Page 34 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

Twenty-Seven

Goddamn Ben Vandergriff. He knows I need to tell Josie some version of what’s happened, and yet he’s wandered off before we can discuss what we’re going to tell her.

Once in the cottage, I find my phone and text him.

Me: Thanks

An answer comes a few seconds later. It’s a thumbs-up.

“Jerk,” I mutter under my breath.

Me: I need guidance here

Me: What do I tell her?

Ben: Your call

I resist the urge to type back a finger emoji of my own and roll my shoulders, sloughing off my irritation.

Me: So everything then? You’re fine with me telling Josie everything?

Ben: Your call

I was being sarcastic. I’m sure he doesn’t want me to tell her everything. I’m about to text back when he beats me to it.

Ben: I’m fine with you telling her everything or telling her nothing

Ben: I’m not worried she’ll run back to Daddy with the whole story

Ben: It really is your call. An outsider view might help us see stuff we’re missing. But if you’re worried about scaring her off, that’s your call, too

I deflate. Fine. He’s not being a jerk. He didn’t abandon me to a hard choice. He left me to make my own decision.

And that decision is…?

I’m not sure. He’s right on both counts. We could use a third party who wasn’t here and can poke holes in our bizarre story. But I’m also reluctant to scare off an ally … and a potential friend.

“We had to call your dad out last night,” I say as I plug in the kettle for tea. “Something happened.”

“You’re both okay?” She sees the answer in my nod and quickly says, “Is it something about your aunt?”

I shake my head. “Yesterday evening, shortly after you left, Ben and I had a run-in with a cyclist trying to camp on the property. Words were exchanged. The guy left—or seemed to. Then we woke up to screams.”

She’s in the middle of calmly adding milk to her coffee and pulls back so fast she sloshes it.

I continue, “Ben came and got me. We headed out. We saw something on the beach to the west. It was the camper. Badly wounded. Lying on the shore. We were running over when something came out of the water and dragged him in.”

She’s still. Utterly still, milk carton in hand, her gaze on mine, searching my face as if awaiting the punch line to a very unfunny joke.

I hold out my phone. “I don’t think you saw this photo.” It’s the blurry one of Gail coming out of the water.

“What the hell?” She recoils, and her gaze flies to mine. “My dad said you got a photo of someone dressed up to look like your aunt, to scare you. That is not…” She swallows. “That does not look like an actor. It looks like your aunt. Except…”

“Dead,” I say. “Drowned. That’s what the figures last night looked like. They hauled the camper out into the lake.”

Josie’s still staring at me, still waiting for the punch line, her expression shuttered with the look of someone who fears she’s being mocked. The little girl hanging out with the older kids who tell her wild stories and then laugh when she believes them.

She finally says, “You told my father that you saw zombies drag a man into the lake and he … what? Is there an investigation? There can’t be. He’d have called me. So what did he do? Does he think you’re pranking him? That Ben’s playing some elaborate hoax?”

“He thinks someone’s playing one. On me. That it’s all part of scaring me into forfeiting my inheritance. My cousin or maybe my uncle. They hired the camper and staged the whole thing.”

“Is that possible? Given what you saw?”

My eyes prickle, and it takes me a moment to recognize the sensation. Tears. Not tears of grief or frustration or confusion. Tears of gratitude for that simple question.

Josie doesn’t jump on her father’s interpretation. She doesn’t even pause to consider her own interpretation. She asks me. What did I see?

That tells me where I want to go with this.

“No,” I say. “Same with Ben. Neither of us can fit what we saw into that narrative, as much as it makes sense.”

“But my father wasn’t there. He didn’t see it with his own eyes.”

“Didn’t see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. Ben and I were freaked out, but neither of us looks back and thinks we saw something staged. I would love to believe that. I don’t even know how to wrap my head around anything else. But…”

I swallow and lift the photo again. “This is my aunt. Of course I’d rather believe she staged it herself, out of jealousy. I’d rather discover she’s alive and betrayed me. But I know what I saw. She’s dead. Someone—something—dragged her into the lake. And now it happened to this camper.”

“Who my dad believes is part of the stunt. An actor.”

“He’s your father, and you two are having some friction. I don’t want to add to that.”

“You’re not. My father is the sheriff. My boss. If he decides no one actually died here, I can’t overrule him. But someone disappeared last night, and that’s going to come out eventually. He’ll need to investigate then.”

Will he?

That feels disloyal, as if I’m accusing Craig Smits of something.

I’m not. I have no doubt that when relatives come looking for that cyclist, Smits will investigate.

But will he believe we told the truth that the guy was dragged into the lake?

Or will he stick to his own interpretation and find a way to fit that?

I remember those memories that resurfaced a few days ago. The ones about people that disappeared and everyone shrugged it off.

Not our problem.

It happens.

Can’t prove they disappeared here anyway.

“Sam?” Josie says. “You’re thinking something.”

I choose my words with care. “You’re right. Eventually someone will report that cyclist missing.”

She nods. “Whichever department it’s reported to will ask all regional law-enforcement agencies whether they saw him.

It could take a while, so you’ll need to make sure my dad takes down all the particulars.

He’s not necessarily going to hear next month that a guy went missing and think of the camper you reported seeing dragged into the lake. ”

“Because it happens. People go missing. It’s cottage country. It’s not the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, but people are passing through all summer, biking, hiking, camping. Sometimes they’re reported missing.”

I expect a quick and easy reply. Yes, people disappear. Instead, she wraps her hands around her coffee cup.

“Josie?”

“People do go missing,” she says slowly.

“Like you said, it’s cottage country. Lots of people pass through, many doing sports with a risk factor.

But some people think too many who’ve vanished had connections to Paynes Hollow.

That what they have in common is that they were known to be here, specifically. ”

“The Bermuda Triangle of Upstate New York,” I murmur.

Her head jerks up. “You heard that podcast episode?”

“My grandfather sent it to me a few weeks before he died. Apropos of nothing in particular. He did that sometimes. He’d send things that, in his mind, exonerated my father.

Once it was an article on a serial killer operating in Syracuse around the same time.

Once it was some weird junk-science piece on chemical-induced psychopathy from factories along the Great Lakes.

I read enough of this podcast to get the gist. People have disappeared in the region, all linked to Paynes Hollow.

As if that’s how Austin Vandergriff died, and my father was, I don’t know, just burying a boy he found dead from mysterious causes. ”

“Except it’s true. Not about Austin, of course. But I talked to the woman who did the podcast while she was researching it last year.” She pauses. “Don’t tell my dad. Please.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I didn’t give her anything. I didn’t know anything. But we talked, and I got curious. So I went digging on my own. She had a point. Over the years, more than half of the people who disappeared within a hundred-mile radius had some connection to Paynes Hollow.”

“Like what?”

She shrugs. “Passing through, mostly. This was often their last known stop. They popped into the general store for supplies or someone in town reported speaking to them. Most were traveling solo, though there were a few couples and in those cases, they both vanished.”

“How many are we talking?”

“Maybe three dozen. That seems like a lot, but they’re scattered over a century or more.

On that kind of timeline, it doesn’t seem so strange, especially when they were just passing through, which makes it difficult to say they disappeared here.

Sure, maybe they were last seen shopping locally, but that only means they had enough supplies that they could have been in Ohio or Vermont when they disappeared. ”

She leans forward and continues, “When you’re talking a hundred years, a serial killer is out of the question. That’s why I never mentioned it to my dad. It’d need to be, like, a father and son and grandson. A killer family. I sure wasn’t taking that theory to my dad.”

A killer family.

I think of that book tucked into Ben’s waistband. What exactly is in there? Something he wasn’t sure I should read.

“So what are you thinking now?” I say as neutrally as I can.

“I have no idea,” Josie says. “Except that you and Ben watched lake zombies drag a guy into the water, presumably killing him. A lone camper. And if my father didn’t take the particulars from you and he gets a report weeks from now of some random camper disappearing somewhere in the upstate area, he’d never think to connect the two. Maybe you found the answer.”

“The drowned dead.”

Her cheeks flush. “I should be glad Ben wandered off before this conversation or he really would think I’m a little kid, blaming zombies for missing people.”

“He wouldn’t,” I say. “That’s what we’re already working through. We just hadn’t extrapolated into anything larger. What can you tell me about these stories? I could listen to the whole podcast, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

She nods. “I have my notes on the cloud. Let me pull them up.”