CHAPTER 72 MATT

72

Matt

MATT AND ELLIE MADE quick work of it all. Josh struggled as they dragged him inside, pleading his case with Ellie, who heard none of it. Together, they wrestled him down to the floor next to the radiator and fastened his handcuffs around the thick iron pipe. Ellie threatened to tape a sock in his mouth if he didn't shut up. He finally did. Once Josh was secure, they drove Matt's cruiser into the garage and closed the door before gently removing Sally from the back and resting her in the freezer. The quilt Ellie had mentioned was sitting on top of the workbench at the back of the garage, neatly folded and smelling of fabric softener. She placed the quilt over Sally's body and tucked her in like a small child before closing the lid and resting her palm on top in what Matt thought was some sort of prayer or silent reflection. When she was done, she said, "You trust me, don't you, Matt?"

"Of course."

"Even with all this going on? I know I'm a little jumpy right now, not exactly myself, but you still trust me, right?"

Matt nodded, but he couldn't hide the doubt in his eyes.

"You can't bullshit a bullshitter, Matt. I know you don't, and I don't blame you for it. The truth is, you shouldn't trust me any more than I should trust you. We don't know what's causing whatever is happening here. We don't know if we've been affected by it, and considering how many people seem to be, it would be na?ve of us to believe we haven't been, too. Josh, Gabby, Addie—everyone in there. Everyone in town. We don't know who we can trust, and until we figure that out, we can't trust anyone, including each other. That makes what I'm about to tell you that much harder, because you need to trust me in order to believe it."

Although she didn't say it, Matt understood what she was struggling to tell him. It was written all over her face; he saw it upstairs. "You know who she is, don't you?"

Ellie bit her lower lip. "I can't possibly be right. And thinking I am makes me believe I'm just another piece of all the crazy."

He followed her down the concrete steps to the basement. She reached for a string and tugged, and a bare bulb came to life. Dust stirred and circled their heads, tiny flecks riding still air. Matt had been down there several times over the years. Every November, they cleared old case files from the cluttered storage room at the office and brought them here—overflow for their overflow. The state of New Hampshire allowed them to destroy files older than seven years, but Ellie preferred to hold on to them. Her basement wouldn't exactly fly when it came to chain of custody rules, but aside from Ellie, nobody really cared about old speeding tickets or noise complaints, and that was what most of this stuff amounted to.

What Ellie said next wasn't what he expected. "How well do you know Buck?"

Matt rolled his fingers through his hair and leaned back against an old exercise bike. "Nice enough guy, fairly dependable. Aside from the drinking, and a few lapses of judgment caused by it, I've never had a problem with him. I suppose he's been the town drunk for as long as I remember, and he doesn't seem to have any interest in changing that. He seems harmless enough, so we let him be."

Ellie studied his face before turning back toward the gloom. "Do you know why he's like that? Where it started?"

Matt shook his head.

Ellie chewed the inside of her cheek for a second and picked her words carefully before she continued, "Back in eighty-seven, my daddy was sheriff and I was a deputy going on my third year. Twenty-five years old. Believe it or not, I was actually young once, too. I've got seven years on Buck; he was only eighteen at the time, about to graduate. I was working the front desk when he stumbled into the sheriff's office with dried blood all over his hands, more blood smeared on his shirt. His face was covered in dirt, streaked with tears. He said he'd been hiking with his girlfriend up on Mount Washington near the old Pickerton place and said she vanished. She went off into the bushes for a bathroom break and never came out. He told my dad that when he went looking for her, he found a rock covered in blood where Buck thought she'd been, but nothing else. Buck said he knew he shouldn't have touched it but wasn't thinking straight. I suppose that was the first red flag. He had a lot of blood on him for someone who just touched a rock. I get maybe one finger"—she held out her index—"just a tap to confirm what you were looking at really was blood, but it was all over his hands and his clothes. Didn't make sense to me, and certainly didn't make sense to my daddy. He wanted to lock Buck up then and there, but we needed him to take us up the mountain, find this rock. We might have found it on our own, but with a missing girl, we couldn't risk the extra time. My daddy took a bunch of photographs of Buck, caught him from every possible angle, then swabbed his hands for the lab, took his shirt … got him a spare from the lost and found. Probably the same box you pulled the sweatshirt and pants you gave the girl from."

Sally had gotten the clothing for the girl, but Matt didn't see the point in mentioning that. He let Ellie continue.

"All that went fast, maybe ten, fifteen minutes at most. Daddy made a call to the State Police, told them to send someone out, then the three of us went up the mountain. We found the rock, Buck took us right to it. It was just like he said—soaked in blood—mostly baked in from the sun, but still dripping down the sides, puddled around it in the dirt. My daddy gave me this look that confirmed what I was thinking—nothing loses that much blood and walks away. There was no sign of the girl, though. No evidence of a struggle. We checked the Pickerton place ourselves, but when that turned up nothing, we got a volunteer search team together. Started with ten, but that grew to more than fifty as the day grew long and word got out. Nearly seventy-five turned out the next day. We found nothing. Days turned into weeks. No sign of her. Through all that, Buck stuck to his story. Daddy and I interviewed his friends, family. Nobody knew of any problems between Buck and his girlfriend. Nobody saw them fight. Homelife for both was good. People were split on their opinions—half thought Buck hurt her and hid the body, the other half figured she slipped and fell out there somewhere. Plenty of cliffs around there. We searched down below as best we could, but at that point, we knew it was a lost cause. It rained twice that first week, and there were always the animals to consider. Mother Nature has a way of cleaning up after herself. We'd lost our share of tourists and amateur hikers in those mountains over the years, but she was our first local." Ellie paused for a second. "The blood came back from the lab as avian, not human at all. Corvus brachyrhynchos , the American crow." She waved a dismissive hand and went on before Matt could say anything. "Buck was never charged. Nothing to really charge him with. And over time, people forgot. Not Buck, though. When the drinking first started, we used to find him out there, wandering. A bottle in one hand as he called out her name at all hours."

"What was her name?"

"Emily. Emily Pridham."

Ellie shuffled around several of the boxes and found the one she wanted. EMILY PRIDHAM / MISSING / 16 YO was written in faded black Sharpie across the front. She peeled the lid off, dug around inside, and found an old copy of the Hollows Bend Gazette . Emily Pridham's photo was on the front page, and she was a dead ringer for the girl upstairs.