I've never heard her voice, but I think about that sound, and that no one will ever hear it again. Someone heard it for the last time and will always be the very last person to have heard her voice. No one else will ever hear it. There are countless words it will never form. Names it will never say. The moment that child left this life, the earth lost an entire sound.
It lost breath.
It lost energy.
It lost heat.
It lost thought waves.
It lost a piece of its identity as a wholly unique perspective and ability to perceive everything was snuffed out.
None of that can ever be regained.
Scrolling past the image gives me some relief, and I read through the article describing her disappearance. It was written before they found her body, but a large, bold-type update at the top gives the barest details of her death. It's written in the cautious, restrained language some newspapers use when reporting on a sensitive death. They didn't find her body, they recovered her remains. She wasn't abandoned in the woods, she was located a distance from the campground. It takes away some of the sharp edges, but it also takes away some of the humanity.
She deserves those sharp edges. She deserves for people to be horrified and sickened by what happened to her. Others don't deserve to be shielded when she went through whatever she went through. I don't know what that was. I don't know enough about the whole event to make a guess about what could have happened to end up with her tucked away in that cavern.
What I do know is it was horrific. Anything that would end with a four-year-old child decaying alone and unseen is horrific.
Reading that article leads me into a whirlpool of other articles, blogs, and forums talking about the incident and the campground itself. It carries me well into the night and just as I tumble to sleep, I absorb one last line.
Arrow Lake is cursed.
Chapter Ten
I am certainly not a person for whom the idea of a curse surrounding a particular location is foreign. In fact, people invoking curses and attributing any number of horrible things to otherworldly influences goes right along with much of my career and personal quests.
If I was a little younger, I might throw out there that it's ‘on-brand for me’. But since I'm in my thirties, I kind of wish I hadn't tried it.
The point is, when I wake up with the strange comment still on my mind, I'm less disturbed than I am intrigued. Before I can put a lot of thought into it, a heavy knock on the hotel room door jostles me.
“Ma'am? Housekeeping,” a voice says from the hallway.
I'm climbing out of bed and heading for my clothes, so I'm at least dressed when the housekeeper comes in, when my phone rings.
“Hold on,” I call out.
Grabbing my phone off the bedside table, I answer it before looking at the screen.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” Bellamy says. “You okay? I was expecting you a couple of hours ago.”
“I know,” I say. “I'm sorry. I managed to oversleep and now I have a very aggressive housekeeper pounding on my door, I missed check-out, and you know they've cleaned up the breakfast bar already.”
“I'm sorry,” she says. “I know how you love a hotel waffle.”
“It's different than making them at home,” I say. “Being able to flip the iron over makes it so much better.”
“But you're still coming?” she asks.
I hold my phone between my ear and shoulder as I get dressed.
“Yes,” I say. “I'm throwing on clothes and I will be on my way.”
I end the call and stuff my phone down in my pocket as I move around the room, gathering up the few things I have with me. The housekeeper is coming out of the room across the hall as I leave. She says good morning to me, but I can see her glare over the stack of towels she's holding.
The manager at the desk is understanding and gives me that wink people do when they think they're sharing some sort of secret with me, or that they're doing something only an insider would know to do. Sometimes it comes after I actually have asked somebody to bend a rule or give me a special consideration during an investigation. But in all honesty, most of the time I have no idea what we're supposed to be sharing.
At this moment, I think he's trying to tell me he knows who I am and assumes I'm knee-deep in some sort of complicated investigation that kept me up all night. I decide not to divulge I was just wandering down a rabbit hole, pre-gaming for this paranormal investigation I will apparently be watching.
I finally get on the road and give Sam a call. I told him yesterday that I made plans to stop by and see Bellamy on the way home, but I want to remind him. He's been working on a couple of cases of his own the last few weeks, and it’s been stressful for him.
I never want to lose sight of the challenges he faces. He's stood by my side as I traipsed right along the edge of losing my mind during any number of investigations. I'm committed to being by his side just in case he starts to slip as well.
When I get to Bellamy and Eric's house, she's already standing outside with her purse over her shoulder, waiting for me. My car has barely even stopped when she's across the yard and opening the passenger door.
“Everything okay?” I ask. “Are you running from something?”
“Running to something,” she corrects.
“Okay,” I raise an eyebrow. “What are we running to?”
“Breast pumps,” she says.
That is not what I was expecting. My hands still wrapped around the steering wheel, I
