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Chapter Six

S o that was Sydney. Ben had recognized her the second he set foot in the pet store, since she didn’t look too terribly different from the girl he’d seen in the photo her father had dropped.

Older, of course, and with a certain tense set to her mouth and a wariness in her eyes that he guessed hadn’t been there when she graduated from college.

She’d hinted at some sort of emergency that had forced her to leave veterinary school — at UC Davis, he guessed, since it was the closest university to offer a vet program — but hadn’t said much more than that, which made sense.

Even the chattiest shop owner probably wasn’t going to drop all their life secrets to someone they’d just met.

Maybe it was all personal stuff, something to do with her family, in which case, he might not be able to find out much about it unless he could get Mabel or Eliza or one of the other people he’d met in Silver Hollow to spill the beans.

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t poke around online, just in case.

He hit pay dirt right away. Apparently, Sidney Lowell’s mother and grandmother had disappeared in the woods around three months ago, with not a trace of them ever found.

The FBI had been called in, teams of trained dogs had been set loose to locate whatever evidence they could, and still, it seemed as if the two women had vanished into thin air.

The story had been unusual enough that it had made the national news and become a new topic for the various “unsolved mystery” Reddits and blogs and Discord servers to go wild over it for a few weeks before they moved on to the next new and shiny thing.

And while speculation abounded — it seemed the reigning theory was human traffickers, with UFO abduction a close second — none of those Monday-morning quarterbacks had come up with anything particularly useful to add to the discussion.

Well, that would explain why Sidney had been forced to drop everything and come back to Silver Hollow.

According to what he’d read, the pet store had been in the family since the early 1960s, and he doubted Sidney would have wanted to let such an important institution go, not when she’d already lost so much.

No brothers or sisters, from what he’d been able to tell, so with her father estranged and her mother and grandmother gone, it did seem as if she was truly alone in the world.

Maybe living in a small, close-knit town had given her something of a support system, but he still couldn’t help experiencing a pang as he thought of her having to navigate all this mostly on her own.

While his little sister Liane loved to tease him about his chupacabra fixation, he still knew she was the one person he could call in the middle of the night to bail him out of jail or pick him up when his truck broke down.

Not that he’d ever been arrested for anything, but he could attest to her assistance in terms of vehicle mishaps, since his old Nissan wasn’t the most reliable thing in the world and she’d come to his rescue more than once over the years.

There had been a lot of wild speculation about the incident on those Reddits and blogs, but as far as Ben could tell, no one had ever mentioned an encounter with Bigfoot or some other cryptid as the reason for the older Lowell women’s disappearance.

Maybe that was a bridge too far for even the conspiracy theorists.

However, no one could deny that something very strange had happened here.

Couple that with the one cryptic comment he’d found about someone spotting a glowing white horse in the woods outside Silver Hollow, and most people would have to admit this didn’t seem to be your ordinary, run-of-the-mill disappearance.

When he got back to the bed-and-breakfast, he didn’t see any sign of Mabel, although, as promised, some cheese and crackers and veggies and dip had been set out in the small salon to the right of the foyer, a place that seemed to function as the B&B’s public space for its guests.

Standing there and munching on a carrot stick was a man Ben hadn’t seen before. He looked as if he was maybe in his late fifties, with gray-streaked dark hair and the kind of mostly handsome features that were often associated with stock photos of CEOs.

That turned out to be not far from the truth, because when Ben went over to introduce himself, the man smiled and said, “Victor Maplehurst. I’m an executive with Northwest Pacific Lumber.”

They shook hands, even as Ben found himself wondering what the guy was doing in Silver Hollow.

The town’s history had included logging, of course, just like hundreds of other places in the Pacific Northwest, but the community now seemed to focus mainly on tourism and conservation work to preserve the precious forests that surrounded it so they could be enjoyed for generations to come.

“Here on business?” he asked politely, and at once, Victor shook his head.

“No, this is one of my favorite getaway spots. I like to come here whenever I can carve out a little time for some peace and quiet. I got lucky this time, since the weather has been nice enough that I’ve been able to put the top down on my car.”

Ah, so he was the one with the exquisitely restored vintage MG. Well, since the guy was an executive with a lumber company, he could probably afford whatever the restoration had cost.

“The green MG?” Ben asked, and Victor nodded.

“So you noticed it.”

It would have been kind of hard not to, considering it had been the only other vehicle in the B&B’s parking lot when Ben arrived.

“Beautiful car,” he commented.

Victor looked pleased. “Are you a car enthusiast?”

Ben thought of his old Nissan truck with the oxidized spots on its roof and hood, and did his best to hold back a smile.

“I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s always nice to see a car that someone’s taken the the time to restore properly.

I suppose it’s sort of like admiring an old house with just the right amount of updates, like this one. ”

They chatted for a few minutes about Mabel’s B&B — Victor seemed fairly knowledgeable on the subject, saying that she’d been running the place for nearly forty years now, ever since she and her husband bought the rundown house in the eighties and then worked hard on restoring it to its former glory.

He had passed away a while back, but Mabel would never give up her pride and joy.

After their conversation began to wind down, though, Ben excused himself to go upstairs to his room and drop off his haul from his shopping expedition earlier today.

While he’d told himself all those purchases were necessary, he still couldn’t help giving an inward wince as he totaled the damage he’d done to his credit card.

Once upon a time, he’d harbored dreams of paying the thing off and living a debt-free life, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Well, not unless his YouTube views doubled overnight.

As he was putting away his new shirts and cargo pants and hiking boots, an idea struck him.

What if he did his own real-life version of all those Reddit conversations about the disappearance of Sidney’s mother and grandmother?

He could go out into the woods, talk about the sighting of the strange white horse, speculate that maybe something very strange was happening in the forests that surrounded Silver Hollow.

People ate up that true-crime stuff, and if he could link it to something supernatural… .

Almost at once, though, he shot down the notion.

Sidney was obviously suffering as she dealt with the aftermath of losing the two most important people in her life, and exploiting that pain merely for clicks and views seemed like an awful way to make some extra money.

He’d started the YouTube channel as a way of supplementing his income, sure, but he still didn’t think of himself as an internet personality.

No, he was just a trained archaeologist whose career had taken a severe left turn a while back.

However, that didn’t mean he couldn’t film some footage while out in the wild, so to speak.

He knew he’d need to be deliberately vague, just because he didn’t want hordes of cryptozoology enthusiasts descending on the forest unless there was some damn good evidence to prove something very strange was going on here.

But honestly, didn’t one patch of deep forest in the Pacific Northwest look pretty much like any other?

Satisfied with that plan, he finished unpacking and then got out his phone so he could decide where to go for dinner later. He was still pretty full from his late lunch, but he knew he’d need to eat something eventually.

What he was really looking forward to, though, was getting into the woods tomorrow morning.

He couldn’t wait to see what he might find there.

As it turned out, a whole lot of nothing.

Oh, sure, it was beautiful here, lush in a way that the forests in Southern California could never be, but still, he’d been wandering in the woods for almost two hours and hadn’t seen anything of note except a cute little owl that had perched on a branch not too far from the trail he was following and had given him a curious look.

Well, there was a lot of forest to cover, so Ben knew he probably shouldn’t get discouraged after just a couple of hours. He’d woken up early and showered, and had been downstairs right at seven-thirty as Mabel Whitaker was putting out a bowl of scrambled eggs and a tray of perfectly crisped bacon.

Everything had been wonderful, but he knew he hadn’t given the food the respect it deserved, not when he was itching to get out in the forest to see what he could find. No sign of Victor Maplehurst that morning, and Ben guessed the lumber executive wasn’t an early riser when he didn’t need to be.

Fair enough. But Ben knew he wasn’t on vacation, even if he’d done his best to give that impression to everyone he’d met in town.