Page 49 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

“He went deep, Wren,” she says, her voice echoing off the tile. “I heard the back door.”

“He thinks he ruined everything,” I say, sliding onto a stool. “He thinks because they saw him, he’s lost his right to be here. And I’m sitting on an offer that would make us all rich if I just let them keep looking.”

Marge sets the tea down with a sharp clack. “You’re a Cassidy, Wren. You’ve got your father’s stubbornness and your grandmother’s eye for a bargain, but you’ve also got that degree you keep apologizing for. Use it. You spent four years learning how people look at things--how they see what they want to see. So, give them something to look at.”

“The internet never forgets, Marge. That’s the problem. It’s out there. It’s permanent.”

“The internet is a swarm of bees, honey. They’re loud, they’re angry, and they’ve got a short memory if you give them something sweeter to buzz around. You aren’t just a girl with a hotline. You’re the curator. Start acting like it.”

She reaches out and squeezes my shoulder, her hand steady and real. She isn’t giving me a pep talk; she’s giving me an order. The panic in my chest shifts into something else. Something colder. Something tactical.

I leave her in the kitchen and walk back to the office, my footsteps heavy on the hardwood. I sit back down in the blue light and look at the footage again. I watch the way the light hits Rowan’s skin, and the impossible grace of his movement. It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. And if I don’t find a way to bury it under a mountain of doubt, it will be the last thing the world ever sees of him.

I pull the drawer open and look at the buyout offer one last time. The numbers are still there, a siren song of safety. I could take it. I could take the money, move Marge and Walt to a house with a roof that doesn’t leak, and walk away from the mystery forever. But then I think of the bees. I think of the way Rowan looks when he thinks no one is watching. I think of the man who saved a stranger while knowing it would cost him his soul.

I’m not taking the money. I’m going to stay. I’m going to fight the swarm with the only weapon I have: the truth, draped in enough lies to make it unrecognizable. I lean forward, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. The hotline is still screaming, but I’ve stopped listening. I have work to do. I have a mystery to bury. And I have a guardian to bring home.

27

WREN

TIME TO FAKE A DEBUNKING

The buyout offer feels like it’s sucking the oxygen out of the room. I stare at it, not quite seeing it. Two million dollars to sell out a man who doesn’t even have a social security number. Two million to ensure Marge and Walt never have to worry about a failing roof again, and all I have to do is hand over the keys to the mountain and let a documentary crew turn a miracle into a commodity.

I open the bottom drawer of the desk and tuck the offer inside, right next to a stack of unfiled 1099s and my art history degree. I need it out of my sight. The red light on the hotline phone is still pulsing, a rhythmic, silent scream from the digital void, but I don’t pick up. I’m done listening to the world tell me what they think they saw. I’m the curator here. It’s time I started curating.

The screen of my laptop is a bright, punishing white. I open the footage Sarah Vance’s crew captured—the three minutes of 4K video that effectively ended centuries of Guardian silence. I watch Rowan, eight feet tall and skin like ancient cedar, hauling a hiker out of a mudslide with the kind of effortless strength that defies every law of physics I know. It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. And if I don’t bury it, it’s a death sentence for the life he’s built.

I hit pause on a frame where his face is partially visible—the same sharp cheekbones, the same heavy brow, but translated into something primordial. The internet is already tearing this apart, pixel by pixel. “Real,” they say. “Undeniable,” they claim. They’re wrong. Not because it isn’t Rowan, but because they’re looking at it like a discovery. I need them to look at it like a forgery.

My degree is usually the punchline of my own internal jokes, four years spent learning the provenance of Renaissance frescoes and how to spot a fake Vermeer. But the logic of a forgery isn’t about the lie itself. It’s about the context. You don’t convince people a painting is real by making it perfect; you convince them by making the story around it bulletproof. I need to reverse the process. I need to take a masterpiece and convince the world it’s a clever piece of theater.

I can’t debunk the rescue. That’s the mistake most amateurs would make. You can’t tell people a man wasn’t saved when there’s a medical report from the SAR team and a very grateful hiker named Jason who is currently being interviewed by local news. The rescue happened. The mud was real. The impossible strength was witnessed. If I try to say it was a hoax, I’ll look like a liar, and the footage will look even more authentic by comparison.

I tap a pen against my chin, the rhythm matching the hotline’s pulse. The rescue is the truth. The performer is the lie. Rowan was with Jax and Miller, but he went into the trees before he dropped the concealment. I saw that in some of the footage Jax had cut.

I need to give them a man in a suit. But not just any suit. I need a suit that explains the scale, the texture, and why it was on that specific ridge at that specific moment. I need a narrative that makes the documentary crew look like the victims of a very expensive, very elaborate marketing stunt that went accidentally, heroically right.

I pull up my contacts on my phone, scrolling past the local hardware store and the birdwatchers from Cabin Four until I hit a name I haven’t called in three years. Toby Richter. We went to school together before he dropped out to follow a girl to Vancouver and ended up doing practical effects for B-list horror movies. He’s the kind of guy who spends his weekends debating the density of silicone versus foam latex. He’s perfect.

I check the time. It’s nearly midnight, which means Toby is probably elbow-deep in a vat of fake blood or half-drunk in a workshop. I hit dial. It rings four times before a voice that sounds like it was filtered through gravel answers.

“Wren Cassidy? Is someone dead, or did you finally decide to sell me that haunted lodge?”

“Toby, I need a favor. A big one. And I need you to sign an NDA that would make a CIA agent sweat.”

There’s a pause on the other end, the sound of a torch hissing in the background. “You’re calling about the video, aren’t you? The big guy in the mud. Everyone’s talking about it, Wren. My Twitter feed is nothing but bark-skin theories and thermal signatures.”

“I need that big guy in the mud to be yours, Toby,” I say, my voice steady even as my heart does a slow, heavy roll in my chest. “I need construction photos. I need rig concepts. I need a paper trail that says Cassidy Lodge hired Richter Effects six months ago to build a hyper-realistic, nine-foot practical suit for a viral marketing campaign.”

Toby whistles, a long, low sound. “That’s a hell of a lie, Wren. That footage... the way he moves... I couldn’t build that. Not for real. The weight distribution alone is a nightmare.”

“I don’t need you to build the man, Toby. I know how to make a fake artifact convincing. I just don’t know how to build a nine-foot Bigfoot ass. I need the evidence of the process. Sketches. Mold-making photos. A few pieces of a ‘prototype’ suit I can ‘discover’ in the lodge basement when the press comes knocking. I need the world to think Sarah Vance’s crew didn’t find a monster—they found a very dedicated actor who stayed in character even when the mountain started falling down.”

“It’s a face-saving exit for the documentary people,” Toby muses. “They get to claim they were part of the greatest viral stunt in history instead of admitting they were fooled by a myth. People love a hoax. They love feeling smarter than the experts.”

“Exactly. Toby… I can’t pay you for this. Not yet. But if you do this for me, I’ll owe you for the rest of my life. I need the ‘truth’ to be more interesting than the mystery.”