"From the campground?"
Sam nods. "She was there with her parents. They hadn't been there very long when she vanished. At first, people around the campground just thought she had run off while playing and maybe got turned around. That happens a lot with kids out camping. Especially ones who are really little or who aren't familiar with the area. But her parents were frantic. Especially her mother, who thought she was with her father when she disappeared. They called the police and there was a huge search. There was no sign of her, nobody had seen anything. They found her body a couple of months later.”
“Oh, no,” I say. “So, she did wander off?”
“She might have,” Sam says.
“What do you mean she might have? What happened to her?”
“They actually don't know. She was found in a little cavern pretty far away from the campground. It wasn't a place just a normal person would happen on. She was propped up against the wall, as if she was just sitting there. But she’d been dead for a long time. She was so decomposed there was no way to identify a cause of death. Some people said it was just an accident, that she got somehow separated from her parents and didn't know where to go. There were a couple of big storms in the days after she went missing, so if she happened to be in the area with the cavern, she might have crawled in for shelter.”
“But I thought you just said the cavern wasn't somewhere that somebody would happen on,” I say.
“Exactly,” he says. “I've seen pictures of that cavern. It's not a huge, open cave like people imagine. It basically just looks like a hole in the rocks. And it's pretty high up from any of the trails. And by trails, I mean the spots where people have worn down the area from walking. It's not anywhere near any of the established trails or paths.”
“So, the chances of her actually wandering away and stumbling onto this cavern are pretty slim.”
“That's putting it mildly,” he says.
“And they never figured out what happened to her?” I ask.
“No. The investigation was heated. As a matter of fact, the head investigator, Ray Fitzgerald, came under some pretty serious scrutiny for how he dealt with the case,” Sam says. “I actually recently pulled up this case and others because of those guys coming into the region.”
“You mean the Ghostbusters?”
“They’re not Ghostbusters.”
“Anyway. What do you mean, ‘scrutiny’?”
“The case really got to him. From the very beginning, he seemed really wrapped up in it. But a lot of questions were raised about how he handled the questioning of the little girl's parents and other witnesses. He didn't follow the protocols and let himself act largely on emotion rather than following the proper steps of an investigation,” Sam explains.
“That sounds familiar,” I say.
“Definitely does,” Sam agrees. “Fitzgerald was really invested in figuring out what happened to the girl. I mean, I’m sure you guys have handled missing persons cases in the Bureau. You know that after the first forty-eight hours the chances of finding the person are slim. But he had a whole task force still searching a full two months later. And once they found her body, even though there was no direct evidence that she was murdered, he wouldn't accept that her death was an accident. People wanted him to just believe that she walked away from the cabin where her family was staying and got lost. She was only four years old. Violet was her name.”
The realization hurts my heart. The image floating through my head is not just some generic child, some generic parents, but my friends. What if it were Bellamy and Eric’s child that was taken from them like that?
“That’s really horrible.”
“Yeah.”
“But, also, things like that happen,” I say. “Little children are curious and can get away in a second if they get out of your sight.”
“That's true. And it's why it was easy for most people to just say it was a horrible, tragic accident. She walked away, got lost, died of exposure and dehydration. It's easy to understand that. But Fitzgerald wouldn't let go. He was determined someone hurt her.”
“But why? Did he know her or something?” I ask.
"No. He'd never met any of them. All he ever said was that he could feel that something happened to her. He mentioned interviewing someone who was staying in a nearby cabin, and who the girl’s mother spoke to right after realizing the little girl was missing. Fitzgerald said the man made a few comments that were questionable. That man also noted hearing a scream a little while before the mom came to his cabin asking if he had seen Violet. But the witness didn't know the family, either. He had just gotten there and hadn't seen anything. But whatever he said to the detective was enough to make him really suspicious. He insisted on keeping the investigation open. But for basically everybody else, things just went back to normal. Until the next year.”
“The next year?” I ask.
Sam nods. “Oh, it only gets wilder from here.”
Chapter Six
"The next summer, the campground was just as busy and popular as it was the year before. A few people remembered the little girl who had died out there but didn't talk about her. As horrible as it sounds, it just didn't seem significant. Not enough to keep people away, anyway. But that year, one day after the anniversary of Violet's disappearance, two teenagers who were at the campground were reported missing. Jimmy and Logan were their names. They were friends staying with one of their families in the cabin next door to the one Violet's family had been staying in.
“Since they were older, young teenagers, the panic wasn't as immediate. In fact, the adults staying with them at the campground didn't contact the police until the next
