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Chapter Seven

I was so angry in that moment that I knew the only thing I could do was walk away from Ben Sanders.

And that’s exactly what I did.

It was stupid to have followed him. I understood that intellectually, but when Mabel Whitaker called me and told me she’d seen her latest guest disappearing into the woods — apparently, Eliza had bumped into her at the market and had told her it sure looked like Ben was poking around and asking the sorts of questions you wouldn’t expect from a casual tourist, so Mabel felt compelled to pass that information on to me — I knew I needed to see just what in the world he was up to.

And even though I’d done my best to act outwardly disbelieving, I knew he really had seen something unusual out there.

Those same flowers had popped in and out of existence in these woods ever since I could remember, none of them lasting very long.

At first, I’d wondered if they had some kind of connection to the unicorn, because they certainly seemed sparkly and ethereal enough to be a sort of companion plant, but since they didn’t always appear in the same place a unicorn did — and showed up much more frequently, to be honest — I couldn’t draw any clear parallels.

Like so many things about this forest, they seemed to defy explanation.

A crunch of feet on leaves a pace or so to the rear told me that Ben had already caught up.

He moved surely and swiftly out here, like someone who knew his way around rough country.

Even though he’d looked like a total city boy when he arrived in Silver Hollow yesterday, it seemed he could hold his own on a woodland trail.

And it also seemed as though he wasn’t about to let me just walk away.

Fine. Time to fight fire with fire.

“Did you Google me?” I demanded once he’d gotten within a few feet or so of the spot where I’d paused on the trail.

His mouth tightened. Dark stubble dusted his chin and cheeks, telling me he hadn’t bothered to shave before he headed out into the woods this morning. In a way, his current scruffiness annoyed me…but not because I was fastidious about that sort of thing.

No, it was because he looked even more handsome when he wasn’t so buttoned up.

His gaze met mine. Yesterday, I’d thought his eyes were dark, but now I realized they were actually a deep hazel, a color that echoed the woodland shades surrounding us.

“I did,” he said. “When you said you’d had to come back to Silver Hollow and leave the university, I figured something major must have happened. Most people don’t walk away from a vet residency, not when they’re so close to being a licensed veterinarian.”

Something major, my brain echoed. Yes, I suppose you could call it that.

“And you found out about how my mother and grandmother disappeared out here,” I said.

Expression now sober, he nodded. “I did.” A pause, then, “I’m very sorry that happened.”

I’d heard the same thing from what felt like hundreds of people, and the words had almost no meaning for me anymore.

A shrug would have been too callous, though, so I only said, “It hasn’t been fun, that’s for sure.

And even though I know the sheriff’s department and the FBI had hundreds of people looking through these woods for my mother and grandmother, I can’t help thinking there still might have been something they missed, something that might come to light if I look hard enough. ”

“So…Tuesday mornings off are your way of continuing the search.”

He hadn’t laughed at me or said I was silly to keep coming out here even when it was obvious that, whatever had happened to my mother and grandmother, I couldn’t possibly succeed where scores of law enforcement professionals had failed.

Of course, that wasn’t the only reason I returned to these woods as often as I could. My unicorn sighting from yesterday had only underscored the reality of the beasts’ continuing presence in the forest, even if I still couldn’t say how they came and went…or how much they knew.

But I couldn’t say anything about that to Ben, obviously. Maybe he was harmless, just someone who liked to poke into odd corners of the country and dig up whatever interesting local tales he could find.

Or maybe he’d gotten a sniff of something about my hometown that was a bit too sensational, which meant I needed to watch every damn thing I said.

No biggie. I’d been doing that pretty much my entire life.

“Yes,” I said plainly. “Also, it sort of helps to be alone in nature. Clears my head, I guess.”

He nodded in understanding. “I get that. I do the same thing back home.”

“And where is that?”

For some reason, I wasn’t sure whether he would reply with the truth. But he said without hesitation, “Southern California. I’m in a town called Yucaipa right now — it’s close to the San Bernardino National Forest and the San Gorgonio Mountains, so I try to be out there at least once a week.”

No wonder he’d looked so at home in the woods. “And researching local folklore is your job?”

He smiled, although something in his expression looked almost wary at the same time. “More of a hobby, I guess. I’m an archaeologist by trade.”

That answer surprised me a bit. I wasn’t sure why — it wasn’t as though archaeologists didn’t exist. But I’d never crossed paths with one, and if asked, would probably have replied vaguely that I thought they must be off digging through Egyptian ruins or sifting pottery shards in the deserts that used to be Sumeria, not in northern California.

Yes, indigenous peoples had once lived here, but anything they’d left behind wouldn’t last very long in the eternal damp.

“Well, I don’t think you’re going to find much local folklore here,” I said lightly, gladder than ever that the women of my family had taken care to hide the truth of what really happened in these woods…

and to conceal the reality of the creatures who roamed among the dense trees.

Vague rumors existed, but the people in Silver Hollow didn’t talk about them to strangers, which was exactly why Eliza had alerted me to Ben’s comment about Bigfoot.

“We don’t have anything like the Jersey Devil or Mothman. ”

Something almost startled flickered in those hazel eyes. “You’re interested in that kind of stuff?”

He sounded more interested than disapproving.

Still, I couldn’t tell him the real reason why I even knew about those creatures, that I’d read accounts of their activities because I wanted to see if there were any parallels between what had happened in the locations where those creatures were seen that was similar to what was happening here in the woods outside Silver Hollow.

As far as I could tell, though, there didn’t seem to be any real similarities.

Most of those stories could be explained away, but in my particular case, I’d seen a unicorn with my own two eyes and knew I hadn’t been imagining it.

It wasn’t like I’d spied a white horse standing in the exact right spot so a tree branch behind it looked as if it could have been the animal’s horn.

“I’m interested in lots of things,” I said simply. “But again, it can be dangerous if you go off the path around here. There are black bears in the forest, and mountain lions, too, although they’re a lot rarer.”

Ben didn’t look too convinced by this argument. “You come out here all the time.”

“I grew up here. I know where to go…and where not to.”

For a moment, he didn’t say anything. When he spoke, he seemed to have abandoned that argument, because he said, “Are you going to tell me about the flowers?”

Damn. I guessed it had been too much to hope for that he might have forgotten about those glittery little clues that this forest was different from any other on the face of the planet.

But I figured since I didn’t know much about them, either, I could tell him the few things I did know and make him think I was being utterly honest about the whole situation.

“They appear here and there,” I replied. “And they never seem to last very long. I don’t know if there’s something strange about the soil here that makes them glitter like that.”

Ben appeared to absorb that small piece of information. “I’m surprised this forest isn’t swarming with botanists trying to learn more about them.”

Good thing it wasn’t, or keeping the secret of the mysterious creatures who came and went here would have been even more difficult.

To be honest, I knew the flowers were real because I’d seen them, and so had my mother and grandmother, but no one in Silver Hollow had ever mentioned the sparkling little bell-shaped blooms, which made me wonder if they also only appeared to the women in my family.

Which begged the question as to how Ben had managed to see one when nobody else had.

Just another mystery that might never be solved.

“They’re very elusive,” I said, which was only the truth. “You’re very lucky to have gotten a glimpse of one. I think any botanists who came out here to research those flowers would end up disappointed.”

Again, he was quiet, thinking over what I’d just said.

I found that interesting about him, that he was okay with being silent for a moment as he processed a certain thought or concept.

Was it something that was part of the territory when you were an archaeologist, or had he gravitated toward that field because his brain just happened to work that way?

Whatever the reason, I knew I liked that he wasn’t the kind of man to immediately break in with his own personal theory on a situation, unlike some of the guys I’d dated while I was in school.

Of course, he wasn’t some college kid, but someone who looked as if he was in his early thirties, old enough to have gotten a little better at interacting with those around him.

Then again, some people never achieved that sort of maturity, no matter how old they were.

He said, now looking almost rueful, “So elusive that they somehow didn’t register on my phone’s camera?”