Chapter 18
City Limits Café — Sylva
The breakfast rush had slowed, but City Limits Café still smelled of bacon grease and fresh biscuits.
Willow moved behind the counter with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done the same dance every morning for twenty years. Coffee mugs clinked as she topped off another round.
Outside the front windows, the square looked calmer than it had all week.
Mountain Mystery Week had finally packed up and gone home.
The ghost hunters were gone.
The true-crime crowd had finally gone home.
Sylva had fallen quiet. Until now.
Deputy Scout Wilson sat in his usual booth near the window, elbows braced on the table while he scrolled his phone with a deepening frown.
Across from him, Deputy Luke Hale leaned back with a mug of coffee balanced loosely in one hand, chair tipped onto its back two legs like it always was until Willow gave him a look.
“What’s got you looking like somebody kicked your dog?” Luke asked.
Scout didn’t answer.
He turned the phone around.
Luke squinted.
“Podcast?” he said.
Scout nodded.
“Vanished in the Valley.”
He’d listened to enough of those episodes, late nights on patrol with nothing but the radio and the dark for company, to know this wasn’t going to blow over in a day.
Luke’s brow creased.
“Isn’t that the woman who was hanging around during Mystery Week?”
“The woman who’s been circling Eleanor Harper all week,” Scout said.
Luke took a sip of coffee and leaned closer to the screen, chair thumping down onto all four legs.
The video thumbnail showed a young woman’s face beside a headline:
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CAROLINE SIMMS
Luke’s boots planted flat.
“Well hell.”
From behind the counter, Willow glanced over.
“Language,” she said mildly.
“What?” Luke shrugged. “I’m whispering.”
“You’re whispering loud.”
Deputy Sara Parker slid into the booth beside Scout, setting her hat on the table.
“What are we whispering about?”
Scout turned the phone toward her.
Sara read the headline.
Her shoulders dropped slightly.
“Oh no.”
Eight years gone. Eight weeks since zip ties bit into her own wrists.
Missing women didn’t feel abstract anymore.
Marylou, who had been lingering at the counter with Ned, twisted around.
“What now?”
Luke rubbed the back of his neck, thumb digging into a knot that had shown up sometime between search parties and interviews and never really left.
“That podcast lady just dropped an episode about Caroline Simms.”
The café went quiet in that strange way small-town places do when a name hits the air that everyone remembers.
Marylou’s hand froze around her coffee cup.
“Caroline Simms,” she said softly. “Lord.”
Ned shook his head.
“That was eight years ago.”
“Never solved,” Sara said.
She’d seen one of the old flyers once, tucked on a bulletin board at the sheriff’s office—sun-faded, easy to overlook.
Willow set down the coffee pot and leaned against the counter.
“I remember her daddy putting those flyers up everywhere.”
“Everywhere,” Marylou agreed. “Gas stations. The post office. Grocery stores.”
“Trailheads,” Ned added. “I saw one all the way over near Bryson City.”
“And he came in here every Friday,” Willow said. “Sat right there at the end of the counter with a stack of fresh flyers, asked if anybody’d heard anything new.”
Scout tapped the phone.
“Well, apparently the internet just discovered it.”
Luke leaned over to read the comments scrolling beneath the video.
The feed was moving fast.
where is sylva
someone definitely killed her
look up david mercer
Luke exhaled slowly.
“Here we go.”
Sara looked up.
“What?”
Luke turned the phone around again.
“Guess whose name they’re already throwing around.”
Scout didn’t have to ask.
“Mercer.”
Luke nodded.
Marylou frowned.
“Now wait a minute,” she said. “Nobody ever proved anything about that.”
“No,” Willow said. “But folks talked.”
Marylou crossed her arms.
“They always do.”
Scout scrolled again.
The comment feed.
check the development sites
the boyfriend did it
why didn’t police arrest him
Sara leaned back in the booth.
“Burke is going to love this.”
Luke snorted.
“He’s probably already getting phone calls.”
“Or records requests,” Scout added.
Ned shook his head.
“That poor girl’s daddy,” he said. “He never stopped looking.”
He nodded toward the window.
“I saw him stapling a flyer to a pole in the rain once, right there by the library. Didn’t even have a coat on.”
Willow reached for the remote mounted under the counter.
“Let’s see what the television says.”
She clicked it on.
The small screen over the coffee machine flickered to life.
A local news anchor filled the frame.
The headline scrolling beneath him read:
COLD CASE INTEREST RENEWED AFTER PODCAST EPISODE
Luke groaned.
“Well, that didn’t take long.”
Sara leaned forward.
“Listen.”
The anchor continued.
“A popular true crime podcast has renewed interest in the eight-year-old disappearance of Sylva resident Caroline Simms. The case remains unsolved.”
Willow frowned.
If it was on the morning news here, Caroline’s face would be playing in break rooms and waiting areas in three counties by lunch.
Marylou shook her head.
“Lord have mercy.”
Scout glanced toward the window where the courthouse steps sat quiet in the morning light.
“They’re going to come back,” he said.
“Who?” Willow asked.
Scout nodded toward the phone in his hand.
“The podcast people.”
Luke finished his coffee and set the mug down with a soft clink.
“Yeah, they always do.”
Outside, the square looked peaceful.
But in towns like Sylva, peace never lasted long once the internet got involved.