Haven Timeline: Chronology of Events and People

by The Cat's Whiskers

This is a "back story" timeline of events and people in the Haven "universe". Any writer wishing to use this to make life easier is welcome to. The timeline has a lot of explanation so I have also done a Short Dates Only Timeline. It is designed to dip in/out of as needed for your own story writing. It covers the distant past founding/origin of Haven up to Season 4.

6. Chapter 6: 1982 to 1985

This is a timeline/chronology of characters and events for the TV show: Haven

For Disclaimer and information see Chapter 1…

Chapter 6

Summer 1982:

Increasingly in conflict with Vince Teagues and struggling with his craving for the "kill thrill", and increasingly fretful about the return of a woman looking identical to Sarah Vernon, his father's murderess, a paranoid Simon Crocker sets in place a contingency plan: he sells his 120-foot boat, the Cape Rouge, to a fellow smuggler/seaman, 'Ray Veigler, up in Castle Rock'. It would be logical that he did so at a heavily discounted price on two conditions: one that Veigler "took ownership" but left the boat moored at Haven and only took real ownership of it once Simon was deceased; two that Veigler should swear to "lose" the Cape Rouge back to Simon's chosen heir, Duke Crocker, in a rigged poker game upon Duke's 21st birthday (1996).

The first condition gave Simon two things: a) somewhere to hide the large casket in the bilges whilst b) still being able to have full access to his "accoutrements" stored in it, including maintaining and updating* his journal.

We see in S2 that Duke had no idea his father had owned the Cape Rouge; since the indication from Season 1 is that Duke lived with Simon as a single father rather than with his mother, then Simon must have owned at least two boats concurrently probably since before Duke was born. Most probably he ostensibly only had "one" boat that he and Duke lived on, to further throw people off the scent of him owning or having ever owned the Cape Rouge.

This subterfuge would help Simon both as a smuggler and in dealing with issues arising from his Trouble. Although Duke himself doesn't present as wealthy (those long shorts and old-man cardigans) we see that he is actually a successful businessman – he makes a go of both the Cape Rouge cargo and the Grey Gull bar; likewise there is nothing to suggest that any Crockers' past including Simon had not also been able to fund such things as visibly owning one "home" boat (or house) and a secret also-owned home boat (or house). Fitzwilliam Crocker in 1786 was able to have Regis Glendower, the town's top silversmith who charged accordingly, make not one but two mystically enhanced silver boxes of delicate and detailed craftsmanship, none of which came cheap. It is also possible that Simon was paid off, either by the woman involved or her family to "go away" if he had fathered a child – the mother of his oldest (as yet unnamed) son or her father or other relative for example may have given him a lump sum to clear off in the shrewd assessment she/they were better off without him on the scene.

The second condition, probably sweetened by Simon accepting a much lower offer than a 120-foot prime boat such as the Cape Rouge was worth, obviously had the no-doubt fully intended effect of making Veigler feel under a moral obligation to honour a promise that, in fact, could not be enforced. Since Simon was killed in 1983, Ray Veigler merely had to keep silent about the whole thing and keep the Cape Rouge for himself for evermore. Instead of which, he honoured the arrangement he had made with Simon when an unwitting Duke reached 21 in 1996.

* The last entry of Simon's in the journal (must have been a few days before 21st May 1983) is a message to Duke that he must kill Lucy Ripley if Simon fails to do so. By the end of 1982, Simon was probably on the verge of full-blown paranoia, jumping at shadows and with open hostility between him and his one-time friend, Vince, despite (from Simon's perspective) this all being Vince's fault. By the end of 1982 Simon must have somehow found the photograph Audrey and Duke find in his journal, the one showing Sarah Vernon sat on a bench with a young Dave Teagues (in a distinctly Harvard preppy pastel pullover) – proof to Simon that his erstwhile friend had been lying to him for years about the Teagues brothers' involvement in his father Roy Crocker Junior's death.

The arrival at New Year 1983 of a young man named James Cogan who hardly would have let any time pass before making it known he was searching for his birth mother Sarah Vernon – the woman who had killed Simon's father – would no doubt have sent his blood pressure and anxiety into orbit. In mid-April 1983, Simon would have had conniptions the moment he laid eyes on Lucy Ripley, doppelganger of Sarah Vernon – yet a woman who had no idea who Sarah Vernon was, or who James Cogan was, or even who Vince and Dave Teagues were, at least at first.

Summer 1982:

Birth of Claire Callahan, murdered by Arla Cogan in October 2010 (the real Claire tells Audrey when they meet in 2010 that she is 28 years old). Although we don't meet Claire until Season 3, it seems apparent that she has been there since Season 1, and that like Dwight the cleaner, she is one of Garland Wuornos' under-the-radar band of "fixers" who help him "hold the town together" and keep the Troubles on the down-low.

Audrey is very resistant to having mandatory insurance-required counselling sessions with Claire until Claire alludes to having a Dwight-style backroom "fixer" status: 'You're on the frontlines, I get 'em when you're done,' and points out to Audrey that the reason she is needed to help and support people just like Audrey is because, 'we take on everyone else's crazy, but pretty soon we have no room for our own.'

The real Claire Callahan is a positive, likeable woman, and the revelation of her murder in mid-October by Arla results in the implacable hatred of Audrey and Duke in particular against Arla. In S3:13 when Nathan enters the Barn with Audrey and finds that his Trouble is gone, Howard says that the Troubles are neutralised in the Barn; we see Audrey's momentary expression and she then leaves Nathan to talk to their son James, before she purposely goes outside and lets Arla enter the Barn with her quite readily, despite being previously implacably opposed to any such happening. It is clear that this is an act of revenge on Audrey's part against Arla for Claire's murder because she knows that James will see Arla for the monster she is inside as reflected in the "sewn together" external body she has to wear outside.

The real Claire Callahan also did her best to help Jordan McKee see how self-destructive her rage was, by practising "tough love" and refusing to treat Jordan as a counsellor any longer when Jordan used her "agonising touch" Trouble to kidnap her rapist and hold him prisoner, torturing him for three days to the extent he was still in Haven Hospital's long-term care ward in a coma (S3:6 Real Estate). Personally, I thoroughly approve of Jordan's proactive method of retribution against the man who raped her, and indeed it would be great if real-life rape and paedophile victims were able to temporarily be gifted with the same "Trouble" as Jordan McKee and granted 24 hours inside a locked room with their abuser/rapist trussed up like a Christmas turkey.

I certainly have no problem with that whether the paedophile/rapist was a man or woman. (Yes, women are paedophiles and can commit sex crime that constitute rape: one biographical example is found in the ghastly misandrist mess that is The Vagina Monologues; the most pitiable "essay" (I use the term loosely) chapter was contributed by a black American woman who as a young girl of six had been raped by a male family friend; her father's excellent response to this was to shoot the rapist, leaving him paralysed for life in a wheelchair – what a shame. Her mother then barred him from seeing her for seven years because of this, on the basis of his 'violence' and being an 'unfit father'?! It is deeply unfortunate that the poor girl was left in the care of a clearly psychologically troubled (no pun intended) ideologue for no better reason that she was the mother rather than the far better care of her eminently sensible father, because in the essay, the woman describes how, effectively, she was raped a second time at the age of 13, with her mother's complicity, by a 24-year-old female lesbian neighbour/friend of the mother. With a heart-breaking naïveté, but also a very revealing ambivalence about her life, the woman, who must have goodness knows what mental illness issues, writes a lacklustre portrayal of this second attack as some sort of moment of feminine empowerment because her second rapist was female and violated her with her mother's encouragement as some sort of "men are evil because they're men" ideology.)

What I would prefer to think is that the reason Claire disapproved of Jordan's actions was not any consideration for the vile scumbag, but rather was because she was wise enough and prescient enough to understand how Jordan's obsessive hatred and murderous rage was damaging her emotionally and mentally far more than her physical torture damaged the rapist. Indeed, we see Claire's fears are fully justified in warping Jordan's personality into an obsessive hatred and corrosive bitterness from S3:12 right through Season 4 until, in S4:7, Jordan's psychological state leads her to enable Wade Crocker's unstable psychotic nature, and he murders her. Should her rapist regain consciousness anytime from 2011, he will find that he has outlived his victim.

Something else is also of concern to me - In Season 1 we had and lost the great character that was Eleanor Carr; in Season 2 we gained and lost the real Audrey Parker; in Season 3 we had and lost the excellent character that was Claire Callahan and in Season 4 we had and lost the strong characters of Jordan McKee and, or at least so it seems, Jennifer Mason (S4:13).

While I am all for avoiding main character complacency in the post-M*A*S*H TV scriptwriting era, I admit I am a bit worried about the show's apparent intention to kill off every main female character (bar The Woman) per season. It's a bit too much like Supernatural, whose initial willingness to kill off a main character if it made the story stronger (e.g., Geoffrey Dean Morgan as the brothers' father, John Winchester) in early seasons turned into something dangerously close to farcical parody by annihilating several main characters in later seasons that they then ended up desperately "needing" further on to service storylines, exposition, OSEs and so forth (e.g., Misha Collins as Castiel; Jim Beaver as Bobby Singer; Alona Tal as Jo Harvelle.)

TV shows work best when there is an ensemble four-tier cast of mains, secondary, recurring and occasional characters; there is always one that will engage some viewer's interest and it gives an added realism rather than some "universes" where the main characters seem to be the only ones that exist half the time (in Haven's case supposedly in a town of over 25,000 people!) The continual killing off of main/semi-main characters willy-nilly as an inversion of the "main characters are never hurt/killed" tradition reduces the viewers' ability and willingness to "suspend disbelief" and keep watching – loss of viewers equals loss of ratings equals cancellation.

New Year 1983:

James Cogan arrives in Haven from Colorado where he has been living in Nederland with his adoptive parents, Paul and June Cogan, searching for information about his birth parents. He stays at the Altair Bay Inn, run by the Toomey* family. It appears that he meets Arla (maiden name unknown) very soon after arriving and they have a whirlwind romance in January 1983. In S3 Magic Hour Part 1 and Part 2, when Duke and Audrey visit Nederland, Colorado, June Cogan gives them the family photo album – we see the wedding photograph of James and Arla in February 1983, however, the fact that Arla is Troubled and that there is no "family wedding" shot of the Cogans with James and Arla on their wedding day, or any people from Nederland suggests that Arla and James met and married in Haven and did so at a "rapid" speed that meant June and Paul and other friends from Nederland could not travel up for the wedding or vice versa.

* In 2010, Arla Cogan, disguised most likely as Roslyn Toomey, knocked on the door of Audrey's loft at The Grey Gull and Tasers her when she opens the door. Tying her up in the basement of the Inn, Arla switches most probably between the skin of Grady of The Guard to hit Audrey and threaten her that he knows she is Lucy, and then to become Roslyn Toomey, pretending to also be held prisoner by the strange man as a ploy to get Audrey to reveal what she knows about Lucy and James. At that point, Arla has at least three "skins" available to her: Grady, Roslyn Toomey and the real Tommy Bowen. However it is unlikely she would risk using Tommy in case Audrey somehow manages to catch a glimpse of "him" and recognise him later.

In 2010, the Inn is has been defunct for some years as a going concern; it appears Roslyn and Wesley have returned to sell the inn after being absent for many years. Wesley calls Haven PD when he gets back to the inn and finds that his mother has disappeared and blood evidence that she was seriously injured. Since Roslyn's paranoid schizophrenic son Wesley is persuaded by Nathan to "go with the Mothership" in the hope of seeing his grandfather again (a self-serving act which Duke, angry at how Nathan accuses him because of the Crocker Curse, rightly calls him a hypocrite for), there seems to be nobody left who knows what Roslyn looks like – Audrey never saw "her", only heard her, and that was really Arla, as we see in flashback due to Arla's habitual word-whiskers, 'hush'. Therefore even after Audrey is freed by Duke and Nathan, Arla is able to continue using Roslyn Toomey's skin because there is nobody in Haven to know any different.

February 1983:

James Cogan marries Arla, apparently after a whirlwind romance – it seems unlikely that James knew Arla "as a person" in such a short period of time, or else he just isn't very discerning of character, given that he is totally unaware his wife is an obsessive, mass-murdering psychopath:

That is not something that one just wakes up one morning and decides to try out being for a change of pace, and Arla's reaction to her Trouble of going straight to the solution of "right-o, let's get a' murdering" clearly shows that she was already mentally disturbed long before she met James.

Indeed, her family Trouble, of the skin literally being sloughed off during intense stress, reflects how a variety of real-life mental disorders present in an emotional-psychological context. The speed and intensity with which she fell "in love" with James, really infatuation, was also an indicator of instability, as genuine love, whether romantic or platonic, takes time to grow and indeed will only grow and be maintained with constant, diligent effort. Arla's complete emotional breakdown at James's apparent death on 28th May 1983, followed within 24 hours by her first murder (as discovered by Vince and Dave in old copies of the Haven Herald in S3) further indicates mental illness, and her narcissistic psychopathy is highlighted by the fact that never once does it even occur to her that James might not entirely approve of her mass-murdering people just so she can present him with a familiar face.

Due to Arla's instability, it strongly suggests that James was not involved with Arla for very long at all before marrying her, as he did not get to know her well enough to realise she had serious mental illness/psychosis that meant she should not have been put under any emotional stress or duress. In fact, marrying the son of The Woman and Nathan Wuornos was about the worst life-choice Arla could have made if she'd tried.

Mid-April 1983, probably around 21st April, start of the Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower:

Lucy Ripley arrives in Haven, looking like Sarah Vernon except for being brunette not redhead; she meets James and Arla and they quickly forge a close bond, although Lucy does not appear to realise that Arla is Troubled or borderline mentally ill; in real life terms Arla presents on the Schizophrenic spectrum. During this period, Lucy also meets 8-year-old Duke Crocker and 8-year-old Nathan Wuornos, just as Sarah Vernon had apparently also met 8-year-old Garland Wuornos and apparently, during late 1955, 6-year-old Simon Crocker. Since Simon and his mother were living in Derry when Simon was killed and the murder was undoubtedly covered up by The Guard at the very least, if not Vince and Dave as well, it probably took Simon a lot of years to track down information and discover that the "pretty redheaded lady" he had "known around" Haven in 1955 to 1956 was his father's murderess. Sarah may even have tried to build bridges with Mrs Crocker and Simon as a "silent" apology for her part in Roy's death.

April 1983:

Lucy and James go to the Holloway house to try and help Roland Holloway, who has "become" the house; they find that he has trapped his wife and daughters inside and that, in despair, in a secret room, Mrs Holloway used a mirror to make Roland watch as she shot dead both their girls and then herself because he would not let them leave the house.

Enraged at what Roland has done to his family, Lucy and James refuse to help him and leave him trapped there. Roland seeks revenge on "Lucy" in 2010 (see 'Special Mention: Real Estate') but Audrey's memory of being there as Lucy with James helps her escape – it would therefore suggest that the memories of previous Incarnations are not "erased" but rather "filed in the subconscious", like steaming off the wallpaper to redecorate and revealing a previous one underneath, and then another underneath that, etc., until you get down to the original brick/stonework.

2nd May 1983:

James Cogan mysteriously disappears with evidence of foul play – Lucy, Arla, Vince and Dave all begin looking for him.

After 4th May and before 21st May 1983:

In S2:12 Sins of the Fathers, Simon's 'ghost' explains to Duke that he had the opportunity to kill Jenny Myers' grandfather, but could not bring himself to do so. A week later, Jenny Myers was part of "Mrs Holloway's* Third Grade class" (8 year olds) who went camping in a particular meadow – when Mrs Holloway told the scary campfire story, Jenny's Trouble – her fear emanated from her as waves of fatally poisonous "gas" like Carbon Monoxide – kicked in, and twelve 8-year-olds, Mrs Holloway and the other chaperone died. The following morning, Jenny Myers' grandfather** came to Simon and implored him to kill him, which Simon did.

During this period, James Cogan had disappeared and was being frantically sought by Lucy, Arla, Vince and Dave, Lucy also having to deal with an increasingly distraught and emotionally crumbling Arla – it is therefore likely that is why Lucy wasn't there to help Simon or anyone else find another solution. From what we glean in S2:12 and Vince Teagues' confession in S4, and the fact that Simon is killed so soon after this event, it appears killing Jenny Myers' grandfather and being able to use the "greater good" excuse was the final straw for Simon, where he finally stopped battling his craving for the "kill thrill" blood-rush and where he became like Wade – justifying his serial killing on the basis that one death saved dozens or hundreds of people from misery.

This is what in the end forced Vince to have to kill Simon; perhaps the reason Dwight hallucinates in S4:9 that Duke is planning to kill everyone who is Troubled is because when Dwight was a child, after that event he overheard or witnessed something that revealed Simon was planning to kill all the Troubled people in Haven in May 1983 (with the exception of himself and Duke, presumably).

There is no way to know, but it may be that Simon Crocker was the one who abducted James Cogan on 2nd May as some sort of pre-emptive strike or bargaining chip against Vince and Lucy due to his paranoia and mistrust and his rage at his former friend Vince for what Vince's emotional blackmail had turned him into. Since Vince, Dave and Garland undoubtedly knew Nathan's biological father was Max Hansen, it seems likely that Simon discovered new information about the Troubles that he recorded in the Crocker family journal he inherited from Roy (why Vince was so eager for Dwight to snatch it first in S2).

Since Nathan and Duke were the same age, it is likely Simon already knew of Max Hansen's faux idiopathic neuropathy Trouble and also knew – or realised following the sledding accident - that Nathan was the biological son of the Troubled Max Hansen, by then in Shawshank Prison. It may be that somehow Simon found out that James Cogan was the biological son of Nathan Wuornos, his 8-year-old son's Troubled schoolmate. Did Simon perhaps kidnap James (whose last memory was of being hit from behind) and then discover that James was "numb", unable to feel pain, which meant he had to be a close relative of the Hansen family – a blood sample removed from an unconscious James compared with one taken from then-8-year-old Nathan (who would never feel it) would show a strong probability of close family relationship. Additionally, Troubles don't work in the Barn – Nathan could feel, so James would not have remembered the brief period he was unable to feel anything when he presumably revived there between May and October 1983.

* The "Mrs Holloway" who taught Third Grade who died in May 1983 couldn't have been the same Mrs Holloway as was Roland's wife as that death was in the process of being covered up by Vince and Dave following Lucy and James's discovering her murder-suicide in April. However, it is most likely that Mrs Holloway was married to a male relative of Roland Holloway.

** The Crocker Curse has some 'in-universe' plausibility problems. While the "minor" effect is that a few drops of Troubled blood gives a couple of seconds of super-strength and an "orgasmic" rush, the "major" part of the curse is that if Crocker male kills a Troubled person, his or her Trouble is "cured".

If the person is Patient Zero of a Curse (like Jack Driscoll) the cure works relatively (no pun intended) by meaning that all their living genetic descendants are cured. If the person him or herself is a descendant of a past Troubled Patient Zero, as is the norm (Harry Nix, Ben Harker Junior, Wade Crocker) then the cure is universal, affecting all living genetic relatives, including lineal and lateral, such as previous generations such as grandparents and cousins.

However, this would actually be very easy to achieve: when a Troubled Havenite reached a point in their old age where they felt the minuses were outweighing the pluses – depending on health and vitality any time in their 80s or 90s or even 100s – they could find the senior man of the Crocker family living in Haven. Go along to his boat or his bar, have a nice cup/tumbler of (drugged) tea/coffee/whisky/wine/gin & tonic and drift off into peaceful comatose slumber on the couch. At which point said Crocker man would gently but firmly insert a sharp stiletto between the unconscious person's third and fourth rib – even if you wanted to, you cannot avoid piercing the heart if you stab someone that way. There is minimal blood loss to the extent it is hard to know anything has happened, but still enough to be absorbed through the skin of the Crocker man, and then, courtesy of the Haven ME (who must of necessity be a member of The Guard or at least "in the know") finding the person died of 'natural old age', the grateful and now curse-free family have a nice funeral at which the Crockers are gratefully and thankfully invited.

The same applies to any Havenite who is Troubled and who learns that they have been diagnosed with, for example, terminal cancer, Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Chorea, Lou Gehrig's Disease (Motor Neurone Disease), a Dementia (Alzheimer's Vascular, Lewy-Body, etc.), or who, for whatever reason, has decided to end his or her life. No exorbitant medical bills to extend life merely for a few weeks or months at the most; a pain-free death at a time and date of the person's own choosing, and above all the knowledge that your immediate family and all your genetic relatives, including people you don't know and have never met, dozens and most likely hundreds of people, including thousands of people yet to be born through the ages, are all going to be free of a terrible "supernatural disease", thanks to You – get buffing my halo and pass that harp, please!

Above all if every Havenite had done that from the 1600s, the Troubles would quickly have been gotten rid of altogether by the time Mara and William came back to see the latest results of their atrocities – as we have seen through Seasons 1-3, the nature of several Troubles indicate that the people who have them are interrelated*** through marriages local to that area of Maine, in locations real-life and imaginary in the Stephen King-verse –Bangor, Haven, Newport, Derry, Cleaves Mill, Castle Rock – so each and every time a large number of people would be completely "cured" and made Trouble-free.

*** As examples of probable interrelation:

Marion Caldwell's emotions trigger violent weather events (S1:1) Mara Kopf's emotions back in the 1950s froze things around her. Was Mara Kopf Marion Caldwell's mother?

In the opening credits, the Halleck family farmstead "vanishes" without trace in 1934; in 1955 Arthur Chambers' vanishes various of his neighbours and family members without trace (S1:13), although in his case nobody remembers they existed – was Arthur Chamber's mother's maiden name Halleck?

Julia Carr (S1) has the appearing/disappearing The Guard symbol, as does Vince Teagues (S4). Was Vince Teagues' father the brother or paternal first cousin of Julia's maternal grandfather?

Ian Haskell, S2:2, takes on/manifests the Trouble of a person if he touches his or her blood; he can only "take on" one Trouble at a time, but he can repeatedly take on a person's Trouble by going back and getting their blood on his skin; Duke Crocker S2- S4 – gets super-strength from absorbing a Troubled person's blood and can remove the Trouble from their whole family by killing one member of it. Since Fitzwilliam Crocker was likely the illegitimate son of a Crocker mother, it may be that Ian Haskell descends from Fitzwilliam Crocker's biological father in a legitimate line?

Anson Shumway, S2:6 – his OCD means he unwittingly resets time for everyone including himself back to the "start" of the day when he thinks he has got things wrong and wants to redo it correctly – he does not know he is doing so. Eventually commits suicide when Audrey changes things to save his daughter to prevent further "restarts"; Stuart Mosley, S3:9 – time shifts people to a time period he is thinking about, usually when he is very upset or under extreme stress – doesn't really realise what he is doing – sends Nathan and Duke back to 16th August 1955 after "recognising" them as the men at the VA Hospital in Haven who were involved with his nurse, Sarah Vernon. Since Stuart Mosley is of an age to be Anson Shumway's father, but their surnames are different, it would appear that Anson was Stuart's maternal nephew or perhaps Stuart was the son of Anson's grandmother by a Mosley husband and Anson's father was by a Shumway husband?

Bobby Mueller, S1:2 – his nightmares become reality to those he feels threatened by; Duncan Fromsley (just glimpsed, S3:5) – his dreams manifest in reality; dreaming of a fire, he awoke to find his bed on fire – he and his wife escaped but his young son died and he was wrongly jailed for manslaughter by "arson" as prosecutors claimed he was attempting to commit insurance fraud. Jordan manipulates Nathan to getting Fromsley transferred so The Guard can "prison break" him; she reveals that Fromsley's prison doctor has stopped his sleeping medication putting the entire prison at risk should Fromsley dream of there being a fire, flood, etc. Carrie Benson, S4:7, what she dreams become reality – the same technique Audrey used to help Bobby Mueller, she re-uses to help Carrie. Given the three different surnames, and the differences in age between Bobby (late teens), Carrie (mid-20s) and Duncan (age 44), and the fact that Carrie said her Trouble afflicted only the women in her family, it is most likely the three are related to some degree of cousinship through their respective mothers' ancestry.

Arla Cogan (S3) has her skin peel off her body if triggered by an incident of extreme stress – in Arla's case, this was the disappearance and suspected murder of her husband James, she also showed obsessive, volatile and murderous personality traits; contact with Jordan McKee's skin (S3 and S4) causes the recipient excruciating pain, and the McKee Curse is triggered by an incident of extreme stress – in Jordan's case, this was when she was attacked and raped (it seems by a man who followed her from her work at the Gun and Rose Bar?) and she also showed obsessive, volatile and murderous personality traits. Arlo McMartin died of a heart attack age only 32 triggered by an incident of extreme stress; he also showed obsessive, volatile and murderous personality traits upon his "return" in S2:12. Arlo was the masculine form of Arla, and he shared a Scottish surname with Jordan, indicating perhaps a mutual ethnic ancestry – it seems likely Arla, Arlo and Jordan are related to some degree of cousinship or aunt/nephew/niece.

Probably 7th May 1983 (peak of TEAMS):

With Lucy focussing on the hunt for Sarah's missing son, it would explain why she wasn't able to help Mr Toomey at the Altair Bay Inn when his Trouble meant his UFO fantasies came to life and he was "abducted" by aliens. In S3:1, Nathan feels he has no choice but to persuade his grandson Wesley to do the same, when the shock of his mother's murder triggers the adult Wesley's same Trouble and Audrey is too injured to "talk him down" after being Tasered by an assailant she doesn't remember (really Arla) and held in the basement of the Altair Bay Inn.

Update 12th September 2014, thanks to Kiluvi's review of Chapter 6 – I missed this one:

12th May 1983:

The Haven Herald reports the impending death of Vaughn Carpenter, last direct descendant of one of Haven's oldest and most wealthy families – who is comatose in Haven hospital with bacterial meningitis; in S1:10 As You Were, Chameleon Vaughn sends away "his" wife from Haven (she has been in on the switch all along) and he has the newspaper clipping in his desk drawer.

In the episode, we learn that Lucy Ripley (at that point Audrey still believes her to be her birth mother) helped* the Chameleon – who was dying – get to Vaughn's bedside and become Vaughn, with the co-operation of Vaughn's wife. Unlike the skinwalker (Arla Cogan) who can only literally steal the appearance of a person, the Chameleon can by touch become the other person, including their memories, their emotions, their beliefs – but the Chameleon's touch kills the person they are going to become, except in one case, that of The Woman, whom the Chameleon was able to become without killing. In As You Were the Chameleon is "dying" in that having been Vaughn for 26 years, his form is failing.

* Since Lucy was in the middle of looking for the kidnapped James Cogan since 2nd May, why she was able to – or decided to – help the Chameleon when she didn't help Mr Toomey on 7th May is uncertain, however, there are several possible reasons. Lucy had doubtless already sussed out her daughter-in-law Arla as mentally and emotionally unstable, and knew that in Haven that also meant Troubled more often than not. She may have had some belief that Arla was a Chameleon herself – as Skinwalker and Chameleon Troubles are related in form, and maybe even genetically amongst interrelated families. Maybe Lucy was following up a lead on the disappeared Arla and trying to use the Chameleon's situation to help Arla?

We also don't know who the Chameleon was in 1983, as that body also began to die – it is more probable that the Chameleon had helped Lucy and so when the truth was revealed, Lucy felt obligated to return the favour. There is no way to know – we do know the Chameleon wasn't "evil" in the sense that Arla was – it had no desire to hurt anyone and couldn't help the fact that its process killed the victim, unlike Arla who specifically set out on a mass murder spree with no conscience; the death of Eleanor Carr in As You Were was an accident.

21st May 1983:

Death of Simon Crocker – initially appearing to be an incidental heart attack on a boating trip, despite him being only 34 years old at the time. The ghost of Simon Crocker reveals in S2:12 that Simon must have realised in his dying moments that it was really foul play, as he accuses "Lucy" and Garland of conspiring to murder him (Garland's reply shows he realised it was murder but believed Lucy had done it). In S4, Vince Teagues finally confesses to Jordan that he arranged Simon's murder, aided by Lucy. It is possible/probable that Lucy believed Simon was responsible for the kidnapping of Sarah's son James, and that killing him would ensure James's safety/rescue.

28th May 1983:

"Who killed The Colorado Kid?" In the opening credits, 28th May 1983 is the dateline of the eponymous photograph that forms the key mystery in the first three seasons.

The photograph (taken by Dave Teagues) shows the "body" of a young man, his face turned away so as to be unseen, propped half-seated against a mooring timber on the headland below Tuwiuwok Bluffs. The man is later demonstrated to be James Cogan. Looking at him face on is Lucy Ripley, holding the hand of a young boy we later learn is Duke Crocker.

We see another photographer – Morris Crane – in the shot photographing Lucy. In the background of the photograph on the left you see a Haven PD patrol officer who is Garland Wuornos, and three people: a thin adult man who has either a goatee beard or more likely a scarf wrapped around his mouth and chin; a young woman in a denim jacket and denim jeans, and another young woman standing slightly forward wearing a baggy sweater with a dark coloured shoulder strap and long tumbling hair – this last woman is revealed in S1:10 to be Vanessa Stanley, Duke's babysitter, who like Garland Wuornos and Duke Crocker, is Troubled.

The thin man with the face scarf's identity is unknown, but logically the man would be Vince Teagues, since Dave is taking the photograph and the brothers are rarely far from each other; the woman in the denim jacket and jeans is also unknown but, logically, she would most likely be James's wife, Arla Cogan. On the extreme left of the photograph there is an unknown person near to Dave Teagues – all you see is a bit of an arm and leg. Most likely this was 8-year-old Nathan Wuornos.

Still 28th May 1983, late afternoon into early night:

James's state of being at this point was unknown – was he really dead, or in so deep a state of unresponsiveness that he appeared so? In S3:1, Vince states – with obvious honesty for once – that he and Lucy buried James Cogan in "Potters Field" (now Eastside Cemetery) in Plot 301. It is obvious when the grave is exhumed and found to be empty bar a message in Audrey's own handwriting: find him before the Hunter that Vince is genuinely stunned. But Howard said that the Barn had 'healed' (not 'resurrected') James.

Whatever the case, James had to have been "buried" privately by Lucy and Vince on the same day his body was discovered – 28th May. If Lucy knew he was really not dead (something she clearly didn't confide to Vince or Arla) or knew/hoped that she could summon the Barn and resurrect James, she would have been desperate to get him there, but without inciting suspicion, meaning she would have to get James "officially" buried before she could retrieve him.

A distraught Lucy pointing out to Vince that Arla had now disappeared – we learn the shock of seeing his body triggered her Trouble (probably she felt it start to happen at the scene when Dave was taking the famous photograph) – and that there was obviously still danger to herself that she couldn't concentrate on with her son lying in a morgue no doubt prompted Vince to act.

We already know that Garland supported Vince and Dave in "holding Haven together" (literally) and since Eleanor Carr was the deputy ME at the time, Vince, Eleanor and Garland no doubt facilitated spiriting James's body from the morgue with no autopsy or paper trail – it is likely Lucy, Eleanor, Garland and Vince buried James hastily in Potters Field together by the evening of 28th May 1983 (in 301, Vince is the only one of the other three still alive). Since a person who is alive but whose breathing is so shallow as to be undetectable will still not survive more than a few hours in an airtight container (coffin) buried under six feet of soil (standard for graves in the US and UK), there can be no doubt that as soon as it was full night, Lucy must have gone back to Potters Field and re-dug out the fresh grave on her own and then refilled the coffin with bricks, written her message and reburied it.

However, it seems likely that Lucy would have known she needed some help in getting James to the Barn on Kick 'Em Jenny Neck Island. If the Barn manifested only on Kick 'Em Jenny Neck Island in 1983 as it did in 2010 (and presumably 1956, though we are never told why it manifests only there) then Lucy would need someone familiar with piloting a boat big enough to get her, James's unconscious body and them as the operator in it.

Help that not only had access to a boat, but whom could be counted on Not To Breathe A Word. The most reliable accomplices she could have in such a situation weren't adults, but children – and that would explain why Duke and Nathan have no memory of 28th May 1983, even though only the Barn erases memory, and there would have been no apparent reason for them to be inside it on that date.

Duke had already been fending for himself more often than not before his father died, and after 21st May would have probably become a latchkey kid now living with an overworked, underpaid mother stressed-out and resentful at unexpectedly finding herself the sole custodial parent after 8 years of Duke living with Simon which gave her the freedom to sort out visitation with Simon to suit her needs not his. It is highly likely that if Lucy hurriedly told Duke to meet her in Potters Field graveyard after dark Duke would have calmly agreed and had no trouble slipping out of his new maternal "home" unnoticed.

It seems unlikely Lucy would have thought to involve Nathan, but the most probable explanation is that Nathan overheard some of Lucy talking to Duke. As a "good" kid, quiet and reserved, Nathan would probably have never caused any trouble with his parents, and so likewise would have been able to slip out of his house without his parents ever thinking he wasn't in bed. Most likely he followed Duke and/or Lucy to Potters Field and inserted himself in the scheme.

We must presume Lucy had some discreet method of getting James's body to the harbour already in hand and that she, Duke and Nathan were not seen. Although, given they were both only eight years old, the two would help Lucy in allaying suspicion – if stopped she could say she had caught both boys sneaking out and was returning the chastised, penitent pair (cue twin expressions of waiflike soulfulness) to their respective homes. That would drastically reduce the chances of Lucy's car being searched and oh, a man's corpse is in the trunk!

We know from Season 1 and S2:12 that as a child Duke lived with Simon rather than his mother, on a boat, and that by 1983 he had had to become extremely self-reliant due to being familiar with pulling first aid/patch-up duty when Simon came back at odd hours 'drunk and beat-up.' As a coastal dweller kid in a fishing town, by the age of eight Duke would have been knowledgeable and experienced in piloting even medium and larger-sized boats and of course familiar with the other boats in the harbour owned by his dad's buddies and associates. Most likely Duke "borrowed" his recently deceased father's boat and took Lucy, James and Nathan to the island and helped her carry James's dead weight (as it were) inside the Barn, where they left James, but both emerged with amnesia, remembering nothing of the previous hours, as they later reveal to Audrey.

Duke would have had no problem piloting the boat back to the harbour, despite not remembering the previous 24 hours, at which point Lucy helped them sneak back in to their current homes with nobody any the wiser they had ever left. Nor would their amnesia be a problem – if anyone tried to talk to them about seeing James Cogan's body, Lucy would have primed them to clam up and claim they didn't want to talk about it.

Besides, adults are rarely really interested in a child's day, so it is likely no adults not even their parents ever asked them about that particular day and if they did say they didn't remember that was actually normal – in real life, 99% of the 7 billion humans in the world have regular routines of life that it is easy to get one period mixed up with another. In short, only celebrities and criminals are usually able to immediately remember where they were on at "2pm three weeks ago last Tuesday"; likewise anyone who can remember where they were, or repeat some conversation from last week verbatim only exists in fiction or in someone who is hiding something/needs an alibi. Remember that we only recognise the "extraordinary" event in hindsight, so very little is memorable as it happens in real time in real life.

Morning of/sometime during day of 28th May 1983:

Arla Cogan disappears, apparently in shock after James is found dead. Since presumably the girl in the photo in denim is Arla (the other one is shown to be Vanessa Stanley), it seems likely that Lucy, Arla, Vince and Dave heard about a "body" being spotted at the base of Tuwiuwok Bluffs and understandably rush down there to see – the shock of seeing that it is James, apparently dead, triggers her Trouble, according to what Arla later tells Audrey 'my skin peeled off in strips'. Since in the photograph in the Haven Herald Arla (?) is wearing a sweater, denim jacket and denim jeans which covered her body, if she felt her skin starting to slough off nobody else would have seen it and with the shock, probably nobody realised she wasn't there any more until a good 15 minutes may half hour later at the earliest. Apparently already aware of or at least hoping that Lucy intends to be able to heal or revive James when they find him she presumably flees in panic so Lucy doesn't find out what has happened. Later that day, Lucy and the others realise she is missing, and when they can't find her, they initially believe she committed suicide. Lucy later learns the truth, but doesn't tell Vince and Dave to protect them from Arla.

28th May 1983 photograph in the Haven Herald:

The 28th May 1983 photograph in the Haven Herald is important, because it was initially the first photographic evidence that could be compared against another photograph or a living person – Audrey Parker's FBI ID badge, in Season 1 - to show that the two women were in fact the same person. We have seen other photographs during subsequent seasons, including those in the Crocker family journal that Simon had (S2), of Sarah Vernon with Dave Teagues, and of Lucy and Dave again with Penny Driscoll at her (bigamous) secret wedding to Cole Glendower as "Gwen" after faking her own death.

In S4:12, we see the Haven Herald newspaper photo of 1902, showing The Woman in the bottom right corner (with the hat and Victor-Edwardian bustle dress which was formal funeral attire at the time). Only by having the 28th April 1983 photograph (if you didn't know about Simon Crocker or the ones of Sarah/Lucy he had) as well as that taken in 1902 was it possible to compare the two and realise that they showed the same woman 81 years apart, yet who had not aged.

29th May 1983:

Arla commits her first known murder; probably improvising with a livestock bolt-gun, she manages to kill a young woman – in all likelihood the sight of the skinless Arla appearing in front of her so paralysed the girl in shock and horror that Arla was able to overpower her. She removes the skin and dumps the body in the sea in the hope that it will be lost forever – it is found many months later, partially eaten by ocean predators and so badly decomposed that it is impossible to tell it has been skinned.

C.30th May 1983:

It seems likely that Lucy was approached - by an unknown young woman insisting she was really Sarah's daughter-in-law Arla Cogan, whom Lucy and the others had concluded had committed suicide in a moment of mental derangement (we know this is the general opinion as Vince and Dave seem to have believed so). Given Arla's total self-absorption, she probably didn't hesitate to reveal to a shocked and understandably confused Lucy the nature of her "Trouble" and explain how she was "okay", and be utterly oblivious to Lucy's horror at her brushing off the murder of an innocent, defenceless young woman as an irrelevancy to her focus of "Where's James? I need to be with him!"

We learn in S3 that the last thing James remembers is being hit from behind. When he exits the Barn in October 2010, Arla tells him that it was Lucy who tried to kill him because she knew that killing the person she loved the most would end the Troubles forever – we learn this is a lie.

By the end of S3 and end of S4, it is still not known who kidnapped James Cogan, why they did so, where he was or what happened to him from 3rd to 27th May 1983. He doesn't remember anything when he exits the Barn in 2010, not realising initially that 27 years have passed and briefly thinking it is still 1983. As of the end of Season 3, of the people we know or think were wholly or partly in the seminal photograph: neither Duke nor Nathan remember anything of the day of 28th May 1983; Audrey has no memory of that period of Lucy's life; neither Vince nor Dave, nor Arla, were involved in the kidnapping or revival trip to the Barn; Garland Wuornos and Vanessa Stanley were both dead; the last person connected with the photograph, Morris Crane, who as the other photographer was most likely to remember key details or have pictures of them, is visited by Audrey and Nathan in S1 and turns out to be utterly insane and totally disconnected from reality.

About end of May early June 1983:

Penny Driscoll begins an affair with Cole Glendower.

1st June to 22nd October 1983:

In S3, Jordan claims that Lucy tried to "run away from the Barn" and that The Guard had to block her exits out of town, but this seems highly unlikely if Agent Howard was telling Audrey the truth in that what stopped the Troubles was not that The Woman entered the Barn, but that The Woman wanted to enter the Barn to save other people getting hurt.

It is far more likely that Lucy was "confronted" by the returned Arla at the end of May 1983 demanding to be taken to be with James, and Lucy realised that Arla was deranged and dangerous. Her priority, given the Colorado Kid was the person she loved the most (there was no "love interest" in 1983), was ensuring Arla got nowhere near James and also attempting to protect her other friends – Vince, Dave, Garland, young Duke, already having his father's death on her conscience, Nathan, Eleanor Carr, who had a young daughter named Julia, etc.

It seems most likely that Lucy's "flight" attempt was a ploy to lure Arla, an unrepentant murderess, away from the real location of the Barn and James – which worked. When Jordan made this claim she was probably remembering from when she was a child* in 1983 and saw/heard her parents, presumably also members of The Guard, panicking because they thought Lucy had "fled her fate". This was most likely the period when Lucy tracked down the real Lucy Ripley and set her up to warn herself 27 years later of the dangers. We see later on that an imposter of Simon Crocker (most likely Arla, see '1984') did visit the real Lucy months after Lucy's visit – Simon had been dead since May and Lucy vanished in the Barn since October. Lucy's causing confusion worked in that Arla could not track her to the Barn and get inside.

* A child's feelings are superficial and their thought processes are simplistic. Up until the age of about 12 years, a child has no concept of his or her parents as people, or individuals. They grasp no further than "my mum" and "my dad" – to a child, the parents are omniscient, omnipotent and also immortal and invulnerable – human frailty is beyond their comprehension to grasp in relation to their parents. This is why divorce, the disappearance/ abandonment of one parent or the death of a parent has such a massively destructive effective emotionally and psychologically on children – their brains are simply incapable of really understanding and processing the events.

To a prepubescent child, everything the parents say and do is accepted unquestioningly, and usually wildly misunderstood by the child at the time and in later adulthood when he or she reminiscences or remembers a childhood event. As a genealogist I was told sorrowful details of marital abandonment and divorce by a cousin who was 95 at the time, and whom had been 31 and pregnant with the couple's fourth (and obviously last child) when it happened. After writing up the account I received an irate phone call from the eldest child who had intercepted the account who was most upset, calling it all lies and protesting she could not possibly show her mother. I could not of course reveal that her own mother had been the source, so apologised and made vague comments about various cousins having told me things (which was true). Going back and checking the facts I found that at the time, she had been 6-years-old to her mother's 31 and I had no doubts about believing my elderly cousin over her daughter's childhood memories that had been hopelessly confused.

Unfortunately adult children condescending to elderly relatives is one of the most delicate issues family historians face, particularly if the adult child's own worldview and opinions – obviously right and others wrong of course – do not agree with the parents' own. My cousin was a mentally competent albeit somewhat frail lady with full mental faculties and her adult children had no compunction about what was, in effect, stealing her mail (a crime in the UK) and unilaterally censoring her access to what she heard, saw and read.

This is also a wider problem – we all always assume our opinion, our belief system and our worldview is not only the right one but the best one, and the wise genealogist (and anyone else) needs to tread carefully – not just between elderly parents and adult children, but between adult parents and teenagers/tweens/older children, siblings, husbands and wives and so on – often people find it easier to confide personal stories and private opinions to a stranger, which then can upset others who are of a different belief, or who think, 'if that were true, he/she/they would have told me, surely!' and they feel rejected, disrespected and unloved. Far easier to blame the stranger than admit that they didn't know something or that their fondly imagined belief of what their spouse/relative/best friend believed – i.e., agreeing with them – was nothing like after all.

In terms of the mythology of Haven, there is nothing more unreliable twenty years later than the kiddie (little pitchers with big ears) who overhears or sees mum and dad or Grandaunt X on some matter and gets a enough of the scene to realise something is going on but has insufficiently mature neurological development to understand it. In all likelihood, Jordan put together what she thought was happening with Lucy and entirely misconstrued it, but as an adult, that was the memory she had. That's why cold cases are so dangerous – because very often the key "witness" being a child at the time means they usually didn't see, hear, or participate in what they thought happened or artificially constructed inside their own minds as what "must" have happened.

C. 1st June to 22nd October1983:

It appears during this period that Lucy must have told Vince and Dave that Arla had not killed herself as had been believed, but did not tell them the truth that Arla was a skinwalker and a deranged murderess, probably to protect them from being seen as a threat by Arla. It would seem most probable that Lucy told them that Arla had had a complete nervous breakdown and she was too irrational to be allowed back to Haven for her own mental health and so Lucy was travelling to "visit" Arla during the periods she kept leaving Haven in the run up to THMS (really laying false trails to throw Arla off the scent). We can guess this is the case because in 2010, Vince and Dave, the two people most intimately involved with Lucy, James and Arla don't know that Arla is still alive or that she is a skinwalker.

Additionally, it is also most likely the period from June to October 1983 was some sort of quid pro quo arrangement wherein, because had Lucy helped Vince kill Simon, when she was faced with Arla, she went to Vince and said she needed "freedom of movement" to leave Haven, but promised to enter the Barn. Obviously taking this on faith, Vince most likely ordered The Guard to pacify the Troubled in general and others, such as the non-Troubled but bigoted firebrand pastor Edmund Driscoll, by letting Lucy "nearly but not quite escape" in her supposed attempts to flee her fate (that Jordan McKee refers to in S3).

We know in retrospect that Lucy's apparent plot to draw in Arla to pursue Lucy in the belief she is trying to flee to where the Barn (and James) is, so Lucy can leave Arla stranded in "Bupkiss" worked as intended. In all likelihood, Vince arranged for The Guard to act as Lucy's transport system during those months. Even before James disappeared on 2nd May 1983, it is clear Lucy confided little to her daughter-in-law - as we see in S3, there are big gaps in Arla's knowledge about and understanding of what the Barn is and The Woman's relationship to it, as when she kidnaps Audrey, she expects Audrey to still be Lucy Ripley and to still know who James and Arla are. In addition, in the flashback to Roland Holloway's house, Lucy is with James, but Arla is not there, despite being James's wife, so it appears Lucy had a (prudent) policy of not involving Arla in the Troubles – perhaps presciently seeing, where James did not, her emotional instability and recognising that emotional shocks were not advisable in any context.

12th July 1983:

Penny Driscoll, wife of the Reverend Edmund Driscoll and mother of Hannah Driscoll, fakes her own death due to irreconcilable differences between her and Ed ideologically. His increasingly irrational hatred towards the Troubled being the driving force. She reinvents herself as Gwen Glendower by marriage to Cole, and has a son, Leith, whom Cole later murders when the adult Leith, fighting his ex-wife for custody of their son Daniel, but unemployed and broke, discovers his mother's true identity and threatens her with blackmail to extort money to fund his custody case. It appears that Hannah Driscoll remains unaware that she had a half-brother or half-nephew. Although Jack and Aidan Driscoll are the first cousins of Hannah Driscoll, they have/had no relationship with Leith Glendower because they are related to Hannah through their uncle Edmund Driscoll, her father, whereas Leith was Cole Glendower's son.

Early October 1983:

Harry Nix's father attacks his family for their organs, and kills most of them - his 21 year old son Harry fights back and kills him, but surviving the attack triggers Harry's Trouble until 22nd October when Lucy enters the Barn.

If it happened only shortly before THMS that would explain why Harry Nix was able to "hang on" because he knew his Trouble would disappear with Lucy and would also explain why Lucy didn't seem to be aware of the Nix family's mass disappearance.

Aware that the Troubles will return 24 years later and that he will only be 45 when his Trouble begins again, Harry secures a menial job at Haven Hope Medical Centre, and as IVF becomes mainstream in the 1990s, substitutes his own sperm, fathering hundreds of babies as organ "spare parts".

Most likely Mid-October, before 22nd October 1983:

The real Lucy Ripley is visited by a man calling himself Simon Crocker; since the real Simon had been dead since 21st May 1983, the only logical individual would be Arla Cogan, in the skin of an unknown male victim, calling herself Simon, in an attempt to track down "her" Lucy or more likely finding out if real Lucy had any knowledge of finding the Barn and with it, James. Of course, having never met the real Simon Crocker, real Lucy would have no knowledge of anything different; however, she obviously has "instincts". When Audrey visits her, she explains that Simon had claimed people were after Lucy, who wanted to "erase" her, and he was trying to help, but despite this blandishment, real Lucy reveals, 'there was something about him…I told him nothing.' When the real Lucy successfully makes "Simon" believe that she is baffled and knows nothing, Arla leaves.

Since the Troubles end with the last of the Orionids meteor storm by the 8th/9th November after The Woman enters the Barn, Arla would only have been able to "swap out" the skins of her victims without being trapped for 24 years in whomever she was "wearing" during the last week of October to the end of the first week of November at the outside. In S3 Stay the old newspaper shows that Lucy had entered the Barn on 22nd October 1983. We learn she was wearing the skin of her original female victim as she visited The Guard on 23rd October 1983 as Vince states this in S3:11 when they discover Arla is still alive and the bolt-gun killer.

22nd October 1983:

The Haven Herald front page has a sidebar, "Local Woman Vanishes" with a photograph of Lucy, because Lucy had gone into the Barn.

Just like the return of the Troubles, which have been demonstrated to begin intermittently and incrementally increase over a period of months until being "publicly impossible to ignore", it appears that after the peak of THMS in mid-October, the Troubles begin to rapidly dwindle in scope and occurrence and that they stop altogether when the THMS, i.e. the Orionids, comes to an end, which is usually between 31st October and the 8th November. In real life and the TV show the duration of THMS can vary from circa 1st to 15th October to 31st October or 7th November, but the "peak" 24 hours is always the third week of October between 19th and 24th in real life and in the show.

23rd October 1983:

In 2010 at the end of S3, Vince states that the "day after" Lucy entered the Barn and it vanished, Arla approached The Guard and demanded they bring the Barn back and when The Guard refused, Arla was "absolutely furious" and then disappeared with nobody knowing where she was or what had happened to her. The most likely scenario is that Arla approached a Guard (recognising them via the tattoo) and declared who she was before insisting stridently that they must bring the Barn back.

Since Vince and Dave didn't know that Arla was a skinwalker until 2010, it would never have occurred to them Arla was in anyway different than she had been – since The Guard members as a group would have known James Cogan was married to an "Arla" but they would not all have met her or seen photos of her, they would never have thought to mention to Vince what the Arla who approached them looked like (since at that point Arla looked like her first female victim and not her original self). Therefore Vince and Dave never knew Arla did not look the same.

They clearly told Vince that 'Arla Cogan tried to threaten us to bring back the Barn and when we refused she was furious and ranted at us and ran off somewhere.' Vince and Dave probably tried to locate her for the sake of Lucy and James but gave up, and doubtlessly privately thought that "this time" she really had committed suicide – especially if Lucy had used the most likely cover story of claiming to Dave and Vince in particular that a traumatised Arla was in a sanatorium in Derry, Castle Rock, or Cleaves Mill – the irrationality and wild rage The Guard members described later to Vince would have been seen as confirmation of Lucy's explanation.

By 8th November 1983:

Arla moves to live in Boston, MA., and most likely gets a job with Boston PD.

Obviously the show reveals nothing of Arla's interim life, since the character didn't do so. However, in terms of "in-universe plausibility", since the Troubles are disappearing and she has no way to access the Barn, Arla realises on 31st October that she is going to have to wait 24 years before the Troubles reactivate, which means she is going to have to "pick" a skin (her original female victim, the male victim in which she pretended to be Simon Crocker, or any others she has murdered) and cope with it from 1983 to 2007. Knowing that she would soon be unable to swap out one skin for another, Arla must have contingency planned for the future – just like Harry Nix was also doing with his own 24 years of breathing space.

We know nothing of Arla's family – her maiden name, how being a skinwalker worked, but we do learn in S3, Last Goodbyes, that a skinwalker's biggest problem is that a skinwalker is only the superficial, outward appearance, not the real person. In Last Goodbyes, when Audrey and Nathan gather the "core group" to Vince and Dave's fishing shack (Vince, Dave, Claire (already murdered and replaced by Arla), Duke and Dwight) Audrey admits, 'The thing is, Tommy made a series of rookie mistakes. I hardly noticed them at first, but when you add them all up there's no way that could be a trained cop.'

At this point Duke, deliberately to lighten the stress, raises his hand and asks if he can point out, essentially, that 'I told you so.' This is a reference back to the earlier S3 episode Double Jeopardy, in the courtroom after Judge Boone's death where it is Duke who spots Tommy handling the evidence he's putting in the bag with bare hands and says, 'Hey, should you be doing that? You're contaminating evidence!' "Tommy" makes the save by snarking back a crack about CSI, the popular US TV show, and neither Audrey nor Nathan really notice, but given that everyone now knows (courtesy of some admittedly excellent genre police procedural shows) that you put on your protective gloves before you "snag, bag and tag it" that alone should have made them realise something was seriously wrong.

In the shack, Audrey ignores Duke and continues, '…the skinwalker sounds and looks like his [they don't know it's a woman, Arla Cogan] victims but he doesn't know what they know.'

Nathan adds in, 'It's a performance – he can't steal their minds.'

Knowing this back in 1983, Arla would most probably have decided that staying in Haven was too risky for being exposed by someone who knew her chosen victim well – or that Dave and Vince, who had known Arla, James and Lucy the best, would recognise Arla's traits and draw the correct conclusions.

She would also know that picking the right "skin" for the next 24 years was crucial. Although the skinwalker knows nothing of the victim's mind, it appears from what we see in the TV show that they physically "become" the person they have killed. For instance, if we assume that Arla was, say, 23 to James's 27 when they married in 1983, she would be 50 years old in 2010, when she murdered the real Tommy Bowen – a man fit, healthy, suspicious by trade and 20 years her junior. Prior to that, she also managed to murder The Guard member Grady – United States Marine Private First Class, a body of men not known for being wimps.

This would suggest that Arla physically "becomes" the age and the sex of her victim in terms of his or her physical health and abilities – or lack thereof. As Tommy Bowen, Grady and Claire Callahan, Arla has no problem running, jumping, etc., despite being at least 20 years older than her victims. Since she killed the next victim "as" the previous victim and kept the skins to keep reusing until her lair was discovered, this would explain how a middle-aged woman managed to overpower military-trained men a third younger than she was. Additionally there was also her sociopathic mind set, in that her only focus was on James; in 2010 she had no remorse in murdering over half-a-dozen people, probably double figures, merely to look the same as she had in 1983 the last time she had seen James. Bunny boiler doesn't come into it.

As a woman, she would be less suspected of any wrongdoing but also less powerful physically and socio-economically. Also, women are always judged on how they look, men on what they do, so as her female skin grew older, and her looks faded, she would lose her ability to manipulate by fluttering her glamorous granny eyelashes. It seems quite likely that Arla decided it would be safest to stay as a man while the Troubles were dormant.

Arla also knew she couldn't move too far away because when the Troubles returned, she was going to be ready to take revenge on Lucy and reunite with James. Boston, Massachusetts fitted the bill appropriately. In terms of work, as a man she would probably fairly easily get a job at Boston PD "under the radar" as a civilian employee.

We know Arla had to have access to Boston PD when Harry Nix murdered his donor son Paul (2009) so as to have access to the case notes in order to recognise the victim of a Trouble, and also to get close enough to the real Tommy Bowen to be able intercept Bowen's leads and confirm that the case did indeed lead back to Haven – meaning the Troubles had returned and meaning that he Barn and Lucy and James would shortly reappear.

Additionally, Arla had to have some familiarity with general police procedures – we saw she didn't have enough to pull off being a cop for a protracted period or under close scrutiny – but sufficient to fake it well enough for short periods of time and enough for the real Tommy Bowen to accept "him" as part of the Boston PD "furniture". That in turn meant she would be able to get close enough to Tommy Bowen to kill him without him realising until too late he was in danger.

Arla also needed to be able to leave Boston PD's employ at fairly short notice without raising too much of a "flag" in others noticing – long-term civilian employee who made himself part of the furniture but didn't make himself too essential is about right. Since Arla's "skins" seem to continue aging as normal, if her 1983 victim was a similar age to Simon Crocker (34) then in 2007 when the Troubles restarted, she would have looked (and presumably felt) like a 55-60 year-old man, just the right age for a civilian employee of Boston PD to take "semi-retirement" and move back to his home town of Haven, Maine.

7th November 1983:

The Orionids (THMS) ends and the Troubles which have petered out stop altogether. Nathan Wuornos is able to feel again, and et cetera.

By May 1984:

Arla Cogan has relocated to Boston, where she will remain undetected until returning to Haven in 2010.

Continued from 1985 in Chapter 7…

© 2014

The Cat's Whiskers