Chapter 63 Caro
CARO
“DID YOU CALL THE police?” Caro asks. The gravel crunches under the tires of the car, and a dust cloud rises around them. She’s going too fast. Slow down, she thinks. Anyone near Afton is bound to see and hear us coming. But isn’t that what she wants?
She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a damn thing in this world.
Why does her dad have so many pictures of Hope Hanover on his phone?
And why did he have an old newspaper clipping in his wallet about a young woman named Eve Herriman who went missing twelve years ago?
The year they made The Last Portal? She remembers the case.
Everyone wondered if someone from the film had been involved because bad things don’t happen around here.
Even though they did, they do. It was the same year her dad couldn’t save that girl who fell in the canyon.
“I’m waiting until we get there, and then I’m going to send Officer Flanigan a pin,” Ash says. “I’ve got her cell number.”
“Okay.” Caro doesn’t push for Ash to message sooner or offer to do it herself. Because does she really want the police there? Her dad’s tracker began working again.
And it shows that he is—or at least that he was—here.
In the ghost town.
Dad, what are you doing?
It’s the dimming time, the “ether hour,” Henry used to call it, because it feels magical, golden, and yet it signals that darkness is on its way.
The road snakes along the flank of the bluff, miles away from the highway and Spring Creek, contouring itself around a base of sandstone buttresses.
The few isolated houses along the road are set back, a stark contrast to the glass-windowed, modern buildings dotting the bluffs nearer the town, the second homes of rich people.
These are first homes, Caro thinks, with their metal whirligigs standing still out front in the absence of wind, parched gardens, American flags, KEEP EDEN WILD signs.
Do they hate us, the visitors? Caro wonders.
Do we stand out like a sore thumb, or are we nothing to them?
If we scream, will they hear us?
If they do, will they come?
“Caro?” Ash’s voice is steady, but Caro hears something in it that she doesn’t like. They are fractured, the two of them. Are they broken?
“What?” They must be getting close. Caro thinks she came here once before, as a kid on a field trip.
She has a vague memory of old buildings out in the middle of nowhere, hidden from the main road by the undulations of the bluffs.
She remembers the teachers and the ghost town docent talking about how the pioneers settled this land.
Revisionist history. The land was settled long before that, thousands of years.
We have been the worst of caretakers, Caro thinks, considering the glass houses, the new roads, the resort where she herself is staying.
“What’s really going on with your dad?” Ash asks.
“What are you saying?” Caro thinks she sees a sign ahead, maybe the one mentioned in the text.
She slows the car. She can’t bear to think about what Ash might mean.
She can’t bear to think about the track on which her own mind is racing, spinning.
“Isn’t Alzheimer’s and going missing all the time enough? ”
“It feels like there’s more,” Ash says. “I feel like you’re keeping something from me.”
There’s a chain hanging across the road, and sure enough, a sign is affixed to it. ROAD CLOSED. Yes. This is it.
“Here we are.” Caro turns off the car. She climbs out and slams the door harder than necessary. The sound echoes, ricochets against the bluffs.
Dad, are you here?
Hope?
She starts walking down the dusty road.