The Moonlight Pines Sheriff's Department was over on the opposite side of town, near the lake.
I knew exactly where it was. I knew every road in Moonlight Pines. Every turn that I took brought something back just around the corner---Remy's, the old grocery store where Lara and I used to steal candy bars and sodas; the playground where Lara had broken her wrist falling over the edge of the slide; the narrow bridge where Dad taught me how to drive; the Midnight Diner where Mom used to take Lara and me for blueberry pancakes---
"Mom," I said aloud, looking away as I shoved the thought aside once more.
I didn't have room or the energy to deal with two ghosts right now, though.
The road ahead curved around the edge of the lake, where fog drifted over the water's surface in long, pale ribbons. I couldn't see anything beyond the guardrail for a moment, then, as if sensing my curiosity, the fog opened where I saw the abandoned sawmill across the lake. Its roof had collapsed some years before, leaving the skeletal remains of the building exposed to the elements. The old smokestack still rose high above it, black against the gray sky.
I can still remember the first time Lara and I had gone there. We'd been twelve and fourteen. Dad had nearly killed us when he found out we'd been there, blaming me for dragging my younger sister along. Of course, Lara being Lara, she thought it was hilarious that Dad unleashed all his rage on me.
I did not.
But Lara had always been the braver of us. Or maybe she had simply been better at pretending she wasn't afraid.
My phone vibrated in the cup holder, startling me out of the past.
I glanced down at it. No signal, but of course there wasn't. There wouldn't be much of a signal out here among the pines and the mountains of Washington.
As I pulled into the Sheriff's Department parking lot, I noticed all the vehicles that were parked outside of it. Several police cruisers, a couple of ambulances, a medical examiner's van that made my stomach tighten, and three news trucks, which I hadn't expected to see.
I parked beside the building and sat there for several seconds with both hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, listening to the rain tap upon the windshield.
I could get out, I told myself. I could open the door, step outside, and I could walk inside the Sheriff's Department. I could then look my father in the eyes, and I could ask him point-blank what had happened, demanding the answers he refused to tell me over the phone.
But instead, I looked up at my reflection in the rearview mirror, groaning when I realized I looked older than twenty-one.
I had left Moonlight Pines as soon as I turned eighteen, spending the last three years convincing myself I no longer needed this place. That leaving it behind had made me into someone else, someone I'd wanted to be for years beneath my father's law, wanting to break free of his expectations and carve my own path through life.
I hadn't really changed at all, though, I realized, sighing. I still had my mother's icy blue eyes where Lara had gotten my Dad's, a steely gray, almost silver in certain lighting. Beautiful and equally haunting, I suppose.
I closed my eyes a moment, inhaling a deep breath, steadying my nerves as best I could manage, and when I opened them again, I saw someone standing across the parking lot from me. A woman, with long dark hair and wearing a long dark coat against the chilly mountain air. She was standing beside the treeline, looking toward me.
I turned my head, looking back at once. There was no one there. I stared through the rain, seeing nothing, telling myself that I was just tired. That I'd been driving for too long and needed a bit of rest. Then I inhaled another deep breath, and finally got out of the car, making my way across the parking lot.
The Deputy, a short balding man with the name Pearson, recognized me at once as I passed through the door.
"I'll be damned," he said, eyes widening as I approached him. "Stacey Krane. It's been what---three years now?"
I offered him a polite smile. "Little Timothy Pearson," I said. "Though, not so little anymore, I suppose." I took in his bulky build. "You've really beefed up over the years."
He chuckled. "Mom says I was a late bloomer."
He squared himself up, proudly, flexing his chest. I watched him a moment longer.
"It's good to see you, Tim," I told him. He nodded in acknowledgement. "Do you know where my father is?"
He hesitated, his smile faltering as he thought it over.
"He's out at the scene," he said. "Surprised you didn't meet him there already."
"Scene?" I countered, arching a brow at him. "I didn't know anything about a scene?"
"Oh..." he started nervously. "Uhm... it's out by the old Cedar Tree. Do you know where it is?"
I drummed my fingers on the desk. "I remember."
I turned to walk back outside, but he grabbed my arm, turning me back around. He leaned over the desk.
"You should... probably brace yourself, Stacey." I saw deep concern flash in his pretty brown eyes. "It's... pretty bad out there, or so I've heard."
I thanked him for the warning, told him it really was good to see him again after all this time, and then I thanked him for the information before heading back outside to my car. I started the engine, then made my way to the western edge of town, where the forest thickened around the lake.
The Cedar Tree stood there, haunted by a past that everyone in Moonlight Pines knew.
Just there, beyond the last row of houses, where the forest started to reclaim the hillside, the Cedar Tree loomed, enormous enough that people sometimes joked it had been there long before the mountains even. It was a place that local legend defined as a landmark the first settlers here had used, way before roads or street signs, providing the illusion that the town had been built around it---and maybe it had. No one knew exactly what kind of tree it was anymore though. Its bark was much too dark and deeply ridged to easily identify with a quick glance, and its upper branches disappeared into the surrounding canopy, tangled with moss and choked with old vines. Its trunk divided off into three massive sections just a few feet above the ground, each one of them thick enough to resemble that of an ordinary tree in itself. And between each of those sections was a hollow space beneath the branches, sheltered safely from rain and hidden from the road, which narrowed the closer you got to it, where generations of children had crawled into it to carve initials into the softer bark, leaving behind precious toys as some kind of momento---ribbons and marbles and other little treasures.
There were stories told about the Cedar Tree, too. Some claimed that lightning had struck it three times without singing or killing it. During a particularly nasty winter, a missing child had been found asleep underneath the Cedar Tree's twisted branches after a week in the woods, perfectly unharmed and unable to recall how she'd managed to survive for so long on her own. Adults would laugh at such stories, though they never lingered long beneath the Cedar Tree after nightfall. Even as a child, I understood that there were certain places here in Moonlight Pines that people treated with a strange kind of respect, and the Castle was one such place.
Lara and I had played there time and time again when we were both little. We called the Cedar Tree the Castle because the three enormous sections of the trunk formed walls around the hollow, while the branches overhead spread outward like the root of some unnatural, impossible wooden fortress. She and I had decided, without ever discussing it, that the tree belonged solely to us, the hollow there becoming our bedroom, our kitchen, our throne room, and eventually our hiding place whenever we wanted to disappear from responsibility and the rest of the world---which, Lara had decided, had been against us both. It was where we collected acorns and smooth stones, arranging them along the roots as decorations. Lara once found a broken blue teacup in the woods out there beyond the Cedar Tree, declaring it royal property, and for years afterward we used it to serve imaginary tea to all the invisible inhabitants of our private little kingdom. We made crowns out of fallen pine needles, prettied up by wildflowers, and we gave the surrounding trees names, and we invented elaborate histories for the people that supposedly lived inside the forest.
I felt a smile crawl across my lips as I remembered that Lara always had to be the queen---Queen of the Hollow, she labeled herself proudly---and I usually preferred to be a knight, though every once in a while Lara would allow me to be a princess alongside her if I promised to protect the kingdom from wolves, and from someone she called The Man In The Red Tie.
I never knew who that was, though, and she would never tell me if I asked her about it.
I hadn't thought about the Castle in years...
I blinked the memories of it away, my eyes focusing on the flashing police lights surrounding the Cedar Tree as I drew closer to it. Yellow tape stretched between the trees, a crowd gathered along it. I stopped the car, stepping out with a sigh, my stomach sinking as something cold settled over my shoulders. My legs felt strangely weak beneath me as I made my way through the crowd, ignoring the gasps of surprise from familiar faces, picking up fragments of conversations instead.
"This is absolutely terrible!"
"Oh my, that poor girl..."
"Such a tragedy this is."
"A damn shame, is what it is..."
"It was her father who'd found her."
I had to force myself to stop listening to them all, each word causing that cold something within me to burrow deeper, filling me with dread.
Then I saw the tree, and my heart broke at once.
There, beneath it, was Lara.
I couldn't explain it at first. My brain refused to understand what my eyes were seeing.
My sister, lying on her back beneath the Cedar Tree, her hair spread around her head, darkened by the rain, her skin almost translucent. Her body was wrapped in a blue sweater. There were no obvious wounds, no blood anywhere---nothing at all that explained why my sister was lying dead beneath that tree.
I stopped myself a few feet away, the realization consuming me, my heart cracking, filling with despair. I felt my thoughts crumble and collapse, reality fracturing around me. I heard someone say my name, the voice distorted as it carved through the ruins of my thoughts, and I saw my father approaching me.
Sheriff Paul Krane. He looked like he had aged ten years in the three of my absence, and he moved with reluctant purpose, broad shoulders slouched in defeat, head aimed low, his legs sliding against one another in slow exhaustion. There was a darkness in his eyes I had never seen before, a weight upon him that was pulling him down into the mud.
"Stacey," he said, tucking his hands into his pockets, eyes flashing over me. "I... didn't expect you to show up..."
Something in his tone filled me with guilt as I stared back at him, unsure of the words I needed to say.
"Well, I'm glad you're here," he said after a heavy silence passed between us, his lips twitching in a forced smile.
I just stood there staring at him, the space separating us blurring, folding in on itself, becoming something else. The walls of my living room materialized from within the creases, my father standing tall before me, my sister lurking in the background, a crooked smile dividing her pretty face in two. My father's voice boomed over it all, demeaning and authoritative, his words thundering fast and cruel, splitting the air apart like hellish whip cracks. I screamed back at him, straining myself to be heard over him, trying to defend my actions, my decisions, tears glistening down my face as my rage boiled and boiled, my father's own exploding, his wrath erupting over me as he took a single step forward and struck me across the face, the sound shattering the memory.
I found myself standing before him once more, the lifeless body of my sister propped up against the trunk of the Cedar Tree behind him. I felt the familiar sting of tears at the corners of my eyes, though I denied them passage, turning my head away to wipe them upon the back of my wrist.
"Why didn't you tell me she was dead?" I blurted, finally finding my voice.
He looked away, back at Lara's body, mouth opening then closing as he looked back at me.
"I couldn't, Stacey..." he muttered. "I... didn't know how to."
I saw that darkness in his eyes flicker, turning wet, gleaming and pregnant with tears, and I felt that strange sensation within me twist, the guilt there beginning to burn. I wanted to say something else to him, something comforting and uplifting perhaps, but the words were foreign to me. Alien and wrong.
I stepped around him, making my way over to Lara, but a deputy intercepted my path, an arm barring me access. My father crossed over immediately, placing a hand upon his shoulder.
"It's alright, John," he said, nodding to the deputy. "Let her pass. She needs this."
The deputy looked back at me, eyes lacing with sympathy, and then he moved his arm. I passed him and crossed beneath the yellow tape. As I stepped over to my sister's body, it felt as if I had suddenly crossed into another world.
Everything became quiet. Deathly still.
I knelt on the ground beside Lara, my face twisting as a wave of emotions crashed over me---despair, loneliness, confusion and frustration, insecurity and uncertainty; a total loss of control.
My sister looked so peaceful lying there like she was. It was odd, I thought. Lara, for as long as I had known her, had never once looked as peaceful as she did right now. Frozen. Preserved, somehow, like an old photograph.
With a hesitant sigh, more tears threatening to break from my eyes, I reached toward Lara's hand. As I went to grab hold of it, my father said my name. Startled, I turned back to look at him.
"What?"
He didn't answer. I looked up at him, unable to contain my tears any longer. The dam broke, and drop after drop cascaded down my face.
"What happened to her?" I managed, the words tasting sour as they grated across my tongue.
"We aren't too sure yet," replied Dad, coming closer to me.
"How long has she been laying here like this?" I asked, climbing back up to my feet, wiping more tears away.
I watched my father's jaw clench before he said, "The Medical Examiner estimated just over four days."
"Four days?" I repeated, looking back at Lara, noticing how well... preserved her corpse still appeared to be.
"Yeah, four days," confirmed my father.
"Who found her here?" I asked him, crossing my arms.
His mouth twitched a moment, then he scratched his head. "I did."
The words cut deeply into me, and as he said them his face dropped, contorting into dark guilt. A strange sympathy fluttered throughout me, and I almost broke down again. But something about his answer bothered me.
I looked back at Lara. Her clothes were slightly torn and wet. Her hair was wet, too. I looked closer, noticing the ground around her body. The rain had turned everything to mud out here, everything except for the small patch of ground directly beneath her body. It was completely dry.
I stared at it, trying to wrap my churning thoughts around it, trying to understand it.
"Why is the ground dry underneath her body?" I asked my father.
He blinked at me.
"Did you move her at all?"
"No." He sighed.
"Did anyone move her?"
"No." He scratched at his beard. "Not that I'm aware of," he added then, almost uncertainly.
I chewed the words over a moment, looking back at Lara. I wasn't sure what, but there was something missing...
I scanned over her body, taking in her hands, her immacutely manicured nails, then I looked at her hair, which had tangled and scattered about her perfectly petite face like brown tendrils. Then I took in her clothes once more, slightly torn and ripped, almost like something had clawed at her, and then I lowered my eyes along her legs.
There it was. She was barefoot.
"Where are her shoes?" I asked my father then.
"What?"
"Her shoes." I pointed down at Lara's bare feet. "They're missing."
His complexion went completely pale.
"Can we... talk about this later?" he asked me suddenly, voice low, stepping closer to me. "Just go home."
Something in his expression froze my lips together as I went to argue, to protest and demand answers, and suddenly I was a little girl again, cowering before my father's authority.
"Go home, Stacey," he ordered once more, a stern finality in his tone now.
I stared at him, years of trauma fighting to surface all at once. And, for years, I had imagined confronting him over all that he had put me through. I had fantasized about saying everything I had never been brave enough to say to him before. However, I had never imagined this, my sister dead beneath a tree on the edge of the woods, my father standing before me ushering me away in avoidance of talking about it.
Caught there, beneath his intimidating gaze, feeling like a scared little girl once more, somewhere within me, deep beneath the grief and the sorrow, something colder was beginning to take shape; a slithery feeling, a sinister certainty.
I didn't believe that Lara had come out here willingly.
I looked at the tree, eyes gliding up its thick trunk where its gnarled branches stretched high above us, disappearing into the gray sky, the bark black as midnight. The leaves up there barely moved. But something up there shifted, a shadow between those gnarled branches. I looked along them, my heart skipping a beat when I saw a face up there, staring back down at me. A man with a red tie. He was completely still, watching me.
I blinked, trying to gather my senses, and the branches creaked, moving with a breeze. The face was gone.
My father grabbed my arm, startling me around with a gasp.
"Stacey."
His face had gone even paler, I realized.
"What?" I muttered, shivering, looking back up at the branches where I'd seen the phantom face, finding only darkness in its place now.
My father looked up, too. I heard him swallow.
"Did you see him?" My father breathed, my blood running cold as his words slithered into my ear.
"Who?" I demanded.
But he didn't answer, pulling me away from the Cedar Tree. He then ordered me to go home again, telling me he had some things to finish up here with the investigation, and I quickly found myself returning to my car without question.
As I started the engine, waiting for the heat to kick in, I realized that my father had been afraid.
The only question, was of what.