Page 16 of Dead Man's Hollow
And it was in 1994 that Dead Man’s Hollow claimed its most recent victim. On Friday, May 27th, at the start of the Memorial Day Weekend, a group of teenagers gathered around a small bonfire deep in the woods to drink and celebrate the fast-approaching end of the school year. One of those present was sixteen-year-old Heather Ryan.
“Sixteen. Only two years older than Emilie.” Chloe’s eyes, always expressive, turn liquid with sadness.
“Oui.”He pauses the trailer.
“Her poor parents.”
“They died recently, without ever knowing what happened to their girl. But her sisters are still looking for her.”
“What an unimaginable heartbreak.” She frowns, then makes a tsking noise before kissing his cheek and heading upstairs to put away the clothes. “The stew smells marvelous,” she says over her shoulder.
He smiles at the compliment, but his heart is heavy. Chloe is right, the story is painfully sad. Still, he trusts Maisy Farley will help the Ryan sisters get answers. And this is a topic on which he and Chloe differ. Bastian believes knowing is always better than not knowing. Chloe believes in possibilities, miracles. He suspects if Chloe were in the Ryan sisters’ shoes—even if Emilie were to vanish, God forbid—she would prefer to go to her grave still holding out hope than to have that hope dashed by reality.
He understands why. Growing up, Chloe was placed in Montreal’s child welfare system, floating from one foster family to the next before aging out of the system when she reached adulthood. She rarely mentions her childhood or any of the foster families, but from time to time she falls quiet and a haunted, faraway look overtakes her. She says she doesn’t remember her childhood before foster care, but it’s clear it was tragic. Then, when Emilie was a baby, there was The Incident. The doctors chalked it up to postpartum stress disorder, exacerbated by her own apparent parental abandonment.
He stirs hisbouilliagain and then retrieves the dough from the proving drawer, pondering his wife’s approach to hard situations. Given the ugliness that life doled out to his wife at a young age, it’s no surprise to Bastian that fantasies, wishful thinking, and relentless optimism hold such sway over her. But in his experience, the best way to handle a difficult truth is to face it—the way the Ryan sisters in Pennsylvania have done.
ChapterEleven
True to their word,the McKeesport Police Department sends over a copy of the entire Heather Ryan case file. Accustomed to being stalled, stonewalled, and stiffed in response to public records requests, both Maisy and Jordana greet the tower of boxes with squeals of surprise. To the courier’s undisguised amusement, Maisy hops up and down and claps her hands.
“Keep acting like a high school cheerleader, and you’re going to end up in a viral video,” Jordana warns ominously.
Maisy tips the delivery person, who is kind enough to help them lug the boxes into Maisy’s dining room before he leaves.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Maisy reminds her producer.
“That old chestnut is PSM.”
“PSM?”
“Pre-social media. Believe me, bad publicity definitely exists now.” Jordana breaks into a smile. “But you bopping around like a little kid is too cute to be bad publicity.”
Maisy throws back her head and laughs, then fists her hands on her hips and surveys the work ahead of her. “I’ll get started on these boxes while you finish editing the interview with Diana. How’s it going with that?”
Jordana blows out a long, exasperated breath that ruffles her face-framing curtain bangs. “I’m going to be honest. It’s kind of boring.”
“A sixteen-year-old girl vanished in the woods. How can that possibly be boring?”
“Yeah, and Diana talked about going to church and taking care of her sisters. I’m not trying to run Diana down. But this interview has no pizzazz. There’s no hook. This isn’t going to go viral.”
“Maybe I need to dig out the cheerleader costume I wore to Naya’s Halloween party one year and film some videos to promote it,” she jokes as she plops down in the chair across from Jordana.
They’d recorded Diana’s interview two days earlier in a tiny conference room that Jordana converted into a makeshift temporary recording studio by hanging sound-absorbing panels on the walls. Maisy’s offered more than once to rent a proper podcasting space. She has the money now that the television station has finally bought her out of her contract. But Jordana claims she enjoys working out of Maisy’s townhouse. Maisy wonders whether the younger woman doesn’t want her to sink the money into a studio because she may not stick around.
Maisy won’t fault her if she decides to do something else. She’s in early twenties, after all. About to graduate with the whole shiny world ahead of her. And working on a podcast with a woman of a certain age as your only coworker isn’t the most glamorous way to launch your adult life.
Her musing about her producer’s life choices is interrupted when she realizes Jordana is watching her with an expectant expression. “Sorry, sugar. I missed that.”
“I said Diana might come across as hard or brittle.” She hesitates. “I don’t want to edit the interview to soften her. Unless you think I should?”
She waves a hand. “We knew she was the straightforward, factual one. That’s why we’re using her interview to set the stage. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not saying we need to have a big reveal in every episode, but ….” She trails off and rubs the heel of her hand against her forehead.
“You may have been spoiled last season since we started off with an interview with a woman who insisted her husband hadn’t committed suicide but had, in fact, been thrown out a window to his death.”
“I know investigations aren’t all excitement.”
