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Chapter Eight

O nce they reached the trailhead, Ben spied a dusty older-model Subaru sitting there, the only car he could see. Sidney unzipped her borrowed jacket and handed it back to him.

“Thanks again for that,” she said. “So…meet here tomorrow at seven-thirty?”

The timing meant he’d probably miss out on breakfast at the B the food was good, but he didn’t think he was in the mood to have the proprietor ask him any more probing questions.

Instead, he decided on Molly’s Corner, a restaurant whose fare didn’t seem too different from what was offered at Eliza’s, except this place appeared to be more of a lunch and dinner kind of establishment.

He ordered a cheeseburger and fries, considered the idea but decided to pass on having a beer, and thought he could get used to this leisurely pace.

These days, he was self-employed, but between the travel to attend conferences and the endless courting of YouTube’s often capricious algorithms, his life wasn’t nearly as laid-back as he’d once hoped it would be.

On his way to the restaurant, he’d spied Sidney through the front window of her pet store, chatting with an elderly gentleman as she appeared to ring up a flat of canned cat food.

Ben wished he could stop in and ask her if she wanted some lunch, but because she was obviously busy — and probably had grabbed a bite before she came in to work — he made himself keep going.

But since she’d offered to help him with his explorations in the forest, he thought he might swing back around later this afternoon just before closing to see if she would be all right with possibly having some dinner. A friendly meal, of course, with no underlying motivations behind it.

Right.

He knew it was stupid to even think of pursuing anything with her, not when their lives were firmly planted on opposite ends of the state, not when she was clearly preoccupied with solving the mystery of her mother and grandmother’s disappearance.

Unfortunately, the more he tried to shove Sidney Lowell to the back of his mind, the more she continued to invade his thoughts.

Well, maybe an afternoon of trying to find any references to those strange, shimmering flowers on the internet would help him get his brain back on track.

He returned to the B&B after satisfying his hunger with that burger and its accompanying fries, then pulled out his laptop and got down to work.

Almost at once he could tell this wasn’t going to be easy, mostly because every time he tried to concoct a different description of “sparkly white flowers,” he’d get all sorts of stuff he wasn’t looking for, whether that was bridal headpieces or stock images or a variety of handmade jewelry on Etsy.

Even adding “Humboldt County” to the search didn’t seem to help very much.

No, that only centered the results on local shops and artisans.

An hour or so of this, and he was just about ready to throw the laptop out the window.

Not that he would do anything so crazy. He’d only just paid off the thing a couple of months earlier, and he certainly didn’t want to be in hock for a brand-new MacBook Pro all over again.

But then he found something. A very small something on an obscure website that dealt with folklore and fairytales, which he had to admit probably wasn’t the most reliable of sources.

Still….

These elusive flowers are sometimes called “fairy bells,” the entry read. They are said to bloom only where creatures of myth and legend have trodden. Some also claim they are evidence of pathways between worlds, since they aren’t normally found in nature.

Ben leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowing as he read the passage again.

Pathways between worlds….

Theories had always floated around that the Jersey Devil and Mothman and the assorted other cryptids had somehow emerged in this world after falling through from a different plane.

This was the far fringe of an area of interest that already existed way outside the center, and yet now he wondered if there might be something to all those crackpot theories.

Or it could be a totally normal plant, he told himself. Every day, someone is finding a new species of flora or fauna in the Amazon. Why can’t the same thing happen here?

Technically, there was no reason at all, even though he admitted to himself that these woods saw a lot more foot traffic than the remote areas of the Amazon rainforest. The chances of a plant like that remaining undiscovered seemed vanishingly small.

And that didn’t even take into account the way his camera had been unable to record a single image of the thing…or how it had disappeared as if it had never been there at all. It wasn’t as if it had contracted into a pod or wilted or anything like that. No, it was just…gone.

He supposed he could do his best to create a sketch of the little flower.

Although he would never claim to be an artist, he wasn’t too bad at rendering fairly accurate impressions of simple objects, a skill he’d picked up after years of drawing layouts of dig sites and making other diagrams. However, nothing short of a set of oils and acrylics would ever come close to re-creating the shimmer of those delicate blooms, and he had no idea how to work with that kind of media even if he’d had a palette and a canvas handy.

The entry he’d found didn’t have any photos, of course, or even an artist’s rendering of the flower. How could it, when he thought it fairly obvious that the flowers didn’t want their presence to be recorded?

Ben wanted to dismiss that thought as pure whimsy. This was a plant, after all, not a thinking creature with its own sense of self-preservation.

Frustrated, he closed the laptop lid and went to look out the window. The clouds that had rained such havoc — literally — that morning had now retreated to the mountain peaks to the east, and the sky was once again sunny and blue.

Perfect conditions for walking into town, as a matter of fact.

He took his MacBook and returned it to the satchel where it usually lived when he wasn’t using the laptop, then put the satchel in the closet and headed out.

The air was just brisk enough that he was glad he’d put on his jacket, although he saw plenty of people downtown who seemed completely fine with walking around in their shirtsleeves.

Well, they were probably used to the weather here, whereas he came from much warmer climes.