The pen dropped from Bel’s hand, a ghost line meandering down the page. “Oh my God,” Ash whispered, somewhere above her. Somewhere far
above her, because she was falling, following her heart off that cliff edge inside.
It was Grandpa.
Someone did take Rachel, she hadn’t lied about that part, but it wasn’t a stranger. Grandpa was the man. He took Rachel from the car on that frozen February evening sixteen years ago, leaving Bel behind. Doors closed, heater on, so his only granddaughter wouldn’t freeze on the backseat as he disappeared her mom, his daughter-in-law.
A lump lodged in her throat, jagged and bitter.
“It was Grandpa.” Her gaze darted over his name in her handwriting, the letters sharpening, growing thorns to prick at her eyes. Patrick Price. Pat. Grandpa. Paw-Paw.
She gasped, but it didn’t make it past the lump in her throat. Mr. Tripp had told the police that Bel seemed fine when he’d found her, that she was babbling made-up words, the same nonsense sound over and again. Now Bel wondered; had she been trying to tell him? Those sounds she’d made, had they really been: Paw-Paw, Paw-Paw?
“I’m sorry, Bel.” Ash ran one hand up her back, against the shiver.
One tear made it out of her dried-out eyes, falling to the page, to Rachel’s message, hidden all these years.
“ ‘Price logging yard,’ ” Ash read out, a question in the quiet lilt of his voice.
“Grandpa’s yard. It went out of business way before I was born.” “Where is it?”
“Here, in Gorham. Fuck.” Bel clawed at her face, raking her fingers through her hair. “She was in town. Rachel was being held right here. I know that red truck. There’s a huge junk pile of old sawing equipment and cars and trucks. We used to go to the yard sometimes, when it snowed. There’s a hill there, good for sledding. Grandpa used to yell at me and Carter when we got too close to the old trucks. Said it wasn’t safe, that we had to keep far away from it.” Her breath juddered. “Not because it wasn’t safe, it’s because he was keeping Rachel there. She was right there, so close to us, and I never knew.”
Ash pressed his eyes shut, like he didn’t know what to say, no words could possibly fit in that awful space, Bel’s memories rewriting around it.
“I never knew,” Bel said again, a quiet echo, reverberating in her hollowed-out head. She looked at The Memory Thief, lying there, splayed open. “I read from this book, this exact copy.” It felt like a confession somehow. “Grandpa must have been taking food to Rachel, gave her books to pass the time. This book.” She stroked one finger against the edge of its pages. “She had it in the red truck with her and she hid a message inside it. I read this book and I never found it, never saw the marks.” Touching the same book, maybe only weeks or months after Rachel had, her small fingers in her mom’s invisible handprints. “Rachel must have been so desperate. Hoping someone would find this message. That Grandpa would give the book away, or someone else would read it and rescue her. She waited all those years for it. It could have been me. Should have been me. But I never saw it. I never knew.”
Ash still couldn’t find the words.
The Memory Thief. A book Rachel had pinned all her hopes on. A special book.
Bel tore her eyes away, heading for the bookshelf again. “Rachel was there a long time. Grandpa must have given her more than one book to read.”
Maybe there were more special books.
Ash followed her with the camera as Bel picked one at random, pulling it off the shelf.
The Hunger Games. Bel flicked to chapter one, hunting through the words. They were here too, the faint pencil marks, picking out the letters. Help all on the first page, the p in Prim’s name. Bel turned to Ash, wide- eyed. “Rachel’s message. It’s here too.”
“Fuck.” Ash placed the camera on the coffee table, lens pointed at them to capture it all. He came to stand beside her, shoulder brushing hers, scanning all the books, spines and sideways titles.
He grabbed a paperback from the highest shelf, The Night Circus, and flipped it open, eyes glinting as they ran down the pages. “He-lp. My na-me is Rach…” He broke off, flicking through the next dozen pages. “It’s here too. The whole thing.”
Bel dropped The Hunger Games, grabbed two more books. She checked through them: Bring Up the Bodies and Behind Closed Doors. The message was in both, all the way to call police, ending on page forty-six in one, forty- nine in the other.
She dropped them at her feet, a crash and flutter of pages, and went for two more.
Ash had a pile in his arms now, looking through the one on top. “This one,” he said, sliding it off to the floor. “This one.” And the next and the next. The mounds growing at their feet, tripping them as they reached for more books.
Gone Girl and Station Eleven and The Vanishing Half and The Guest List.
They all had it. Help. My name is Rachel Price.
Ash paused on the book in his hands, doubling back, finger on the page. “This one’s different. Help, my name is Rachel Price. We are being kept instead of I am being kept.”
“What is it?” Bel stepped over the growing mess of books, heel catching one, bending its spine.
He held it up.
“An old book. The Green Mile by Stephen King.”
Bel stared down at it, found the two letters. “We? You think my grandpa was keeping someone else in there too?”
“I don’t know,” Ash said. “It’s the only one I’ve found. The rest say I.”
Bel grabbed more books, searching for the highlighted letters, for any variation. The Midnight Library, A Little Life, Six of Crows and Game of Thrones.
“Some of these books are recent.” Bel dropped Malibu Rising to the
growing heap, peaks and valleys of sliding books, the shelves emptying before their eyes.
Ash nodded, holding up a hardcover, eyes dancing around the copyright page. “This was published last year. January 2023, it says.”
Bel reached for another book, but she stopped herself, retracting her fingers, losing them up her sleeve. What else was there to know?
“She was there the whole time, wasn’t she?” Bel said, missing half her voice, staring around at the mess, the devastation. A row of books fell over by themselves, jumping to their deaths with all the others. The crash brought Bel back. She held out her arm to stop Ash too, resting against his chest.
She looked down at them all, the answers to the mystery, right here the entire time. “I read a lot of these books. These exact copies. No one ever found her message. It should have been me.”
Maybe Rachel hoped it would be her own daughter—the Anna she imagined—who’d eventually find the letters, who would be the one to save her. Marking her message in a dozen books. Maybe hundreds. A hundred hopes. A hundred chances. A bookshelf full of them, Grandpa hoarding them here, telling Bel they were special, but never why. Because her mom had read them first.
“I’m sorry,” Bel whispered, to the books, to her mom.
“Why is this her favorite?” Ash returned to The Memory Thief, picking up his camera.
“Maybe that was the first one.” Bel joined him. “It was out here the longest. Her biggest hope.”
“Fuck,” Ash said, softening the hardest word somehow. “This is awful.
Poor Rachel.”
The truth was awful, but this wasn’t all of it. The answer was Grandpa, it was here in Rachel’s own words, in Bel’s handwriting, but where did Dad fit into this story?
There was only one way forward, the way that hurt more.
Bel decided, knowing bone-deep that the decision had already been made, the moment she’d read her mom’s message.
“I have to go there. To the logging yard. The red truck. I have to see it for myself. I need to see what they did to her.”
Ash’s eyes narrowed. “They?”
“My dad.” It hurt just to say it. “Why would she do something to him, if he hadn’t done something to her first?”
Phillip’s words, now her own.
She turned away, hands empty, out of the living room. She didn’t look back: not at the half-empty shelves or the chaos below, the aftermath. Bel didn’t need to see any more.
Ash followed her with the camera, out the front door.
Outside was a different world, a silver glow around her fingers, a cool breeze up her spine, another shiver.
Bel threw the key toward the ceramic toad, no time to go back and hide it under. Her heart and her head were on the same side, telling her she needed to go, that she was so close now.
She glanced down at her bike, discarded on the grass. “I can drive,” Ash offered, reading her eyes in the dark.
—
He started the engine, beams too bright, lighting up Grandpa’s house, glaring off the glass like an accusation.
“There’s two ways,” Bel said. “The yard’s on the other side of the river. Quickest from here is the bridge at the mountain trailhead. We’ll have to ditch the car and go the rest on foot.” The bridge you could drive over was all the way on the other side of town. Neither way hurt less, but one would be faster, and Bel’s heart didn’t have time for the other, a violent ache in the base of her throat. “Turn right.”
Ash pulled out onto Main Street.
Bel gripped the camera, watching the road in the viewfinder as Ash sped down it. They passed under a flickering streetlight, where the town thinned out, trees taking over. A rush of blood in her ears or maybe it was the Androscoggin River, racing them to the right.
“It’s coming up.”
The old railway bridge that flew over the road, across the river too, now used only by snowmobiles.
“Slow down.”
They passed under the hulking green metal bridge, standing on double concrete legs, making the darkness darker still for half a breath.
“Pull off here.”
Ash followed her voice, peeling right into the small gravel lot by the base of the bridge. The car rolled to a stop, Ash parking right in front of the mountain trail sign.
Bel passed him the camera and jumped out, the rush in her ears becoming a roar, a sound inside her own head or was it the river right there? The headlights switched off and Bel waited for Ash in the pitch black, the moon too weak to reach her. She pulled out her phone for the flashlight, a ghostly white glow on her feet. There were no lights here, and there would
be no more the rest of the way to Price & Sons Logging Yard.
Ash scrambled out of the car, fiddling with the camera’s screen. “It has night vision mode. Hold on. There we go. I can see now,” he said, using the viewfinder as his eyes in the dark.
Bel lit her way up the base of the ramp, her steps hollow and metallic as she followed it around, where the pedestrian walkway had been added, a lower level to the bridge, closer to the churn of water below.
“OK?” she checked with Ash, stepping out over the river.
The metal clunk of their feet on the bridge, out of time as they hurried along, re-creating the beat in Bel’s chest. She flicked the light up from her feet, the trestle frame of the bridge caging them in, catching them.
“Fuck.” Ash stumbled behind her. Bel turned and he stumbled again, another “Fuck.”
“What?” she hissed.
“Just, you look scary in the night vision. Your eyes are glowing green.”
They reached the other end, Bel’s feet speeding up as the metal ramp tilted her down to the ground. The river was behind them now, on the other side, the wilder side, trees growing up around them. Bel raised her phone, branches and leaves dancing in the wind, throwing nightmare shadows along the path.
“How long from here?” Ash asked, sticking close to her.
“Ten minutes, if we walk fast. The yard is near the base of Deer Mountain. We follow the river for now.”
Bel kept the light on her feet, watching every step, the only thing keeping the darkness from swallowing them whole. “This goes to an old power station, over the reservoir.”
“Are there bears?” he said, turning his camera toward the thick covering of trees.
“Ash. It’s New Hampshire.” “Fantastic.”
They crossed the small concrete bridge over the reservoir, another rush of dark water they couldn’t see.
“This way now.”
The road curved left, taking them away from the river, around the hulking shape of the mountain. The path was uneven, an old logging road, churned up by heavy wheels.
Ash tripped and Bel offered her hand, keeping her glowing eyes to herself.
“We’re here,” she said eventually, lighting up the high metal fence that surrounded the yard, a huge clearing in the trees, cut into the forest. The rusty printed sign, telling them: Trespassers Keep Out. Had that always been there, or did Grandpa only add it when he had something inside to hide?
They trudged alongside the fence to the huge gates at the front, a larger sign here, old painted letters, peeling away with time. Price & Sons Logging Yard.
Looking through his viewfinder, Ash approached the gates, reached out for the large padlock, a thick chain around the middle railings, sealing them shut. He let the padlock swing back with a clang, echoing in the trees.
“How do we get in?”
“There’s a gap in the fence this way,” Bel said, guiding him with her flashlight.
They walked beyond the gate, to where the chain-link fence was broken, the bottom corner rolling away from its post.
Bel hauled it up and ducked her head under, holding it for Ash.
“Used to get our sleds in this way,” she said, making sure he was through.
The fence marked a boundary, separating two worlds. Beyond it lay the place where her mom had vanished for so long.
Ash trailed behind as Bel entered the yard, now overgrown with patches of wild grass. The flat terrain gradually sloped upward towards the treeline. Memories of sledding with Carter flashed through her mind – their excited shouts as they raced down the snowy hill towards the fence and river. Had Rachel heard their laughter? They certainly hadn’t heard her cries.
“This way,” Bel directed, illuminating the path to the junk pile at the far end. She recalled her grandfather’s warnings: “That’s far enough, it’s dangerous over there. Those saws could cut you. Those trucks could fall on you. Come back, Bel.”
But Bel pressed on, searching for the looming shapes of rusted cars and the towering log-hauling frame she and Carter had nicknamed Larry.
Her foot struck something – an old, rusted saw blade, its center hole sprouting grass, teeth forming a perfect circle.
“We’ll need to navigate through this,” she told Ash. “The red truck is somewhere in the middle.”
Bel forged ahead until she encountered an obstacle: two skeletal cars, stripped of glass and tires, pressed nose-to-nose. She clambered over their hoods, her light swallowed by the metal. From the top, she helped Ash climb over.
More obstacles, unseen things catching their clothes in the dark, holding on. A machine Bel didn’t understand, interconnecting wheels and gears. Too big to climb over so they went around.
Part of a sawmill; a huge, round blade, growing out of the earth. “Watch out,” Ash warned her.
Bel was lost, in this dark labyrinth of broken, rusted things. Blades, and saws, and axes and metal skeletons that used to be machines.
“Can you see it?” she asked him, checking back.
Ash looked down at the viewfinder, panning the camera around.
“Not sure,” he said, voice ragged and tired. “I can see a truck that way, I don’t know if it’s red. Night vision doesn’t show colors.”
Bel held up the flashlight, the way he pointed the camera. She squinted, eyes following the beam.
The red truck was right there, thirty feet away, just a pile of tires between here and there, separating them.
A semitrailer with an old shipping container still attached to the bed of the abandoned truck. The head of the truck and its container both red, dull and rusty. But it stood out against the cold grays and browns of everything else Bel’s light found, the heart at the center of the metal beast.
Ash gasped; he’d seen it too.
The end of their journey.
Bel walked toward it, stepping in and around the tires.
Ash lagged behind. She turned, a question in her green, glowing eyes.
“N-not sure I should be filming this,” Ash stuttered. “It’s a crime scene.
Doesn’t feel right, to show the place where Rachel…” He trailed off. “Wouldn’t Ramsey want you to? For the film?”
Ash shook his head, eyes shrinking as Bel lit up his face. He stopped recording, a beep that echoed through the metal maze. He tucked the camera under his arm, pulling out his phone instead, flicking on the flashlight. Two lights better than one. “Some things are more important than the film.” He squeezed her hand. “Ramsey would say the same.”
“Ash—” Bel began, but the words died before she breathed life to them, her ears pricking to a new sound, carried by the wind.
A shout, muffled and faint. And again.
Bel followed the sound with her eyes, over to the red truck. “There’s someone in there.” Ash’s mouth dropped open.
Another shout, dampened inside the metal container, almost in the shape of words.
“Is somebody out there?!”
Bel’s heart doubled, kicking up into her throat. “Fuck,” she said, retaking Ash’s hand.
Another low shout, one that sounded like, “Help!” “What do we do?” Ash asked, low and urgent.
Bel knew, didn’t need to say it. She had to keep going. The red truck had the answers she’d waited her whole life for.
She dropped Ash’s hand, wading through the tires, eyes up on the shipping container, the four metal bars and handles that sealed the doors shut.
A tire flat on its side, two piled up behind it, leading like stairs to the back of the container.
Bel stepped up the first tire, up again, planting her feet against the thick rubber, resting her fingers on the cold metal.
Another shout, louder now that she was right outside, touching it. She glanced back at Ash.
He was just a pinprick of light, floating somewhere below. “Somebody help!” from inside.
Bel took a breath, sucking in the darkness, filled herself with it.
She reached for the first lock, hand tightening around the metal lever, stinging her skin. She pulled it to the left and it screeched, blocking out the shouts inside as it unclipped from the door.
She grabbed the other handle, flipping it, the bar releasing, unsealing the left door. It creaked, a crack of different darkness beyond.
Bel held on to the handle, pulling the door toward her, swinging it open.
She knew before she opened the door, before she waved the flashlight inside, before she saw him slumped against the far wall of the container.
He held his hands out to block the light, covering his face. “Who is it?” he shouted, voice rough and raw.
“It’s me,” Bel said, hiding behind her ball of light. “Rachel?”
“It’s me, Dad.”
He lowered his hands, eyes wide and haunted, staring blindly at the dark shape of her.
“Bel.”
