Chapter 7 Above
Above
At eight o’clock, I head out the door. It’s a solid two hours after I would have preferred to leave, but I doubt Emily would appreciate me showing up at the crack of dawn.
I fill a Kong toy with peanut butter for Barry and promise him we’ll go hiking later, and then slip out the door while he stares accusingly after me. He’d be good company, but if Bill is out there with his rifle, I’m not going to risk him being willing to shoot a dog.
Along the way, I pass the patch of dirt on the shoulder where a bus stop once stood. I track the miles past it, imagining how long it would have taken a fourteen--year--old girl and how much her feet would hurt at the end of it, crammed into kitten heels.
By the end of the Hills’ drive, I can practically feel the ache in my own soles.
I know without being told that she would have walked to the side of the drive here so the gravel wouldn’t crunch.
There are wheel ruts there this morning, marks chewed into the grass and weeds by our tires only two days ago.
The search for Bryson Lee has left no evidence behind but these, campsite rules observed to the last biodegradable coffee cup.
I pull all the way up to the house. It sits back among the trees, shaded and shielded, a dappling of light crowning the moss on its eaves.
A wind chime of hammered copper spins lazily over the porch; a wreath of colored glass adorns a fence post. Small creatures of twisted wire, each almost but not quite an identifiable species, peer from beneath the broad leaves of potted plants or crouch with an air of polite skepticism under fern fronds.
I step onto the porch. A half--dead moth clutches the doorframe above the bell, so I knock instead and wait. The rain, which began to fall softly during the drive, patters against the roof. Even in a quiet town like Franklin, this kind of silence is rare.
There’s no answer at first. I knock again, check my phone—-though I never gave her my number, so I don’t know why I’d think there might be a message there—-and ring the bell, making silent apology to the gray moth.
The chime is muffled on the other side of the door, but it summons movement at last. Quick footsteps and then the clack of a dead bolt, and Emily opens the door with a distant expression.
She looks at me for a moment like she can’t imagine who I am or what I’m doing there, and then she blinks.
“Audrey,” she says. “I’m sorry. I was . .
. I got distracted.” I don’t have to ask what she was doing.
She wears a pair of paint--splattered overalls over a thin white T--shirt.
The paint is like an archaeological dig, history stratified into layers.
She favors earthy colors, the more muted greens of winter or late summer, blues made humble by tones of gray.
A pale streak the color of bone still shines wetly on her wrist, obscuring part of the tattoo that twines from her wrist to the crook of her elbow: black ink blurred to blue, tracing the intricate shapes of a moth and ferns and various fungi.
Her hair is up in a messy ponytail, darker roots beginning to show at the base of the blond.
“I realized we never said when we’d meet up,” I say, letting her off the hook. “If you’re not available—-”
“No, I am,” she assures me. “Let’s get going.” She doesn’t wait for a response, just grabs a coat from a hook by the door and shoves her feet into a pair of rubber boots. The coat hangs loosely over her small frame. “Did you bring Barry?”
“Not today,” I say.
“I thought he might be trained,” she says, half a question.
“Like for Search and Rescue?” I ask. At her nod, I smile. “Sort of. As in, he’s trained for trailing and cadaver work, but he gets too excited by all the volunteers. He’d rather go check them all out than find the subject, so he got demoted to bodyguard.”
“He seems like too much of a marshmallow for that,” she notes.
“You’re not wrong,” I say with a laugh.
She hums a little and sweeps her hair back behind her ears, still more than half lost in other thoughts.
“You should see Matsuda’s dogs, though—-Paul Matsuda, he’s one of our senior volunteers. They’re incredible,” I say, but she only hums a response, her gaze tracking over the woods.
“You want to start where you saw the beads?”
“That seems like the best plan, don’t you think?”
She nods. Some part of me is oddly wounded by her distraction. Was, I realize, grateful for her interest last night. Now she seems preoccupied, her eyes focused on the canvas she’s been forced to abandon instead of the trees before her.
“Promise we’re not going to get shot at?” I ask as we walk.
She steps over a fallen log without breaking stride. “Bill left last night. He hasn’t been back.”
“You’re sure?”
“I would have seen the headlights,” she notes. “You have to take our driveway up to the other house.”
“You couldn’t have slept through it?” I ask.
“I didn’t sleep,” she confesses. She clears her throat. “How did you get into it? Volunteering?” I can’t tell if she’s interested or just trying to be polite. There’s an edge to her today that wasn’t there yesterday, a nerviness.
“I just answered an ad,” I say. “We’re always looking for more volunteers.”
“I guess what I was wondering is why,” she clarifies.
“Ah.” I look down as I step over a root, taking the excuse to break eye contact. “Janie, really.”
“Oh. Of course.” She looks chagrined.
I clear my throat. “Did you know her?”
“Not really.” The rain is picking up, but remains more mist than droplets.
“She dated your brother.”
She shrugs. “For a few weeks. We only really met a couple times.”
“Sometimes I think no one knew her,” I say, and she halts, expression gentling. “Meghan reminds me of her, a little.”
“How so?” She cocks her head, curious.
“I don’t know, exactly. They’re both . . . peculiar, I guess. And gone.” My lips twist in half a mirthless smile.
“Do you know where she went?” Emily asks, and her voice is soft now, cautious.
I shake my head. “She just left.” I think of knuckles tapping at glass and a voice I tried not to hear. What might have happened if I opened that window?
“Do you think something happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe she just went to live a new life. I know she wanted to. But . . .”
“But the world isn’t that kind,” Emily finishes for me.
“Sometimes it is,” I say. “For every tragedy, there’s someone found.”
Her jaw tenses briefly. “The scales don’t balance out like that.” She tilts her head to the right. “We’re here.”
The red marker hangs limply from the tree.
I follow Emily past it, walking the scant few steps to the tree where the beads hang.
In the rain, without the tension of the search, the distance seems shorter and the display in the trees less ominous.
A few scraggly strings of cheap beads stuck there by a bored teenager, nothing more.
“You think Meghan was here?” Emily asks.
“She took photos,” I say.
She squints up at the beads. “Do you think she’s the one that put them here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I try to imagine it both ways—-hiking out here to tie up offerings, or stumbling across them. Each feels true in its own way.
I look up at the tree. There must be three dozen strands of beads. They look old—-cords grayed and fraying. Meghan didn’t leave these here. Not recently, at least. These have been here for years.
We’re near the rear edge of Terry Butler’s property; there are trails that snake all over the place, in from the public land and the Hills’ acres. “What exactly are you looking for?” Emily asks.
“I’m not sure. Nothing. Anything,” I say, and she nods like this makes sense.
I don’t need to tell her that Meghan Vale has been gone for months. The odds of finding any trace of her are slim, as are the chances that this little tableau has anything to do with where she is now.
“Do you know where that cellar was? The place they found Bryson?” I ask.
“Yeah. Up this way,” she says. She sets out northward.
It’s not long before we’re off the Butler property, and despite Emily’s reassurances, I relax a bit at that.
It was the team Rick and I were supposed to join that found Bryson, in the end.
We were so close to him. A short hike later, Emily pauses to get the lay of the land and then directs us to a hillock.
Calling the hole she points to a root cellar is generous.
It’s barely wide enough for a grown man to fit down, with the remnants of a crude and long--rotted door framing the uneven, muddy steps down.
Wooden beams have been shoved into the earth to provide the semblance of structure, but it’s far from trustworthy.
I crouch and peer down, shining my flashlight inside, and I can just make out a low--ceilinged room supported partially by the thick root structure of the tree beside it.
The whole thing is maybe four feet by five feet, with nothing but an ancient wooden apple crate for decor.
Bryson must have been terrified if this place looked like a safer option than staying out in the open. There’s no sign that anyone else has been out here. Certainly not Meghan Vale.
“Did Terry build this?” I ask after I extract myself, wiping mud from my arm. “Some kind of survivalist thing?”
“Could be,” Emily says. She stands with her foot braced against a tree root.
She’s gone without a hood, and the rain slicks her hair against her brow and cheeks, drips from the tip of her nose.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything out here, Audrey,” she says apologetically, but my eyes track up past her shoulder to the trunk of the tree.
There, at shoulder level, someone has gouged rough lines in the bark.
Five lines, splayed, drawing together to a single point, the last one shorter than the rest.