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Geri
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I rise from the dead of sleep in a jolt of panic as I become conscious of lying on a cold, uneven concrete floor. My arms are straight above my head, shackled together and attached by a chain to a crumbling brick wall that’s being overtaken by vegetation.
Holy shit!
Squeezing my eyes shut, I shake my head in an effort to force my brain out of the fog it’s stewing in so I can figure out what happened. What’s the last thing I remember? The Sasquatch hunters—Ken Broughton telling Jackson to see me back to the lodge because it wasn’t safe for a woman to be out in the woods alone. And I said I would be fine on my own...
I shift, twisting around to get a better view of where I am, and recoil in pain when the heavy metal chain tethering me to the wall rubs against my forehead. My fingertips trace a jagged scab. The area all around it is tender and swollen.
I roll onto my side, preparing to pull myself into a sitting position, but I stop when I come face-to-face with another woman about five feet away from me, chained in the same position I’m in.
She has a heart-shaped face framed by straight light brown hair, a thin nose, and a generous lower lip. She’s wearing a navy-blue Mountain Equipment Co-op jacket, and the collar of a polar fleece sweater peeks out from under it. Her hiking boots look as though they’re not even broken in.
“Hey,” I whisper to her, nervously looking around for our captor. Then I catch sight of a large, brown, furry thing in the corner, staring at me.
Gasping, I pull my knees up to my chest, contracting into a fetal position in an irrational attempt to put distance between whatever it is and me. I wait for it to spring into action and pounce on me, but it doesn’t move. It just stares at me with black, sightless eyes.
Cautiously, I extend a leg and kick some of the rubble on the floor toward it then jerk my knees back up to my chest. When I don’t receive a reaction from it, I bravely uncurl my body and allow myself a closer look at it. That’s when I realize the furry head is sitting on top of a pile of fur. It’s a costume. And judging by the apelike face and enormous hairy feet, I’m guessing it’s a Sasquatch costume.
“Are you kidding me?” I whisper under my breath, thinking to myself what an idiot I am. Of course there’s a Sasquatch costume because everyone knows Bigfoot doesn’t exist.
What was it Mary said to me? Everyone’s gotten so swept up in the entertainment of a Bigfoot hunt that they’ve forgotten the real problem. There’s a missing person. And she was right. I got so damn caught up in the attraction of a Sasquatch hunt, so caught up in the urban legends of aliens and UFOs, so caught up in finding an angle that would make the story exclusively mine, that I didn’t make the missing person the priority of my investigation.
I turn my head and take a good look at the woman lying next to me. Now that I’m thinking more rationally, I know it’s her. I’ve seen her picture enough times, splashed across the news, to know this is Lisa Hornsby.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper to the unconscious figure, thinking that if I had just stuck to the facts, this missing woman would have been my angle to the story all along. It would have taken my investigation in a whole new direction, and since there’s no such thing as Bigfoot, it quite possibly would’ve occurred to me that maybe some whackadoodle was pretending to be a Sasquatch in order to terrorize and abduct women.
It all makes perfect sense now that I’m chained to a wall.
I haul myself up into a sitting position and take a look around. We’re in an old brick building that’s in the process of falling down into itself. Sections of the wooden roof have either rotted away or have been torn off by weather, and what’s left of the rafters has become an aviary, judging by the number of nests. Tendrils of vines are entwined together, dotted with tiny spring buds erupting from their woody form. The vines snake across the brick walls in random crisscross patterns, and saplings push up through concrete that has turned to powder through the years. The place smells of damp earth, animal urine, and bird droppings.
I have no idea where I am.
I turn my attention back to Lisa. “Hey,” I say again, slightly louder. I stretch my leg as far as it will go to give her a nudge. “Wake up.”
Her lids begin to flutter. Then, all at once, her eyes fly open, and she gasps for breath, extending her neck and opening her mouth to gulp as much air as she can get.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” I wonder if she has been abused, maybe choked. Come to think of it, the inside of my throat feels bruised.
Then it comes to her attention that she’s tethered to the wall, and she panics. She starts thrashing and yanking on her on chains, grunting with the effort of trying to pull the bolt out of the wall.
“Please be quiet,” I plead in a loud, raspy whisper. “I don’t know where he is.”
She stops struggling, leans against the wall, and surveys the room with fearful eyes. “Who is he? Where are we?”
Now that she’s sitting upright and motionless, I check her exposed skin—face, hands, wrists, ankles—for any injuries, but I don’t see so much as a bruise. I do notice, with interest, the powdery film of grayish mortar peppering her hair.
“I was hoping you would know the answer to those questions.” I scan the debris scattered over the concrete for something I can use to scrape around the bolt. “You’ve been missing for a while, Lisa.”
“You know my name?” she asks, startled.
I nod. “A lot of people are looking for you.” I suddenly wonder if anyone is looking for me. Does Sean know I’m missing? We were staying in the same lodge, and our rooms were next door to each other. He must know I’m not there.
“Where’s my friend?” Her voice is rising with fear and desperation. “Where’s Bethany? She was—”
I snap my attention back to Lisa and shush her. My eyes nervously dart toward the hallway leading into this dead end room, but I don’t see so much as a shadow. “The last time I saw Bethany, she was in Pembroke Regional, being treated for minor injuries, surrounded by her family, and worried about you.”
Sean probably just thinks I’m avoiding him after our fight... after he told me he couldn’t offer me a future.
Lisa’s eyes well up with tears. “She’s really okay?”
“I promise.” I return to my task of finding something I can gouge the wall with. I can tell by how dry the sticks are that they’ll be useless, but there are lots of pebbles and a few good-size pieces of broken concrete. I’m thinking one of the jagged pieces of concrete would make the best tool.
Lying down on my back, I stretch out and use my feet to slide a bunch of the rubble closer to my hands.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I can’t just sit here.” I don’t really believe I can free us, but I know I’ll go into a full-on panic if I don’t at least give myself the appearance of doing something to escape.
I roll the debris as far as I can then sit up and roll it the rest of the way until my hands can reach the pile. I choose a sturdy piece of concrete, a little bigger than the size of my hand, and set to work scraping it around the bolt in the wall.
“Can I try?” Lisa asks.
I kick a few big pieces to within her reach.
“Do you remember anything?” I ask as we both scrape away at the wall.
“Last thing I remember is hiking up to the bluff with Beth. It was nighttime, and we were goofing around, trying to scare each other...” She trails off.
“Do you mind if I ask why you were hiking at night?” I remember what I said to Emma—that women have the right to hike wherever and whenever they want—but honestly, how many people go for a midnight stroll in the woods, especially unarmed?
Lisa turns her attention back to the bolt she’s scraping. Furrows of concern crease her forehead.
“Lisa?”
“It was stupid,” she says. “So stupid.”
“What was?” I like this—having a conversation. It’s keeping my mind occupied, and I think it’s keeping hers occupied too.
“My boyfriend died six months ago in a car accident.” She makes eye contact with me. “He was driving drunk.”
Automatically, I reach out for her hand but come up short, my chains preventing me from touching her. “I’m very sorry, Lisa.”
She nods. “Me too.” She pauses to take a breath and swallow hard before continuing. “He used to talk about Algonquin Park all the time. Spent every summer camping with his dad and brother, fishing and hunting. Anyway, he was planning to take me on a camping trip next summer, you know, to show me the place he loved most in the world.” She bites down on her trembling lower lip. “And I, um, figured that if there really is an afterlife, he’d want to spend it in Algonquin. So I asked Beth to come with me to help with a séance.”
She stops talking and directs her tortured gaze at me, as if waiting for me to give her the scolding she thinks she deserves. It strikes me that after all she has been through, it’s not fear for herself that she’s feeling; it’s grief for her boyfriend and concern for her friend that are coming through.
Her tear-streaked eyes look heavenward. “You think I’m stupid, right? Taking my friend into the woods in the middle of the night to conjure up my dead boyfriend. Thank God I didn’t get Beth killed.”
“Don’t do that to yourself,” I say in a firm voice. “If you live your life in fear of the psychos of the world, then you’re handing them the power to control you.” I go back to scraping around the bolt with angry vigor. “And we’re not going to give the asshole who chained us up the power, are we, Lisa?”
She shakes her head and resumes her scraping with greater determination. “No way.”
“Is that so?” a male voice asks.
My heart leaps into my throat, and a strangled cry escapes me, although Lisa’s scream drowns it out. My first instinct is to get to my feet and put myself at eye level with my captor, but my chains prevent me from standing upright. So I sit up as straight as I can and flash my defiance as I look straight into the bastard’s shockingly ugly face. Short dark hair spikes along a Neanderthal-ish square forehead. His brown eyes sit on either side of his broad, flat nose, sunken below the cliff of bushy eyebrows. He actually looks like Bigfoot.
Poor guy has probably been a bullied outcast for most of his life and grew up to be the thing he was most likely accused of resembling—a monster. No wonder he’s screwed up.
What am I thinking? This psychotic bastard has me chained to a wall. I will not go all Stockholm syndrome by feeling sorry for him.
“Looks like I already got the power,” he says, laughing. He motions toward Lisa. “I terrorized this one and her friend when I caught them using a Ouija board in the middle of the night. And you”—he stares at me—“I caught you looking for Bigfoot.” He goes over to the Sasquatch costume and kicks it. “Easy pickins.”
I’m trying to remember if that’s what happened. I remember meeting the hunters in the woods, getting some film footage of them, and then... I found a Bigfoot trail and followed it, came across a broken, bloody branch, and... a hurt Sasquatch. I remember kneeling down beside it, looking into the dark brown beady eyes. Wait a minute—dark brown eyes. Squinting, I take a closer look at the caveman’s eyes and think there’s definitely something familiar about them.
“The injured Bigfoot—it was you, wasn’t it?” I ask.
His eyebrows shoot up, two wooly caterpillars, and his fleshy forehead creases into a road map. “Look who’s getting her memory back,” he says in an accusatory tone.
“You were pretending to be a hurt Sasquatch, and when I tried to help you, you hit me.” I touch my forehead, feeling the tender area.
“That’s right,” he says, as though I’m a child who just got a math question right. “What else do you remember? Aliens maybe?”
A cold chill goes down my spine. The only place I ever mentioned aliens was on my social media, and if he knows my alien angle it means my capture was premeditated. “Did you stalk me online? Were you waiting for me in the woods?”
He squats down in front of me, his dark sunken eyes scrutinizing me from under those bushy brows. They’re the most terrifying eyes I’ve ever seen. “Are you talking about your little media campaign, Miss Reporter?”
I grip the piece of concrete I’m holding, feeling its hard weight, and swing my arm with as much velocity as I can get, slamming the rock into the side of his head. “You sick freak.”
He falls back, stunned, his eyes popping out of his face as a trickle of blood drips down the side of his head. “You little bitch. I should’ve killed you when I had the chance.”
Then he’s up, coming at me, and Lisa is screaming at the top of her lungs for help. But I know help isn’t coming. No one knows we’re here. So I fight back with my legs and feet, catching him under the chin and in the side of the head where I already got him with the rock.
“Get off me, you piece of shit,” I scream at him.
He smacks me in the face, hard enough that it stings my skin, but not hard enough to make me see stars. He’s barely fighting back, I think as I land a kick right in his groin. His face goes white, and he stops breathing as he cups his crotch and staggers backward, out of my reach.
Lisa’s still screaming hysterically, yanking at the chain and trying to pull the bolt right out of the wall, so we don’t hear Kenneth Broughton come in. He just suddenly appears, his rifle cocked and aimed at Caveman.
“Oh, thank God,” I say, tears pricking my eyes.
Caveman jerks his hands away from his groin and throws them in the air. “Don’t shoot!”
“Whatcha got goin’ on here, son?” Ken asks him.
“Nothing that’s any of your business,” Caveman says bravely.
“Is that so, Ms. McKenna?” Ken asks me without ever taking his eyes off Caveman.
I’m still catching my breath after my struggle with Caveman. “We could use some help, Mr. Broughton. Thank God you’re here.”
Bert walks in, looks at Lisa and me chained to the wall, and then directs his stare at Caveman. “Woowee, you one ugly som-a-bitch.”
“You got a key to unchain these girls?” Ken asks.
Caveman’s hands are still in the air, and he points his index finger downward. “In my front pocket.”
“Then you take it out real slow and give it to Bert,” Ken says.
Bert saunters over to Caveman without a hint of fear. Then I remember Ken said something about them being former military and that all of them, except Jackson, were trained professionals.
“You born that ugly?” Bert asks him.
Louey walks in. “T’aint nothin’ bag daer. Only dis—” He stops midsentence and does a double take at Caveman. “Whoa.”
Ken still hasn’t moved his eyes or his rifle off Caveman. “Did Jackson call the authorities like I asked him?”
Caveman hands Bert the key. Bert grips it in his fist then hauls off and punches the psycho in the face, sending him flying backward onto the furry costume.
“Oh, maaan,” Bert exclaims, drawing the word out into a whine. “Is that what I think it is?”
Jackson pushes his way into the now-crowded room. “Yeah, Dad, I called ’em. They said they have officers already in the park on account of that missing woman, so they’ll be here shortly.”
Bert bends down, grabs Caveman by the forearm, and throws him off the costume. Caveman recovers his balance and puts a hand over his bleeding mouth, eyeing the rifle Ken has trained on him.
Bert holds up a pair of big costume feet, shaking his head in disgust. “Found our skunk ape.”
I’ve just been sitting here, chained to the wall, patiently watching and waiting, but it’s as if they’ve forgotten all about Lisa and me. “If someone wouldn’t mind.” I hold up my shackled hands.
Bert drops the costume and walks toward me. “Sorry about dat, Ms. McKenna,” he says, unlocking the cuffs.
“I’m just relieved you found us, Bert. Thank you.”
He moves on to free Lisa. “And who is this little catin?”
I vacate my spot, and Louey strong-arms Caveman into it.
“I’m Lisa Hornsby,” she says.
“Well, well,” Ken says flatly. He lowers his rifle now that Caveman has taken my place and is chained to the wall. “We found what we’re looking for, boys. The Sasquatch and the missing girl.” He’s shaking his head, his tone heavy with disappointment, which is echoed by the rest of the hunting party.
I get how they feel. I sympathize with them because the mystery is solved, and what an anticlimax it is. There are no aliens, no Bigfoot, and no government cover-up. It’s just a pathetically deranged man in a suit. The only good news to come out of this is that Lisa is okay. She made it.
I nod my agreement of Ken’s assessment, a sad half smile on my face.
“What am I thinking?” Ken walks the three steps over to me and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
I’m taken aback by his concern. “Yeah, I’m totally fine.”
Ken scrutinizes me with the intensity of a psychiatrist who thinks his patient is lying, and it makes me squirm self-consciously. Even though I was being honest about Caveman not hurting me, I’m not feeling wholeheartedly fine. And maybe that’s the problem—I don’t feel wholehearted. I feel as though I’ve lost something important, almost as if I’m grieving.
I wish Sean were here.
“You can be honest with me,” Ken says in a fatherly tone.
I adopt a reassuring smile. “It’s hard to feel like a victim when I slept through the crime.” When he gives me a questioning look, I say, “I’ve been unconscious up until about forty minutes ago, so I didn’t even know I was the captive of a psychotic Neanderthal.”
Ken drops his hand from my shoulder and laughs softly as he glances at Caveman, who is sitting on the floor, chained to the wall, with his head hanging while Bert and Louey make fun of him. “He sure ain’t pretty,” Ken says. He shifts his gaze back to me, his eyes zeroing in on the sore spot on my forehead. “He gave you a good knock on your head, though. Hopefully, that’s all he did.”
“I honestly feel fine.” I pat his arm reassuringly then look across the room at Lisa, the true victim in all of this. She’s crouched down and emptying the contents of a backpack. “I’ll go see how she is.”
“You girls might want to step outside, away from this fou,” Bert says.
I nod and cross the room to squat down beside Lisa. “How are you holding up? You doing okay?”
“I don’t remember anything.” She emphasizes the last word with distress while she rifles through the empty pack, turning it upside down and shaking it.
“What are you looking for?” I ask.
“This is my backpack. I was hoping my phone was in here to find out what day it is. To see if anyone’s been trying to get ahold of me.”
The reminder of a phone has me patting my own pockets, but the familiar weight of the rectangle isn’t there. “You’ve been gone five days,” I say, but then I realize I don’t even know how long I’ve been held captive. “I think. Ken, what day is today?”
“Tuesday afternoon,” he says. Every time he looks at me, it’s with a sad, fatherly expression. “I’m real sorry about what happened to you. If only you hadda let Jackson take you back to the lodge yesterday.”
“Yeah.” I huff a bitter laugh at the implied I told you so, thinking about Emma and how she’s going to take personal delight in scolding me. Maybe she’ll even gloat that she was right about women hiking alone in the woods.
Then it dawns on me that I was supposed to be back to work this morning, bearing Derek’s soy latte and groveling for my job. Maybe that’s the loss I’m feeling. I mean, losing my job at Global is a big deal, right?
“Are you sure you’re okay, Ms. McKenna?” Ken asks.
I shake myself out of my reverie. “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks. I was just thinking about something.”
Lisa is putting everything back into her pack. Her eyes are pooled with unshed tears. “My parents must be going crazy.”
“Jackson, can Lisa use your phone?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says.
Lisa jolts to a standing position, sniffing and wiping at her tear-stained face with the heel of her hand. “Thank you.” She takes the phone and goes outside.
I finish putting her things into her pack with the exception of her Ouija board, which is in a clear plastic baggie. It might be a while before the police get here, so why not help her do what she came up here to do?
“Jackson, you go on out with them,” Ken says. “Get them some water.”
“Yes, sir,” Jackson says with military brusqueness before following me outside.
Lisa has the phone to her ear. Her head is bent down, her shoulders hunched, and she is shaking with sobs.
We keep a respectful distance, giving her privacy, and I wonder if I should call my parents. Do they even know I’m missing? Probably not. If anyone actually did notice I wasn’t in my hotel room last night, like Sean or Mary Ross, I would still have had to be missing at least forty-eight hours before the police would even consider opening it up as a case.
Jackson hands me a bottle of water.
“I’m grateful you guys came when you did. How did you know we were here?” I scan my unfamiliar surroundings, noting the old gravel road overgrown with weeds leading here. I see the nearby remnants of another building, its wooden walls mostly rotted away to expose a broken concrete foundation. Just beyond the ruins is a uniform line of fir trees that look as though they were planted to mark the property boundary, or maybe as a windbreak. “Are we even in Algonquin Park?”
“Yeah, we’re still in the park. This is some kind of ghost town or somethin’. Couple more old buildings hidden in the trees down there.” He motions with his chin down the old gravel road. “We were followin’ a set of Bigfoot tracks when we heard screaming.” He unscrews the cap off his bottle of water. “So we surrounded the place, and then my dad went in.” He takes a swig of water.
“Your dad’s a brave man.” I open my own bottle. “When I write my story, I’ll be sure to mention it.”
It strikes me then that I don’t feel the least bit traumatized. I’m more preoccupied with the future than what has just come to pass. Is it normal for a victim of a madman to feel nothing? Or am I losing my mind?
“Much obliged, ma’am,” Jackson says, maintaining a militant solemnity, completely oblivious to the life-changing moment I’m having.
Lisa walks up to us, holding Jackson’s phone out to him. Her eyes are red, and her cheeks are glistening. “Your battery died. Sorry.”
“Did you get through to your parents?” he asks.
“Yeah. They’re going to start heading up here, but I didn’t know where to tell them to meet me.”
As if on cue, a black SUV appears out of the forest line, pitching back and forth as it takes the deep ruts. “The Mounties will have a phone,” I say.
The vehicle comes to a halt eight feet away from us, and two RCMP officers, a woman and a man, jump out, immediately reach for their sidearms, and take aim at Jackson.
“Are you ladies okay?” the woman asks.
Raising his hands in surrender, Jackson points one finger at the building. “The man you’re looking for is in there.”
Lisa thumbs toward Jackson. “This is one of the guys who saved us.”
Another vehicle emerges from the forest, a white RCMP van, and it parks beside the black SUV.
“The Bigfoot hunters are detaining him,” I say. “He’s chained up.”
The two officers in the van, both male, alight from the vehicle in full flak, carrying rifles.
“Find cover, but stay close,” the female officer says to us, and the small militia of Mounties head toward the building, where they’ll no doubt discover Ken, Bert, and Louey making fun of the caveman they have chained up in there.
“They’re going to be a while,” I say to Lisa. “In the meantime, look what I found.” I hold up the Ouija board.
“You want to play a game now?” Jackson asks in disbelief.
I shake my head. “Nope. Lisa came to Algonquin for a reason. I thought maybe she and I could finish what she set out to do.”
Lisa dips her head so her hair is partially covering her face. “I told you, it was just dumb. Stupid. I could’ve gotten Beth killed.”
But I’m not about to take no for answer because it will give us both something to do to take our minds off what’s happening. “C’mon.” I grab her hand and lead her to the decomposing house next door, making a mental note to research what this place was back in its day for my article. Maybe it was once a farm or a lumberjack outpost, which were common in this area in the early 1900s.
We perch on the edge of the old foundation with enough space between us to set up the Ouija board. I try to ignore the discomfort of sitting on cold concrete. “How do we do this?”
She breathes in a shaky, sobbing breath and takes the board and the planchette out of the plastic baggie. “We have to concentrate on the person we want to contact”—she places the planchette over the G on the board—“as we both put the tips of our fingers on the triangle.”
“Got it.” I put a fingertip on the planchette. “So who am I concentrating on? What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
“Jason. Jason Eastman.”