Snow on a warm April morning that tasted like early summer, the road sun- dappled, trees in full, green bloom. Fake snow. Made of shredded paper, Ramsey told her. Not everywhere, that would have been far too expensive and they didn’t have that kind of budget. But enough to set the scene, to cover the ground around the car.
“It’s the exact same car,” Ramsey said, too pleased with himself. “A 2007 Honda Accord in royal blue.”
Bel pretended to be impressed. Well, it couldn’t be the exact same car; that one must be in police storage somewhere, but the same in all the ways that mattered. Parked roughly up on the shoulder there in the exact spot it had been found, matched up to the crime scene photos. In the middle of a small, nameless road that led out onto US Route 2, toward Moose Brook State Park at the other end. It was blocked off for filming, vans and trucks parked sideways across the entrance and exit, a morning chorus of angry horns.
Bel’s eyes were stuck, tracing the outline of the car. The same car Rachel was driving that day, the one she disappeared from, the one she left Bel behind in.
Ramsey was watching her.
“Let me know if this is too weird for you,” he said.
“This is too weird for me.”
But Ramsey had already been called away by someone. There were four more crew members milling around today, another camera rig, more microphones, more metal trunks, more voices. One right in her ear now.
“Hey, Bel,” Ash said, the sound of him so out of place in this road that was out of season, out of time.
Bel turned from the snowy scene to face him.
A small camera was mounted on his shoulder, the fluffy pad of an external microphone attached on top. The red recording light blinking. Bel blinked back at it.
“Rams wanted me to film some behind-the-scenes,” he explained. “Fake snow,” Bel said.
“Yeah, that stuff is a nightmare. Been here since five. Just got to get through the filming and life can go back to normal.”
“Amen.”
Hey, maybe they weren’t so different after all. Actually, forget that: Ash was wearing a white-and-black candy-striped shirt tucked into green flared pants with bright pink clip-on suspenders. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing one tattooed forearm.
“See you came dressed for the winter weather,” she said. “Always.”
“Least you’ll scare the bears away,” she said, trying to be as quick as he was.
“Wait, there’s bears in New Hampshire?” He swallowed, looking nervously at the trees.
Bel laughed, but so did Ash. It was a joke. That was annoying, now he’d think he was funny. Which he wasn’t, by the way.
Ash shuffled. “Ramsey said you were ill on Thursday. I hope you’re feeling better.”
“What are those?” She pointed at him.
“Tattoos. Do they not have those in New Hampshire?”
“Yeah, but what are they?” Bel said, studying the designs tracking up just one arm, pale flesh running like tributaries around the gray pictures.
“They’re memories. Family stuff, you know.” “No, I don’t know,” she said, pushing him.
He held out the arm, camera still rolling. “That rose, that’s for my sister, Rosie. Took the thorns out because she’s nice all the time. The lily next to it, that’s for my sister—you guessed it—Lily.”
“The leaf?”
“A fig leaf, for my oldest sister, Eve. She’s married to Ramsey. I’m the youngest, the baby. That’s me, the old campfire. I’m Ash, by the way. Never properly introduced myself. Ash Maddox. That bird above my elbow is my mum, Bridget, but everyone calls her Birdie.” Ash twisted his arm, showing her the bare, exposed patch by his wrist. “Gonna get one for Ramsey too. He doesn’t like the idea of being an old horned sheep.”
“The campfire’s the worst one,” Bel said, taking a shot, getting him back for the bears.
“Tell me about it.” An amused sniff that meant something more. “They’re all amazing people, my mum, my sisters, Rams. I’m the only fuckup.”
“Have you considered, maybe, just trying to be normal?”
A car pulled into the road then, saving Ash from her. They must have moved the truck to let it through.
“Ramsey, she’s here!” Ash called, using it as an excuse to walk away from Bel. He hadn’t lasted long. “She’s here.”
Who was she? Not the horsefucker again, surely. Bel was the only one in the family scheduled to film today, the only one they needed, because she’d been the only one there when Rachel disappeared.
The car rolled to a stop thirty feet away, sunlight glaring against the windshield.
The passenger-side door opened. Rachel Price stepped out.
Bel froze.
A cold winter wind that only she could feel, inside and out, as she came undone.
It couldn’t be.
Rachel covered her eyes against the sun. Dressed in the same clothes she was wearing when she disappeared. Black jeans and a red long-sleeved top, under a large gray quilted coat. The coat she’d left behind in the car. The same age she’d been that final day.
“Hi, hello,” she said to nobody in particular, in the crisp voice of a New Yorker.
“Hi, Jenn, welcome back,” Ramsey said, jogging over. “Bel, let me introduce you.”
He caught Bel’s elbow, unsticking her, and walked her over to Rachel. Not Rachel.
A fake Rachel.
Bel could see that now, her mind thawing out, dripping cold down the back of her neck.
“Thanks for the fucking heads-up,” she hissed, taking her elbow back from Ramsey, Ash following them with the camera.
Ramsey glanced down, eyes kind and concerned. Yeah, right.
“I told you it was a reenactment,” he said. “Thought you assumed.” They stopped.
“Bel, this is Jenn, the actress who’ll be playing the role of your mum today. Jenn, this is Bel, Rachel Price’s daughter.”
“Good to meet you,” Jenn said, gum popping in her mouth, sticking out her hand.
Bel didn’t take it. She was busy studying the stranger in front of her. The differences were clear, now she was this close: the color of the eyes, the shape of the chin, no birthmark on the forehead. But for a moment there…
“You look like her,” Bel said, instead of a greeting. “So do you,” Jenn replied.
As if she didn’t dislike this woman enough already. “Not as pretty, though,” Bel added as a quick jab.
“Aw, well, your mom was beautiful. I’m sorry about what happened to her,” she said, fiddling with a strand of her yellow-blond hair. “I’m obsessed with this case, oh my gosh. I listened to a podcast about it last fall, called
Wine and Murder or something, and I’m obsessed. Ob-sessed.” She split up the word, holding on to it like a snake.
“Yes, you said. Three times.”
Bel’s eyes flicked over to Ramsey. A blink, slow enough for him to read. Fake snow and fake Rachels. This gum-popping idiot? He blinked back, like he almost agreed with her.
He clapped his hands. “Long day ahead of us. Sooner we get started, the sooner we can wrap up.”
“Not soon enough.” “That’s the spirit, Bel.”
—
Everyone was waiting. Ash stood there beside the car, headphones cushioned around his neck, beckoning Bel into the backseat.
Fake Rachel was behind the wheel. “You guys don’t actually want me to drive today, right? I don’t have a license.”
Ramsey shook his head, from the passenger seat.
“OK,” Ash said, a little louder this time, gesturing at the backseat again.
The window on the other side was rolled down, a camera rig mounted half inside the car, to point directly into Bel’s face. Another camera set up on a tripod in front of the car, shooting through the windshield. Battery- powered light boxes hemming them in.
“Let’s get started,” Ramsey said out of his open window. “Hop in, Bel.” Hop in. Like it was that fucking simple. Oh, she’ll just hop in, all right.
Bel took a step toward the backseat, the knot growing in her gut, a fake
ball of ice, sharp where it melted. She ducked her head, held her breath and climbed inside, Ash hovering too close like he could somehow speed the process along. Bel sat back, hands balled together in her lap, pressing against her stomach, kneading the knot.
“You OK?” Ash said, like he was a fucking mind reader now. Bel lashed out at him. He was the closest, in range.
“Just shut the door,” she snapped, flinching when he did.
Done, OK. She was in the backseat. This wasn’t so bad now, was it? No different from the front. Not really.
“We shot the full reenactment yesterday.” Ramsey turned around to bring Bel into the conversation. “Louise from the crew, her two-year-old was playing young you, Bel. Very cute. But while we have the real you today, this is more the interview part of the sequence. I’ll ask Bel questions, and Jenn, today I don’t want you to speak or react in any way, almost like you’re not here.”
Fake Rachel was just a prop, like the paper snow and the undrinkable water.
“Why is she here, then?” Bel asked.
“We’re going to interpose the interview with shots from the reenactment, so you go from young Bel to you, sitting in that same seat, talking us through what might be happening, what you’re feeling. It’s hard shooting a reenactment when you don’t actually know what happened, but I thought it was important for Rachel to have a presence in both time zones. Here, even though she’s not.”
Bel had something smart to say to that, but it was too late, Ash was in front of the car, holding the clapper board in front of the camera.
Someone else shouted, “Action!” loud enough that birds scattered.
“How does it feel, Bel?” Ramsey turned to her. “Sitting here, in the same car, on the same road where your mum disappeared? To be reliving this moment?”
Did it count as reliving when you couldn’t remember the first time? “Fine,” she said. “Bit strange.”
“Why is it strange?”
Because there was a woman cosplaying as her dead mom, sitting in front of her.
“That I’m here, in the same way it happened sixteen years ago. I don’t remember being here, but I know that I was. Right here, in a little blue coat.”
She was wearing a blue sweater today, like Ramsey asked, the same color, to match. Look how Louise-from-the-crew’s cute two-year-old grows
up into this haunted young woman, you can tell by the bright blue.
“I wonder, does being here in these exact same conditions, does it spark anything in your memory? Any images, feelings?”
“Shit, yes, now you mention it, I’ve just suddenly remembered everything and solved the entire case, can you believe it? What a plot twist.” She didn’t mean to do that. Just that Ramsey was now the closest, in range. And it was uncomfortable here, on the backseat. But memory didn’t work like that. If it was gone, it was gone, or it had never existed in the first place. If Ramsey needed her to have some big revelation for his film to
work, she was going to have to disappoint him. “Sorry.”
“Never apologize,” Ramsey said. “I like the real stuff, the unguarded moments.”
Unguarded? She was as guarded as they came, mate. Layers of iron and steel between her skin.
“Maybe it’s better to start with the little that we do know,” Ramsey said, defusing. “Tell us how you were found. I know you don’t remember, but what you’ve learned since.”
“This is all I know, from Julian Tripp’s testimony. I was found here, in the backseat,” she said, so tense that she wasn’t truly sitting against it, stopping herself from sinking in, a hot ache in her lower back. “It was freezing outside. Snowing. The real stuff, not paper. But the car engine had been left on, so the heaters were still running, and the headlights were on. Mr. Tripp was driving the other way from Route Two. He spotted the lights, saw that the car had veered off onto the shoulder, half on the road. So he pulled up to investigate, see if anybody needed help.” Bel glanced out the window, as she might have done sixteen years ago, through smaller eyes. Had she been scared at the time, sitting here in the dark, all alone? Did she even know what scared was? “He came up to this window. It was dark inside, but he had a flashlight, saw me here in the backseat. He told police that he called out a few times: Hello? Is anybody here? When he got no answer, he opened the door to see if I was OK.”
“And were you?” Ramsey asked, even though he already had all the answers.
“I was fine, he told police. I didn’t seem distressed, like maybe I hadn’t been left that long. The heaters were on, so I wasn’t cold at all. I was fine, not crying. He said I was babbling words and sounds, nonsensical, trying to talk to him. He’d met me before, but he didn’t recognize me right away. After he checked that I was OK, Mr. Tripp called the police. This was all just after six o’clock that evening. He sat with me, to keep us warm while we waited for the police to turn up. He gave me a juice box that he found in the footwell. He saw Rachel’s coat and purse there on the passenger seat, where you are now.”
Ramsey was quiet, a reverential silence for the front passenger seat. Which was stupid, because this wasn’t even the same car. Rachel had never been here.
“It was cold that evening. Freezing, even.” Ramsey studied his phone screen. “Twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit, or minus five Celsius already at six o’clock.”
“That’s cold,” Bel agreed.
“Not easy for someone to survive out there in just a thin red top, without their coat,” Ramsey said, running his hands over said coat. Not the real one; the police had that too.
“No, it wouldn’t be easy,” Bel said. Unless you’d planned it.
“But she might not have been out in the elements for long,” Ramsey continued. “Police brought in a K-9 unit the following morning. Sniffer dogs who followed Rachel’s scent from the abandoned car. They tracked her scent thirty yards up the road that way”—he pointed out the windshield
—“where they lost the trail, in the middle of the road. That might have been down to the snowy, windy conditions, and it doesn’t mean that Rachel didn’t walk into the trees, but police initially thought this indicated that Rachel got into another vehicle there, that’s why the trail suddenly ends. Whether by her own will or not.”
“Wouldn’t need your coat if you’re getting into another car,” Bel said, putting an end to that thread of discussion, cutting it off like Rachel’s trail,
vanished in the wind.
“You’ve touched on something that many online theorists obsess over. The fact that the engine was left on, and the heaters too. If someone did abduct Rachel from the car, people theorize that they left the engine on and shut all the doors on purpose, to keep you safe, Bel, so you wouldn’t freeze to death. People think this possible abductor could have been someone known to you, someone who cared about you and didn’t want harm to come to you.”
That had been one of the prosecution’s theoretical arguments against her dad. Scrabbling at straws for their weak case.
Bel shrugged. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If someone did take Rachel from the car, the engine was probably already running, and if they shut the doors, maybe it’s because killing a two-year-old would have gone against their moral code. Or they thought the crime scene would be more inconspicuous with the doors shut. Or maybe it was Rachel herself who did that, who left me here. Whether it was meant to be for a few minutes or… longer.”
All more plausible. Rachel walking away from the car, walking away from her life, leaving Bel behind, but she didn’t want her daughter to actually die in the process. Mother of the year right there.
“On the topic of public opinion, of the enduring obsession with this mysterious, unsolvable case…”
He should talk to Fake Rachel there. She’d listened to one podcast and she was Ob-sessed.
“Do you mind if I ask you about Phillip Alves?” Well, he’d already asked, permission or not. “That’s fine.” Bel cleared her throat.
“Phillip Alves, a plumber from Boston, who was thirty-seven at the time of Rachel’s disappearance, became fixated on this case when it first hit the news cycle. An obsession that only grew as time passed without answers. He traveled to Gorham, convinced he was the one destined to solve this case, to find Rachel Price. Police suspect he’d been watching your house, going
through your trash, taking photos. Can you tell us what he did to your uncle Jeff and aunt Sherry back then?”
“It was in the early days,” she said, “before my dad’s arrest. The police were around a lot, as you can imagine, wanting to talk to everybody. Phillip Alves dressed up as a police officer and went to interview Jeff and Sherry, asking questions about Rachel and our family. They didn’t realize he was an imposter, only found out when they told Police Chief Dave Winter about this interview, but police couldn’t find him.”
“It’s believed that Phillip made regular trips to Gorham,” Ramsey said, “over the following months and years, to stalk your family, to search for Rachel, growing more unstable. His wife left him, lost his job because he spent all day researching, reading the message boards. His obsession reached another boiling point in October 2014. Can you tell us about that incident?”
Bel actually could this time, from her own memories, from her statements to police.
“Uh, I was eight years old, in elementary school. It was a Thursday, and I was waiting for my dad to pick me up from school. But this police officer turns up instead, tells my teacher he’s supposed to collect me. She believes him, because of the uniform and the badge. So I go with him, he takes me to his car, tells me to climb into the backseat and put my seat belt on. I did. But he wasn’t a police officer. It was Phillip Alves.”
“He kidnapped you,” Ramsey said, voice breathy, in the shape of a gasp, like he didn’t know exactly how the story ended. Besides, Bel didn’t like using that word. So dramatic.
“He didn’t really take me anywhere, and I didn’t disappear for long. He drove a couple blocks away, parked, then turned around to talk to me. Kind of like you are now.”
Ramsey didn’t like that comparison, she could tell. And Bel didn’t like being here, in the backseat again.
“What did he want to talk about?”
“He wanted to ask me questions. Well, he was kind of screaming from the start. Sweating, angry. Tell me what you saw that day,” Bel whisper-
yelled in the voice of Phillip Alves. “You saw who took Rachel, tell me who it was. You have to remember something, you were right there. I need to know what you saw.” She stopped; it was hurting her throat.
“Was that terrifying for you?” Ramsey asked. “Eight years old in a stranger’s car and he’s screaming in your face, demanding answers you didn’t have?”
Bel had been old enough to know fear then. But she was even older now, and knew it was better to keep that to herself.
“I just kept saying I don’t know. That teacher called the police right after letting me go, realizing her mistake. Dave Winter, chief of police, he’s the one who found me, got me out of the car. I was only gone about seven, eight minutes. Phillip was arrested, and they realized he was the same man who’d interviewed Jeff and Sherry. That he’d been stalking us for years.”
“Police of course looked into Phillip, in connection with Rachel’s disappearance, but found no evidence of his involvement,” Ramsey said, rounding off the story for her. “Phillip pled guilty to charges of stalking, kidnapping and impersonating a police officer, and served three years in state prison. He was released six years ago, but upon his release, your whole family filed a restraining order against him, is that right?”
“Yep. He’s not allowed anywhere near us.”
Ramsey cleared his throat. “We’ve actually been trying to contact Phillip, to see if he’ll talk to us for the documentary. If we find him and he agrees to an interview, is there any message you would want to pass along?”
Bel thought about that for a moment, now she was ten years older and ten years meaner. “Fuck you, I guess. Why do you think you deserve the truth more than anybody else?”
Ramsey looked pleased with that answer.
“Good,” he said. “That’s really good, Bel. OK, I think we should stop for lunch.”
—
Lunch was a sad, wilted sandwich and a bag of chips. Bel ate hers silently, watching Ash and James fiddle with the camera rig in the car window, Ash being pointed around here and there, go get this, go get that.
Fake Rachel was standing close by, facing the other way. She hadn’t eaten because she was off carbs, apparently, had an audition next week. Made sure everyone knew that.
“I’ve not done a documentary before,” Jenn said to one of the crew.
Louise, Bel gathered, the mother of the little Fake Bel.
“No? What do you think of this case? Mind-boggling, huh?” Louise asked her, checking quickly side to side, making sure they weren’t being overheard.
Surprise, Bel was standing right here, twenty feet behind them. Should have checked harder.
“Isn’t it?!” Jenn said. “Like, how did they disappear in the mall, just vanish into thin air, and then the kid turns up here, alone?”
The kid didn’t know either.
“Just crazy,” Louise agreed. “What do you think happened?”
“Honestly,” Jenn said, her abrasive voice dipping into whispers, not any quieter. “I think it’s pretty obvious what happened.”
Obvious, huh? Please, do share. “It was the husband.”
The knot outgrew Bel’s gut all at once. Winding up her spine, python- strong.
“He must have killed Rachel. That makes the most sense.”
“I guess it’s always the husband,” Louise said, half committed to it.
“I feel bad for the daughter, honestly,” Jenn continued. “What a sad, messed-up life.”
Bel’s fist closed around the chip packet, squeezing it to death. How fucking dare she? Give Bel two minutes alone with her, then she’d have a sad, messed-up face. Best of luck with the audition.
Bel threw the balled-up packet toward Fake Rachel’s head. “Hey!”
It made contact.
Ten points.
But Bel was already moving past them, shoes angry and fast against the rough dirt road. She didn’t look back.
Was that what they all thought, the crew? The extra ones today and the original four, the ones Bel was starting to trust. Ash? Ramsey? Maybe Bel had never been in control of the story, just a prop, repositioned where they wanted her.
The knot grew inside, pulling harder, so Bel walked faster, almost a run.
Beyond the replica car, footprints in the fake snow, toward the thick canvas of trees.
They swallowed her whole, welcoming her into their shadows, vanishing her.
“Bel?”
Well, not quite.
“Oi!” A voice followed her into the trees. Ash.
“Oi,” Bel repeated, picking up her pace. “Don’t oi me, what even is that?”
“Where are you going?” He struggled to keep up, the hem of his pants snagging on the forest floor.
“I’m storming off,” she spat.
“Oh, right,” he said. “C-could you do that a bit later? We’ve got a few more scenes to shoot.”
Bel turned back, wildfire in her eyes, a growl in her throat. “Fuck off, Harry Styles.”
So he did.
