#adventure prep

“I don’t remember any of it. I mean it.” The image of her father standing in front of my door still screamed at me from the inside of my mind, demanding to be further examined, for as long as it took to prove it wrong. “Can you just, walk me through what happened to your dad? Maybe it would help.”

“You already know,” she cried, croaking out a sob. “Don’t you?”

Hands still raised, I shook my head slowly, keeping my face a stolid mask. “No. All the police told me was that you were missing. I didn’t hear anything about your dad. That’s the truth,” I pleaded.

“You talked to the cops and still came out here, when you knew they were looking for me?” Her tears weren’t even dry, but now she was almost laughing. “Gee, for a teacher you’re awfully stupid.”

I burned with quiet annoyance, and breathed it out slowly. “I came here to help you. Even though the cop told me not to, because I thought you were in trouble.” It’s not my fault you lied, I didn’t say.

“Well, I had to get you out here somehow,” she said defensively. Sensing a weakness, I thought to pounce. No. Slow, and calmly. There was still a rifle being pointed at my head.

“Just talk me through what happened, why you ran out here in the first place.” She looked at me suspiciously, shifting on top of the dead basswood tree. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“Jesus,” she swore, then stepped backward off the trunk. “You’re still asking, even when I promise to kill you for lying.” She had calmed down too, and took a deep breath as she crouched, her pijamas muffling the thumps of her knees on the forest floor. 

I watched her carefully as she hunkered down against the fallen tree, rifle held against the trunk, now aiming at my chest.

That was when the woodpecker chose to leave in flight. He was a thin, red-headed bird, starkly visible against the blue sky, framed by the leafless branches of the trees. 

He chirped above Noel and I, pecked at a withered branch before unfurling his wings and slapping hard into the air. He freed one brown tail feather, and we watched it gracefully see-saw down, landing in the roots between us. 

We both stared at the feather, then looked back towards each other. Eyes locked on the tiny feather, she began.

“He was… I wanna say kidnapped, but he’s not a kid. The power to the whole house was cut.” She sighed, still staring down at the lonely chocolate feather. “No idea how the alarm hadn’t tripped, they said.” She took another breath, this one shaking slightly.

“Mommy and I woke to a broken house full of blood. Father comes home late, so mommy said she didn’t wake up when she heard the noise.” Now her voice was full of tears, breaking and shaking throughout.

 Her eyes turned to mine. “I didn’t have to stay up late, watching for him to go in your room. You were gone.” Staring into the raw red of her eyes, I could see the simmering hatred on the surface. Hatred for me.

“So I told them, told the cops, about you and him. They all figured you were the…” She turned to face me, tears and hate still brimming in her eyes. “They all know that you stole my dad. I told them I had to go to the bathroom, so I went back in the house, and…” 

Now her eyes were back on the feather, and she was somewhere else, seeing it all. Slowly, she started again. 

“None of them stupid cops were watching his study. It was full of his blood. Books everywhere. Chair shattered and stupid highball glass in pieces on his black walnut hardwood.” 

She suddenly looked up at me, eyes wide. “His guns. They were untouched. All that time spent shooting… His gun cabinet was chock full, unlocked, unloaded, untouched.” She turned to me now, then looked down at the rifle in her hands.

“I don’t think he’s even used this one,” she said, marveling at it. 

“Do you really intend to change that?” I asked in a whisper.

She stared at me, then down at her finger, her pink nails and too small hands tight against the wooden stock. She looked back at me again, straight at my chest, where the rifle was leveled.

“I want to,” she whispered back. “I want to bring my daddy back.” She finally blinked the tears out of her eyes, and the hatred came pouring out of her as she stared at the center of my chest. 

“It won’t. It will just ruin your life.” I took a deep breath in, grabbing the courage. “Keep the gun at me, but know that I’m not lying.” I waited for her to nod, and she didn’t. “I didn’t do anything to your dad. There’s a lot in that video I don’t understand, I do understand that you’re scared right now. And that’s why I’m here. Not to get shot by my student, my friend. But to help her see reason,” I said.

Her eyes slowly trailed upward to my eyes, then held there before she broke. She collapsed, the rifle falling as she let go of it to break into a horrible sobbing fit. The rifle landed on my side of the basswood trunk.

Feverishly, I leapt for it. With the heavy metal and wood furnishing secured in my hands, I realized I had no idea how this type of gun worked. The only thing I’d ever shot was some sort of pistol with an eleven in the name, and that had been a decade ago in some long forgotten shooting range.

The cold metal of the lever underneath my glove drew my attention, and I jacked the lever down. Nothing happened. I looked down at the safety, then decided just to try it again. This time, an unfired bullet flew out of an ejection port on the side, and I could see another thin sliver of death being loaded within. 

I slammed the lever up and down repeatedly, bullets coughing out with a noisy rasp. Over the small clinks and thumps of the unloading, I could still hear Noel’s sobbing. Now empty, I threw the husked rifle into the woods uncaringly.

Standing, I stepped over the trunk to sit next to Noel. She was curled up in the dirt, hiding her face, and sobbing. I put a hand on her to rub her back, and she screamed, kicking at me. I scooted back, her yell fading into the choked sobs again.

I moved away, then just sat there silently. I listened to Noel’s sobs eventually die away into labored breathing, and then just deep, haunted moans.

Gloved hands between my knees, I stared at the pile of live ammunition, and the small reddish brown feather.

Suprising myself, I began to silently cry.

*****

Inspector Horne was an older, skinny woman. She stared at the clearing over thin, gold rimmed glasses that were bound to her neck by a skinny metal chain. She was dressed carefully in work clothes and a thick down coat, buttoned only to the waist. 

I watched her eyebrows knit together as she peered down at the lever action rifle I had thrown to the ground at least an hour ago. She was alone next to the old basswood, in her own world of quiet concentration.

Thick clouds had gathered above quickly, suddenly and violently pelting the woods with blasts of thin, melty snow. It’d stopped for a while, now only blasting us with a never-ending wind from the mountain. 

The sun was hidden behind the clouds, and with my phone taken away, I had no sense of what time it really was. I was trapped in slow time again. Nearby, a cicada buzzed.

I looked around again for Noel, but she had been taken too, with a thin red blanket and a cop’s hand around her shoulder. She had still been crying, snot pouring down her face. She hadn’t looked at me once.

I felt my eyes land on the feather again. Nearby, the inspector touched the same sappy cutting in the tree that I had. The feather was pinned beneath a single unfired bullet, pushing and pulling with gusts of wind.

There was something almost vile about the way it was held there. It seemed lost, trying to free itself and rejoin its flock. 

Tearing my eyes away from the pinned feather, I stared into the woods. They had lost their apathy. It had been silenced, choked out as the space between the trees was choked with cops, their chirps of radio chatter and the steam from hot coffee in paper-thin McDonald’s cups. 

Radiating outward from Horne was a small entourage of cops. The infection of blue uniforms spread as they scuttled over every inch of the woods, all but two steering clear of a yellow line of tape I sat just outside of.

My own red blanket covered my head and back, doing a poor job to keep the wind from cutting through my jacket as I sat against a tree..

“Mr. Dempsey,” a particularly unkempt and balding blue-suit was saying. “Can you please take a stand?”

I looked up at him, and imagined what I must look like. Sleep rings under my eyes, fucked up hair, sweat frozen to my face, and still recovering from having a gun pointed at my head. I blinked heavily once, twice, then said, “Why?”

He stared back at me with a growing resentment, hand on the taser in his holster. “I need to make sure you don’t have any more weapons on you, I do,” he said, slowly. His accent was lilting in an almost sing-song manner, though his thick beard and mustache muffled his words.

I looked back at the rifle, which another cop was carefully shoving into a large plastic bag. Its lever was stuck in the ‘down’ position, and I wondered idly if I’d ruined it. “Wasn’t mine,” I said tiredly. 

“Be that as it may,” he started, almost growling.

“Heel, Junior.” Inspector Horne approached the two of us, and the blue-suit Junior stepped back, plainly annoyed. “Good boy,” she said in an accent to match his own. “I’m sure Mrs. Montgomery could use some help back at the home,” she said pointedly, hooking her thumb backwards.

He wandered away, cursing and muttering something under his breath about dog treats. Horne turned to look at me, glasses magnifying her blue eyes as she gave me an evaluating stare. Her thinning, gray eyebrows peaked high as the stare went on.

“What?” I finally asked.

She went on staring, curious eyes and brows unchanging. A sudden gust of wind blew a crop of black hair into her eyes, covering her gold-rimmed glasses. She blinked, and carefully moved the hair out of her eyes as she crouched to face me on my level. 

I thought about asking her again, but decided against it as she settled on her haunches.

Then, her eyes moved past mine, to something behind me. Idly, she pulled a knife out of the pouch on her belt.

I turned to watch her as she wicked a thick but stodgy dead branch off of the tree, pulled it to her, and began to slice the dead stubs off. Thin, pale curls of wood, maybe ash, dropped into the woods between her knees. The knife had to be as sharp as sin.

“Are you our guy?” She asked me without looking up. Her head was cocked slightly as she looked down. She swiftly squared the branch, leaving a pile of pale curls of wood at our feet. “Did you take Kyle?” 

“No,” I said quickly. “I don’t know anything about that, besides what Noel told me. I… I’m sorry I ran away when we were on the phone. I was worried about her.”

She looked at me silently and slid the block of wood into the pouch with her knife, still assessing me all the while. Her lips made a line, and she stood again. “That was about the worst thing you could’ve done. It doesn’t exactly help prove your innocence in this whole ordeal. But I’m sure you’ve figured that out.”

She paused, looking over at the pile of bullets. “I’ve got a lot of questions to ask you, Mr. Dempsey. First, we’re gonna need to search you. Stand up,” she said matter-of-factly.

I did so, almost without thinking. She had honed her cop-voice as much as her knife, and it shocked me how quickly I jumped to do what she said. 

“You got anything on you I should worry about? Needles, sharps, guns?”

I shook my head, thinking of Sam and Jack, and the imagery that had stuck in their minds. I grimaced, facing the old inspector.

“Turn an’ face the tree, kindly,” she drawled. I did so, and she kicked my feet apart, so my legs were spread. Considerate but roughly, she patted me down and checked my pockets. 

My wallet and phone had already been taken, leaving only the headphones for her to find. She carefully replaced them, patting on my back. “You’re good,” she said. 

I turned to face her again. “What happens now?” I asked, feeling the nervous energy bleed into my voice. 

She smiled. “We take you down to the station, ask you some questions. That’s all we were gonna do on the phone too, before you went Forrest on us.” She surveyed the basswood over the creek, looking down at the slowly disappearing pile of ammunition an officer was slipping into a bag. “I’m just glad no one got hurt.” 

She turned back to me, and I nodded. “It was a close thing. I don’t think-”

“Save it for the station, Dempsey.” She turned to a nearby cop with a high ponytail, and approached to talk with her briefly. I turned back to the feather. As the final bullet was packed in the bag, it finally slipped away into the wind.

I watched as it climbed, higher and higher, until it disappeared into leafless trees. As it faded away, I wondered if it would reach the sky, or if it would be caught again in the skewers winter had made of the dead branches.

“Let’s go, Dempsey.” Inspector Horne was waiting for me at the edge of the clearing.

 I stood.

*****

The empty side street that fed into the park entrance was bathed in flashing blue and red lights. Compared to the cop cars that filled the street, I realized Horne’s car was different. It had the same bars in the back windows, but no sirens, and no obvious signage. 

Now, other parts about her stood out to me. She wore no uniform, just black slacks and a smart button down with a coat, along with her fancy, gold rimmed glasses, and their thin, web-like chain.

“I can’t get in that car,” I said.

Horne was standing on the opposite side of her small blue-black four door, and having opened the door, she was already situated with her left foot on the inside. “And why not?” she asked, with guarded curiosity.

I already felt woozy, staring through the bulletproof window at where she intended me to sit. I shook my head, and looked at her from across the car. “Matter of fact,” I started, knowing I wasn’t answering her question, “do I need to come with you to the station?”

Horne looked at me testily, her eyes narrowing. She simply said, “No.” 

The ‘but I’ll arrest you if I have to,’ went unstated. 

“I have a meeting with a professor of mine soon,” I lied, the meeting wasn't for hours yet. “Maybe we could do it another time?”

She leaned on the side of the car, sighing quietly. “You’ve got a meeting at, what, eight in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Dempsey, we need your help with this. Noel’s father is missing, and whatever just happened in the woods back there needs to be cleared up.” She looked down at me meaningfully. “I’ve seen the security footage. We need your utmost cooperation in this matter,” she drawled slowly.

I felt a shock of anxiety ride down my spine and out to my fingers as I registered the doublespeak for what it was.

You're fucked.

“Do I have to ride in the car? I could just walk. And I’ll tell you for free, I’m not answering any questions without a lawyer.” 

The lights of the sirens played in her eyes as they glimmered, and she smiled cruely. “Being a smartass won’t get you anywhere, Dempsey.” Her southern accent had vanished, and was replaced with a formal north-eastern accent. She slammed the car door, and rounded the vehicle while pulling out her handcuffs.

Finally, I realized what had been bothering me about her the entire time. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or just the fact that I’d been making some reckless decisions, but I knew she was working with the kid gloves on. She was no cop. She was a fed. Why was a CIA or FBI agent in town, just in time for all of this to happen? And where the hell had her accent gone?

These thoughts dissolved as she pushed me roughly against the car’s trunk, bringing my hands together behind my back. “You have the right to remain silent,” she started. I tuned her out, distantly hearing that I was under arrest for ‘disobeying an officer of the law,’ while one single burning truth rode visciously in the front of my mind as I stared blankly at the dark blue paint of the trunk. 

She was going to make me ride in a car. 

*****

I was living a nightmare. Trapped in the back seat behind bars, I sat with my legs curled up against my chest, feeling like some sort of dull species of rabid animal with my heart stabbing a beat so hard into my ribs I felt it in my skull. Somewhere distant, Horne was talking uncaringly on her radio.

I could feel every bump in the road, and I had to keep myself from throwing up Levi’s hot chocolate all over the leather seats. My body, traveling faster than it had in years, knew something was desperately wrong, and was flooding with flight and fight chemicals. 

I could do neither. I very carefully tried to force this knowledge into my body, but it went on blindly losing its shit. Levi and the White Picket Trench seemed like a lifetime ago now.

I closed my eyes, and it made it slightly better. Now, all I could see was their faces. My mother and my sister, cold in the morgue, my father pulling me out of-

No. Happy thoughts.

My mother. My mother had driven us to vacation every year. Although Danil, our driver, had taken us to Brearley every day, mom had taken it on herself to drive all of us down to our vacation home every year.

‘I wasn’t born into this life of luxury like all of you,’ she’d say to us anytime someone suggested we take a plane or have the chauffeur drive us. Nadine Dempsey reckoned, often verbally in her I’m-your-parent-and-I’m-teaching-you-a-lesson tone that, ‘Sometimes doing some hard work all on her lonesome keeps a woman sane.’

How keeping a gas pedal parallel to the floor of the big black dodge caravan she'd bought special for the occasion constituted hard work, my sisters and I never understood. Nor did my father understand why she kept on with it after he'd explained the seemingly foreign concept of cruise control to her for what had to have been the fiftieth time today.

I smiled, thinking of the day Danil had been off sick, and mother, before she went to work, dropped my sisters and I off at Brearley.

 She had been worried about being late, but still took the time to kiss us goodbye before peeling out into 83rd Street traffic. A long time after that day, after Nadia and I had graduated from Brearly’s upper school, and Nicolette was just entering the upper school, 

You laughed.

The thought stopped in my mind, jarring my eyes open. 

I looked around. 

Horne had no smile on her face, and the noise had been… A laugh. It wasn’t Horne’s voice, and it hadn’t been mine. There had been no crackle of the radio in the gruff, quiet laughter. 

Had it come from inside my head?

Fuck. I’m losing it. Today was not a good day.

“We’re here,” Horne said. The car came to a sudden stop, and I pulled from my thoughts yet again.

She killed the car, then got out and pulled me roughly from where I had curled up. “See?” she drawled, her southern mountain accent mysteriously returned. “Wasn’t so bad, now was it?”

I thought about saying a few things, then decided against it, in fear of my voice shaking. It felt good to be out of the car, finally. 

The Old Hill Police Station was an ugly, bedraggled thing, crouched low to the ground and made of soot stained concrete and hastily drawn curtains behind thick paned windows.

 Horne herded me past a standing rock with the town’s map carved into it, hand on the thick chain of my cuffs, and forced me to open the door for us. I did, and I was pushed into the empty waiting room.

The precinct smelled like dust and stale coffee. Behind a desk, a young pretty woman who was watching reruns of Cheers on a seven or eight inch tube TV stood suddenly, staring reverently at Horne as the two of us passed her stopping before a thin hallway left of the desk. 

Horne looked at her from across the sea of paperwork and cold coffee as the theme song rang out in the small, guileful room.

“Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot… Wouldn’t you like to get away?”

“A bit on the nose, no Kim?” The young woman stared blankly at Horne, then blinked. The inspector sighed, and shoved me down the hallway. The theme song echoed down after us, the thin piano and sullen bass seeming empty and dead, he vocals haunting us from down the hall. 

“Where everybody knows your name…”

The precinct was empty, save for the dead cockroaches in the corners. I imagined all the bored fifty-something blue suits coming out of their dusty offices at the first sign of something interesting, getting all geared up to go stand in the middle of the woods to be useless and drink coffee.

I was herded past the empty meeting rooms and offices towards what was obviously the cellblock. A small light above the high security door flickered, then died. The door opened as we approached, sounding with a loud buzz and a chunk of something mechanical in the wall.

The cells were empty, and surprisingly clean, save for a thin, emaciated roach that slivered up the wall and into a dim light fixture. Horne had paused here, to let me take it all in. I smirked, and hoped she didn’t see it.

“You get a call, of course.” And again, the accent was gone. She gestured to an old landline on the wall, to the right of the entrance. “You’ll probably wanna call that lawyer of yours,” she said, full of a dry mirth.

“Can’t exactly call with my hands locked up,” I kindly reminded her.

“Now that’s quite the conundrum,” she smirked, and now it was an exaggerated New Yorker accent, something out of the 1980’s. 

“What the fuck is your deal, lady?” I couldn’t help it. 

Her smile only grew, and she roughly grabbed my hands, undoing the handcuffs. “Now, do you have the number memorized? Or do you need your phone? Most a’ you youngins these days,” again she slipped into the mountain-folk accent, “don’t bother to memorize phone numbers.”

“I know the number.” I glared at her. As a child, I had only known one. My mother’s. 

She was dead now, and I was back in that morgue again, staring at her ruined face. It made me think of the old Snapchat and Facebook memories that had popped up on her birthday, and all the old pictures they’d shown at the slideshow at her funeral.

They weren’t right. They were no longer her for me. My mother was a ruined eye socket, an open jaw with both sets of pristine teeth revealed. A face torn clean of skin, then muscle, and then most of its bone by the rainy blacktop. 

Across the table, my sister was somehow worse, a twin to my mothers disfigurement. At times, I had trouble remembering her face. There hadn’t been anything left that resembled a human.

I took the phone off the rack, listening to the dial tone. Horne turned away from me, slipping the knife and block of wood out of her belt pouch, starting on it again. 

I laid my head against the cold cinderblock wall, receiver to my ear as it played it's reedy dial tone. I held my finger above the number pad.

What do you do?

*****

The woods of Old Hill were untouched. Serene, tranquil, and still easing itself awake from the dusty silence of early morning. I tore through the trees at a sprint, thin vines and branches tearing at my coat as I sped over the cold packed dirt and gnarled forest roots. 

I was following a creek, and I was relatively sure it was the same one that Noel meant. I’d seen the maps of the land in the museums, but those had never held much truth when it came to small details like a small creek in the heavy western woods. Noel's parent's mansion had been built only a few decades ago, so I was guessing at a ghost.

I slowed as I approached a large fallen basswood tree, leaning on it as I caught my breath. I really wasn’t made for running, and my lungs screamed with the icy air pulling and pushing out of them. As I sat on the cool bark, I faced the way I’d come, and recognized it.

I’d been here before, with Noel, when she needed a break from her homework, or life in general. This was near the right spot.

“Noel!” I shouted, turning around on the tree to search for her. The quiet, yet alive chatter of the woods slowed as my voice rung out, then returned as it died.

A woodpecker stabbed a rhythm into a far away tree, and the forest all together went on uncaring. I swore under my breath, and moved my legs to straddle the cold dead tree like a horse.

The felled basswood spanned the creek, and I stared down its length as I caught my breath. Moving my gloved hand down the trunk, I found my glove was sticking to something.

It was a carved heart. The injured wood was green and fresh, sap building up and out at the edges of the cut.

The letters in the heart read N + J, then a date. 2-3-23. Very fresh. I stared at the ‘N’, brushing the older sap aside with my thick gloved digits.

Natalie.

The name still burned painfully in my heart, incorrect and shameful in the memories it wrought. One word from a well meaning stranger, one reminder of the date of the accident, that’s all it took. 

February 15th, 2020. The night was alive in my mind again, without my asking. I turned my head up, to face the woods. 

The woods, as many dark and cold nights on the road had taught me, could be very dangerous. Refusing to drive or even be driven after the accident, I had backpacked my way down from New York.

I’d thought the trip would be quick; Google Maps said ten days, and I thought I'd be in Old Hill in nine, maybe eight days, easy.

After the money for inns and motels had run out, I had realized that walking worked on the same kind of time that hospitals and classes right before lunch did: Slow time. 

Time that stretches on until you're sunburnt and dehydrated, until you want to turn back, but that would make things even worse, and everyone back home doesn’t want you there anyway, so just keep on heading down I-81 counting the mile markers. 

Slow time traps you in this until your eyes roll into the back of your skull, and you’re willing to sleep on a pile of rusty nails because at least they don’t fucking honk at you for having the gall to walk on the shoulder instead of in the gluttonous mud trench that sucks your falling-apart-shoes down its shit-coated-throat.

So, after a long day of trudging, the sun would go down, sometimes obligingly slow, sometimes slipping right out of slow time and into blink-and-you’ll-miss-it time, diving below the horizon and leaving you soaking wet, struggling with two damp sticks to make a fire.

This, however, was preferable to the perils of the interstate’s shoulder and its many bored, cloying cops and just-like-me vagrants.

If I had to choose, though, it’d be the vagrants. I’d shared a few kind fires with a number of them, sometimes learning their names and their stories, sometimes sitting in uneasy silence until we wandered off to sleep in private.

As the weeks wore on, I had been moving into a cold front, and not sleeping in front of the fire had become impossible. 

More often than not, I’d made camp in a thin layer of trees that lined a highway-side property. Sometimes you’d need to hop a fence, which started out hard, but by the second week was routine.

This was technically and legally trespassing, but a camo sleeping bag and a good spot usually got you through the night without disturbance. Usually.

More than once, I’d been woken by something rummaging through my belongings, sometimes even the coat I’d been sleeping in. Sometimes it’d be curious and annoyed animals, but most times it had been people. The cops had always been the worst. 

“What you’re doing is illegal,” they’d say, then look at me confused and finish either with “Sir,” or, more often, “Ma’am.” Always with disapproval in their voice and always using more force than needed.

Sometimes they’d let me move on, or I’d get a ride to their office, where they called my father, confirmed he knew where I was, then bewilderedly let me go, usually with a stern warning. 

Most cops, when they understood, had offered food and drink for my trip. Some had even offered rides, which I graciously denied. Some offered neither, and just let me go.

One, the worst, had left me locked up in the little town’s singular cell for three days and three nights. It was just outside of West Virginia, right after I’d crossed the Kentucky border. 

Jessup, as the nothing little two-road town was called, apparently had trouble keeping folk around. Or so I was told by Jessup’s top boozer, who said his name was Jesse. He’d already been in the cell when I was thrown in.

The officer who’d found me on the side of the road, a mean mugging ugly woman, had given Jesse her meanest mug as she walked away with a clipboard securely tucked beneath one arm.

Jesse of Jessup played harmonica, and drank like a fish. In the morning he was always set free, but at night, he was brought to the cell, what he lovingly and drunkenly called ‘Jesse’s Little Corner of Jessup’. 

On my last night in his town, he’d snuck in a small bottle of Fireball, a deck of cards, and his dirty harmonica, still wet from its play in the bar. After the mean-mugger had left for the night, Jesse showed me how to play Hearts, Bullshit, Garbage, and the 'ca.

He was good, and I told him as much. In his jovial way, he corrected me: “I’m not good,” I remembered him slurring, “I’m mean. ‘Jesse,’ you should say. ‘You play a meaaaaan har-moan-i-cah,’ you should be saying.”

So I did, and he cheered. We shared no campfire, but did huddle and did dance around the rattling radiator, him blowing sharply into the ‘cah and me stomping my boots and clapping my hands.

He’d thanked me for my company, and kissed me gently on the cheek. He’d reeked of alcohol and worse, but I thanked him for his good humor, and let him sleep. 

After the mean-mugger had exhausted all of her attempts to find me guilty of various crimes, she’d let me go. She had demanded I shower first, staring me down with a disappointed grandmotherly glare. So, thanks to her, I walked out of Jessup and up the highway on-ramp cleaner than I’d been in weeks.

The memory of the mean-faced officer set a worry ablaze in my stomach as I stared down the creek. Again, the stab of the woodpecker cut through the wood’s idle chatter. Why was I out here?

Why in the world had I ignored direct orders from an officer of the law, when they knew my name and phone number? It gnawed at me. I’d never done anything like this.

I finally crossed the log, and stepped off of it onto the other side of the creek. “Noel!” I shouted out again, this time more of a bark. A quick check of the woods revealed nothing but the quiet apathy that suffused the trees. Wasting my time, when she could be in danger. What the fuck am I do-

“Hands up,” a thin, scared voice said from behind me. I recognized the slight southern accent.

“Noel,” I said, half turning my head. “I-”

“I said hands up!” She was shouting now, and I turned to face her with my hands up.

Noel, almost thirteen and dressed in stained Hello Kitty pijamas, held a rifle aimed at my chest. The lever action rifle was almost comically large in her arms, and I laughed nervously, falling, then stepping backwards as she approached me slowly, gun held level against her shoulder. She was trying not to cry.

“Where is my father,” she asked in a broken voice, screwing up her face in a grimace.

“I-I don’t know, Noel, what are you doing? I came here to help you,” I blurted out, still holding my hands in the air carefully. “Please, put the gun down.”

She shook her head. “Answer me,” she said, waving it in the air. She stood on the basswood I had crossed the creek on, and faced me, searching my face for a clue.

“I don’t know,” I repeated, feeling the cold press of a tree against my back. The creek babbled quietly next to us, and I stared at her. We both stood, unmoving.

Carefully, she stared at me, then raised the gun to point at my head. “Stop fucking lying!” she barked at me. I flinched, closing my eyes.

“I’m not! The cops said you were missing, nothing about your dad! I don’t know what the hell is going on, I just want you to stop pointing that thing at me,” I said, breathing heavily. 

“Bullshit,” she spat, the curse sounding foreign in her light voice. “Don’t move,” she said, and braced the rifle against her with one arm as she dug in her pocket for something. Then she threw it at me, and adjusted her grip on the gun. 

Her phone landed next to me in the leaves, the screen lighting up to show a picture of Noel and her mother, smiling happily in a selfie. I looked up at her, facing the glare of the rifle’s blackened metal barrel. She stared at me, raw anger in her eyes.

“You know the passcode,” she growled. “Open it. Watch the video.” I blinked, then nodded, crouching slowly and taking my right hand down to put in the numbers. 9-2-1-2. Her birthday.

The phone opened, showing a paused recording of a computer monitor. The woodpecker stabbed his staccato into a nearby tree. I tapped on the screen, then pressed play.

The video was a recording of the security system in the house I’d lived in until yesterday, portrayed in black and white. It was a view from the top of the grand staircase, watching the front door and most of the upstairs balcony, and the time in the bottom left corner read 2:03 A.M..

Noel, holding the camera in the video, was quietly and carefully breathing, the view slowly moving with her breath. The time in security footage flipped to 2:04 A.M.. The real Noel’s breathing suddenly broke out in a gentle shaking wheeze, I wasn’t sure if she was sobbing, or laughing. “Keep watching,” she choked, seeing I was looking up at her.

Car headlights streamed through the front door’s windows, casting shadows on the wall of the balcony floor. The balustrade’s shadows fled quickly across the wall, then slowly melted away as the headlights died. A moment passed, and then the door opened. Noel’s father walked in. 

Kyle Montgomery was a tall man, ambiguously young but mature and well kept. Grey was seeping in at the top of his scalp, peppering his blond, jaw length hair. Carefully hanging his keys on a hook near the door, he stared at himself in the full length mirror next to the door, straightening out his thin mustache and checking his jawline. 

He mussed up his hair, then turned his head back and forth to check if it was correctly incorrect. Nodding in approval, he shrugged off his heavy business coat, and let it drop to the floor as he walked up the stairs. He shed his suit and loosened his tie, leaving him with just a tailored pinstripe button up tucked into perfect black slacks. 

As he rose to the top of the stairs, he stopped and carefully undid the highest button of his shirt, the tie hanging loosely about his chest like an ascot. 

Then, he paused, staring down at the mess of his coat on the ground, the stairs, then the hall the opposite way, where his wife and child were asleep. He looked small in the video, and suddenly very tired. Still facing his bedroom, he raised his hand gently to his mouth, and bit down softly on it. 

He turned to face my bedroom, biting down on his own flesh hard enough to draw a bead of blood. He walked to my door, then knocked on it, drawing his wounded hand to his side, near his hip. He looked as if he were going to draw a sword, though nothing was there, just his right hand hovering a few inches away from his left hip.

The door opened, and I was standing in the crack. I was dressed in pijamas, and looked at him confused. He said something, the recording silent. In the past, I nodded, widening the door.

My brain felt like it was dropped in a bath of ice water, pure confusion washing over me. “What the fuck?” I said aloud, watching myself open the door further, letting him step in. I walked away, disappearing into the room as he slipped through the doorway, then closed it. 

I stared at my door in the video, nauseated. “Noel,” I said, staring up at her from the floor of the forest. “I don’t remember this.” My voice was cracking, confusion and fear seeping into my words from my core.

“Bullshit,” she croaked. She readjusted the grip on the rifle. “I’ve literally seen you do it. I watched you open that door for him! I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but it’s got to be why he’s gone. Where is he?”

“Noel,” I pleaded, “That’s not me. There’s no way, I’m not lying. I wouldn’t do that to you, or your mom,” I said. “Beli-”

“I don’t believe you,” she shouted, almost sobbing now. “You’re a liar. You stole my dad, or killed him, or something, ‘cause you knew it wasn’t right. Almost every night at two A.M., since you got here. Look!” She gestured towards her phone with the rifle. 

I looked down carefully, cringing away from the gun as it came back up to point at me. Noel in the video was shaking, watching as her father left my room, five minutes after he had entered it.

He looked the same as when he’d entered, save for the blood and bite mark on his hand. They were gone. He walked calmly down the stairs, grabbed his coat, and left the house. The car’s headlights cast the familliar shadows in reverse.

The camera spun, and the mouse on the desktop shakily moved to a new folder, reading 2/13/23. Two days ago. The mouse maneuvered to the video file labeled 200, the second file in the folder, and opened it.

Almost on the dot at 2:03 A.M., Mr. Montgomery stepped into the foyer, shrugged his coat onto the floor, then climbed the stairs.

This time, he didn’t pause on the way to my door to bite his hand, stopping only to knock, clearly hover his hand over his empty hip, then enter my room. 

I hadn’t even looked up at him. I’d just let him in. 

“What the fuck,” I whispered hoarsely. 

The mouse skimmed the video to five minutes later, when Kyle exited punctually, closing the door after him carefully, then taking the stairs two at a time to leave the mansion. 

The video then clicked through random nights at two A.M., watching the same process occur many times over, sped up. 

Sometimes he bit his hand, sometimes he just knocked. Always, his hand reached for the empty space at his left hip. I watched, silently, until the video ended suddenly in the middle of a night.

Noel had been staring at me the entire time, burning with silent rage. “Just tell me.”

I took a deep breath, and sat on the cold, packed dirt. “I don’t know, Noel. That’s not me. There’s no way…” 

I wasn’t one to repress memories. My worst traumatic memories, I could remember in painful detail, burned into the fabric of my being. It could be an actor, but no, I’d been there at two A.M., almost every weeknight for a year. I could very distinctly remember my nights, they were usually taken up with studying and listening to music.

A coldly horrible idea formed in my head. He could have been drugging me to make me forget. Something in a drink, or something in food. He hadn’t been carrying anything in with him… 

But it could’ve been in his pocket. I writhed in disgust, and I drew my knees up to my chest, feeling my breath hitch inside me as I stared emptily at the phone. 

“What the fuck was he doing to me,” I said, hollow, not really there, not really meaning to. What had he done to me? Why couldn’t I remember? If he was drugging me inside of my room, how had I let him in? Would I let that man in my room if he knocked? No. Definitely no. “What the fuck,” I whispered, rocking slightly.

“Parker?” Noel asked softly.

“No,” I stated, almost to myself. “It’s a fake, a fake video or a fake set that he made to set me up. It’s just an actor, just…” Noel was staring at me, shaking her head.

“What do you mean?” She asked, lowering the rifle a little, stepping towards me.

“He was never home, he could’ve been, I don’t know, setting this up? There’s no way I’d let him into my room. I don’t even like your father as a person, let alone,” I stopped, feeling bile rise in my chest. “No. This isn’t real.” I stated firmly, and felt like I was coming back to myself, at least a little.

“No, Parker,” she said, stepping back again and raising the rifle. “I watched you do it. After I recorded this, I stayed up to watch you. He knocked, you let him in.”

“No,” I pleaded.

“Please, don’t lie,” Noel whispered.

“Stop calling me a fucking liar! I don’t remember any of this!” I was shouting now, on my knees in front of her.

"Just tell me the truth!" She cried, matching my intensity.

"I am!" I screamed I picked up the phone, throwing it back to her harder than I needed to. She staggered backward, shocked.

"Liar." Noel almost growled the word, dripping with resentment.

She bent to pick up her phone, momentarily hugging the rifle against her chest, hand still on the trigger guard. It was pointed at me. My eyes darted up to Noel's. She wasn’t looking at me.

What do you do?