Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 119746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
But knowing in your heart that someone is truly gone without any concrete proof is a special kind of purgatory I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And so I’m going to keep doing everything I can to find her, even if it means hunting down a tracker named Jensen McGraw.
I pull the bureau-issued Durango onto the highway and take the first turn off toward Donner Memorial State Park. As I pass the park monument, a chill runs down my spine despite the bright sunshine, and my hands instinctively grip the wheel. It isn’t just that I’d spent so much time here when Lainey first went missing, gathering friends plus fellow agents who wanted to support me as civilians as we canvassed the area. It’s something more than that. It’s that the history of this place was the whole reason Lainey came here to begin with.
“It’s calling me, Aubrey,” she’d said over the phone the day before she left. “The mountains keep calling me and the dreams never stop. I have to go. They’re trying to tell me something. Show me something.”
You’d think what she said sounded cryptic, but that was Lainey and I was used to her obsession. When Lainey was nine years old, her history class went on a field trip here, since they were studying the Donner Party and it’s not too far from Sacramento. When she came home later that evening, she almost seemed like she had a fever. Her eyes were shining so brightly, her cheeks flushed, and she could barely speak. My father was still out on duty so I was in charge of her and I had her taking a shot of Children’s Tylenol before she finally told me what happened.
Turns out she wasn’t sick, she was just fanatical. And while she had been eerily quiet since she stepped in the house, suddenly she was blabbering all night long about the Donner Party and everything she learned, forcing me to learn it all as well.
Ever since then, it became Lainey’s obsession. Even in high school she was re-reading all the books about the historic tragedy, saving her money so she could bid on supposed heirlooms on eBay, sometimes dressing up in pioneer woman’s clothing as some kind of historical cosplay. Lainey always had an addictive personality thanks to our mother, and at the time I remember my father saying “Well, at least it’s not drugs” (I should be glad he wasn’t around later to eat his words), and blamed it as her way of coping with our mother’s death.
He might have been right. We all did what we had to do to cope. And when he died in the line of duty one horrible evening, Lainey leaned into her obsession even harder. Unfortunately, she also leaned into drugs, bad men, and poor decisions. And yet through it all, her affinity for the Donner Party remained. I chalked it up to her being one of those people fixated on different points in history, though to be honest I’d wish she’d been wrapped up in the Civil War or the French Revolution instead of the gruesome and disturbing events that befell the eighty-seven emigrants that fateful winter.
So when Lainey rang me up and told me that she and her deadbeat boyfriend Adam were going to go visit the park because it had been calling to her, I wasn’t worried and I definitely wasn’t surprised. It was an early summer day and though I hadn’t seen her for a couple of weeks, she seemed okay. She seemed sober. And I thought maybe it would be good for her to get out of the city and get some fresh air and exercise. A change of pace. She sounded feverish about her dream, the same dreams she’d always had, where she felt the mountains were speaking to her, but that was just the way she was.
But now, I’m not so sure.
I hate myself for not picking up anything amiss. What kind of investigator was I if I didn’t see the warnings? What kind of sister was I, for that matter, to just take her at face value and let her go tramping off with a guy I didn’t trust? Did Adam kill Lainey in the mountains? Did they end up going elsewhere, stranded in the deserts of Nevada? The fact that there have been so few leads since has been a weight on my shoulders every single second of the day. Even the nights offer no respite, filled with dreams of blood and snow. I dream about her and the Donner Party.
With my knuckles turning white, I force myself to do the box breathing exercises my therapist taught me how to do until I gain control and clarity back. I need to focus on the task at hand and figure out if this McGraw character is going to help me or not. The only information I have about him is what the twins at the saloon said: father died, ranch in financial trouble, takes care of his ailing mother, and that he must be in his late thirties. I should have asked if he was married or not, but I felt like I needed to get out of there with the information I got. There was definitely something sketchy about the bartender and her relationship to him, or at least she knows some things about him that I shouldn’t, and that makes me expect this won’t be smooth sailing. Call it a hunch.