her head: Mom had sent Gram a letter from Boone’s Ferry dated October 14, 2014.
I am in Boone’s Ferry. I came here to find the truth that you’ve worked so hard to hide from me.
I know everything.
The state police had found Mom’s old Subaru at the bridge—which Ash couldn’t help but notice was about halfway between Boone’s Ferry and home—on October 19.
Her purse and phone were in it, as was a small suitcase stuffed with clothing and toiletries.
As if she’d either been on a trip or was planning on taking one.
But the leather tote she used to carry her laptop and hold all her family history documents had never been found—not in the car or back in her apartment.
It had been a splurge from a craft fair before Ashley was even born and had her mom’s initials—LEF—stamped into the leather under an embossed sunflower.
Ashley hated that the bag was gone—her mom’s laptop, with all her emails and writings and photos. Just lost forever.
“What’s up with the directions?” Malcolm asked, calling Ash’s attention back to the moment, and she glanced over at the GPS screen. The road they were on had disappeared from view. It showed their truck sailing through a blank green space.
There was no calm woman’s voice advising them, “Make a U-turn now.” No “Recalculating.” Just silence.
“Are we still on the right road?” he asked.
“We’ve gotta be,” Ashley said, looking down at the printed map and directions. “It’s not like we’ve even seen any other roads. This has to be it.”
She pulled out her phone. No signal.
They drove another half hour. The road narrowed, began a long, steep descent full of switchback turns.
Every time they rounded a bend, Ashley braced herself, thinking there was no way there was room for them to pass any oncoming vehicles.
But they passed no one. They found themselves entering a deep valley.
It was darker, cooler, everything in shadow.
The dense pine forest came right up to the edge of the road, and everything was covered with a layer of mist.
They passed a sign: ROAD DEAD-ENDS, 4 MILES.
“Dead-ends?” Malcolm asked. “How can that be?”
Then they passed a second a sign: WELCOME TO BOONE’S FERRY.
“Because we’re here,” Ashley said. “Boone’s Ferry is literally the end of the road.”