"Sam," I roll my eyes, shooting him an incredulous look as I pull back the covers to get the bed ready.
"I saw you watching. You were fascinated," he gloats, a playful gleam in his eye. “Admit it. It was pretty good.”
"I was fascinated by the sheer quantity of drama one man could put into something as innocuous as a gross abandoned campground bathtub." I lower my voice and take on an extremely serious expression. "This is the very bathtub where Violet's mother said she was rinsing her family's bathing suits when the little girl went missing." I laugh. "I mean… come on."
I make my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth and braid my hair.
"Alright, well when he posts the evidence tomorrow, we'll see what you think about it," Sam says.
"He posts evidence?" I ask around my toothbrush and a mouth full of brisk mint foam.
"Yeah. On their website. They put up unedited versions of their video and audio evidence so people can analyze it for themselves," he explains, reaching for his toothbrush.
I nod. "Well, at least there's an interactive play element to it."
He glares at me and I laugh, giving him a playful smack on the butt as I walk out of the bathroom toward the bed. I still haven't quite gotten over the shock of not knowing about his secret devotion to ghost hunting, but I'm realizing I like finding out something new about him. I might tease him endlessly for it, but he has plenty to tease me about, too. It's nice that after so long, we still have that.
That doesn't mean I'm buying into it, but it's still nice.
Chapter Fifteen
"Caught you," Sam says the next morning when he comes into the kitchen.
I look up from my laptop where it's sitting on the table.
"There's coffee, and I have breakfast in the oven."
"What is it?" he asks.
"That frittata thing Janet gave me the recipe for last Game Night."
"Smells good."
"We'll see." I point at the screen. "Did you know these people do private ghost hunts? As in, people pay them to guide them through haunted houses and stuff and use their equipment?"
Sam pours himself coffee, turns it into socially acceptable melted ice cream with creamer and sugar, and brings it over to the table.
"Oh, so you are interested after all? I knew it!" he crows. "That might be a fun honeymoon."
He has laughter in his eyes when I look up at him, but I still feel the need to shut that down really fast.
"Not even a little bit. Do people actually do this? They sign up to be toured around and try out ghost equipment?" I ask.
"Yes. A lot of them," Sam says. “Everybody has their thing, Emma. You said so yourself.”
That finally draws a chuckle from me, and I raise my hands in surrender as the calendar page on the website loads. “Wow. You're not kidding. They're booked up solid for the next four months.”
“You should look at Halloween. Usually, the couple of weeks around then are booked for a couple of years ahead of time,” he tells me. “What are you doing looking at the site anyway? Just can't resist evaluating the evidence for yourself?”
“Not exactly,” I say. “I don't know what happened to the show last night. Don't you think it's strange it just turned off?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But they could have lost transmission. Or that cop could have gotten tired of dealing with him and not let him turn it back on.”
“He wouldn't have jurisdiction to do that. Not unless he was going to arrest the team under the suspicion of putting in a fake call because of the bones. But for somebody who was putting on so much of a lecture about wasting time, I don't think he would do that. Even if just for the sake of avoiding the paperwork. Something else must have happened.”
“Did you find anything?” Sam asks.
I shake my head, going back to scrolling through the page.
“There isn't any mention of it. Some of the evidence was uploaded, but not the part toward the end of what was shown," I say. "One part they do have is something that's been bothering me. Well, I guess not bothering me, exactly. I just keep thinking about it."
"What is it?" Sam asks.
I go back to the page where the evidence has been uploaded and bring up a portion of a video.
"This is when they first got to the cavern where they found Violet's body. Elsie is climbing up the rocks while Ken talks about what people think about what happened to Violet."
"I remember," Sam says.
"Alright. Listen."
“I mentioned there are people who believe Violet simply wandered away and got lost. In fact, that is considered the official theory by the park authorities. But something not many people know, and something law enforcement doesn’t want you to know, is that the case was never closed. It is still an open investigation, and there’s one important detail that is usually left out when talking about this case. There was a witness who …”
I turn the video off. "That's when Elsie yells out to him that she found those bones."
"A witness," Sam states.
I nod. "He never finishes that. Who's he talking about? I went into this thinking her death was suspicious, but figured there was a possibility it could have just been an accident. Things like that do happen. Children go off, they wander around. And even the cavern wasn't really enough to convince me it had to be murder. It's hard for adults to find that place and to get up there, sure, but that's kind of why I thought it might be more plausible she just found it. It's far enough away from the campground she wouldn't have been able to find her way back. It's too deep in the woods. So she would get tired and want to find somewhere to stay during the storm. And think about
