The Children on the Hill(15)

I wrote back immediately: Is it really you?

The email bounced back as undeliverable. No such address.

I dove into new research, spending hours online, and soon discovered a pattern of teenage girls who had gone missing on full moons, all from towns with reports of a local monster.

The earliest match I could find was thirteen-year-old Jennifer Rothchild, back in 1988. She’d disappeared from a little town in Washington State with a lot of bigfoot sightings. And Jennifer had told her friends she’d met a creature in the woods, a creature who spoke to her. She’d vanished on the night of the full moon in September. The woods were searched by police, dogs, and teams of volunteers. Signs were put up around town. The police questioned her friends, her teachers, members of her family. No trace was ever found. No one ever heard from her again.

In 1991, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Morales disappeared from Farmington, New Mexico, after telling people she’d seen the Dogman and was going out to look for him on the full moon.

In 1993, Sandra Novotny in Flatwoods, West Virginia, showed her friends a blurry photo she’d taken of the Flatwoods monster. She went into the woods to get a better picture and was never seen again.

Sixteen-year-old Anna Larson vanished from Elkhorn, Wisconsin, in September of 1998 after telling her little brother that she’d met the Beast of Bray Road, that the Beast had told her she was special.

Each girl disappeared on a full moon after claiming to have met some sort of legendary creature.

Nadia Hill in New York State was the fifth to fit the pattern.

In addition to my online research, I’d visited the towns where the girls had disappeared, talked to locals, friends, and family, always under the guise of monster research for my podcast. I’d walked the woods and fields where the girls had gone missing. But over and over, I found nothing.

The monster, my monster, was too clever to leave behind clues.

I held out hope that one of the missing girls would surface one day and tell her story. But none of them ever did. And no bodies or personal effects were ever found. The girls vanished without a trace.

I didn’t go to the authorities. I was sure they’d look at what I had and say just what the local police always did: These girls were runaways.

And why would they listen to the crazy theories of a woman who hunted monsters for a living? Besides, once they found out who I really was and where I’d come from—well, that was a road I didn’t want to go down with law enforcement of any sort.

So I investigated on my own. Crisscrossed the country, searching, hunting.

And occasionally, I’d get another email from the same user, MNSTRGRL, at a different address. Always, the notes were cryptic, teasing, sometimes quoting lines from our childhood Book of Monsters: They can pass as human. They hide in plain sight.

Sometimes there would be questions: Do you know yet? Why I do what I do? Have you guessed?

And sometimes, just taunting: You were so close, but again, you missed so much.

I’d printed copies of every email from MNSTRGRL and these were in the file too. I flipped through them now and looked at the last one I’d received, about three months ago:

Do you ever get tired of it? The cat and mouse game we play? The hunter and the hunted. Only, which is which, sister? Which is which?



I shut the folder, shoved it into my bag.

I went into the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and got out my thermos. Not that I felt the need for coffee now—I was keyed up, on edge—but I’d need the caffeine for an all-night drive. While I waited for it to brew, I pulled out my phone, knowing I shouldn’t, but longing to hear my brother’s voice.

“Hey,” he said when he picked up.

“Hey, yourself,” I said back.

“How’s Louisiana? Any sign of your swamp monster?” The words were a little mocking. He didn’t believe in monsters anymore.

“I’m not in Louisiana.”

“I thought you were there for the rest of the week. Where are you now?”

A lump in my throat warned me not to tell him.

But I longed to tell someone, to confess, and who else would I tell? Who else could possibly understand?

“I’m home,” I said. “but I’m heading out soon.” I paused, then made myself finish: “I’m going to Vermont.”

He fell silent, so quiet I thought the call had dropped.

At last he said, “Why?” his voice a little higher than usual. A littleboy voice that took me tumbling back through time. I closed my eyes, pictured a too-skinny Eric, his tube socks pulled up to his knobby knees, curly hair sticking up at strange angles. A boy who was always cradling an animal, trying to tame something wild, to fix something broken.

“I think she’s there.” I didn’t need to say more. Didn’t need to tell him who she was. “There’s another missing girl,” I explained, offering up my evidence. “Taken on the full moon. From a place with a monster. It fits the pattern.”

Eric, member of the Monster Club, illustrator of our book, would have understood this.

More silence. But I could hear him breathing, a soft wheeze that worried me a little. He sounded like an old man. Behind the sound of his breath, I heard a TV. A baseball game. His beloved Tigers, no doubt. The sound dimmed, and his breathing got louder. He was walking, moving out of earshot of Cricket and the girls. I heard a door close.