Ghosted: A Mystery in Four Parts Part II

“Oh God, he’s such a twat!” Keri exclaimed as soon as she and Trey were settled in his Toyota. It was still raining, the drops falling fat and heavy on the windscreen. He’d stood for the price of a jumbo hot coffee; she hoped he understood that this morning was going to cost more than that.

“Sure, but does he know something?” Trey asked with impatience. He started the car and drove a block and a half to an unpaved lot overlooking the river. The lot was filled with searcher’s cars, but Trey wormed the Toyota in. They could just see the river through the trees and on their left was the bridge that Maggie Grose was supposed to have leaped from. A Shayham patrol car was parked on the bridge, lights spinning as they coordinated the searchers on both sides of the river.

“No,” Kerri said. She took a sip of her coffee. It was old and burnt, but it was piping, and that was what mattered. “I don’t know. He might. It’s true what he said that people have gone missing from this area. He has it all graphed out. Offered to show it to me. ‘Want to come see my serial killer profile?’ has got to be the weirdest come-on anyone’s ever tried on me.”

Trey took his camera out and began scrolling through the stills he’d taken. “I already searched for Shayham, and there are a few missing persons.” he said, “It’s spread out over the years though. I don’t know if it’s greater than the average.”

“It’s almost forty percent higher than average for a city this size!” Keri exclaimed. “He rattled off names, dates, odd facts. The bridge there,” Keri she said, pointing. “The Grose girl wouldn’t have died from jumping from it, he said. It’s too low. So, he thinks she was abducted. He thinks some kind of cult or murderer stalks people from that mill. Calls it ‘the nexus.’”

“Why does anyone even think she jumped off the bridge?”

“Some of her friends told her to — on Facebook. She was being bullied.” Keri sipped more coffee. What she really wanted was a shower, preferably back in New York. “Then she disappeared. They don’t have anything else.”

“What does your twat friend think?”

“He’s mad, I swear. Went on about The Green River Killer and how no one had caught him for years. BTK, too.” She looked at Trey. “What is wrong with this country? You’ve got more maniacs than…” She trailed off. “Than a place with a lot of maniacs, I don’t fucking know. Too many, that’s how many!” She laughed, but Trey didn’t. Without saying a word, he got out and walked towards the mill.

“Fucking leave then,” Kerri said, determined to stay in the car. She began scrolling through the pictures, stopped in disgust at the shot of the dead bird. Trey was gone for almost fifteen minutes. Keri sat; engine running, heater on high, wishing her jeans would dry out. Searchers were starting to come up from the river and collect their cars, and she felt sure that she’d see Paul among them before Trey returned. Instead, Trey rapped his knuckles on the passenger side window and gestured for her to follow. “Bring the camera.” he shouted through the glass.

The old mill was red brick over a skeleton of steel beams. They stepped into a smaller room, bare to the plaster walls, the single window an open rectangle that let river mist and spattering rain in.

There was graffiti everywhere.

That wasn’t surprising, but Keri did take note that most of the graffiti was done in chalk, not spray-paint. There were stubs of brightly colored chalk scattered about, the thick rounds kids used on sidewalks and driveways.

The rain had spoiled most of the artwork, the faces and words flowing together in shallow swirls of running color.

“We need to shoot this!” Keri said. She turned and looked out the door. “You can see the river, just a few steps out and you can see the bridge she jumped off of.”

Trey didn’t say anything about that, only invited Keri to go further into the mill. She followed his boot prints, splotches of purple, brown, and orange from where he’d trod through the chalk puddles.

Looking through the passage into the space beyond, she could see it was a much larger room, with windows set high on the walls. The weak sunlight that came through only just lit the huge space, and as she passed through a small moment of near blindness as her eyes adjusted.

Trey was heading straight across the open floor. She saw that three sets of loading doors were securely boarded up and three large windows that were similarly sealed up with thick plywood. The gray light of midday leaked in around the sills, with greater strength in the places where someone had tried to pry the boards off, breaking off the corners but with no further success.

“The light is shit in here.” Trey said. “We can set up the stand lights I have in the trunk, but we’ll need a few hours on an outlet to charge the batteries.”

“Why bother?” Keri asked. She wasn’t excited about spending time in the mill after dark. “What’s wrong with the other room? The melted faces and so on? Creepy stuff and you can see the river.”

He’d stopped and put his hand out for her to stop when she’d joined him. She could see that they were standing by a long channel set in the concrete floor, just eight feet wide but more than twenty feet long, the opening covered by a chain link fence tied to a frame of steel pipes and bolted down. She could see that someone had tried to pry this up as well but had no luck.

“Does that go down to the river?” she asked.

“Probably.” He turned on the light on his phone. She could see they were standing on a chalk drawing of girl’s face, almost eight feet by six feet, the long hair black and deep green, the eyes black with small squares of white cut into them, like the big-eyed paintings her mother had treasured, but lacking the pleading sorrow of those long-ago curiosities.

These eyes were vacant, animal-like. Sinister she realized was the word.

The mouth — Jesus the mouth — was the channel in the floor, so the face, a teenaged girl’s face, had no chin, only a hugely distended jaw, the ever-screaming mouth sealed over with chain link.

“Look,” Trey said as if Keri were missing something, and she was startled to see that she was missing something: footprints in the chalk dust, bare footprints, a girl’s, spattered and smudged around the edges as if she’d been walking in the puddles, and had stepped to the horizontal fence, where, Keri guessed, had then walked along the top of it? As if on a dare? Because there the footprints ended.

“I thought I heard someone moving in here.” Trey said. “When I was in the other room. I heard someone moving away from the door.”

He shone the light of his phone into the room, a small effort given the size of the space and the motes of dust swirling in the air.

“I hope that’s not asbestos.” Keri said. She wanted to get out of here.

“I think there’s someone here,” Trey said, ignoring her. “Something to do with the girl who disappeared. Maybe the local kids are up to something. Some kind of suicide thing, or a bullying thing where they got her to jump. I think some of those kids are here right now, in one of the other rooms, maybe upstairs somewhere. Watching the search.”

“God, you sound like Paul.” Keri said.

Trey turned off the light. “Maybe,” he allowed with a shrug. “But there is something going on here, something the locals are either covering up or refuse to see. That many disappearances, even over twenty years, could be national news stuff.”

He walked out into the parking lot, without looking to see if she was following.

Keri stood in the doorway for a moment, hearing the rain on the dead October leaves and the river they all but obscured.

She shaded her eyes from the rain and looked up at the open upper windows that ran along the length of the huge building. She wondered if she’d see faces peering down at her, but there was nothing, just black rectangles of shadow.

Continued Next Sunday June 7th

Thank You for Reading!