The Girl In The Woods Part 13

"Exactly. Miss Brenner had become pregnant. And you all thought no one had s.e.x outside of wedlock back in the old days."

They all laughed.

Ludwig smiled as well, but he didn't continue with the story. He waited, letting their curiosity grow until someone shouted out, "Well, what happened?"

"Oh," he said. "You want to know what happened to Faith Brenner?"

"Yes!"

"You really want to know?"

"Come on..."

Ludwig shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "n.o.body knows. She disappeared from her dorm room one night. Her body was never found. She didn't leave a note. n.o.body saw her go, at least not according to any records that I've been able to find in my research, and believe me, I've looked."

"So she ran off with the guy," a student said. "The poor guy."

"A good theory," Ludwig said. "Except he was still around after she disappeared. The police questioned him extensively, and he claimed not to know the girl's whereabouts. He eventually graduated from Fields, married, and had a life of his own, one without Faith Brenner."

"Then she ran away," a woman said.

It was always the female students who wanted to believe Faith Brenner ran away and had the baby on her own.

"Think of how difficult that would be for a woman today, someone your age. Leaving everything she has ever known, with no family support, no money and no real education to speak of, to go and have a child and then raise it on her own. And I know a woman today might have an abortion, but back then...No, I find it hard to believe that Faith Brenner simply ran off to start a new life with her unborn child and no means of supporting herself. In a rural area with no transportation and only the clothes on her back." Ludwig shook his head. "Most unlikely."

The question hung in the air then-what really did happen to Faith Brenner?

Ludwig waited, thinking to himself, Come on, it can't be this hard to make the connection...

"Are you suggesting," one of the students said, "that Pioneer Club thing you talked about had something to do with it?"

"Why would I suggest such a thing?"

A ripple of enlightenment spread through the room. The students whispered and buzzed among themselves.

"Connections, right?" Ludwig said. "Everything's connected?"

Their buzzing grew louder, so Ludwig raised his arms for quiet. When they settled down, he continued.

"Some people do think she was murdered. They think that the scandal of the pregnancy and the relationship with the farm boy was too much for her family to bear. They had her killed to avoid the public disgrace and a.s.sociated drop in social standing they knew would come. Faith Brenner's mother, Eliza Brenner, was never the same after the girl disappeared. She was inconsolable, wailing away her days in the upstairs of the Brenner family home, which still stands by the way on the corner of Ohio Avenue and Grant Street. Her father, Hiram Brenner, never spoke of the girl again after she disappeared. He focused his attention on his work and the three children he still had, the ones who had the good sense to marry the right people and stay out of trouble. Oh, and something else about Hiram Brenner, her father? The rumor has always been that he was one of the most powerful and important members of The Pioneer Club."

He paused. They were all paying attention to him now, most of them thinking some variation of, Why can't school be this interesting all of the time?

"But ever since Faith's disappearance, the folklore around campus has been that Faith Brenner wanders the halls of Maxwell, waiting for her lover, the farm boy from Fields University, to come and take her away." They watched him in silence for a long moment. "Do there seem to be any themes running through these stories we've shared today?"

"That this is a weird place," someone said.

"Not quite," Ludwig said. "Not quite. You see, folklore often plays on our deepest fears, as well as our greatest desires. We all wish to fall in love and live happily ever after, so we kiss in the gazebo and hope the magic works. Conversely, we all fear an early end to our lives, a snuffing out of all of our hopes and dreams before we've had the chance to realize them. And if those hopes and dreams do get snuffed out early, we hope that there's someone there to help us pick up the pieces. Someone to help us with our grades. Or maybe we just wish that some part of us lives on after death, wishing for the possibility of a reunion with the person we loved in life. Because, the truth is, our lives don't always turn out the way we hope they will. And sometimes young people die, often in horrible ways.

"Well, now that you're all cheered up, maybe we should go on..." But Ludwig saw a hand up in the back of the room. It was the same young woman who had originally brought up the ghost of Faith Brenner. "Yes?"

"Maybe there will be a ghost story about the girl who just disappeared," she said.

"Excuse me?" Ludwig said. "I don't know to what you're referring."

"You mean you didn't hear?" the woman said. A ripple went through the room. Some seemed to know what she was talking about, while others craned their necks to look at her as though they didn't know anything. "Some girl, a student here, she disappeared yesterday. Vanished into thin air."

"Are you joking?" Ludwig said.

"No, not at all," she said, and many other heads nodded in agreement as though they had heard the news as well.

It took Ludwig a moment to realize that his mouth was hanging open. He could imagine the color disappearing from his face, like water running out of a drain. The cla.s.s was looking at him now, a hundred sets of eyes expecting a response, something profound, something adult.

But he didn't have anything to offer.

He looked at his watch. They still had twenty minutes to go.

But he couldn't wait.

"Okay," he said. "That's good enough for today."

He jammed his notes into his briefcase and left as fast as he could.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

Nate Ludwig always worried he'd turn into the kind of academic he saw at conferences. They were men and women with greasy hair and thick gla.s.ses, the kind who wore out-of-date clothes and blinked in the light of day as though they'd spent years holed up in small, windowless rooms, shuffling paper and dusty books, ignoring the world around them, waiting for a once in a lifetime chance at recognition or importance that never came.

After hearing the news in cla.s.s that morning, Nate Ludwig thought his time had come.

His hands shook as he turned on the radio in his office and started his computer, desperate for any news of the disappearance he had just heard about.

It's probably nothing, he told himself. College kids come and go like cats. She's probably drunk or off with her boyfriend.

Was it sick of him to wish it were the real deal, that the girl had really disappeared?

To hope that her misfortune would allow him to finally find the clearing in the woods where The Pioneer Club met?

The radio told him nothing. They were into a morning call-in show, people asking a gardening expert what they could do with their perennials in the fall.

Did anybody care about this drivel when important things were happening?

He checked his email and found a campus crime alert that mostly confirmed what his students had already told him. A Fields' student named Jacqueline Foley had gone out for an afternoon bike ride the day before and never came back. She was believed to be riding her bike in the Union Township area, ten miles west of New Cambridge. The email included a map of Jacqueline Foley's usual route, a grid of county roads and two-lane highways. Ludwig knew the area well. He had been studying it in recent months.

Ludwig's desk was a ma.s.s of papers-student work, bills, university memoranda-but he always knew how to put his hands on the most important things, the things that made up his research, and he brought out the map he had been working on recently. It was crude and hand-drawn. He had tried doing it on the computer but couldn't get it to work and eventually gave up in favor of the old-fashioned method of a pencil. And he liked the feel of having the map in his hand. He could put it on the floor and stand above, orienting himself to the locations he was studying and thinking about.

And trying to find.

He laid it on his desk and compared it to the map in the email. For the past six months, he had been trying out a new theory concerning the location of the secret meeting place used by the men of The Pioneer Club of New Cambridge. Most of the doc.u.ments relating to the area's founding were lost when the original courthouse burned to the ground shortly after the Civil War, a fire whose cause was never adequately determined and may have started as the result of arson. Over the years, Ludwig had combed through newspaper clippings, old letters and diaries, the debris of lives he came across in antique stores and estate sales, and through a process of elimination began to narrow the possibilities for the location of the meeting place, and he had come to the conclusion that the site had to lie in Union Township, somewhere in the many acres of woods that covered the area. All he needed was some sort of final confirmation, some contemporary proof that he was on the right track, and now he might just have it, proof in the form of another disappearance.

Faith Brenner was just the tip of the iceberg.

Among the doc.u.ments he had collected over the years, Ludwig had found stories of at least twenty unexplained disappearances, all of them women, all of them long forgotten.

His quest had begun at the county historical society with a letter addressed to a Dr. Upton Jones, a physician and Methodist minister who founded the first church in the township. The letter was dated March 19, 1805 and read: ...I implore you, kind sir, most Reverend man of G.o.d and physical healing, do your utmost to tell me what happened to my Abigail. Yes, she is a high-spirited girl, and quarrelsome with those older than she, but her father and I miss her greatly. Our hearts are broke. I know the men of The Pioneer Club will take mercy on a high-spirited girl. She is only fifteen years old...

And another, a fragment with no salutation and no signature, found among papers and books at an estate sale in another county.

And you call yourselves Christians! So my daughter committed the sin of lying with a man who may have had a dollop of indian blood inside him. And for that you take her away to your secret place, you take her from her home. And you call yourselves Christians...

And finally, a letter he found in his campus mailbox, placed there by someone who must have known about his research, someone who wanted to help while still remaining anonymous. It was dated August of 1825 and addressed to Hiram Fields, the first mayor of New Cambridge and founder of the university: ...I beg you to use your considerable influence and standing in the community to help us find our daughter. The women's college claims no knowledge or responsibility for her whereabouts. And she was last seen on your campus, in the escort of a young man she was keeping company with. I find the reports of the poor treatment of young women in our town alarming, and I wish to understand why you find it impossible to respond to my simple inquiries. A father's inquiries. I know what you men do at those meetings. You will, of course, recall that I used to be a member in good standing of that august organization. If my own beloved Nancy has fallen victim to one of your machinations...

Ludwig understood that, by their very nature, new settlements, especially ones carved out of the wilderness, were insecure and tenuous propositions. And in order for a new community to survive in a new land it was imperative to have as many members rowing in the same direction as was humanly possible. Most new communities started optimistically, building churches and schools and stores, but eventually, faced with life's harsh realities, they began to build jails and graveyards and gallows.

But why did New Cambridge and Union Township seem to have so much trouble? And why was the trouble only with women?

A newsbreak came on the radio. Ludwig stopped looking at the map and turned the volume up as high as it would go, then leaned in close.

"We have breaking news on the disappearance of Fields University student Jacqueline Foley..."

They found her, Ludwig thought. She came strolling back into her dorm and said to everybody, What were you all worried about?

"Captain Dan Berding of the New Cambridge Police informed the media that Ms. Foley's bicycle, a blue Cannondale, has been located on State Route 17, five miles east of New Cambridge and some fifteen miles from the area where she ordinarily rode. Police have now shifted their efforts to the area east of town and are treating the case as an abduction. We will continue to follow this story as new information comes in..."

Ludwig shook his head.

No, he thought, that's not right. That doesn't fit the data at all.

He looked at the map. He knew in his gut that The Pioneer Club met west of town, out in the same general area where the Foley girl rode. If her bike was found on the east side of town, on the highway going away from New Cambridge, it implied either one of two things. Either she changed her route and was riding somewhere else when she was taken. Or they took her off her regular route and then drove the other direction.

But what did all of this mean to him, a professor of Folklore at a Midwestern university, living alone with his books and his theories? He didn't want to make the amateur researcher mistake and cherry pick the data so that it fit the theory he desperately wanted to prove-that The Pioneer Club really existed at one time and that they were responsible for the deaths and disappearances of a number of young women who had run afoul of the power structure in New Cambridge. And, more importantly, that the location of The Pioneer Club meetings possessed a force, something beyond the understanding of any rational human mind and something that existed far outside the purview of any academic researcher, a force that emboldened the members of The Pioneer Club to act in the most horrific ways.

And he had a new theory now, a natural outgrowth of everything he had already been working on: that finding the location of that secret meeting place, the clearing in the woods west of New Cambridge that he knew had to be out there, would lead directly to the location of the missing Foley girl.

It sounded crazy, even as he ran the words through his own mind, but something told him, something deep in his gut, that it had to be true.

It had to be.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Diana stopped by the Hurst Flower Shop in downtown New Cambridge and asked about the flowers that were delivered to her mother. The clerk, a college student who only added to the endless loop of thoughts in Diana's head concerning Jacqueline Foley and Margie Todd, had no helpful information. She could only say that the flowers were purchased in person, paid for in cash, and no, she hadn't been working the day the order was placed.

"People do that all the time," the girl said. "You know, send flowers anonymously. I've had guys do it for me. Maybe your mom has an admirer?"

"Did you see the address the flowers went to?"

The girl studied the ticket. "Vienna Woods? Is that an apartment complex or something?"

"It's a mental hospital."

"Oh."

On her way to the car, Diana called Jason. She had resisted calling him all morning, hoping that if she stayed out of his way long enough, he would get back to her with some piece of information pertaining to the case, but he never did. And relying on the radio didn't cut it.

The call went to voicemail. She stopped walking to leave the message.

"Okay," Diana said, "I guess you're too busy to talk." She hated the sound of that, like she was a needy girlfriend. "Just call me when you get a chance. I have things to tell you, and I'm sure, I'm hoping, you have things to tell me."

She flipped the phone shut on her way toward the car, which was parked around the corner just off the square. When she turned the corner, she saw someone standing against the side of her Honda, leaning against the vehicle as though they needed the car to support their weight. At first, Diana couldn't make out who it was, and she wondered if it were a homeless person or a b.u.m, someone looking for spare change to buy a fifth of whiskey. But then she recognized the short haircut and ratty shoes, the ever-present cigarette tossed aside as Diana approached.

"Kay?"

"Hi, honey. I saw your car and thought I'd stop."

"You just happened to see my car parked on a side street?"

"I went to a doctor's appointment this morning. The usual bulls.h.i.t. He said my lungs are congested. I said, 'They're full of cancer, what do you expect?' I've reached the point where things only go one direction. Down."

"I was going to talk to you anyway," Diana said.

"Great. You want to have lunch?"

Diana looked around. "No, I think we need to talk in the car. In private."

"That's fine. I don't eat much anyway."

Diana climbed in and unlocked the pa.s.senger door, then waited while Kay made a slow circuit of the car to the other side. It was a cool morning, the sky bright and clear. Kay still wore the ugly windbreaker and the sight of it made Diana feel depressed. It might as well have been the purple flag of pathetic defeat.