"The fucking bitch knew," Chloe says. Shouts, really.

She floors the pedal. The truck jolts backwards, digging into gravel in Samuel's driveway and shelling the front of the house with it. Thankfully none of that hits any windows. As she switches gears and punches the gas again, it sounds like the engine has picked up some of the rocks to snack on.

"Slow down, Chloe," Steph says. "It won't help if you drive us off a cliff."

"Nah. I got this. I'm just pissed that she didn't say anything."

"Why do you think she knew?"

"The face she made when she saw the bike! Now it makes sense."

"OK, maybe… but you need to try and be calm when we talk to her."

"Oh, I'll be calm," she says, thinking about the bag of food she brought the lady that morning, the betrayal of it blown completely out of proportion by her mind, as though it was Chloe and not Joyce Price feeding the homeless lady for years. I'll be calm, all right. The food bag transforms into the brown bag tucked away in the glove compartment.

Which is right in front of Steph.

Damn it.

Can't just nonchalantly reach for it.

There's no time to come up with a plan, because there's the beached silver whale of the diner already. The trucker in the baseball cap loiters by the newspaper machine smoking a cigarette and gazing lovingly at the 18-wheeler parked at the gas station across the street.

"Maybe you should leave then," Max Caulfield says.

"Would if I could. Hell, even that shifty Rachel whats-her-face once asked me if I'd drive her to Los Angeles."

"Yeah, I'm sure she did, Needledick 77," Chloe mutters.

She swerves into the alley and skids to a stop.

The cardboard sheet, the box of Squeekinax and the paper cup are all still there, but the homeless lady herself is missing.

"Thanks for that warning, Max. You treated me like a human, not like trash."

And that's how you pay us back.

Chloe is the first one out of the truck. She stomps deeper into the alley behind the diner, confirms that it's empty and reappears. Steph stands looking around, at the roofs and out into the street. Maybe the old woman turned into a bird and flew away. There's a lone raven sitting on top of a street pole.

"Is that you, Claire?" Chloe yells at the bird. "You better come down and talk to me, right now, or you won't get any more free food!"

"Chloe, who are you talking to?"

By way of the reply, Chloe kicks the paper cup and immediately regrets it, as the cup is half-full and explodes suspicious liquid all over the wall and her shoe. Actually, it looks like regular coffee, which makes her feel worse.

"Shit," she says. "Now what?"

"Maybe she's inside using the bathroom?" Steph suggests half-heartedly.

Chloe goes in through the back door and returns a minute later, shaking her head.

"Should we just wait here?" Chloe asks. "I can't just wait here."

"Well, she's probably not the only one who knows where the tribe has moved to. I mean, there's the city hall, the mayor."

"Yeah, let's go talk to Mayor Cochran!" Chloe scoffs.

"Doesn't have to be the Mayor. There's probably a clerk or a record-keeper of some sort. The police might know…"

"Fuck the police," she replies mechanically. It's basically a reflex. "Let's go find a record-nerd."

They climb back into the cabin. Chloe freezes with the key touching the ignition.

"Except it's a Saturday and the City Hall is closed," she says. "Fuck."

For a while, there's nothing to do but sit there and stare at the wall. In the rear-view mirror, the sky is putting on all the bling for the golden hour. The clouds are beginning to blush like damsels in stupid romance movies. The grey wall in front of them stays gray, though. Zero fucks given about sunsets.

"While we're thinking," Steph says, "want to tell me what happened at Samuel's?"

"Huh? Oh, that… Yeah, I guess I should. So I had this vision recently… kind of scary, that I couldn't place, of me in the rain in the dark, with a wet knife in my hand or something, not knowing where I was, or what I did… And when he was telling us about me crashing around his yard that night, I thought… maybe the vision was about that."

"What does it mean?"

"I don't know."

"But it scares you. Why?"

"I don't know, Steph. All I know is I don't remember a whole lot in the timeline between Rachel leaving my room and me buying drugs from Frank like two weeks later. And I get a million of these flashbacks, and they're all about stuff that happened 3 years ago and stuff that didn't happen and won't, and the only one that might be from the two weeks I'm missing is the one with me in the dark, with the knife, and the feeling that I stabbed somebody! What did I do, Steph? What if…?"

That "what if" hangs there in front of them on the gray cinderblock wall like it's been tagged.

"Do you… want to go back there and look around?" Steph asks after a minute.

Chloe shudders, but nods.

"But not Samuel's. There's nothing there. Why was I out in the woods north of town? There's a cave out towards the hospital… Max and I used to play there when we were kids, because it was near to where we built our secret fort… There's the lighthouse to the west… Or maybe the mill! If I was coming back from the burned down mill through the woods instead of the tracks I could have ended up on Samuel's property in the dark."

"Why would you go to this burned down mill, though? What's there?"

"No idea. Not my favorite place, to tell you the truth. But that's where… I met Rachel, so… maybe… shit, I don't know. It sounds stupid. What probably happened was, I got drunk at the junk shack, went out for a stroll in the woods, passed out under a tree somewhere, got woken up by the rain at night, didn't know where the hell I was and ended up on Samuel's farm."

Max wakes up on the ground, in the middle of a storm. Where am I? What's happening? I'm trapped in a storm? How did I get here? And where is "here"?

"Would you drink so much alcohol that you would literally pass out?" Steph asks, incredulous.

Chloe just laughs.

"Wow," Steph says. "I would be so sick."

"That's been known to happen, as well."

"And the vision?"

"Fuck if I know. Half the shit I see is not helpful, or making any sense. Like, I remember dropping the knife in the woods in this vision, but it's right here. And I found it in Rachel's bag."

"Do you think we should check these places, anyway?"

"I think we're going to be wasting our time, but… since the crazy homeless lady is missing in action, and the Mayor is out of the office, what the hell else is there to do on a Saturday in Arcadia Bay?"

Hang in there, Rachel, she thinks. I'm coming. I hope.

They back out into the street, causing an ugly maroon Caravan full of mustached people to squeal to a stop and the red-hatted truck driver to shout something from his voyeuristic perch.

Chloe flips a decidedly firm bird at him in passing, while Steph stares straight ahead.

"You stand at the three-way crossing," Steph says almost exactly three years earlier. "To the left, the raiders' training grounds. To the right, the prison. Straight ahead, an enormous, ostentatious tent that could only belong to Duurgaron the Unscarred. Which way do you go?"

"The cave is a hike," Chloe says, "so we'll do the other two spots because we can drive there. Mill first. We'll stop by the lighthouse on the way back down."

They head north on Arcadia Bay Avenue and out of town. Before long, the road curves right and begins to weave through the hills, then suddenly they burst out of the rainforest into a landscape of rolling hills bristling with charred tree trunks.

"Wow," Steph says. "After all these years, it's still…"

"Just three years, Steph," Chloe says. "And you can see things are already growing in between…"

"Yeah, I guess… It's just, I haven't actually been out this way after the fire. Didn't realize there was so much destruction."

"You know a lot about Blackwell for being a Science teacher," Max says. She's in front of the Blackwell entrance. The students are all outside because of the fire alarm. There's a cheerful din in the air, threaded through with the buzzing of a drone hovering overhead. To the left, there's a mess of spilled Rachel Amber missing person posters trailing off towards the parking lot.

"Science is history, Max," says Ms. Grant. "And I have a secret wish to teach local lore and legends. There's a lot of unique facts about this place you might enjoy discovering."

"Of course," Chloe says, slapping the steering wheel. "Ms. Grant!"

"What? Who? Ms. Grant? The Science teacher?"

"Yeah. She's all about the Native Americans and the local history, and, like, social justice or whatever. I bet she knows where the tribe is."

"Brilliant!"

"Except, it's still the same Saturday, so she won't be at Blackwell, and we have no idea where she lives."

"Your stepfather is probably still at work…"

"Ugh. Steph, can we not ask him for help, like, ever again? Makes me nauseous. And besides, he might eventually remember that his gun is missing."

"Which… maybe you better return…"

"I will return it, when this is over.

"OK, well… Would Samuel know?"

"Maybe. I feel like I remember him and Ms. Grant being tight. Or it could have been me tripping. Anyway, better than asking the step-fuhrer, because anything is. We'll stop by on the way back from this place."

The old road to the mill is barely visible because of all the grass growing through the pavement. Chloe remembers the girl who drove through there three years earlier. Completely out of her mind, that one. Burning the evidence in the crooked DA's office. Thinking she would save everybody by herself. Talking to her dead father on the way in. Lucky to be alive, honestly. Dumb luck, and Frank…

Good thing she's learned her lesson.

New, mature, 19-year-old Chloe doesn't do stupid anymore.

Right?

A rusty iron gate bars the road. It's fairly plastered with threatening, non-informative signs.

Chloe kills the engine and climbs out.

It's quiet as hell, though, strangely, the trees around them are alive. Untouched by the fire. There are no visible tire tracks in the ground, and her memory doesn't suddenly rush back, but she has a strange feeling about the place. Like it's not as abandoned as it should be. It's the signs. The signs don't look 3 years old.

The gate is held together by a latch. Glancing back at Steph, who's clearly not comfortable going against all the signs, Chloe unlatches the gate and pushes it open. It swings in with a groan. Hesitating for a moment, Chloe climbs back into the truck and lets it roll through.

"Probably nothing here," Chloe says under her breath.

Steph nods.

A hundred yards later the woods end, and they emerge into the blinding light of the setting sun. There is a large clearing, and the old mill is in the middle of it, huge and dark, and definitely still burned down. On the left there are old, overgrown train tracks running right up to and through the building. Behind the mill there is a river and a railroad bridge in the distance. A couple of miles up river, to the right, you will reach the Overlook Park and the white oak that started the forest fire.

The flashbacks and memories come in waves, as she parks the truck in the shadow of the mill. Damon and Sera, 20-dollar t-shirts, spilled beer, blood on Frank's RV and a mess of other things. Rachel moshing. She rides them out, which must have taken a while, because eventually Steph says, "Well, there doesn't seem to be anything here, so maybe we should…"

"Sorry," Chloe says. "Just seeing if I remember anything. Let's take a quick look."

She climbs out again, and walks up to the carcass of the building, feeling with every step she takes that it's a bad idea, but stubbornly laboring against it, because it could be the enemy keeping her away from a crucial clue.

It's not, though.

Or anyway, not this time.

She realizes that, when she registers the background noise under the current of the forest and the river and the old burned out building sounds.

An engine of another car.

Which appears out of the same driveway just as Steph steps down from the cabin a moment later. A green pick up truck. They watch it come to a stop at the edge of the clearing, blocking the exit. There are two men inside, one of which Chloe recognizes without enthusiasm: Sheldon, the spilled beer scumbag straight out of her flashback.

"Steph, get back in the car," she says. "I'll talk to these guys."

"I'll stay," Steph says. She's pulling her jacket tighter around herself, as though she's cold. Her hands are tucked away deep in her pockets.

The men exit the truck and begin to leisurely walk towards them. The other guy is not Sheldon's usual sidekick, whats-his-face, but he doesn't look any less skeevy. Long hair, farmhand's denim overalls and a mustache. Sheldon, meanwhile, rocking the fashionable fucking goatee, of course. Arcadia Bay, Oregon, 2013.

"Ladies," he says in that annoying, sticky drawl of his. "What brings you?"

"Just looking," Chloe says.

"This is private property."

"Might have put up a sign, or something," Chloe says.

Sheldon's grin has no trace of mirth.

"I see you still run your mouth straight into trouble."

"I see you're still fragile."

"Listen, if we're trespassing, we can just leave," Steph says.

"No," Sheldon replies without taking his eyes off Chloe. "Nobody's going anywhere until the owner says so. Which he might not."

"Damon's not been around for years," Chloe says.

"Damon? Nah. This here site is under new management. And here it is now."

Sure enough, there's a sound of another car, and then the car itself, the sight of which makes Chloe run a finger over the knife handle in her back pocket and weigh her chances of reaching the brown paper bag in the glove compartment in time. She may have given it a go, if not for Steph. She can't get Steph hurt here. So she tries to stay calm, as the red pick up truck comes to a stop, and Nathan Prescott steps out.