"Where is she?"

"Where's who? Rachel?"

"Yes, Rachel. Where is Rachel Amber?"

Tommy Hill take a swig, grimaces, shudders.

"In LA, I guess," he rasps, tilting his head to see how much is left in the glass. "Why are you here?"

Chloe sits down facing him at the table, while Steph is still making her way across the room. When she comes up and sits down next to Chloe, he gives her a wary look.

"And who are you?"

"I'm Steph," she says. "Rachel's friend."

"What's she doing in LA?" Chloe asks.

Tommy interrupts his scrutiny of Steph's visage and answers a bit late, as if the question took a scenic detour to get to him.

He shrugs.

"Living the dream. How did you find me?"

"Did you take her there?"

"Me? No. She caught a ride with some trucker."

"My friend Rachel Amber told me about this cool rig in town because I love taking pictures of truckers," Max Caulfield says. She's a walking prop for that line, dressed as she is in Rachel's clothes and carrying a camera bag slung over her shoulder.

"You knew Rachel?" the man in front of the diner asks. "She sure didn't give a rat's ass about truckers… or real work."

He's got a walrus mustache and a baseball cap that says "Riverhill Infinity." Disturbingly, he's pretty close to twinning her with the red and black flannel under his jacket. In the window behind and above him, Max can see two-thirds of Nathan Prescott's head.

"Oh, so you must have known her too?" she asks.

"Only from the diner. She was just a gold digger. She belonged in California with all those… you know whats…"

Steph is about to say something, but Chloe puts a hand on her leg under the table, fairly making her choke on her words. She slurps her drink.

"How come you didn't go?" Chloe asks meanwhile.

"Why would I go to LA? There's nothing for me there."

"To be with Rachel," she say through her teeth.

He looks at her with foggy eyes, then at Steph, then out of the window at the water.

"Look, we hung out, but it wasn't like that. She was too young… She never even asked me to come with her."

"She never asked you to take her there?"

"Not really. It was more like she was jealous of me owning a bike and being able to leave any time I wanted, as if Arcadia was some sort of prison. Like there was a line around it she couldn't cross, you know?"

"But then she jumps in a random truck and crosses it?"

He looks down into his glass.

"Well, she did talk about leaving a lot. It was all talk for a while, but then one day she suddenly made up her mind. And I mean, there isn't really a line around Arcadia Bay, is there?"

The lighthouse.

You can never escape the lighthouse here.

This time it's on a sign.

Another great day in Arcadia Bay. Thank you, come again.

But it's all a lie.

"Did you see her get into a truck?"

He runs his fingers along the mustache on top of his lip.

"I… uh… no."

"So how do you know she caught a ride out of town with a trucker?"

"…She called me. From the road."

"Blood oath?" Nathan repeats. "Who…? What the fuck? I never told anybody about that freaky shit… Besides, everybody knows Frank is a liar and a loser. Even Rachel did…"

"Chloe, table for two!"

"When was this?" Chloe asks, blinking.

"A few weeks back now."

"What did she say?"

"Oh, just, you know. 'I did it. I really did it.' It was kind of a short call."

"Has she called you since then?"

"I don't think so."

"Have you tried calling her back?"

"No. Why would I?"

"To see if she made it. To see how she's doing. To see if she's alive."

"No. I mean, we said our goodbyes."

Chloe gets up.

"Have you talked to the cops about all this yet?"

He peers at her from under his cap.

"The cops?"

"Rachel is missing, Tommy. Everybody's looking for her. She hasn't been seen in three weeks. She hasn't been answering her phone. You're the last person to hear from her that we know of."

"Oh, wow. I mean, I knew she wanted to escape, to get away, but I had no idea she was going to go completely dark. But now that you mention it, she did say something about getting rid of her phone…"

"Did she? Do you know anything at all about that trucker?"

"No, I…"

"Do you have her call saved on your phone?"

"No."

"That's OK. I'm sure they can pull phone records. Let's go Steph."

"I wish I could help you more, Chloe Price," Tommy says. He turns and watches them leave the bar.

"What was that about?" Steph hisses, once they're out of the earshot.

"He's lying. So we'll have to eat later."

"What? Why?"

"Because he's probably going to leave in about a minute, and you're gonna follow him. Ninja-like."

"Me? What are you gonna do?"

"I need to go stop by the car for a second."

"The car? Why? Oh… Chloe."

Chloe shakes her head at the hostess, who's beckoning them to follow her, making silently for the exit instead. Steph stays behind briefly to apologize, then catches up to her on the steps. She's about to say something.

"It's fine, Steph," Chloe cuts in, before she can. "I'm fine. I promise. Just don't lose him. And remember the ninja way. Stay away from those windows."

Steph is not convinced, and even less happy, but happiness is as rare as the fucking pixie dust these days. Chloe leaves her by the statues and hikes back to the car.

It was easy to say she was fine. Easy to believe it when she said it, even, but the quick solitary walk sort of makes her doubt it.

That lying motherfucker. What did he do? Her knuckles begin to burn again.

The first text from Steph arrives at about the same time she reaches the truck.

You were right. He left quickly. Heading south on Promenade.

Chloe debates if she should drive, but gives up the idea. The truck is not exactly a stealth-mobile. Instead, she climbs all the way in and slams the door behind her before opening the glove box, to make sure no tourist clocks her stuffing a revolver into her pants. She covers the handle, lights a cig, spends a minute watching old couples, nuclear families, and camp groups in matching t-shirts trickle by on her right. On her left is a steady stream of cars, headlights flashing on one after another. She waits for a gap in traffic, gets out and starts south.

She feels like Rachel is close, but it's not a happy feeling. She knows Tommy was lying, but doesn't know what the truth is, and various possibilities are spinning around in her head as she walks, making her clench her fists, and sometimes her jaw, and sometimes mutter "No fucking way."

Turned left on 4th Avenue. Inland. A new text.

She checks the street signs. She's crossing the 7th. Three blocks.

When she reaches 4th avenue she slows down, so as not to bump into the bastard as she turns the corner or something.

How far are you from G street? She texts.

Not sure. Don't think we crossed it. He's entering a hotel.

She peeks around the corner and sees Steph in her beanie, loitering half a block away on the other side of the street, under a big green sign that reads Dew Drop Inn. Steph spots her and waves conspiratorially.

"Did you see where he went?" Chloe asks in an indoor voice, as she gets closer.

"He went around the left side there," Steph says, her back to the motel. "I didn't want to get too close."

"It's fine. Let's go."

The motel is sitting in a hollow, so that the roofs of its three one-story wings, arranged in a kind of crow-foot, peace sign pattern, are roughly at the level of the 4th avenue sidewalk. From the top of the driveway you can see pretty much all of the parking lot, and they quickly spot the Indian, parked at the far end on the left, by the dumpsters.

"Gotta be one of the two end rooms of that wing," Chloe whispers, as they descend.

The sun is done setting. Away from and below the din of the street, the fenced-in parking lot is dark and quiet, illuminated weakly by the curtained yellow glow of the occupied rooms. Above them, the stars are suddenly out. Like, all of them.

"But sometimes, there's greater beauty yet to come," William Price says.

"Incredible," Chloe says.

"Fire is jealous, Chloe. It wants all the beauty for itself. That's why you need to be careful."

"Chloe, we're still here to talk, right?" Steph asks.

"We're here to find Rachel," Chloe replies. "To find her and make sure she's safe."

She pulls the gun out.

"OK, but Chloe…"

"Yes, Steph. I know. No shooting. Unless he charges at us with a butcher knife or something, OK?"

"OK. I guess that's fair."

At about this point, as they are halfway across to the motorcycle, they become aware of the noise. It's a vague, as yet unidentifiable commotion, but it seems to be growing louder the closer they get to the rooms at the end of the building.

"That sounds like…" Steph begins to say, just as there's a crash of something breaking against a wall, making them duck down behind a parked car.

Chloe is first up and advancing again, Steph following two seconds later.

The noise is coming from the last room.

As they near the door, there's a shout "Shut up!" from the inside.

"Just shut the fuck up!"

It's Tommy's voice.

Something slams into a wall again.

Chloe is about to charge the door, but has enough rational thought left in the tank to realize that her ninety pounds of weight is not going to be enough to kick the fucker in.

Shoot the lock?

She gestures at it.

Steph shakes her head.

She looks pale even in this dark, but she straightens up and pounds the door with her fist.

The commotion dies to frightened nothing.

"Who is it?" Tommy's voice, muffled, short of breath.

"Your boss!" Steph replies in an angry manager imitation.

There's a total silence of about three seconds, and then a click.

The door cracks open.

Tommy's haggard face appears. He begins to slur "Sorry, I just dropped a…"

But he never has the chance to finish, because Chloe pushes Steph to one side and the door to the other, and her gun is right in Tommy's face, and she's walking him backwards into the room, her eyes darting, ready for it all to be over, ready to see where Rachel is tied up, or hurt, or smoking naked in bed, but there's nothing. There's no one. There's just the banal, cheap motel room, empty.

"Lock the door, Steph," she says, or somebody pretending to be her, as she steps around Tommy and peers into the bathroom, which is also empty.

"Jesus," Tommy says finally, wiping sweat off his eyebrows. "What the fuck?"

"Where is she?"

"I already told you…"

"Yeah, yeah. Caught a truck for LA. Bullshit. Tell me where you're keeping her."

"I… I'm not keeping her anywhere."

"Who were you arguing with just now?"

"Nobody."

"Half of the fucking town heard you, Tommy. Let me see your phone."

"What do you think you're doing with that gun?"

Chloe stops and stares him dead in the eye.

"Let me stop you, before I have to hear another asshole trying to call my bluff or whatever, or tell me his spiel about little girls and guns. Here's the scoop. Rachel is my… everything. Rachel is missing. We know she was with you. And we know you lied to us back at the bar. What I think I'm doing with this gun is asking you to tell me the fucking truth. If I think you hurt her, and I will think that, if you keep lying to me or keep trying to give big man speeches, I will probably shoot you, against better judgment and Steph's wishes."

Chloe is out of air and trying hard not to gasp. Steph is just Steph, hanging in there, by the door, worrying. Tommy seems to be having an internal discussion, which finally ends with him bending down to pick up an ice bucket from the floor. He puts it back on the dresser.

"Truth is not gonna help anybody," he says. He pulls the phone out of his pocket and hands it to Chloe. "Me or you."

She checks. There were no calls made in the last five minutes. Or last week. She goes further back. There's nothing in the call log at all. It's been wiped clean.

"So you're talking to yourself," she says.

"Tommy, if she's in a coma," Steph says, "or has amnesia, you can't just keep hiding her, even if you're afraid."

He looks at her, incredulous, then chuckles.

"Oh, I wish that's all it was."

"Rachel…" Chloe Price says, looking at the photographs inside the red binder. "This can't be real. These are all… These are all posed shots, right?"

There's a faint buzzing of the fluorescent lights.

"Chloe," Max says. "Look at her face. She's… out of it."

"Maybe… maybe Nathan paid her a shitload of cash to do this. She probably would have."

"I don't think so. Why is he putting her in the ground like that? Where…?"

"Chloe..." Steph says.

"Is she…? Are you saying she is…?"

No fucking way.

Everything is blurry. The walls. Furniture. People. Everything is running like paint in the rain.

All she sees is the gun in her hands.

"Can you just explain what happened?" Steph asks.

"Explain?" Tommy scoffs, shaking his head. "No. I can tell you what happened. Then maybe you can explain it to me."

He sits down heavily on the chair in the corner and bends forward, rubbing the lines in his hand with the other hand's thumb. Chloe wipes her eyes with her sleeve.

"She texted that morning," he says. "Asking me to meet her at the junkyard."

"What morning?" Steph asks.

"Your aunt said you didn't have a phone," Chloe says at the same time, handing his back to him.

He looks at them both in turn, then answers Steph.

"It was a Monday. About three weeks ago now, I guess."

To Chloe, he adds, "It's a burner. Tally doesn't need to know I have it."

"Anyway, I happened to be in town on business, so I said fine."

"When I got there, she was pretty worked up. More than usual, I mean. Had me move this huge plank to help hide her backpack, but wouldn't tell me why. Just said she needed to leave that there and that she needed my help to find her friend."

"What friend?" Chloe and Steph ask at the same time.

Tommy looks up.

"You."

"What? That doesn't make sense," Chloe says. "I wasn't…"

"Yeah, I don't know. She said she called you and you didn't pick up and she went to your house and you weren't there, and she had a bad dream about it, and something about a knife, and on and on…"

"Wait, what about a knife?"

"She found a knife and thought it was yours, which was bad or something. Like I said, it was hard to follow. I was kind of hungover, and none of it was making much sense, until she said that she needed my help finding this abandoned hut near the train tracks."

"What the shit?"

"Yeah, but the really weird thing was when she said that, I immediately knew what she was talking about. Woke me right up. See, a few years back, after the Prescotts fired everybody, I used to camp by this old hut near the river, and everything was fine, until the big fire. I remember I went at it pretty hard at the Firewalk gig at the old mill the night before, to celebrate my early retirement and all, so I slept most of the next day, woke up in the afternoon to drink a can of beer, then slept again. Then I woke up in the middle of the night and found the whole goddamn mountain on the other side of the river on fire. I mean it was insane, bright and hot as hell, but that wasn't all. That whole place there, the hut, there was something… there. Like something woke up and it wasn't fucking happy at all. And it was moving all around, angry. I can't describe it. It sounds crazy when I try in my head, but I feel like I barely got out alive. I remember crawling to my bike, just praying for it to start, and then riding it the fuck away without looking back when it did. If my bike wasn't there, I'd probably swim across the river and jump in that fire."

"So did you take her there?"

He sighs.

"Yeah, I did. It's been a few years, you know? You start telling yourself it was the booze. It was the drugs. Crazy shit out in the woods, that's just the old tribal nonsense. Should have stayed the hell away."

"Why?"

"So we got there. There's this abandoned mill or something on the bank near the place. Creaky old ruin. Rachel, she went and searched it up and down. Don't know what she was looking for. Footprints, maybe. Bread crumbs. No idea. I kind of hung back a bit. Told her I didn't like the place, without going into the specifics too much. She wasn't crazy about it either, I could tell, but she hung in there. Toughing it. Next was the hut, which made my skin crawl. My tent was still there in the backyard. I didn't go near it. She didn't care. Went through all of it. Turning rocks and shit. After that she got on her hands and knees and crawled all over the train tracks by the points. There was nothing anywhere, though. I could tell she was getting pissed, but I wasn't mad about it myself, if I'm honest. It seemed like the visit was about to be over, and I was fucking ready to go.

"But then suddenly I felt something... stir, like it did during that fire. We must have both felt it, because we both stared back towards the hut, as though something was about to attack us from there or something. I remember hearing this train horn, except there was no train, and then a thunderclap in the distance, and a gust of wind, and this weird sound just behind me where Rachel was, like the air being sucked out. And I turned around… and she wasn't there. There was nothing there. Just the tracks and the points. I thought there was a scream, but I didn't actually hear it. You know what I'm saying? Imagine hearing a scream as an experience, and then remove the part that has the sound, leaving you only your impression of it. The memory. The residue of it on your brain. It sounds dumb, but that's what it felt like. And then the place sort of exploded into the same nightmare it was at the fire. I felt like I had to jump on the bike and just get the fuck out…"

"So what, you just left?" Chloe asks.

"No. Not for an hour or so. I crouched there with eyes closed and hands over my ears and waited. The commotion died down eventually, the place got empty again, but she never came back. So then I left."

"That's it? You left and it's been three weeks?" Steph asks.

"What was I supposed to do? Report it to the cops? I went to see my aunt, whose mom - my grandma - was a shaman, but she didn't know what the hell I was talking about. She thought I was on drugs."

"Were you?" Chloe asks.

"Not then."

"Did you take Nathan's new drugs?"

"What?"

"The new drug Nathan gave you to pass around to your buddies. Did you take it?"

"What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

"Did you or not?"

"Not that day."

"Did Rachel?"

"Yes, she did. But again, it wasn't that day. This wasn't the drug."

Tommy falls silent and returns to tracing lines in his hands. Chloe watches him with disgust.

"Well, this great story didn't make any fucking sense," she says finally. "How is this supposed to help me find her? Steph? You had a version ready for me getting out of the points. Can you make this bullshit helpful?"

"What points?" Tommy looks up.

"I… uh…" Steph says. "Shit, Chloe, I don't know. How long was Rachel not in your field of vision before she disappeared?"

"Seconds."

"How many? Enough for her to run away? Hide in the trees? Jump in the river?"

"No. No way."

"Is it possible you passed out and came back later than it seemed to you? Lost memory?"

"About as possible as Rachel vanishing into thin air, I would say."

"I think it's a lot more possible that he's fucking lying again," Chloe says, lifting the gun. "We know he lied once already. Now that he's cornered at gun point we're supposed to believe this bullshit story? Oh, she vanished into thin air! How convenient. Is she dead?! Did you kill her, motherfucker! Tell me where she is!"

He looks scared and offended at the same time.

"No, I would never kill Rachel. I swear. I swear on my father's spirit."

There's a honk of a big truck's horn in the distance.

"There's my cue," William Price says. He lets go of the invisible steering wheel, in order to put on the invisible seatbelt.

"Dad?" Chloe says nervously.

"Relax, sweetie. It's all pretend, right?

"Right."

"Just a bit of stage magic. Floodlights. Sound effects."

Bright stage lights come on with a metallic clang. There is another honk, closer, louder this time.

"Chloe. Look at me," William says. "Look at me, sweetheart. It's going to be okay."

She hears her own scream in her head, back in Tommy's motel room. The impression it left on her brain. The residue.

"That means… fuck all to me," she says, swallowing.

But she lowers the gun and sits down on the bed.

"Let's say it happened as you say," Steph says after a silence. "Again, it's been three weeks since then. Were you really just going to do nothing? Just keep on living? Forget about it?"

"I was trying! What was I supposed to do? What would you have done? I was there, you understand? It's not like someone told me a story. I was there."

"Something. Anything. What have you been doing?"

"Just working. Drinking."

"Hearing voices. Yelling at yourself," Chloe adds.

"I've been having nightmares," Tommy goes on, not hearing her.

"What nightmares?"

"About her. About me, being sucked into a dark vortex."

"What do you dream about Rachel?"

"That she's a room with no windows or doors. Dark room. What do you do? I wish there was something, believe me, but sometimes there's just nothing you can do. When someone dies, for example. No matter how sudden and stupid. It's done. There's nothing you can do."

A huge green truck barrels across the stage, smashing into William, leaving behind nothing but blood and splintered wood.

"She's not dead," Chloe says.

"Maybe not. But she's not… here. The woods. They took her. You can't fight it. There's nothing to fight."

"Yeah, fuck that." Chloe gets to her feet. "She's somewhere, and she got there somehow, so there's gotta be a way back."

"I don't know it," Tommy says. "Nobody does."

"Somebody has to know," Steph says. "There's an internet full of crazy people out there. Somebody knows."

She pulls her phone out as she says this.

"You can do that in the car," Chloe says.

"Are we going back there now?"

"Yeah." She nods at Tommy. "You're coming with. Get ready while we bring the truck around. Ten minutes."

"Why would I go?"

"Because you know where the place is."

"I'll draw you a map."

"Because you lost her and you hid and you lied about it. Because you're about to lose your mind and drink yourself to cirrhosis."

"That's not a real thing," Tommy mumbles, helping himself from the chair onto the bed.

Steph unbolts the door.

As they step outside, Chloe adds, "And because the angry forest gods might demand a human sacrifice."

"Don't even joke like that," Steph says.

"I'm not."