The Girl in the Mist: A Misted Pines Novel Read online

  “That’s obviously to be expected. Kids are kids. A variety of factors would affect how they learn, or if they do—”

  “Ms. Larue—”

  “Delphine.”

  He grew silent again.

  “I don’t know how big her class is…”

  I let that lie.

  Cade Bohannan made no reply.

  Even so, I still sensed that now, my message was clear.

  Moving on…

  “Further, there are vast resources based on even more vast research that are available globally that help us to understand a child’s development, physically, mentally and emotionally. The days where it’s generally understood that the moment a child can coordinate their limbs, they’re sent to a factory to help the family put bread on the table are no longer accepted. At all. You would not set a pack of puppies to guiding a sled, you do not send children in to do adult’s work.”

  He studied me silently.

  “In other words, you must know this teacher’s behavior is unacceptable. Indeed, even unforgiveable. She should be fired. With what she did to Celeste, she has no business teaching anyone under the age of thirty-five, and even that’s up for debate. She is clearly not fit for the job.”

  Above his sunglasses, his dark, dense eyebrows rose but no words escaped his lips.

  This meant, obviously, I carried on.

  “I understand she’s human. She’s fallible. Perhaps she was having a bad day. However, she’s in a position that she must understand that singling out a child, I don’t care the age, Celeste is still a child, for that kind of scorn is reprehensible. Celeste was defending herself against an attack. Powerless in her position as a student, she perhaps took the wrong tack in her defense, but her defense was most assuredly defensible. Of course, she should have chosen her words more eloquently, but I do not agree that the lesson she needs to learn in this scenario is essentially that she needs not to protest when someone is forcing her to eat their shit.”

  When I stopped speaking, he didn’t start.

  As I had nothing further to say, I didn’t say any more.

  Eventually, he realized I was done, and therefore spoke.

  “Are you telling me you think I should go to the high school and try to get the chemistry teacher fired?”

  “No, I’m telling you it’d be lovely if Celeste could stay with me for a bit longer to help me unpack boxes.”

  His head listed back, his chin going into his neck and shunting a bit to the side.

  And then he said, “Why didn’t you just say that?”

  I didn’t have the opportunity to answer that question.

  His shoulders rotated, his arms dropped, his neck twisted, and my breath caught.

  I heard my phone ring in the other room.

  My skin tightened.

  Bohannan pivoted around and marched out.

  Quickly, I followed him just as another cop-knock sounded at the door.

  Just clearing the path to the great room that led under the stairs, Bohannan halted so quickly, I nearly ran into him.

  I sidestepped him.

  I saw Celeste was pale again, frail again, staring at her father with huge, terrified eyes.

  She was also standing at the front door. A door she’d opened.

  A man in a beige sheriff’s uniform was lurking there.

  His name badge read Moran.

  “Alice?” Bohannan grunted.

  The deputy’s hard face hardened more.

  “Alice,” he confirmed.

  Five

  Letter to the Editor

  I fought it.

  I did.

  Unimpressed by my virtual soliloquy, Bohannan sent his daughter home.

  He left with the deputy.

  I made myself finish the bookshelves, stack the spent boxes in the mudroom, and then allowed no excuse but to tackle the reading room, which took hardly any time at all. I therefore gave myself permission to kick my own behind considering I could have had that sanctuary the last few days.

  Only then did I make a pot of tea and go get my laptop.

  I curled into the chair that dominated that small space precisely how I’d envisioned, sipped tea, pulled up Google and typed in Alice Misted Pines.

  I was alarmed to find, with that vague and wide-open search criteria, that I did not have to dive any deeper.

  The first link was for an article in the Tri-Lake Chronicle.

  The title for the article was “Girl Missing: Police Have No Leads.”

  Tasting something sour at the back of my tongue, I pulled up the article.

  I read it.

  And all the related ones.

  And anything at all I could find that had to do with the case.

  What I learned was that Alice Pulaski, the bright, red-headed, freckle-faced, eight-year-old daughter of Dale and Audrey Pulaski, had a slumber party for her birthday.

  This party had occurred the evening of the first night I spent in Misted Pines.

  Upon pulling up a map, I found that Dale and Audrey lived much like I and the Bohannans lived.

  Goldilocks.

  Not too far from town, not too close.

  Not too far from their neighbors, and not too close.

  In the woods, not alone, but not populated.

  Alice’s friends, as girls were prone to do, had decided to be naughty, and when they should have been sleeping, they snuck out of the house to go play some game in the woods in the dead of night.

  When they returned to the house, they did so waking Alice’s mother and father, seeing as the girls were panicked and hysterical.

  Because, as they reported to Alice’s parents and later to the police, once they’d noticed something amiss, they’d spent some time looking, but no matter how hard they tried, they could not find Alice.

  A search by Dale and Audrey, as well as Alice’s big brother, seventeen-year-old Will, who was Dale’s son by his first marriage, was to no avail.

  Now also panicked, they called the police.

  The sheriff and his deputies had arrived promptly.

  At that time, they instigated a preliminary search.

  When hours went by and this proved fruitless, they brought in a K-9 unit.

  This did not prove fruitless. However, Alice’s trail, as followed by the dogs, abruptly and mysteriously stopped somewhere deep into the woods.

  As time wore on, temperatures dipped up and down, and Alice’s continued disappearance was beginning to spell out an unpleasant outcome, the sheriff’s department organized a volunteer search force made up of off-duty deputies, police from other counties, fire department personnel and ordinary citizens.

  All told, well over a hundred people came forward to help search.

  They combed the woods.

  Hide, nor hair, of Alice was found.

  No ransom was requested.

  No odd characters were seen about town.

  An animal attack was ruled out as she might have been carried off, but the dogs would have discovered that trail and any location of attack.

  Meaning no animal could make a child disappear into thin air.

  But a human could.

  Interviews with family, friends, teachers, neighbors, acquaintances all came up with the same thing.

  Alice was a good kid. Sweet. Smart. A regular eight-year-old girl with no enemies or anyone who might wish to cause her harm. She was popular, her family was close, they were good stock, frequented church and involved with the community, and she was beloved by her parents and her big brother.

  It came in a letter to the editor.

  That little combination of a few of the myriad puzzle pieces that were floating in my mind fitting together before falling to the board.

  A resounding censure of Sheriff Leland Dern, for his entire tenure, most recently his handling of the missing girl, Alice Pulaski.

  The letter’s final line?

  It’s time to call in Bohannan.

  Six

  Nightmare

&
nbsp; When I woke from the nightmares, I didn’t do it like I suspected no one on earth did it.

  Gasping in horror and sitting bolt upright in bed.

  That was Hollywood’s interpretation of a nightmare.

  Mine was sudden consciousness and deep paralysis, caused by extortionate amounts of fear.

  I didn’t move a muscle.

  See a shadow.

  Hear even silence.

  Taste a thing.

  Was he there?

  In that room?

  Like the dream told me.

  Or was he close?

  Did he know where I was?

  Could he get to me, without sensors blaring, his approach caught on camera, me being able to get to one of the seven panic buttons in the house, or behind the steel door that now protected my bathroom?

  As the fear subsided and I was able to assess my environs and then found the courage to add sight to sense and sound, I got on an elbow, looked around the darkness of my room and saw nothing.

  No one.

  I was alone.

  I was safe.

  I rolled, threw off the covers and twisted out of bed.

  It was cold. I had the habit of turning the heat down before bed. I liked to burrow, settle under the weight of more than one cover.

  I moved across the room, reached for the throw across the armchair by the French doors that led out to my personal balcony and pulled it around my shoulders.

  I then stood at the doors, gazing out.

  The moon was behind some clouds.

  The shadows ran deep.

  I had not yet become accustomed to the landscape, but I saw dark outlines of pines, a muted shimmer on the water.

  The very far away, diminutive triangle that was slightly lighter against the black shadows of the night.

  The only bit of Cade Bohannan’s roof visible to me.

  It’s time to call in Bohannan.

  I had not only been a mother to teenage girls.

  I’d been a mother to eight-year-olds.

  Thus, it was also time to activate Delphine.

  Seven

  Doomed

  I set aside the laptop after scanning the Tri-Lake Chronicle.

  It was three days after I’d met Celeste and her father, she had gone, as had he.

  The weekend had passed.

  It was Monday, and I could only assume (and hope) that Celeste was back in school.

  Try as I might, and I studied it often, that triangle of their roof that I could see told no stories.

  The Tri-Lake Chronicle did, however, the prevailing one being that Alice Pulaski had not been found.

  This was a curious mixture of horrifying and comforting.

  It was horrifying, obviously, because Alice had not yet been found.

  It was now more than clear that she had not wandered off, got lost, became scared and holed up in a cave where some intrepid deputy would run across her, dirty, hungry and dehydrated, but alive. News I’d been hoping I would wake up and read in a relieved article accompanied by a joyous photo of parents and child reunited.

  It was comforting because this was still the top story in the local newspaper, splashed underneath the online masthead.

  A community like this did not have girls missing, or, as I’d become accustomed to in spending so much time with the Chronicle, hardly any news at all…but good news. Bingo nights and bridge tournaments, boys and girls basketball league signups at the rec center and a local woman who still lived by herself and stitched stunning embroidery reaching the age of 105.

  And whoever ran the newspaper did not feel that their readers would get Alice Pulaski fatigue.

  This was not a sensational piece of news offered up for information and digestion in a digital landscape where people experienced sorrow or outrage but had no interest in follow-through. Their only craving being getting their hit of sorrow and outrage. Their only thought being, what was next to devour?

  Alice Pulaski was important, and the community cared.

  A video had been posted on Saturday—one I could only stand to watch for forty-five seconds before I had to shut it off.

  Audrey Pulaski begging whoever took her daughter to bring her home.

  Dale Pulaski stood beside her looking ravaged.

  Sheriff Dern stood behind her, appearing solemn.

  I didn’t even have to be in his presence to sense his puzzle.

  Whereas Cade Bohannan’s covered a twelve-seater dining room table, and it was made of thousands of pieces that held subtle shading that only the most patient of players could fix together, Leland Dern’s could be assembled by a five-year-old.

  This did not bode well.

  I’d made the decision, and upon watching that forty-five seconds, I carried it through.

  I called Hawk Delgado.

  It was no surprise this situation in Misted Pines was known to him. He was tasked with keeping me safe, and although this had nothing to do with me, it had to do with Misted Pines, and that was where I was. It was also not a surprise that he currently did not have any resources to devote to assisting with it.

  However, he gave me two names.

  Nightingale Investigations, an outfit located where Delgado was, in Denver, Colorado.

  And Tanner Layne, a private investigator who worked out of a shop in Brownsburg, Indiana, which was, to my astonishment, where Joe Callahan was based.

  Neither were close.

  But Nightingale was closer.

  Though for reasons I didn’t understand (they probably had to do with Callahan), I called Layne first, left a message as it was the weekend and waited.

  It was not long before he returned my call.

  He had a full caseload, but said he’d look into it and get back to me.

  I then reached out to Denver, leaving another message.

  Not much time passed before a woman named Shirleen Jackson got in touch, saying she’d assessed it and presented it to her boss, the man behind the name, Lee Nightingale. She would follow up with me as soon as he’d made his decision.

  Within hours, I had two replies.

  Layne: “We’re ready to roll when we receive word from the investigator on site that he welcomes assistance. We have a message to him. But if he doesn’t give us the greenlight, I’m afraid at this time we can’t get involved. I hope you understand. I would feel the same if someone I didn’t know pushed into one of my investigations, especially at this early juncture. Trust me when I say that it’s never helpful.”

  I didn’t know who “we” was, I also didn’t ask, but I suspected he’d consulted with Callahan.

  I also didn’t think this was “early.” At that point, she’d been missing nearly a week.

  Which begged the question, what parents had a slumber party for their eight-year-old on a Monday evening?

  I didn’t ask Layne that either.

  Jackson: “We understand your concern, but Lee looked into things and the investigator contracted to assist the local authorities is second to none. In this kind of situation, although it seems contradictory, more hands on deck can make a mess.”

  That was two nos of the same ilk.

  I decided to focus on the “second to none” comment, knowing they were referring to the fact it was clear the locals had called Cade Bohannan in. She was not talking about Dern.

  This seemed to be quite a bit of esteem for Bohannan, but knowing it, no puzzle pieces fell.

  Even so, I was undeterred.

  Which was why, upon indication that Alice had yet to be found, I left my laptop where it lay, and did what I hadn’t done in the entire week since I’d been there (save one epic trip to the grocery store, this trip accompanied by Agent Palmer).

  I walked into the kitchen, grabbed my purse and keys, then made my way through the mudroom and to the garage, where I got into my Volvo XC60, pulled out and drove into town.

  I’d memorized the directions, and in less than fifteen minutes, I was there.

  I checked all mirrors and reche
cked the pocket of my purse, where the GPS emitting panic fob Delgado had given me was ensconced.

  Only then did I get out of my SUV.

  I walked into the sheriff’s department to find it buzzing.

  This came as no surprise.

  It was also no surprise when the deputy, who was walking swiftly across the unstaffed front counter, did a double take and stutter step when he turned his head and caught sight of me.

  He stopped.

  I approached the counter.

  He opened his mouth, closed it, blushed.

  I put him out of his misery with a quick scan to his name tag.

  “Hello, Deputy Dickerson, I’m Delphine Larue.”

  I reached out my hand.

  He stared at it, and his Adam’s apple bobbed.

  It took a moment, and then he clasped it, letting it go quickly, like his lowly touch might infect my famous person and turn me to ash.

  “I know this is likely an imposition at this time,” I continued. “But I was wondering if I could have a word with Sheriff Dern.”

  “I’ll get Polly,” he announced, and then he took off in a way I was surprised a blossom of dust didn’t bloom from his heels.

  I stood there, outside the polished wood counter that ran the whole front of the station and separated the reception area from the inner workings of the department.

  There were people behind the counter, quite a number of them, and I now had much more attention than when I’d first walked in.

  Except from the men who were all in a glass-walled conference room at the back, discussing something with what seemed great intensity, while staring at a board that had its back turned to the window wall.

  Sheriff Dern was not among those men.

  Nor was Cade Bohannan.

  A further note, there was not a woman in that conference room, or in uniform outside of it.

  Ditto that for a person of color.

  But the rest of the area looked like a mashup set design directly inspired by Veronica Mars, several dozen Supernatural episodes and Twin Peaks.

  “Oh my goodness, oh my gosh, oh my goodness,” a woman sing-songed.

  I turned right.

  And I had to reach out a hand to the bench and curve my fingers around as a plump, diminutive, red-cheeked, helmet-haired woman, wearing an ill-advised pleated skirt and a twinset with requisite string of pearls, appeared.