Page 19 of Into the Dark, We Go

"She was hit by a car."

"Here, in Duluth?"

"No." He looked at me a little too closely as if weighing whether he wanted to say more. Then he added, "It happened onsome small country road in West Virginia, not far from where she grew up. Black Water, if that means anything to you."

I nearly choked for the second time that day. My brain struggled to process another connection leading us to the same place. It seemed impossible, and yet, it was happening. Nick noticed my widened eyes and raised his eyebrows.

"Lucas was from Black Water, West Virginia," I said.

"Strange coincidence." He shrugged as if he didn’t quite know how to react or perhaps didn’t think it was a fascinating piece of information.

"You’re kidding me, right?"

The more of these overlaps surfaced, the less I believed they were accidental. Amanda knew Mary. Mary might not have known Lucas, but they were from the same place. The connections were still hazy, but they were beginning to take shape.

"So all three—Mary, Amanda, and Lucas—are somehow tied to this town, Black Water, and you’re calling it a coincidence?"

To be fair, Amanda wasn’t definitively tied to Black Water, but it was close enough that I left it out to keep him talking. His mother, psychic or not, had to be involved in these disappearances. Or was I swayed by Mitchell and June’s contagious conviction, tumbling into a spiral of cognitive bias, drawing meaning from nothing more than chance?

Nick shrugged again, his evasiveness as apparent as the ink on his skin. God, I wanted to strangle him.

I exhaled, closed my eyes briefly, and then said, "We’re going to Black Water to see if we can find whatever makes people disappear."

"Or kills them," he suggested.

I looked up at him, once again facing the possibility that Lucas might be dead. Each time the thought made me shudder. I still spoke of him in the present tense, but reluctantly, I noddedand said, "Or kills them." Then it hit me. He wasn’t talking about Lucas. "Wait, killed? I thought you said your mom was hit by a car!"

"She was. Kind of. A car ran her over," he paused. "Three times."

"Holy shit!"

"Yeah," he exhaled, confirming that my reaction was justified.

"Do they know who did it?"

"Nope."

It couldn’t have been an accident. Hit-and-run is one thing, but hitting a person with a car, backing up, and then deciding to take their chances and flee the crime scene, running the victim over yet again, was a horrifyingly conscious choice.

"And you never thought to look into it?"

"Not until you guys showed up," he raised his eyebrows. "Homicide is not that common, statistically speaking. There are always higher chances that you’ll die being hit by a car than be murdered. And that’s what the police report said, too, anyways."

"The police thought it was an accident?"

"Yep."

"So we have two people missing and one dead, all allegedly linked to the same place," I recounted the facts. "Don’t you think that is more than just odd?"

"I think it’s something to take into account."

I looked at him again with a heavy sigh. He was making mental notes, but he was cautious about what he shared.

"We’re leaving in the morning. We’ll go to Black Water and see what’s going on there."

"Are you inviting me to come?"

"I’m just saying that we’re leaving in the morning, so you can take that into account as well."