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“It looks like she scrambled out of bed trying to get away from her attacker. She got wrapped up in the sheets and blanket and probably fell on the floor. That’s likely when she was struck for the first time. Look at the blood on the blanket. She fought. She was trying to get out through the door, but wasn’t able to.” I look around for another moment, then walk outside and around to the back of the cabin. “I’m confused by the blood on the ground under thewindow.”
“It looks like she climbed out through it,” Garrison says.
“It’s possible. But it seems unlikely,” I say. “It wouldn’t be easy to get through that window. She’d probably have to climb up on the bed or one of the dressers and push herself through. If she’s being attacked, as evidenced by the blood spread throughout the cabin and not just in one location, the killer is fast enough to follow her movements. He’s not going to let her just crawl up and go out through the window. It would have given the perfect opportunity to strike her down righthere.”
“Maybe she hit him,” Sam offers. “She could have gotten an upper hand for a second and while he was getting himself back together, she got through thewindow.”
“Alright,” I nod. “I can go with that possibility. She was clearly trying to survive. He didn‘t just strike her in her bed or on the floor and that was the end of it. She put up a struggle trying to get out of the cabin. There was a book on the floor several feet away from her bed and a hairbrush. Neither of them is heavy enough to actually cause any damage, but if they were thrown hard enough, they could definitely disorient a person and break theirconcentration.”
Sam nods. “Only problem is that’s a lot of blood loss. She’d have been weak. Maybe the adrenaline got her strong enough to throw something that hard and also get out of the window. That could explain the blood. But where is she? She would have needed medical attention. What happened to her after she landed on theground?”
“She was obviously taken off the grounds,” Garrison says. “Like Mary Ellen Conner from1964.”
“Alright. But officers have swept the entire area. They didn’t find any sign of her, a burial, or the killer. He would have had to stash her somewhere, commit the murders, and then go back to get her, getting her far enough away to not be detected in the amount of time it took for Lisa to get to the house and contact the police, then for investigators to get here and startsearching.”
“What are you saying, Emma?” Samasks.
“Just that we need to be open-minded when we consider each step of this. We can’t make any assumptions. I know this is bringing up all the memories of the last time, but that can’t factor in. Not right now, at least. Until there is absolute concrete evidence that there is a link between these deaths and the ones twenty years ago, every single element of this has to be approached as something completely new. Nothing related to the past, nothing linked to any stories orlegends.”
“You can’t think this is a coincidence,” Garrison says. “That this has absolutely no link to themassacre.”
“Of course not. That’s not the point. The point is we have to find the link through investigation, not investigate with the link in mind first. If we think it’s the same thing that happened twenty years ago, that gives us tunnel vision and we might miss something. We can’t assume this man forced Miranda to walk through the woods or swung her up over his shoulder and carried her away. That‘s the image people have of the first killer. But if he was able to get her away without being noticed, that might not have been what he did. The grounds are very large, maybe he did leave on foot and simply escaped notice because he’s familiar with the area. But he could also have used a vehicle. He could live in the area, one of the houses that haven’t been searched, maybe something close to the couple who wasmurdered.”
“The question is, was that couple killed first or last?” Samsays.
“Exactly.”
“We need to find the origin point,” Garrison says. “We find where it started and go fromthere.”
“I want to see the lakefirst.”
Idon’t know what draws me to the shore of the lake tucked in the back corner of the camp. The officers who walked the camp already reported it was cleared. Nothing there to show any evidence that it was involved in the massacre. Yet I want to see it.
The walk along a dirt path through a fern-carpeted section of woods should be idyllic. This is what sunrises were made for. It’s the kind of imagery that makes people believe fairies and sprites are hiding among the little pools of new sunlight and drinking from the droplets of dew.
But I can’t see the whimsy this morning. Its beauty hurts. It’s the glistening red on a poison apple. The biting cold on fingertips that can’t resist touching glittering snow crystals. It feels designed to lure us in.
Soon the camp behind us is invisible and we’re surrounded only by trees. The hair on the back of my neck stands up and heightened awareness tingles down my skin. There’s a feeling almost like someone is looking at me, but instead, it’s the entire woods. The camp itself is alive and watching our progress down the slight hill toward the lake. I find myself glancing to my side to make sure I can still see Sam just a step behind me.
I don’t believe in curses. But I do believe there’s something to the energy of places where horrible things have happened. Brutality and tragedy leave scars, and those linger. Maybe those scars can be felt by everyone who comes to those places. Maybe they have a way of drawing people who are already broken, those prone to do the most evil. There are documented cases of certain locations being the site of repeated deaths, disasters, and other tragedies that are linked only by the locations themselves.
Maybe in that way, there is such a thing as a curse.
But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. This didn’t happen again because darkness of some kind was released across the grounds. There isn’t an unexplained force taking over the hearts and minds of good people and driving them to kill. Whoever is responsible for these deaths did it entirely of their own accord. And whatever is behind it has nothing to do with some unseen being. There’s no other realm existing here. Nothing straddling this existence and another, no otherworldly forces using the humans walking here as their puppets.
This is the work of someone who planned it out. They thought of what they were going to do and fantasized about what it would be like. That person walked onto these grounds knowing exactly what they were going to do.
In a way, it’s like I can feel that man’s footsteps. I know he’s been here. I can feel where his presence burned the air. It’s not a mystical power. It’s perception. More people are capable of it than they realize. It’s one thing I’ve known about myself for as long as I can remember. I notice things. Details stand out to me. Inconsistencies stick themselves in the back of my brain and send prickles along my spine until I acknowledge them. My parents inspired me to become an agent. My perception is what makes me one.
We step out onto the sandy shore of the lake and look out over the gently rippling water. Each of the soft peaks reflects the sunlight, then dips into shadow. Seeing them out of the corner of my eye can look like a creature rising to the surface of the water and sinking out of sight. It’s flickering, uncomfortable moments like those that make Xavier avoid water. He always says he knows there’s nothing in the water that’s going to eat him, but he’s going to be careful just in case.
That includes not getting in canoes, resisting plans to take a cruise, and always sitting on the inside of ride vehicles on water rides at his beloved amusement parks. All the practical cautioussteps.
I look out over the water thinking about what could exist just beneath the surface. There’s no real way of knowing. Short of draining the entirety of the lake, there’s no way to find out all of its secrets. I stare quietly over the water, waiting for something to stand out to me, but nothing does. It’s peaceful here, a stark contrast to the rest of the camp. There’s no blood. No bodies. It looks untouched.
To be sure, I walk along the sand, paying close attention to the ground at my feet. I’m looking for footprints that might tell me someone has passed this way recently. The rain has disrupted the sand, washing it out of place so any prints that were there yesterday before the storm hit wouldn’t be there now. If there are prints, they would have been made during the storm or rightafter.
As the water at the edge of the lake recedes a few inches, I notice an impression. Kneeling down in front of it, I find several deep ruts right along the water.
