“Is it completely plausible? Not really. I don't know if I believe a four-year-old getting that far away without making a massive fuss and somebody finding her. And it takes a good bit to die of dehydration outside if you have shade. I don't think she would just sit there the whole time. But that’s how everybody was presenting it. As if there wasn't any other explanation. But if there was a witness…"
My voice drifts off and Sam nods. "If there's a witness nobody talks about, there could be more to the story."
"So, who is it? Why doesn't anybody know who this person is or what he or she had to say?" I ask.
"Could he be talking about Adrian? The neighbor?" Sam asks.
I shake my head. "I don't think so. Ken Abbott already talked about him earlier in the investigation, remember? They went to the cabin, and he described the interview and everything. When he mentioned this person, he said it was something the police didn't want people to know. Why would he say that?"
"I don't know."
"Neither do I. And it strikes me as very odd."
"Something always does, babe," he shrugs, getting to his feet and kissing the top of my head before heading to the coffeemaker for another cup. "Is this thing done?"
The timer goes off.
"Yes," I say. I'm still reading, still sifting through the site to try to find out anything I can.
My phone buzzes on the table beside me, and I glance over at the screen.
"Who's that this early?" Sam asks.
"Eric," I tell him.
"What did you ask him to find out for you?" Sam asks.
"He's one of my best friends," I say. "Has been for a long time. And he and my other best friend are getting ready to have a baby together. Maybe he's calling me to tell me about that. Or even just to say hi."
He turns to me, still wearing the purple and blue floral oven mitt he used to get the hot frittata out and holding a metal spatula in the other hand. On his face is an eye roll even bigger than the one I had last night watching the investigation. We hold at a stalemate for a brief second.
"I had him try to dig up the original case files so I could figure out who the witness was. And maybe about the other disappearances and deaths, too."
"There it is," Sam says.
He comes to the table with two plates of food and sets one in front of me before sliding my computer out of the way.
"I'm just curious. Ever since reading that comment about the curse, and then Ken mentioned the curse during the investigation. He said it right to the officer. What are they talking about?"
"People were murdered or disappeared from the same campground four years in a row. To a lot of people, that would sound like a curse," he offers. "And even if someone thinks that Violet's death was an accident, that still sounds fairly curse-like to me.
"So, is it the campground?" I ask.
"What do you mean?"
"We’re going to go with the working theory that in this and any other instance I use it, 'curse' just refers to the tendency for bad things to occur while linked to one another in some way. All right?"
"You can just take all the whimsy and mystery right out of things, can't you?" he asks.
"In this circumstance, yes. For all intents and purposes, Santa Claus is real, the Easter Bunny hid all those eggs in your underwear drawer this spring, and every single one of the princesses at Disney World is actual royalty right out of the storybooks. But in this case, curse just means bad shit happens for some interconnected reason."
He thinks for a second. "I’ll take that."
"Good. So, what do you think? What's the curse? Why that place? What's linking the deaths and disappearances? The campground? Or something else?"
"I really don't know," Sam says. "I haven't looked into the cases very deeply."
"But what do you think happened to Violet? Do you think she was murdered?"
"Yes," Sam nods without hesitation. "I can't believe it was an accident or a coincidence."
"And what about the ones who went missing but weren't found?" I ask. "Do you think they're alive somewhere?"
"After knowing what happened to the others, would you want them to be?" Sam asks.
"I'm glad Julia is."
Chapter Sixteen
"The Bureau wasn't involved in these cases when they happened, since it was under the national park rangers’ jurisdiction. Apparently, there was a task force assigned to look into it after the last four disappeared, but nothing really came of it. Eric was able to get me the case files the rangers handed over to the task force, along with the information they got from their investigation."
"Which wasn't very much," Xavier comments. It’s been a couple of days since the night of the broadcast, but the deaths and disappearances of Violet Montgomery and all those other victims are still lingering in my mind.
"How do you know that?" I ask.
"Because if it was very much, you would have said 'Xavier, I figured everything out and we're going to go get the bad guy', not 'nothing really came of it'."
"Oh," I say. "Yeah, that's probably true. I don't know if I would have used those words exactly, but… yeah. Anyway, I went back to the first case, Violet's case, trying to find more about that witness."
"What witness?" Xavier asks.
He disappears from the screen and comes back a few seconds later with an apple.
"The one Ken Abbott mentioned. Remember? When he was talking about Violet and what happened to her, he said that a lot of people like to think that it was an accident. But that there's a little-known fact about the case: there was a witness. Who knows who it was or what exactly that witness said, but whoever it was had enough significance to make officers pretty confident something else happened that
