Courtney
I take the car, leaving Elliott and the kids carless, not that it matters because they won’t go anywhere. The resort is nearly
empty now. All day yesterday, I watched out the window as other families packed their bags and left, driving away from this
awful place, so that Elliott and the kids have it all—the pool, the beach—to themselves now, not that that matters either,
because they won’t leave the cottage. It’s not like anyone is in the mood for a swim, but even if they were, they couldn’t,
because it’s not safe for them to be outside.
I leave the resort. I pull from the parking lot and onto the main road, which is a two-lane highway through town, though the
term highway is misleading, because it gives the impression of a main artery, when this is nothing more than a small vein, not much different
than any of the other roads around here. I drive through the small village with a population of something like four or five
hundred people, though I don’t know where they live because houses around here are so infrequent. It feels like it’s stepped
back in time. There is a Laundromat in a tired storefront with a rusted sign. There is a psychic and a seedy-looking liquor
store—with crooked signs that hype beer, ammo, bait—and gas stations with convenience marts in place of grocery stores. There are restaurants, but nothing high-end, everything
local and modest like the dive lodge at our own resort.
I drive the couple miles it takes to get to the location Snap Map pulled from Reese’s phone. The further I go, the more the road narrows. Trees draw nearer the street; their branches overhang it, the sun coming through in mottled swathes that move on the asphalt with the wind.
As I drive, I can’t stop thinking about Reese on these same roads two nights ago. There’s an image that plays over and over
again in my mind like a song on repeat until I can’t get the lyrics out of my head: Reese with a blindfold over her eyes,
a sock in her mouth gagging her scream, and zip ties on her ankles and wrists. In my vision, she lies on her side in the hard
bed of a pickup truck with her hands bound behind her with her knees pulled into her chest, struggling in vain to get free.
It’s been about thirty-six hours since she’s been gone.
She could be in California by now. Or she could be here, just like the Snap Map said.
I try not to give in to paranoia and fear. I try not to think that for the last thirty-six hours, someone—whoever took Reese—has
been keeping watch on the cottage, that they watched me leave and that they’re following me.
No one is following me, I tell myself, as I steal a glance in the rearview mirror to see that the street behind me, which
narrows until it’s almost only one lane, is empty. I’m completely alone, which is the one thing Elliott told me not to do:
Don’t ever let yourself be alone.
If something were to happen to me right now, no one would know. No one would see.
My fear lightens when I see cars parked up ahead. They’re pulled to the side of the road, just off a wooded trail not far
from a waste disposal site, which is the kind of place where people bring their own recycling and trash. I pull onto the shoulder.
I turn the engine off, and then I sit in the front seat of the car, taking in the wide expanse of trees that surrounds me.
People gather at the edge of the trees, including Detective Evans.
As I get out of the car, hearing the low growl of an ATV in the distance, he starts to make his way toward me, and we meet in the middle, where the dewy grass reaches my knees, the moisture coming in through the mesh of my gym shoes and making my feet wet.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” he says.
“Why wouldn’t I come?”
“I thought you’d want to stay home and be with your family.”
“Reese is my family.”
He nods. “Of course. Listen,” he says, as I let my eyes go to the people behind him, wearing orange vests, a small group of
civilian volunteers who stand around doing nothing, with no sense of urgency, and I wonder if it’s because they’ve already
found Reese, if it’s because they’ve found her body or something else to suggest she’s dead.
“What is it?” I ask, starting to panic. “Has something happened? Have you found her?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “It’s not that. I just wanted to say, you shouldn’t get your hopes up,” he says, and it’s hard not
to notice how he gazes over my head then, surveying the area around us.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, feeling my hands start to tremble. I wouldn’t say that my hopes are up, but my emotions
are charged and run the gamut of hope, grief and fear to an overwhelming, paralyzing sense of dread.
Maybe Reese is here. Maybe she’s not here.
Or maybe we will find her dead.
I think of what that would look like. I prepare myself for it, to come across Reese’s dead body in the damp and overgrown
grass or deep in the dark woods, shaded beneath the mantle of trees where the sun can’t reach.
He lowers his eyes to mine, though it’s fleeting before his eyes leave mine again to graze the area, his hand moving slowly, intuitively to his hip, where his gun sits, and this time, I’m unnerved by his attentiveness.
He thinks someone is out there in the woods.
He thinks someone is watching us from the depth of the trees.
When he looks back at me, he says, “Reese might be here. We might find her phone. Or we might find nothing.” He waits a beat
to let his words sink in, and then says, “It’s best if you keep your expectations to a minimum. Hope for the best but prepare
for the worst.”
Detective Evans walks with me to the rest of the volunteers, where we’re given directions before splitting into small groups
to search. We work under the guidance of the police and trained search and rescue volunteers, moving outward from what the
police call Reese’s last known position, which is where Snap Map picked up her phone signal the other night. We move slowly,
methodically in the area to which we’re assigned, though it’s not known if Reese is on foot or if she’s in a vehicle—that
image of her bound and gagged in the bed of a pickup truck comes rushing back—and so there is no way to know just how fast
she’s traveling or how far away she is from the trail by now, if at all. It’s not only Reese we’re looking for. It’s things
too, like her phone, footprints, drag marks, blood, a shoe.
Around me, as we search, people call out her name, so that I’m surrounded by a chorus of Reese.
Reese.
Reese.
Reese.
I worry about what we’ll find or if we’ll find anything.
There aren’t as many volunteers here as I’d have liked.
There are five people in my group and the area is so large that, at this pace, we won’t cover much distance.
We stay quiet, intensely focused, concentrating on the rocks, the soil, the blades of grass, so that our eyes almost never leave the ground until thirty or forty minutes into our search, when one of the women in the group says to me in passing, “Yours isn’t the only pretty girl who’s gone missing, you know? ”
Her words, and the way she says them, make the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“What do you mean?” I ask, looking sharply up, my heart rate accelerating.
“Joanna over there,” she says, and I follow her gaze to another woman who searches nearby, picking her way through the tall
trees. “Her and her husband’s little girl went missing a couple years back.”
“What happened to her?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the woman in the distance, Joanna, whose head is bent, taking in the earth
beneath her feet, long dark hair falling down to veil her face.
“Hell if I know. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“What do you mean? They didn’t find her?”
“No. They looked everywhere for her, but she was just gone.”
“Gone,” I echo, wondering how it’s even possible that a person—a child, anyone—could completely vanish like that, into thin
air. “What was the little girl’s name?”
“Kylie Matthews.”
There is a poster in the resort lodge for a missing girl. It’s her, Kylie Matthews. The poster asks Have you seen me? in big, bold red letters along the top of the sheet. My eyes have grazed over it more than once, never really processing
the words or seeing the face of the missing girl. Instead, I breezed casually past it. I never gave it pause, which I feel
guilty for now. I shouldn’t have been so blasé. She’s a child, someone’s daughter. At the time, I chalked it up to just another
missing child, thinking that this girl and I had nothing in common, believing this missing child had nothing to do with me.
“Excuse me,” I say, turning and making my way deeper into the woods, where the terrain varies from dirt trails to bog bridges when the ground becomes too soft and spongy to cross.
Wildflowers and mushrooms grow beneath the trees where the sun doesn’t reach.
There are houses in the area, though they’re intermittent and small, mobile or ranch homes, five hundred to a thousand square feet at best, so spread out and hidden away that my mind fills with horrible possibilities that make me afraid.
What if Reese is in one of the houses?
What if someone is keeping her in there?
I make my way to Joanna.
“Excuse me,” I say, my voice bridled, her back to me as I approach. She straightens and turns, and as she does, I’m taken
aback by her hollowed-out cheeks and the wasting away of her body. Knobby collarbones bulge at the base of her neck; there
are half-moon-shaped shadows beneath her eyes. It takes my breath away and I see another version of myself in a few years
from now, one that scares me. “Are you Joanna?” I ask, my words a whisper.
She nods.
“I’m so sorry to bother you. I just . . . I’m Courtney,” I say, struggling to get my words out. “Reese—the girl we’re looking
for—she’s my niece.”
“I know,” she says, explaining how she saw my car pull up before and how she saw me speaking to Detective Evans. “I’m sorry