The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

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.