Endings by Linda Richards (e ink manga reader txt) 📕

on the roadside as we head into town: SANCTUARY, POPULATION 7674.

There is a grain elevator at the feed store, a gas station, a donut shop, a town square, a barbecue place, and several country bars, all on a couple of main streets. In all of that, we see one white van. It is stopped at the gas station. I feel my heart jump to my throat as I pull up and then get out of my car, leaving Arden behind.

My hands are almost shaking by the time I reach the driver’s side, lean in. But the van is filled with electronic equipment, and the driver is a fresh-faced kid with a skinny ponytail and wispy facial hair.

“Can you … can you tell me how to get to the freeway?” I don’t know what else to say.

He directs me politely, looking slightly curious. There are, after all, signs indicating the freeway is this way or that every few feet.

“Nothing,” I say with a sigh when I get back into the car.

“Do you know about Hoyo Lago?” Arden asks, like she’s been thinking while I was otherwise occupied.

“I don’t. Tell me.”

“It was a gravel pit. Hoyo. Long ago. Now it’s sort of a weird little lake. Dried out half the year. More than that. More like a pond most of the other time. But it seems like … like a place …”

I look at Arden for several seconds that stretch into a minute. I think about strength and fortitude and the things mothers are sometimes called upon to deal with. Things beyond normal human endurance and certainly expectation. And I hope that, whatever the outcome we have here and despite the evidence of my own search to the contrary, the child has merely wandered off and is even now being discovered waking from an innocent nap in the day care garden, dirt on her face, a leaf in her hair, hungry and maybe afraid and looking for her mom.

But I don’t really think so.

“Okay. Hoyo Lago sounds like a good next step. And it is consistent with what I’ve been thinking. Tell me which way to go.”

I send the car in the direction Arden shows me, making turns along the way as she instructs. “Here,” she says finally, indicating a driveway so lightly used, I would have missed it without her keeping watch for it. I say as much.

“Yuh,” she says, coloring slightly. “You pretty much have to have grown up around here to know about this place.”

Unspoken: parking with boys. Fast cars. Torrid summer romances. Crickets in the dark and the smell of cum on upholstered seats. Memories I don’t possess anymore, if I’d ever had them at all.

The road is bumpy and overgrown, but nowhere near impassable. It’s not ideal, but I push the rental down it, beyond the place where rental cars are meant to go.

Here, further off the road, there are indications of forgotten activity. Old road signs with bullet holes in them; someone’s long-ago weekend target practice. Faded fast-food wrappers. Discarded cans, some with still more bullet holes. After a while, the overgrown road thins out and the old gravel pit comes into view, looking more like a small, dried out lake than the center of the beginning of urban growth it had been a hundred years before.

“Not much to see,” I say.

Arden’s eyes scan the area closely. She is familiar with this place. She knows better what to look for. She gets out of the car and I let her go, watching closely as she looks at the ground and the immediate vicinity, a mother animal on the hunt. She looks frightened and dangerous in the same moment, though maybe heavier on the side of dangerous. She seems calmer than she did at the day care. We are hunting now and we are hopeful, but I feel she has resigned herself for the worst; whatever small hope she’d had having been squashed by miles and time.

“Someone has been here,” she says, getting back into the car.

“Are you sure?”

“No,” she says. “But I feel it.” It doesn’t occur to me to disagree.

“Where does the road go?”

“More of the same, just like how we got in here. And then it just stops after a while. Or it used to. But it will be harder going. And there’s not really anything up there to see.”

I start to turn the car around. “Wait. What was that?” The urgency in her voice brings me to full alert.

“What?”

“A flash of … never mind. It’s gone.”

“Say it.” My voice is quiet, but insistent. There is nothing. And there is everything. The sense of something that matters.

“Well, I thought I saw a flash of white,” she says. “Like metal? But then it was gone.”

I strain in the direction she’s looking. I can’t see anything. But her face—tense and certain and urgent—tells me she isn’t making it up.

“Like a car maybe?”

“Maybe,” she says hesitantly, not like she’s afraid I won’t believe her, but like she doesn’t dare believe it herself.

“Look, Arden, I believe you and I want to go in and investigate, but I don’t want to endanger you. Please take the car back to the day care and call the police. If it is him and he’s here, we’re going to need help.”

“No,” she says. Firm and solid. Nothing of movement in her voice. Or weakness.

I look at her in surprise. “No” hadn’t been on the table. I hadn’t thought she had it in her.

“I’m not arguing this, Arden.”

She crosses her arms. “Whatever. I’m going with you. If Ashley is here … with him … you’ll need me.”

I regard her. Think it through. She actually has a point.

“Okay. Fuck. Okay. Stay close, all right?”

She nods silently. She is pale. Barely there. But the hope that had been nearly dead minutes before has been flamed slightly. She has everything at stake. I can see that in the profile she’s turned to me; the firmly set jaw, the tilt of her little chin. And I get