Page 18 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

He vanishes into the curtain of rain before I can think of a comeback. I stand on the porch for a long time, watching the spot where he disappeared, my hand still tingling from the pressure of his grip. The lodge is saved, or at least it has a fighting chance. But as I open the door, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just invited the forest inside, and I have no idea how to make it leave.

I walk into the lobby, the bells above jangling with a cheerfulness that feels entirely unearned. The room is empty, save for the low hum of the vending machine and the flickering glow of the desktop computer behind the front desk. Marge and Walt are likely tucked into their cabin on the edge of the property, blissfully unaware that the local color I’ve been peddling just tried to negotiate a ceasefire. I leave muddy, crescent-shaped prints on the floorboards my grandfather sanded by hand, and for the first time, I don’t feel the immediate urge to grab a mop. There are bigger things to clean up.

I drop into the swivel chair behind the desk, the springs groaning in protest. On the monitor, the Bigfoot Hotline dashboard is a sea of activity. There are forty-two voicemails and a dozen emails with attachments titled things like BLURRY_FOOT_01.jpg and is_this_a_nest.mp4. Usually, this sight gives me a hit of pure adrenaline because it’s the sight of the bank account slowly filling. Not tonight, though. I’m looking at forty-two people who want to catch a glimpse of the man I just shook hands with. Forty-two people who are, inadvertently, his enemies. And I’m the one who gave them the map.

I pull a yellow legal pad toward me, the edges curled from the humidity. I need to map this out. Pragmatism is the only thing that’s ever kept me from spiraling, and right now, I need a grid. On the left side, I write THE HOAX. On the right, THE GUARDIAN. In the middle, I draw a jagged line that looks suspiciously like the mountain range I’m currently failing to manage.

The math is impossible. If I shut down the hotline, the viral interest dies. If the interest dies, the revenue drops. If the revenue drops, the lodge is sold to the first developer with a checkbook and a dream of building a luxury glamping retreat with zero respect for the local ecosystem. Rowan would lose his home either way. But if I keep it running, I’m essentially pointing a neon sign at his front door. I have to find the sweet spot, that perfect level of frustrating, tantalizing failure that keeps people coming back without ever letting them get close enough to see the bark on his skin.

I start scribbling.

Fake sightings: South Ridge (creek bed).

False leads: North trail closure (state ‘aggressive bear activity’).

Merch: Bigfoot-proof bear canisters?

I stop, my pen hovering over the paper. The we-talk-first rule. It’s a simple boundary, but it’s the most complex thing I’ve ever agreed to. It means I’m no longer the sole director of this play. I have an associate producer who is ancient and capable of snapping me like a dry twig.

I lean back, staring at the ceiling. Why did he agree? He could have just disappeared deeper into the timber. He could have made it so I never saw him again, used that sliding-perception magic he mentioned to become a literal ghost. But he stood there in the rain and took my hand. He’s choosing to stay, which means he’s just as desperate as I am. Or maybe he’s just as tired of being a secret as I am of being a failure.

The phone on the desk rings, the sharp trill making me jump so hard I knock my coffee mug over. Luckily, it’s empty. I check the caller ID. It’s an out-of-state number, probably another ‘tracker’ from Ohio. I let it go to voicemail. I can’t deal with the fanatics tonight. Not when the lead actor just gave me his notes.

I get up and walk to the small window behind the desk that looks out toward the back of the property. The rain is coming down in earnest now, a silver curtain that turns the world into a series of gray silhouettes. I think about him out there. Does he have a house? Or does he just... stand under a tree and wait for the sun? The thought of him standing out in this, stoic and lonely, has a strange, sharp knot forming in my chest. Pity? No, you don’t pity a mountain. But it’s something uncomfortably close to empathy. We’re both trying to hold onto a legacy that the rest of the world thinks is a joke.

I touch the glass. It’s cold. My mind drifts back to the North Ridge, to the moment he changed. I’d expected his skin to feel like rough bark, but it didn’t. It was something living, something structured and intentional. I think about his eyes, the way they didn’t change even when everything else did. They were the same eyes that looked at me with dry exasperation in the gift shop. Rowan isn’t a monster. He’s just... a very, very old man with a very, very difficult job.

I pull my hand away, leaving a faint smudge on the glass. “No melodrama, Wren,” I mutter to the empty room. “It’s a business arrangement. He provides the mystery, you provide the screen. That’s it. Don’t go turning him into a project.”

I walk over to the ancient filing cabinet in the corner. This is where we’ve always kept the records from my great-great-grandmother’s era. If there’s an ‘arrangement,’ it would be documented. It has to be. The Cassidys never did anything without a paper trail. I spend the next hour digging through yellowed folders and ledger books that predate the invention of the television. I find records of timber sales, grocery lists from 1924, a furious letter to the county regarding a dispute over a fence line, and an accounting ledger for honey sales, which makes something in my mind itch, but nothing about a Guardian.

Until I hit the very back of the bottom drawer. Tucked behind a stack of old property tax receipts is a small, leather-bound journal. The cracked leather is the color of dried tobacco. I pull it out, my heart doing that tap-dance again. On the first page, in cramped, elegant writing, are the words: Observations on the Silent Neighbor.

I sit on the floor, cold seeping through my jeans, and start to read. My ancestor, Florence Cassidy, didn’t write about a monster. She wrote about the man who speaks to the bees. She wrote about a presence that kept the deer from the garden and the wolves from the porch, provided the family respected the deep timber boundaries. There was no mention of a transformation, but there were mentions of a height that exceeded the measure of any man in the valley.

There was a debt mentioned, too. Something about a fire in the 1890s that nearly wiped out the lodge back when it was just a house, and a stranger who carried Florence’s children out of the smoke before the roof collapsed. The arrangement was a blood-debt of gratitude. We protect his privacy, and he protects the ground we stand on.

I close the journal, the weight of it feeling like an anchor in my lap. I’ve been treating the forest like a resource to be mined for content, while my family has been treating it like a partner for over a century. By starting the hotline, I broke the treaty.

The guilt I felt on the ridge returns, sharper now, more focused. I look at the legal pad on the desk, where I wrote down the cynical marketing points. I can’t just manage the narrative. I have to be the Guardian of the Guardian. If I fail, I’d lose centuries of integrity as well as the lodge.

I stand up, my knees popping, and put the journal back in its place. I don’t need the legal pad anymore. The plan is the same, but the motivation has shifted. This isn’t just about the bank account. It’s about keeping the silence that my great-great-grandmother promised.

I walk back to the desk and pick up the phone. I have a lot of voicemails to delete. I start with the one from the guy who claims he saw Bigfoot eating a Slim Jim behind the dumpster. Delete. The woman who thinks the calls are coming from inside the mountain? Delete. I work through the list, pruning the noise to create a buffer of boring, explainable reality.

By the time I finish, the clock on the wall says it’s nearly midnight. The storm has settled into a steady, rhythmic thrum against the roof. I’m exhausted, my brain feels like it’s been put through a woodchipper, and I have to be at the trailhead in five hours to meet a man who might actually be a tree.

I turn off the light and head to the stairs. At the front door, I stop and check the lock, looking out at the dark tree line, the edge of the world where my authority ends and his begins.

“We talk first,” I whisper to the shadows.

And I like to think that he can hear me out there in the deep quiet where no drone can reach. I toe off my father’s boots and leave them beside the door, then head upstairs. For the first time since I moved back home, I don’t feel like I’m just waiting for the end. I’m waiting for the morning.

And as terrifying as that is, it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

11

ROWAN