Chapter 9
Hunter sat quietly at his desk. He must have dozed off. There was a book in front of him. A yearbook from the high school. It was old and battered, as if someone had just pulled it from the attic. There was a stack of yearbooks next to him. They were in order by year. From the one they released at the end of the last school year to the one he was holding in his hands. More than sixty years worth of yearbooks.
As he paged through the book he had in hand, Hunter wondered why he had all these yearbooks. It seemed like an odd thing. If they were part of an investigation, surely they wouldn’t need so many of them. A deputy knocked on his door and poked his head in.
“Someone here to see you sheriff,” the deputy said.
“Let them in,” Hunter said. The yearbooks faded to the back of his mind like a dream in the early morning hours. He wrote down a note to ask why these yearbooks were in his office, although Hunter didn’t think he would forget. There were vast piles of them on nearly every free surface. Nonetheless, something told him, he had to write down the question.
Alex walked in and sat down at his desk.
“No school today, kiddo?” Hunter asked.
“No more school,” Alex said.
Hunter couldn’t remember the date off the top of his head or the school schedule.
“Vacation already?” He asked, playing it off as a joke when he honestly didn’t know.
He was worried that Alex would think he’d forgotten about her and her schedule if he admitted to not knowing why she was done with school. Hunter was sure he had it written down somewhere. He was just tired and couldn’t get his thoughts straight.
“No more school,” Alex said.
“Do you want to hang out here?”
“Sure.”
Alex sat down at the desk opposite Hunter.
“What’s that?” She asked.
“Yearbooks.”
Alex started paging through the books and looking at the pictures while Hunter sat there trying to remember what he had been doing before. Before he could recall, there was another knock on the door. The deputy poked his head in and said, “We’ve been called out to a house. There’s another missing kid.”
“Can I come?” Alex asked.
“No, sweetheart,” Hunter said as he got up and grabbed his car keys. “I’ll drop you off at home.”
After dropping Alex off, Hunter continued on to the address the deputy had given him. There was already a police car standing in front of the house when he arrived and an officer talking to an older woman.
When Hunter got out of his car, another officer approached him.
“She came to pick up her grandson,” the officer told Hunter. “She watches him during the week while her daughter goes to work. Neither of them is here. There is no sign of where they might be or where they could have gone.”
The officer who was speaking with the woman started walking down the street with her. If Hunter had to guess, the officer was walking the woman home. Hunter made a note to asked that officer about their conversation later later.
“The woman who lives here is named Tanya Debrowski. She has a young son named Tommy. Neither of them has been seen in a couple of days,” the remaining officer said.
The door to the house was open and the officer led Hunter inside. They walked through the house together. There was nothing out of the ordinary. It was a tidy home. Nothing indicated a struggle or a reason to leave. From the bills Hunter saw on the counter, there were no financial issues. Everything was paid. The car was in the garage. If they went somewhere, it was on foot.
“Sheriff, do you think the woods took them?” The officer asked.
“I’m sorry what?”
“That’s where people go missing. No struggle. They left on foot. The woods are a block away.”
The officer was right. Even if the mother was cautious, maybe the little boy ran off into the trees.
“Get every volunteer you can find,” Hunter said. “We don’t know how long they’ve been missing. The longer we wait, the deeper they might wander into the woods.”
“How well did you know them,” the officer asked.
Hunter was stunned by the question for a second and looked at the officer. The officer gestured at a framed picture. Hunter could see his smiling face admits a group of smiling faces. He didn’t recognize anyone in the picture. If he didn’t know them, why was he with them?
“Are we going into the woods again?” Hunter turned around. Alex was there.
“You’re not,” he said. He walked over to her and grabbed her by the wrist.
“I’ll meet you by the road,” Hunter said. “Get as many volunteers as you can. I’m going to drop Alex off at home and then meet you there.”
Hunter drove Alex back to their house and told her to stay there. She begged and pleaded to go with him, but he didn’t cave. He pulled his credit card out of his wallet and told her she could get pizza. He then drove to the old road that went through the woods. Cars were parked there, but no people.
The search party must have gone in already. Hunter parked his car and walked down the road. The others couldn’t have gotten too far ahead of him, but he heard nothing. No calls to the missing woman and her son. No chattering between search party members.
Hunter went to radio to the officer he had told to organize the search and realized he didn’t have a police radio on him. Instead of venturing further into the woods, he returned to his truck. There was no radio in there either. For a moment, he wondered what he had done with it. He used his cellphone to call the sheriff’s office and ask if he had left it in his office. It wasn’t there either. So Hunter went home, the one remaining place it could be. He had a mild suspicion that perhaps an angry teenager had swiped from his truck.
After pulling into his garage, Hunter searched his truck just to be sure. He didn’t want to accuse Alex of anything if the radio had just dropped under a seat. There was nothing other than a yearbook there. It was from the fifties. The dusty cover was tattered and worn.
For a moment, Hunter wondered how that yearbook had gotten into his car. He took it into the house with him where he was greeted with a dozen pizza boxes opened and scattered everywhere. The pizzas were in various stages of having been eaten.
Hunter couldn’t believe that Alex would pull a stunt like this. Clearly, she’d thrown some kind of party in the brief time he had been gone. There was a sound upstairs and Hunter walked towards it. Maybe the kids panicked when they heard his truck pull in and went upstairs to hide. When Hunter reached the top of the stairs, he put the yearbook down on the bookshelf that lived on the end of the hall. Once he put it down, he noticed a bright yellow note sticking out from between the pages.
Curiosity overtook Hunter. The kids could wait. There was no way past him to leave the house. He had plenty of time to read this note. Written in unfamiliar handwriting, the note read “It wants more.”
The note seemed new compared to the ancient yearbook. Hunter wondered about it for a minute and put the note down when he heard another noise come from Alex’s room. As he walked down the hall to her room, the sound become more distinct and more confusing. Like a thousand voices whispering in a language he couldn’t understand.
When Hunter opened the door, he found a black void. It wasn’t a dark bedroom that just needed a light switched on. It was sheer nothingness consumed by the purest black Hunter had ever seen.
Before he realized what he was doing, Hunter reached his hand into the darkness. It felt like a cool, thick liquid. Hunter was about to pull his hand out again when he blinked and Alex’s bedroom came into focus.
It had to be exhaustion, Hunter told himself. That was why he couldn’t remember things. That was why he was misplacing things. That was why he was hallucinating whispering voices and viscous darkness.
Hunter stepped into the room and looked around. There weren’t any teenagers here. He’d call Alex in just a minute to see where she’d gone. There was, however, a little backpack on her desk with the name Tommy embroidered into it.