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If that’s the case, the question is why. Why would he do that? Why would he only pretend to be dead?
Late Monday afternoon, I leave work early. The first thing I do is go back to the Hayeses house to return the key. It’s around four o’clock when I get there. I park in the same place I parked the other day and retrace my steps, entering the house through the garage. According to Lily, Nina has taken her mother to an appointment and won’t be home. The house, she said, should be empty and she’s right. It is. I put the key back in its place. I hurry out through the garage door and to my car, and then I make the snap decision to revisit Langley Woods. Once there, I leave my car in the same lot where Lily and I parked, and make my way back to where she and I found blood. It’s not easy to find. The ground is soft and wet from the rain this weekend, though, despite the mud, the weather is much nicer today. The sun is finally out and it’s warm. Presumably everyone who was cooped up inside this weekend is here, because the place is more crowded than I’ve ever seen it.
Even having been here before, having found the spot once already where Jake and Lily fought, I don’t find it on the first try. It takes three. Three wrong turns onto the wrong unmarked paths until eventually I come to the right clearing in the trees. I’ve brought a small screwdriver with me, which I found in my car, in a car tool kit. I use it to engrave lines on the trees, to blaze a trail so that I’ll be able to find my way out when it’s time to leave. I don’t want to get lost. Lily doesn’t know where I am. No one does. I walk further into the trees, remembering how Jake isn’t the only person to ever disappear here. Years ago, a woman named Amanda Holmes also vanished in Langley Woods. She went missing from the area. I remember that she was twenty-two at the time, a senior in college. Her case was strange, the kind that captured national attention. It was all over the news. I followed her story at the time because it was interesting. I didn’t think it would ever matter to me on a more personal level.
When Amanda first went missing, her car was found about a quarter mile from Langley Woods. There was a suicide note set on the dashboard. The search for her should have been cut-and-dried. It was anything but. Search parties looked for her for days that stretched into weeks. They used bloodhounds and then cadaver dogs to scavenge the woods and the residential areas around them. Even the dogs couldn’t find her. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people searched for Amanda, whose friends called her Mandy, by air and by foot. Her family was devastated. This was maybe five years ago. I remember at the time watching her parents cry on TV. I remember that months passed without finding her. Eventually everyone gave up. People stopped talking about Amanda Holmes. They came to believe that she wasn’t at Langley Woods or anywhere even close to it, that something else had happened to her, something far more mysterious and insidious, but no one knew what. There were theories, and unconfirmed reports of Amanda sightings all over the Chicagoland area and around the country. Had someone met her and driven her elsewhere? Was the suicide note just part of a cunning plan? Had she abandoned her life, her family, and was she living a new life somewhere else? But why? No one knew.
The case went cold. A year passed and still she wasn’t found, until one day when some hikers stumbled upon her body in the woods.
The medical examiner determined the cause of death: suicide. Amanda Holmes took her own life. She hung herself from a tree. She had been in these woods the whole time everyone was looking for her, and still no one could find her.
I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly. Jake, his blood, his wallet, his phone, a shoe. After an hour of searching, walking aimlessly through trees, marking the trees with each turn, I find none of it, and I wonder if I can’t find them because I’m not looking hard enough or in the right places, or if I can’t find them because they’re not here. Because Jake isn’t here.
Dusk starts to fall upon the earth. The sun sinks low and the world turns to gold. I look at my watch; it’s later than I thought. I need to leave before it’s so dark I can’t find my way back and before Lily starts to wonder where I am.
I turn around, looking at my inscriptions in the trees, following them blindly out of the woods. I don’t notice anything else at first because I’m only looking at my own markings, letting them lead me.
But then I see that there are also dashes etched into some of the trees, with something like paint or chalk. It’s white and fading. The dashes are much more elusive than my own etchings, making them hard to see and impossible to follow because some have already been washed away by rain.
I look around and realize what it is I’m seeing. Not so long ago someone else blazed a similar trail so they, too, could find their way out of these woods.
I make my way out of the trees for the path, following the crushed limestone trail back toward my car as the sky starts to get darker. It’s late September now. October is only a week away. The sun sets around six thirty, so that now, just shortly before, it’s what’s referred to as the golden hour, where the sky has a signature soft golden glow. I’ll be home later than usual tonight and I’ll have to give Lily some reason why, though I wonder if I’ll tell her that I was here. It’s probably better that she doesn’t know.
Up ahead, a man walks his dog. I watch them for a while from behind, thinking how Lily and I used to have a dog before she died. Lily and I always said one day we’d get another dog, but there was never a good time for it. We said kids first and then another dog, but the kids didn’t happen like we expected.
The man gets stopped by a little girl who wants to pet his dog. He bends to get a good hold on the leash before he lets her, and then I watch from a distance as the giggling little girl strokes the dog’s ears while her mother watches on. When she’s had enough, she waves goodbye to the dog. The man stands back up. Something falls from his pocket, but he doesn’t notice. He and his dog turn and keep walking.
“Sir,” I say, calling after him to get him to stop. I jog to catch up, calling again, “You dropped something, sir.”
When I come to it, I stoop over and pick up the man’s wallet. At the same time, he hears me and turns around. He’s tall like me. He can’t be forty.
He shields the fading sun from his eyes with a hand. “Did you say something?” he asks.
“Your wallet,” I say, holding it out to him. “You dropped it back there.”
“Thanks, man,” he says, taking it from me, turning it over in his hands, looking at it as if to make sure it’s his. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice.”
I shrug. “It happens.” As I get a good look at him, I realize that I recognize this man. I cock my head. “Hey. Do I know you?” I ask, narrowing my eyes at him.
At first he looks at me like he thinks he knows me too, but then that look of recognition fades and he shakes his head. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t think so.” The dog at his feet starts to bark, tugging on the leash. We both look down at it and he says, “Serena, no.” It’s a black-and-white dog, something like a border collie. The dog turns and tries walking away despite his command. He tells her again, “No,” and this time she listens. “Thanks for this,” he says, brandishing his wallet before slipping it into a back pocket. “I don’t know what I would have done if I lost it.”
I lost my wallet once. Canceling the debit and credit cards and having to go to the DMV for a new license was a pain in the neck. This man is just lucky his wallet didn’t fall into the wrong hands.
I say, “No problem.”
It’s later, driving home, that my brain makes the connection. That man works with Lily. I’ve met him once or twice. He has a face I’d remember, though, in retrospect, I’m glad he didn’t recognize me because then he might have told Lily he saw me at Langley Woods and I would have had to explain what I was doing there.
I might have remembered the man’s face, but his name is another story. I beat my brains trying to remember it. I never figure it out, but my best guess is that it’s something like Brian or Ryan.
NINA
Wednesday afternoon, shortly after I get home from work, my neighbor across the street sends me a direct message on Facebook. It’s a little after three in the afternoon. I’ve just stepped into the kitchen when the notification comes through. I set my bag on the island, find my phone in the bag and step out of my shoes.
Nina, hi. Been on a social media hiatus but just saw your post to the neighborhood page. Sorry so late. Thought you might like to see this.
It’s another video, this one taken from her video doorbell. I sit down on one of the counter stools and press Play. I still have my coat on. There is a timestamp in the bottom right corner of the recording. It’s from Saturday morning at 10:07 a.m. This neighbor has a direct sight line to my house, which entices me. This is what I’ve been waiting to see. The only thing getting anywhere close to being in the way is a tree, which blocks only part of the frame. You can still see around it.
As I watch and wait for Jake, the same black car from Ellie Miller’s video enters the frame. It drives past my house and then exits the frame. Thirty seconds and then a minute pass by while I stare at the video, waiting for something to happen, but starting to give up hope, thinking this is just another wasted effort. Maybe all Emilie, my neighbor, saw was that same black car driving by.
