"We could drive away right now," Dean said. "We could just leave her here Sammy."
"Dean," he warned as Addy approached the Impala.
"I'm serious man." He drummed his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel. "All I have to do is start the car and drive away. Then we'd be free of all her obnoxiousness."
Sam shook his head and Addy climbed into the backseat.
"Wow Dean, I'm surprised," she said. "I half expected you to go speeding away, leaving me here."
He laughed and started the engine. "Oh ye of little faith."
As they started down the road Sam looked back at Addy. When she raised her eyebrows questioningly and jerked her chin towards the back of Dean's head he nodded and she grinned at him.
They had been driving for an hour when Addy finally snapped from boredom.
"What do you guys do on these drives?" she asked. "I'm about ready to chew my own fingers off just for something interesting to accomplish."
"Look at the scenery," Dean suggested sarcastically, turning up the music to drown out her voice.
Sam rolled his eyes and turned the music back down. "I don't know. Dean can't do much since he's driving and, you know, I'm not about to ask him to play Go Fish while trying to avoid mowing down pedestrians. We can talk if you want."
"Okay," Addy said, sitting up straighter. "What do you want to talk about?"
He paused. "I don't know." Then, "What's your favorite color?"
She made a face than said, "All right, twenty questions. My favorite color is red. When's your birthday?"
"May 2nd,1983," he replied. "Dean, are you playing?"
"Not a chance."
Sam shrugged and said, "Okay… what's your middle name?"
She blushed. "Ugh. This is embarrassing, but remember, I didn't choose it. My psychotic mother had an unbelievable craving for yogurt when she was pregnant with me and she thought it would be funny to name me Gertrude so that she could address me by saying, 'Yo! Gert!' Get it? Like yogurt. Anyway, my dad managed to get her to make my middle name Gertrude instead."
Sam had turned around in his seat to look at her in disbelief. "You are so lying."
"Nope. Check my birth certificate. It says Addella Gertrude Sorenson."
He laughed. "Sorry. But that's pretty awful."
Addy seemed to sense Dean's silent laughter too, because she shot him a look that could kill. "And now I'm sure that you'll use this little tidbit of knowledge against me at every opportunity."
"Yep," he replied.
The game continued, allowing Sam to learn, among other things, that if she could have any exotic pet, she would have a cheetah; that her favorite band was called Hawthorne Heights; that her favorite food was orange chicken; and her most embarrassing moment had been tripping and falling down in the cafeteria – wearing a skirt.
Addy was able to find out that Sam really liked candy, especially those sour patch kids things; that he had gone to law school; and that he was a little bit of a computer geek.
Obviously they had managed to talk for quite a while because, after a while, the sun had moved to the opposite side of the sky. The Impala reached the top of a hill and they could all see the ocean stretching out in front of them. Glancing out the window Sam saw the signs for the missing children. A smiling toddler with pig tails was pictured on one flyer; a pre-teen boy with too much acne stared out of another; and a brunette who looked about Addy's age beamed at the camera as she held a puppy under her chin. He looked back at Dean.
"So what now?"
"Now we get lunch because I am freaking starving," Dean replied, turning left to head towards a restaurant. "And while we're there we can ask around about the missing kids."
- - -
In the restaurant we ordered our food and Dean promptly ditched Sam and I to – of course – go flirt with the girl at the cashier.
"Okay," I said to Sam while we waited. "How old is Dean? Because that girl can't be more than twenty."
"He's twenty-seven," he replied.
"He's shameless." I sipped from my water glass. "Should we be asking people about those kids right now? 'Cause I don't really know what to say."
Sam nodded. "I'll ask the waitress when she brings our food."
I glanced back at where Dean was leaning casually against the counter. Sure enough, the girl was wearing the same smitten expression that the waitress from that morning had had plastered over her face.
"What kind of demon steals little kids?" I asked, turning back to Sam.
He took a minute to respond. "It's not necessarily a demon. It could be a vengeful spirit."
"Spirit?" I arched my eyebrows. "Does this mean ghost stories are sometimes true?"
Sam nodded. "Dean and I have run across more than a couple spirits straight from the legends. Ever heard of Bloody Mary?"
My eyes nearly popped out of my head. "No way! My friends and I tried to summon her when I was twelve!"
"Well, you're lucky it didn't work," Sam told me.
A moment later our food arrived and he looked up at the waitress. "Excuse me, but I couldn't help noticing how many missing children flyers are posted around town."
The waitress, a chubby middle aged woman shook her head sadly. "No one knows who's been taking 'em. But it seems like every other day another kid vanishes. Just like that. One day they're in here ordering ice cream and the next they're gone." She pointed at a flyer stuck up on the wall. "That girl is a waitress here. Her name's Kristin and her parents are worried sick. The police keep asking if she had a boyfriend or anyone she might've run away with, but that's not somethin' she would do. She's a good kid and she's crazy about her little sister."
I pursed my lips and squinted at the poster, but it was too far away. "That's so awful. How long has she been missing?"
"Since last Monday. She disappeared sometime in the morning."
"And none of her friends know where she could have gone?" Sam asked.
The waitress shook her head. "That's the thing. She wouldn't have gone anywhere. Not willingly."
But I wasn't entirely listening. Instead I was trying to remember something. Something that I felt connected to what was going on in this town. Then I found it.
"Have any of the kids been found?" I asked.
"Not one." She sighed. "It doesn't seem right. This happenin' here. And after Ashley…"
"What happened to Ashley?"
"Terrible. She was just five years old and livin' in a house that looked over the beach. Her mamma had taken her outside with her while she cleaned the windows. Not ten minutes later she calls out Ashley's name. When she didn't come running, Mrs. Chandler walks over to her backyard and sees little Ashley wander right over the edge of the cliff." Tears had sprung into the woman's eyes. "She fell right into the ocean."
Sam gave her a sympathetic look, but I was lost in thought.
Taking a deep breath, the waitress said, "Enough of this sad talk. You enjoy your food, all right?"
"Thank you," I said and as she walked away Dean slid into the booth next to me.
He immediately went into a description of how hot the girl he'd been talking to was, but I cut him off.
"I read this story in a book of ghost stories once," I said, mostly to Sam since Dean had begun cramming French fries into his mouth. "It was about how this woman killed her kids because she thought they were causing problems between her and her new husband and she didn't want to lose him. So she pushed them off a cliff into the ocean. But then her husband left her anyway and she was completely alone, so she jumped off the cliff herself. In the story it says that she steals other people children now, to replace her own."
Sam was nodding. "That fits. So we'll just have to look up local suicides now."
Half an hour later we were walking towards the public library. On the sidewalk a woman wearing a simple white dress was walking past us with her son. She caught my eye and smiled. I forced a smile back, hoping that this wasn't the kind of town where everyone smiled at complete strangers. I had never been comfortable with that.
Sam held the door open for me and I ducked inside the building. We were flipping through old newspapers on one of those machines when it happened. My skull exploded with pain. Trying not to gasp in shock, I casually massaged my temples and closed my eyes.
"Hey," Sam said, gently nudging me with his shoulder. I opened my eyes. "You okay?"
Nodding I mumbled, "I just have a really bad headache. It'll go away eventually."
Dean continued to scan headlines until, finally, he paused. "Think we've got something."
I could barely see through the searing pain, but, through gritted teeth I asked, "What?"
Sam leaned closer to the screen. "In 1952, Melanie Rogers committed suicide six days after her three young children were reported missing. It says here she jumped off a cliff into the ocean. Her husband had apparently been getting ready to leave her. He told the paper that he thought Melanie had murdered her children."
"Which makes sense," Dean said. "It fits right in with the legend. Crazy lady thinks her new husband is going to ditch her, so she throws her kids into the ocean. When it turns out her marital problems aren't actually their fault, she follows them."
Clenching my fists to distract myself from the pain I said, "And now she's stealing other children as replacements." I unclenched my fists and put a hand to my forehead. "Holy crap that hurts."
"Do you want me to go get you some Aspirin or something?" Sam offered.
I shook my head. "I'll be okay." Taking a deep breath I said, "Thanks though. Anyway, if she died in 1952, why are kids just disappearing now?"
"Maybe they've disappeared before," Sam said. "Dean –"
"I'm on it." Dean scooted his chair over so that he was in front of a computer. Clicking open an internet window, he began typing.
Slowly the pain in my head was fading and I relaxed. A youngish man with dark sunglasses on and shaggy white blonde hair walked by us so I lowered my voice and said, "What do we do to get rid of her?"
"We find her grave," said Dean. "Dig the bitch up and salt and burn her bones."
"Do you know where she's buried?"
"At the moment, no."
"Addy?" Sam asked. "Do you know that guy?" He was looking at the blonde guy who had stopped walking and was standing a few yards from us, watching me. Or so it seemed. "He still had his sunglasses on, so I couldn't really be sure.
"I don't think so." I stared at the man, but he was unfazed.
Finally, I looked back at Dean's computer screen, ignoring him.
"Okay. So apparently a year after Melanie killed herself, five kids vanished. One washed up on shore a couple months later. Then, in 1964, five kids went missing again. And in 1989, five more kids," Dean reported, turning to face us. "How many kids are gone right now?"
"There are the three on the flyers," I stated. "But then there's the girl who died."
"One girl died?" Dean raised his eyebrows, but I ignored him, glancing back to where the blonde boy had been standing. He was gone.
"So, if the pattern holds, one more kid's going to be taken," Sam said.
I looked back at the newspaper article Dean had found Melanie in. I hadn't noticed it before because of my headache. There was a picture of her to go with the story. I gasped, the realization that I recognized her sinking in.
"Oh my God."
"What?" Sam asked, anxiously.
"I saw her!" I cried out. "She was walking on the sidewalk with a little boy. Oh, God. We have to save him!"
Before either of the brothers had stood up, I was sprinting towards the door.
- - -
