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No, it was a picture of a pretty woman in her early twenties as she smiled at the camera, her long brown hair topped by a black graduation cap that looked as if it was going to tip over at any moment.

The image wasn’t the greatest quality, since it had been printed on regular paper, and was fairly creased, as though it had been traveling in the man’s wallet for quite some time.

Written on the back were a few words in what looked like a woman’s hand, graceful and looping.

Sidney, Humboldt State graduation, 2021.

Below that was another line.

We wish you could have come to Silver Hollow for the party.

That was all — no dates or any other names, but Ben thought it was probably enough. A native of Southern California, he’d never heard of a place called Silver Hollow, but he supposed it wouldn’t be too difficult to look up.

More than four years ago, so the girl in the photo was probably in her mid-twenties now. Considering how much people moved around after graduating from college, Ben wasn’t sure if she would even still be living in Silver Hollow.

Someone there would probably know who she was, though.

As soon as that thought went through his head, Ben knew he should push it away. The young woman wasn’t anything to him, and neither was Silver Hollow.

And yet….

The man had made that comment about the “real thing” not being too far away. How could Ben call himself a cryptozoologist if he wasn’t willing to follow that kind of lead, no matter how nebulous it might seem at the moment?

After all, cryptozoology was about believing in the unbelievable.

He inclined his head toward the bartender, who immediately came over.

“Another one?”

“No,” Ben replied at once, then reached out with the hand that held the photo. “But the guy who was sitting next to me dropped this when he got out his wallet. I thought you’d better keep it here in case he comes back looking for it.”

The bartender nodded and took the piece of paper from him. “Sure — I’ll put it in the cash register.”

Ben thanked the man, then fished a twenty of his own out of his pocket and placed it on the bar before heading upstairs to his hotel room.

His last night here, thank God, and then he was supposed to head back south.

Although he’d grown up in Costa Mesa, not too far from the beach, the insane SoCal real estate market had long ago chased him out of his hometown, and now he lived way out in Yucaipa in San Bernardino County, in a little rented cottage he’d been lucky enough to find when he was starting to think he might have to give up and leave the state entirely.

But his flight to Ontario International didn’t depart until ten o’clock the next morning, which meant he had time for some research tonight. Maybe he was about to take a leap into the deep end, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try to back up his actions with some actual facts.

His laptop waited on the desk opposite the bed, attached to the built-in charger. He sat down in the chair facing the desk and opened his MacBook’s lid, then headed over to Duck Duck Go and typed in “Silver Hollow.”

The first entry was the town’s Wikipedia page, which stated that it had been first settled in the early 1850s during the state’s Gold Rush days, although the center of industry there shifted quickly to logging.

Now, though, it seemed as if the place survived mostly on tourism, on people coming to explore the remote part of the state and drink in its natural beauty.

That was all fine and good, but Ben’s sixth sense told him something more was going on here than simply a man estranged from his daughter.

At least, that was the story he’d pieced together, based on the way the stranger had been drinking alone and had been carrying a graduation picture of a young woman in his pocket.

Well, with any luck, the man would realize he’d dropped the picture and would retrace his steps to come back and claim it.

Ben had to admit that Silver Hollow looked absolutely beautiful, based on the images he’d found online.

A quaint settlement with a downtown right out of those Hallmark holiday movies his mother loved to watch, it was located about a half hour outside Eureka off Highway 299 and boasted a population of a whole two thousand people.

The kind of place where everyone knew everyone else, so he had a feeling it wouldn’t be too hard to discover who “Sidney” was.

Of course, that begged the question as to why he would even bother to do such a thing. If nothing else, that looked like Bigfoot country around there, not chupacabra.

Was that the “real thing” the stranger had been referring to? Did Sasquatch roam those dense evergreen forests?

Ben kept scrolling, skipping past the entries from the city government and the local tourism board, the links to the quaint bread-and-breakfast inn on the outskirts of town — a real B&B, not the Air kind — the entries from the various businesses, the mentions of people who’d lived there or who’d even talked about the town in their blogs and YouTube videos.

Five pages in, he finally came across something that might have justified why his spidey-senses had gone off when he’d read “Silver Hollow” on the back of that crumpled, apparently much-loved photo.

It was buried deep in a Reddit forum dedicated to cryptozoology fans in the Pacific Northwest.

Someone had written, Anyone ever hear about some mythical white horse that’s been spotted in the woods outside Silver Hollow? I heard it from someone who visited there once, but I don’t know if they were serious or not.

Not too many replies, although someone asked, You mean, like a unicorn?

Don’t know, was the response. The person said something about the horse kind of glowing, but maybe they’d just smoked a lot of spectacular weed.

The conversation devolved from there into the various strains that the Humboldt County region was famous for, with no one conclusively chiming in to say that sure, they’d also heard about a unicorn roaming around in the forests that surrounded Silver Hollow.

Which could have meant everything…or nothing at all.

Ben stared at the screen and rubbed his chin. He wanted to tell himself there wasn’t much point in going off on a wild goose chase — or a wild unicorn chase, as the case may be — but at the same time, what if that one off-hand rumor turned out to be true?

He had a feeling that images of a real, live unicorn would pack ’em in even more than Bigfoot.

Take that, Prentiss MacAfee.

And it wasn’t as if Ben had anyone waiting for him in Yucaipa. His last relationship had collapsed more than a year ago, after Jennifer laid down the ultimatum that he try to salvage his academic career instead of yakking about mythical creatures on YouTube, or she was out of there.

Because he knew that said career was beyond recovery and that the YouTube videos actually paid more than what he’d been earning in academia, he’d stood firm.

So she’d kicked him out, since they’d been living in her condo at the time.

That was when he’d found the cottage in Yucaipa, which had saved him from having to crawl home to his parents’ house in Costa Mesa.

Sure, they had the room, but he was damned if he was going to move in with them at the ripe old age of thirty-two.

A little more research showed he could fly United from SFO to the small county airport in Arcata, where he would still need to rent a car. The trip would drain his already tight coffers that much further, but that was what credit cards were for, right?

Ten minutes later, he’d postponed the flight down to Ontario and booked the one to Arcata, along with making sure there would be a rental car waiting for him when he arrived.

While he was working on the flights, he’d recalled the listing for the bed-and-breakfast he’d seen earlier, and navigated back to that once he was done with all the flight arrangements.

Sure enough, a room was available. He reserved that as well and then closed the laptop.

“Silver Hollow, here I come,” he murmured.