“You’re talking to your computer again,” he points out.

  Xavier regularly engages in interactions with inanimate objects, so it’s not a judgment. He just occasionally points out when I have slipped into behavior unlike me. I try not to engage in interactions with inanimate objects. The vegetable and herb garden in the backyard doesn’t count in that. The starters are a gray area.

  “You mentioned the tag on the bird’s leg. It reminded me that when I asked about any security system in the park, the park employee I was talking to told me there aren’t very many actual surveillance cameras, but there are trail cameras to track animals that live here. They aren’t heavily used anymore. And I’m guessing most people don’t even realize they’re there.” I don’t find what I’m looking for on the official park site, so I do a broader search. Finally, I find it.

  “Here. Streams and recorded footage from the trail cameras. They’re still recording and there are people who watch them pretty obsessively. This is a fan site. They have the link to the trail cam streams and they discuss them, post stills or recordings they find particularly interesting, share stories. The whole thing. Let’s see if they caught anything interesting a few days ago.”

  “What are you expecting to see? Do you think a bear took her?” Xavier asks.

  One of the fun things about Xavier is it’s difficult, sometimes impossible, to confidently gauge whether he is being facetious or completely serious.

  I scroll through snippets of video and still images that users of the site have posted. It takes a few minutes, but I find exactly what I’m looking for.

  This time, I allow myself a little indulgence and decide to address the computer anyway. “Jackpot.”

  “Yeah, that cart definitely shouldn’t be out there on the trails at that time of day,” Jennifer says, looking at the still images I have pulled up on my phone to show her.

  “But it is one that’s available in the park,” I say.

  She nods, straightening up. “Yeah. It looks like one of the carts we offer for registered campers to rent so they can get around the recreational areas more easily.”

  “And it’s different from the one you brought me in,” I point out.

  “Yeah. If you look,” she reaches toward my phone and uses her fingers to zoom in and focus on the cart. “The logo on the side is different. You can’t really read it in this image, but it says ‘visitor’ under the logo. And on the back of the cart would be a number identifying it.”

  “I thought I saw something like that in one of the images, but it’s not readable. Unfortunately, the trail cameras are positioned in just a way that everything on the cart as well as the people inside is blocked most of the time by trees. There are some clear images without obstruction, but they only catch a small part of the cart from a distance. Enough to know it’s there, but not to actually see anything.”

  “That is really strange behavior. We sometimes have visitors rent the carts and go on drunken joy rides around the recreational area. We even had some teenagers try to stuff as many people inside one as possible and crash into one of the creeks. None of them were seriously hurt, but it was definitely disruptive,” she says.

  “So, you do get bad things happening out here,” I tease.

  “I don’t think the actions of stupid teenage boys is good enough justification to install a multi-million-dollar security system throughout the park,” she chuckles.

  There’s a loud sound outside like an engine revving and Jennifer’s eyes get wide.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “The staff carts. It sounds like someone got into the parking area and is trying to take one of them.”

  “Go ahead and check,” I say. “I’ll be right here.”

  She hesitates, unsure if she feels comfortable leaving the outpost unattended except for me. The sound happens again, layering with the first so it seems like several of the carts are now on out in the small lot behind the building. She mutters a couple of creative profanities and runs toward the hallway at the back of the building that leads out to the lot. The second she’s out of sight, I jog around behind the counter. Remembering the sequence of steps she took when she accessed the computer, I try to pull it up. It takes a few tries recreating the movements of her fingers over the keypad for the screen to open.

  I look through the available options and pull up cabin reservations for the last few weeks. I click around as quickly as I can to isolate them by name, and then I find it. Darian Torrance. I snap a quick picture of the reservation and close down the screen, then scamper my way back around the counter, trying my best to look natural. I’m reaching for a paper cup at the coffee station just as Jennifer is coming back into the room.

  “Everything alright?” I ask casually as I fill up the cup.

  “Yeah,” she says, shaking her head. “Four of the carts had their engines running. One of them had been moved out of its spot a little, but there was no one out there.”

  As she’s saying it, the door opens and Xavier comes in. He has shed the hooded shirt that will conceal his identity if any of the few cameras Jennifer mentioned happen to be covering the back lot.

  “There you are,” I say. “Jennifer, this is Xavier.”

  “Hello,” she says.

  I turn my head over to him. “Hey, they do have it in stock, so why don’t you grab one while I finish up here?”

  I’m not referencing anything specific and he knows it. It’s just a way to explain his presence in the outpost and keep him busy so he doesn’t start talking. He walks away into the main area of the shop and I show Jennifer another clip from one of the trail cameras that shows the visitor-rented cart moving through the woods. It’s at a distance, but the pale color is distinctive enough for its movements to be obvious.

  “It’s not on a trail there,” she says, confirming what I thought when I first saw the clip. “It starts on one, but then it goes off. Look at the way it’s bouncing. That’s a rough ride going through the woods like that.”

  “Are the carts checked for damage when they come back?” I ask.

  “Yes, but it isn’t like the fleet is new. And they are used in a park. All of them have scratches and dents and things. Nothing extreme, but they’re definitely used. If there wasn’t a ton of damage done going through the woods like that, it probably wouldn’t have been noticed.”

  There’s a brief moment where something dark seems to appear at the side of the cart in the image. The cart slows and the dark object moves back inside before the cart speeds up again.

  “Something just almost fell out,” I point out. “Did you see that?”

  “I did,” Jennifer says.

  “Do you keep track of which cart is rented out to which visitor?” I ask.

  “It’s a self-serve system,” she says. “Visitors can pay cash or use a card to pay the fee and a lockbox provides the key.”

  Xavier comes up behind us and I turn to see him carrying an arm full of s’mores making supplies and a sleeping bag made to look like a fox.

  “Alright.” I nod and look at Jennifer. “I think we’re ready to check out.”

  Detective Rice moves one of the stills I printed out across the table to look at another one. The slight shaking of his head isn’t encouraging.

  “It’s a golf cart without the golf course,” he observes.

  “It’s a cart rented to campers in the park and it’s going around on and off the trails after they closed for the night. And this area… this is right near where I was found. Where I saw the body.”

  “The body that wasn’t there when the officers went back to look,” he says.

  I let out an exasperated sigh. “Yes. I’m aware. But that’s my point. I was in the hospital for hours before I got in touch with the police, and then they had to put together a team to search. They wouldn’t have gotten to the park and out into this area until after dark. After this footage.”

  “You think there’s a dead woman in that cart,” Rice says.

  “I think Caitlin Torrance is in that cart,” I tell him. “I told you, I saw her picture when I was looking through that file about her abduction. Mila Auden told me her name and that she and her husband had a rough marriage. Her husband then told me she left him and he hasn’t heard from her. But his name is on the reservation for a cabin at the park. One that is right behind mine. And on my reservation, it says I specifically requested that cabin. Which means part of what I can’t remember is finding out that Darian Torrance had reserved that cabin and would be there with his wife, so I reserved a cabin nearby.”

  “Why?” Rice asks.

  “To watch them,” I say.

  “But why?” he presses. “Why would you need to watch them? Why would Darian and Caitlin Torrance even be on your radar if you were investigating Thomas and Mila Auden?”

  I don’t have an answer to that question. The couple of days before waking up in the park is all but fully obliterated from my memory, but there’s also so much of the last couple of weeks that is hazy. It’s one of the most frightening elements of my blackouts. They are fully unpredictable. Not only do I not know when one of them is going to happen, but I don‘t know how much of my life it’s going to take when it does. There have been people who experience the same thing who have lost years, even decades in an instant. They go from living a completely normal life to opening their eyes to a face they don‘t recognize and a world that seems like it morphed into a different time when all they did was blink.

  I can’t bear the thought of going through that one day. There’s nothing to say I won’t. There’s no guarantee my lapses will remain infrequent or that they will only claim relatively short swaths of time. As it is, I’m usually able to regain some of the memories from those lost times. But that might not always happen. I might not always be able to get those things back and the stretches of time could get longer. And the longer they are, the more I’ll encounter moments like this: times when questions don’t come with answers.

  By the time we leave the police station and grab something to eat, the sun has dropped down and it’s dark as we pull into the paved area beside the cabin. I climb out and stare through the trees at the cabin I now know was reserved by Darian Torrance. The warm air touches my face, carrying with it the suggestion of rain. Breathing it in sends me backward.

  The flash of memory is as vivid as if I’m doing it again: I’m waiting for the storm to break as I sit in the parking lot of the Good Knight Inn. I know it’s going to. The pressure in the air and the heaviness of the clouds feels like the sky is pressing down on top of me. There’s nothingness, and then—the phone in my hand, a rectangle of light in the distance, and a figure blending with the shadows.

  My car rumbles through the deep hours of the night, taking the turns and dips of the back road like a ricocheted bullet. Ahead of me are taillights. I diverge from them halfway through the drive. I know where they’re going. I need to get ahead of them.

  The clouds stay behind me. I don’t know when they split open or if the rain washed some of the blood from the sidewalk before the investigators ever had a chance to see it. By the time I’m running through the trees from the bottom of the hill, wanting to cut off from the back of the park, I’m chasing starlight.

  And then I’m back to the present. Another piece of the puzzle slotting into place.

  “Come on,” I tell Xavier, heading back to the car and getting in.

  “What are we doing?” he asks.

  “I need to check something.”

  We drive along the perimeter of the park until we get to the back entrance. Just as Jennifer said there would be after the park has closed for the evening, there’s a heavy chain across the road. I park to the side and get out. My flashlight glows on the dark chain and I direct the light to the center links. Taking out my phone, I snap pictures of the flecks of red paint embedded in the metal. Running my light along the length of the chain, I get to the end and find a link that has been welded and the wood around the anchor in the post is split.

  “Something hit that chain,” Xavier points out.

  “The red SUV,” I tell him. “When I was chasing it from the motel, it came this way. I knew it would. I went the other way, to the front of the park, and went through the main entrance. There’s a record of me using the access code to open the gate. But the red SUV came back here and didn’t think about the chain. They drove through it. And all the park did was fix it when they found the damage.”

  He follows me as I get back in the car and return to the cabin. It’s barely stopped when I get out and make my way through the dark plot of trees to the SUV in the driveway. The light on the side of the cabin is on and I duck down to avoid as much of it as I can. Crawling along the side, I get to the front and run my hand along it. The height of the vehicle means the chain would have hit the front bumper and broken. There are chips of paint missing, not enough to be extremely obvious just looking at it, but enough to further confirm this is the car that took down the chain.

  Hiding in plain sight.

  But why?

  I chased Darian Torrance from the Good Knight Inn to the park, which means he was at the motel when I made the call to 911 to alert them to check Thomas Auden’s room. But did that mean he killed Thomas? Or did he discover the body first?

  And where was his wife?

  I go back to the cabin and sit in the chair, staring out the window at the SUV until the sound of shouting waking me makes me realize I fell asleep. By the time the fog of sleep has dissipated enough for me to really process where I am and what’s going on, the shouting has stopped. I can’t bring to mind any details about the voices. I didn’t hear any words. Maybe I didn’t actually hear what I thought I did. It could have been a dream that was vivid enough to wake me up.

  Looking through the open door to the bedroom, I see Xavier wearing his fox sleeping bag, lying on top of the comforter, fast asleep. The unsettled feeling is still in the pit of my stomach. I walk outside and look around. An instant later, the door to the cabin next door opens and one of the women comes out. Clearly surprised by the chilly air that greets her, she rubs her arms and looks around the same way I did.

  “Hey,” I call over.

  The intention was not to startle her if she looked over and saw me, but it looks like it had the opposite effect. She jumps, then presses her hand over her chest.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” she replies in a loud whisper.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, walking toward her. “I was trying not to do that.”

  She shakes her head and looks out over the rest of the street. “Did you hear it, too? It sounded like shouting.”

  “You heard it? It woke me up. I thought it might have been a dream.”

  “I definitely heard it. Where did it come from?” she asks.

  My eyes slide over to the cabin behind mine, but I don’t point it out.

  “Maybe it was just people who had a few too many by their campfire,” I suggest.

  She nods but doesn’t look convinced. She shudders a little.

  “This place is freaking creepy,” she grumbles. “It was my sister’s idea to come out here for her birthday. I hate it.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” she says, twisting slightly toward her cabin like she wishes she was already back inside.

  “That blue tote by the grill,” I say.

  “The blue tote?” she asks. “The plastic thing? Yeah, what about it?”

  “What’s in it? I’m sorry, I know that’s probably weird of me to ask. I just keep noticing it and curiosity got the best of me.”

  She turns a little to look in the direction of the grill. It’s too dark to be able to see it clearly, but I know it’s there.

  “Um, cooking supplies, I think. It’s my sister’s. She’s the camping lover of the family.”

  “You could fit a lot of cooking supplies in something that big,” I remark.

  She looks at me strangely. “I guess.”

  I realize I’ve made her uncomfortable and start back toward the door to the cabin.

  “Goodnight.”

  “I saw you.”

  I turn back around to look at her.

  “Saw me?” I ask.

  “I saw you at that other cabin,” she nods toward it. “Creeping around the car. What were you doing?”

  My mouth opens and I look to the cabin and then back to her. “I thought I saw an injured animal. I wanted to check on it.”

  Not too far from the truth.

  “Did you find it?” she asks.

  “No.” I look up at the cabin again. “Have you met the people staying there? It doesn’t seem like they come out of there very much.”

  “No. I haven’t even seen them,” she says, emphasizing the word seen in a way that makes it seem like she’s trying to say something without saying it. “Maybe they’re newlyweds.”

  She gives me a wink and walks back to the cabin.

  I wake up the next morning with even more questions. A drive to the outpost for coffee does nothing to clear my head and as I stand outside staring at the neighboring cabin, those questions just keep getting louder. The red SUV is gone this morning. It was there when I left for the outpost but gone when I got back with cups of coffee for Xavier and myself. If I’m going to be here for much longer, I’m going to need something to brew my own here. For now, I’ll get by with getting enough of the small cups to fill a travel tumbler I also bought there and stuffing the donation jar with bills each time.

  The window beside me opens and I look over my shoulder to see Xavier. The arms on the novelty sleeping bag aren’t long enough and everything below a few inches under his elbow is sticking out. He’s wearing the hood shaped to look like a fox’s head, but it’s being pulled tight over the top of his head by his feet pressing into the bottom of the sleeping bag. Whoever designed it probably thought they were being generous with the length of the bag, but they didn’t expect Xavier to take a liking to it.