Last Girl Ghosted(69)

“And did it heal him?”

“It might have,” I say, though I’m not sure I believe it. “If not for the raid.”

“There were other families up there, right?” says Bailey. “Do you remember any of them?”

“Not really,” I say. “In the article, I recognized the names—Stone, Wilson. But some of those folks had been up there all their lives. Many of them wouldn’t have reported the birth of their children at all, or the deaths in the family.”

“I’m getting that,” he says. “This place. It keeps its secrets, doesn’t it?”

I find myself smiling. It does.

“Did you go to The Hollows Historical Society?” I ask.

“Every time I go there, the door is locked. The woman who apparently runs the show there, Joy, she hasn’t returned my calls.”

That makes sense. Bailey Kirk is an outsider, an interloper. He’s been snooping around, and the folks up here have noticed. She won’t open the doors to the past for him unless she’s sure of his intentions. That those intentions are in line with what The Hollows wants.

“That was going to be my next stop. I know Joy,” I say.

She was Miss Lovely’s oldest friend. She came to the house every Thursday afternoon for coffee and cake, always had a story about this place, a memory, an anecdote. One of the few people who knew my secret, she was always talking about the property that my father’s family owned. Take care of it. You don’t want to go back there now. But someday you will. It belongs to you and you to it.

Honestly, I thought Joy’s obsession with this town and its history was a bit much. And I had no plans to go back to my father’s house, not ever. But it turns out she was right; I do have a sense of ownership. And I haven’t been able to let it go.

Bailey gets up from his perch and walks to the window, looks outside. The fading light washes his face. Maybe that’s a PI thing, always wanting to know who’s coming and going. I want to ask him: Were you always a curious kid, the kind who asks too many questions? I like to know what makes people tick. And Bailey, aloof, cool, is a bit of a mystery to me.

“What do you think you’ll find at The Hollows Historical Society that you don’t already know?” he asks. “I mean you were there. Who knows better than you? And what does this have to do with the ghost?”

“The ghost?”

“Adam Harper.”

“Is that what you call him?” I ask.

“What else? He is a man I’ve never seen, who doesn’t have a name. The closer I get, the more quickly he slips away.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Because it’s a place that you and Melissa have in common. And I’m out of leads, out of time. This is the last solid thing I have.”

“Same.”

He turns to regard me, gives me a kind of up and down assessing glance. Is he looking at me? Or trying to decide if I’m telling the truth? “Fair enough.”

I walk over to his bedside and pick up the book he has there about the dark web. It’s a floppy paperback, looks self-published with bad art and unprofessional looking typeface.

When Bailey speaks again, his voice has gone soft.

“Time is running out. She’s slipping away. Time is a kind of distance, isn’t it? It’s a road you can’t turn back on.”

Maybe he’s fallen in love with Mia, I think. Or the ghost of her, his idea of her—since they’ve never met. Maybe he’s been chasing her so long, tracking her, that he’s formed a kind of attachment. There’s a tug to him, a kind of sad understanding.

“My firm,” he says. “My boss, Nora, she wants to pull the plug and tell the client our case is cold.”

“Is it?”

“I haven’t found a single thing that brings me closer to her. Except for you.”

I tell him about the email message I received. The texts on my phone. They are lures on the end of a line. All I have to do is bite and he’ll reel me in.

“This is not a game,” he says when I’m done. He moves closer to me, his face dark with worry. We stand a foot apart in the middle of the room. “He’s a dangerous man. A predator. What do you think he wants from you, Wren? Why is he reaching out?”

“I don’t know.”

But I do. I feel the pull of that darkness, a deadly riptide. It reminds me in a weird way of my father, how the things he said about the world, and nature, and mankind both frightened me and made a kind of sense. How I wanted to get away from him and get closer to him all in one complicated twist of the heart.

“Because he knows you’re hooked into him,” Bailey says. “He knows you’ll go to him. And then what do you think will happen?”

In tracking, it’s a known quantity that your quarry may, will probably, elude you. You can follow the sign—the prints, the broken branches—but you may never find the creature that left little pieces of himself behind. Even when he’s in your sights, one wrong move and he will dash away. Every good hunter knows that nature is smarter, faster, more sensitive than he will ever be. If you catch what you’re stalking, it’s a gift, something that’s been offered, not something taken. But you still hunt if you want to survive.

“Do you have another plan?” I say, already knowing the answer. “Another way to find him? To find out what happened to Mia?”