Chapter 6

Hunter

    Days went by and nothing. Alex had no information other than she had known about the kids going into the woods. The police weren’t forthcoming with information. The kids weren’t found. The bones weren’t explained and instead of rising up and demanding answers, everyone seemed to slowly forget about all of it.

    Hunter didn’t though. It was still eating at him when he ran into Sheriff Beckert in the hardware store on a Saturday. Alex was out at the animal rescue center where Tanya worked, helping with a batch of kittens that just arrived, so Hunter could speak to the sheriff freely without worrying about her.

    “Hey, Sam,” Hunter said. “I know you can’t say much with the active investigation and all, but do you have any idea about those bones?”

    Sheriff Beckert hesitated for a second. He seemed completely thrown off guard by Hunter’s question.

    “Oh, that,” the older man said after a minute. “It’s from a crematorium that got shut down in the seventies when someone realized the ashes they were given were full of bits of wood. The owner was a conman who didn’t want to fire up the ovens. He left town once the heat was one. Since it was easier to disappear and start a new life back then, no one knew where he went or where all the bodies he was supposed to burn ended up. Well, now we know, he dumped them in the woods.”

    It was a plausible answer. Hunter had to admit that. However, if the last body was dumped out there in the seventies, why were some of those bones so pristine? Hunter was by no means a scientist. He had no idea how bones would age or bodies decay out in the woods, but Sheriff Beckert’s answer didn’t feel right.

    “When’s the next search for the kids?” Hunter asked.

    “Didn’t you hear?” The sheriff said. “They’ve been found down by the river. It’s all good. No need to worry anymore.”

    “I hadn’t heard.”

    Hunter knew that he was out of the loop on occasion, but something as big as this would have popped up on his radar.

    “And the teacher that didn’t sign back out when we called off the search?” Hunter asked. “She good too?”

    “Perfectly fine. Turns out she signed up to do the search, but never actually turned up. Officers found her at home. She’d overslept and decided it was pointless to go out and disrupt everything just to join when there were plenty of volunteers already.”

    “Cool,” Hunter said. “Glad to hear it. Well, then, it’s your day off. I will leave you to your shopping.”

    Hunter moved away from the sheriff and walked to the register. He hadn’t found everything he was there to get, but with the outright lie he had just been told, Hunter wasn’t going to wait around. He had walked next to that teacher. He knew she went into the woods and never came out.

    Hunter paid for his items and texted Tanya to meet him at the house. He wanted to ask Alex if she’d seen the kids since they were found.

    Once inside his home, Hunter saw Alex on the floor of the living room playing with a box of kittens and Tanya sitting at the kitchen table.

    “Alex, sweetie, did you know the kids were found?”

    Alex looked up at Hunter, clearly confused.

    “The ones in the woods?” She asked.

    “Yes,” Hunter replied. “Have you seen them back at school?”

    “No. They don’t come to school. They’re still in the woods,” Alex said. She watched Hunter for a moment to see if he’d say anything else and when he didn’t, she turned back to the box of kittens.

    Hunter moved on to Tanya and joined her at the kitchen table.

    “I told her she could watch them for the weekend,” Tanya said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

    “Does she know how?”

    “Of course,” Tanya said. “I would put her or the kitten through the misery of not knowing how.”

    “As long as she’s happy doing it,” Hunter said. “It’s fine. I saw Sheriff Beckert at the store. He says the bones are from a crematorium, the kids were found by the river, and the teacher that went missing was never out searching.”

    “None of that sounds right,” Tanya said.

    “I know the woods are messed up and bad things happen there, but whatever this isn’t normal. Sam’s a good guy. Why would he lie about all this? Why hasn’t anyone else said anything?” Hunter asked.

    “I mean if the kids were found by the river,” Tanya said before Alex cut her off.

    “There is no river,” Alex called from the living room. “There is no river in the woods. If you look at a map, you’ll see that there was never a river there.”

    Hunter got up from the table and walked to the shelves where he kept various books and odds and ends. Somewhere there was a book on the town’s history that someone had given him for his birthday a while ago. The book had maps of the area from various points in history.

    After dropping the book on the table between him and Tanya, Hunter started paging through it. The woods weren’t in all of the maps, but when they did appear, Alex was right. There was no river. Not until a much more recent map. A map printed around the time Hunter was in school suddenly showed a river running near the road in the woods.

    “A river doesn’t just come out of nowhere,” Hunter said. 

    While the river was there, it was an anomaly. It started nowhere in particular and ended nowhere as well. It was just a blue squiggly afterthought someone had drawn onto the map. 

    “It doesn’t enter the woods and it doesn’t leave them,” Hunter said to Tanya tracing the blue line. “But if it’s strong enough to carry off a car full of kids.”

    “Do you think that maybe the river was never noted because no one really went into the woods?” Tanya asked. 

    “Maybe, but I doubt it. A river that size couldn’t be unnoticed for long and contained in a forest this size.”

    “Well, there’s one way to find out if it’s real,” Tanya said. “Then we’ll know if the car crashed into the river when we were young and we’ll know if Beckert is lying to us saying the kids were found by the river now.”

    “Can I come?” Alex asked.

    “No,” Tanya said. “You’ve got to stay here and look after the kittens. They can’t be left alone for too long.”

    “Here,” Hunter said. He got up and handed Alex the cordless phone and a timer set for three hours. “If you her this alarm go off and we’re not back, you call the police and tell them we’re in the woods.”

    Hunter wondered if it was pointless calling the cops when clearly they’d stopped searching for those kids. He consoled himself with the thought that if Alex called the cops to report them missing, at least someone would have to take care of her while he was gone.

    After tearing the map out of the book, Hunter and Tanya set off. There was a spot about a mile and a half into the woods where the river came real close to the road. This was the place where the car would have been swept away. Based on the landscape around them, the spot was easy to find. One of the few slight bends in the road and a little hill on one side.

    “The river should be there,” Hunter said as he and Tanya peered off of the road.

    There was nothing there. Hunter carefully stepped off the road and walked a few steps into the woods. Still no river, but a large open field filled with cars appeared beyond the dense trees. Some cars were covered in decades worth of dust. Some were new and sparkling in the sun. 

    Hunter walked through the cars and an eerie sensation took over his body. He felt as if he’d seen some of these cars before, but he couldn’t place them. He took pictures of a few of the cars and their license plate numbers with his phone. When Hunter confronted Sheriff Beckert, he would ask how many of these cars belonged to missing people. How many secrets was the sheriff hiding in these woods.

    Were the bones and cars connected? Hunter suspected that they were. The childlike manner in which bones had been arranged into mandalas and hung from the trees mirrored what Hunter was seeing here now. Cars arranged by shape and color. Stacked like blocks. Balanced in trees.

    Hunter didn’t stay long. His instinct to run and get as far from here as possible was taking over. After a few minutes of looking around, he walked back up to the road and went home as fast as he could.

    When Hunter arrived home, he was surprised to see Sheriff Beckert sitting on his couch watching a movie with Alex.

    “What are you doing here?” Hunter asked.

    “Alex said you were missing,” the sheriff replied.

    “The bell rang and you were still gone so I got the police,” Alex said without taking her eyes off of the screen.

    “Showed up at my house and said you were gone.”

    “I’m sorry,” Hunter said. He didn’t think it was more than three hours. Maybe the walk had taken longer. “I probably have set the timer for four hours.”

    “Four hours?” Sheriff Beckert said. “You’ve been gone for three days.”

    That seemed impossible. The sun had never set. The way in and out of the woods had been simple.

    “That’s not possible,” Hunter said.

    “It’s very possible,” Sheriff Beckert replied. “I think you and I need to sit down and have a chat about what exactly you think you’re doing in the woods.”