The afternoon breeze is a mess of gusts and ebbs, as though it's not a single force but instead an army of invisible ninjas storming Blackwell out of the ocean. You can almost see these weird curved lines their swords draw between earth and sky.
"So... that was scary," Steph says, looking over her shoulder for about the hundredth time since they left the dorms. She would be jumping at every shadow, except there aren't any shadows, because the sun is still stubbornly, inexplicably high.
The campus is deserted. There's no one around anywhere, except at the far end of the stadium across the street a couple of Bigfoots are tossing a ball back and forth. A raven is perched up on Jeremiah Blackwell's shoulder. It doesn't caw.
"So that theory, Steph," Chloe says, staring straight ahead. "How long have you been carrying it around?"
Twenty days earlier, in Chloe's room, Rachel shrugs.
"A few months, I guess."
"You're right. You should have told me sooner."
Chloe's hands are rolled into fists inside her pockets. Her scuffed knuckles are rubbing against the denim and stinging like crazy.
"What theory?" Steph asks. "Oh, that. No, that was just an idea that came to me when Nathan started talking about how he didn't do anything."
"So you think she's in a coma, or something?"
"I mean, I hope not, but I guess it's possible? It could explain why she... didn't get in touch."
"Fuck, Steph. It's been like three weeks. I was out for three days and that felt like… The only way anyone survives three weeks in a coma is in a hospital. And if she was in a hospital, she would have been ID'd by now. Unless the hospital is in Kathmandu."
"OK. So, or… She could have woken up after three days, too, but maybe she doesn't remember… things. Amnesia, you know? You said you don't remember two whole weeks."
Chloe scoffs.
"Yeah. But I still remember who the fuck I am and where I live. But let's say she doesn't. Wouldn't she go to that same hospital again? Or even just ask anybody for help? What is she, lost in the woods?"
"Don't you get it, Price?" Nathan's voice. "She's probably dead!"
They reach the truck and climb in and just sit there. The parking lot is empty, except for Nathan's red pickup.
Nathan has a red pickup. Nathan has a green pickup.
Chloe recalls the weird way drugs erased just the right amount of people's memories in her hallucinatory adventure.
Steph's got her chin in her palm, meanwhile, thinking. Her other hand is twirling her dragon necklace.
"OK," she says after a minute. "How about this? What if she was with Tommy, and they… uh... took these pills, and he was fine, but she… went into a coma, or something, and then woke up with amnesia, and he's… not telling her anything? Or he's telling her something, but not exactly the truth? Maybe he's afraid, or maybe he just prefers that she doesn't remember, so that he could tell her whatever."
Taped wrists. Taped mouth.
Rachel's eyes, awake, aware, furious in the photo.
Chloe's face darkens as she slowly begins to nod.
"So at first," she takes over, "when she's completely out of it, he freaks out, runs to his auntie in Hamlet instead of taking her to the ER, to ask about spirits and possessions and whatever, because he's also hella high, and maybe because there's something he's trying to hide, but then he comes down and she wakes up clueless, and he realizes that it might be better for him not to tell her too much. And now he's basically keeping her captive!"
"I mean, it's a theory."
"Motherfucker is going to be provably dead if it's true."
She's about to turn on the ignition, when Steph puts a hand on her arm.
"Chloe, listen," Steph says. "This... I mean, I understand having a gun for self-defense. It's dangerous, and I think it's more trouble than it's worth, but I understand it. Understand... you. But... talking about killing people? And back there at the dorms? I thought... Look, I totally got your back. It's just... It's getting out of hand. Like, things are scary and crazy enough..."
Chloe sits with the key between her fingers, not moving. Her mind is replaying scenes involving her and guns, both recent and those that have not happened yet. Even the King is frozen on the dashboard. Waiting.
Finally, she lets go of the key and slumps back against the seat.
"OK. Yeah. OK, you're right. It's getting pretty bad. Between these flashbacks and the bullshit clues, and worrying about Rachel, and being pissed at her, myself, and everyone else, I'm so strung out, it's like I'm losing my mind."
It's a fucking miracle I haven't shot anybody already, she thinks, but doesn't say.
She pulls the gun from behind the waistband of her jeans and lays it on the seat between them.
"Here. Why don't you hold on to it for now?"
It sits there, on the seat, for a while.
"Those knuckles look pretty bad," Steph says. "Do you want to...?"
"It's nothing. You should see the other guy."
"I saw," Steph says.
Finally, Steph pick the gun up by the barrel and stows it away into the glove compartment.
"Let's just keep it here."
Chloe nods.
"Chloe, if it turns out this Tommy has... done something bad... Since he's not an almighty Prescott, can we just give him to the police?"
Chloe meets her eyes, then looks away and turns the key. The engine starts.
"Electrode insulator's probably cracked," David Madsen says just over three years into the past. "You know what a spark plug does?"
"Yes," Chloe says, contemplating breaking his face with a tire iron for snapping fingers at her like she was a dog.
A single spark can start a fire that burns the entire prairie. Or a forest. Or a face.
"It ignites the..."
"Did you not hear me? I said I know what it does."
"Let's cross that bridge, Steph..." she says, back in the Blackwell parking lot.
Steph nods.
"OK, so how do we find this guy?"
"We go to Seaside and check every motel. Go door to door if we have to. There can't be that many."
"You drive, I'll look up how many exactly."
Chloe reversed out of the handicapped spot and switches into drive.
"Steph, does the phrase 'Trail's End and Arcadia Head' mean anything to you?"
"Not really. Sounds kind of weird. What is it?"
"I don't know. I saw it in a flashback. On a postcard from Rachel. A Seaside, Oregon postcard."
"Trail's end. There are bunch of trails around here. The lighthouse stands at the end of the trail, right?"
"Yeah, but we've been there already and didn't see any heads. Or clues."
"Well, there's also the Blackwell expedition trail, but that's…"
"Oh shit, you're right! They built the Overlook where the Blackwell expedition ended! Trail's end! And that's where me and Rachel went for… But... there's nothing there now. It all burned down. And what the hell is Arcadia Head? And if the clue is at the Overlook, why does the postcard say Seaside?"
She recalls walking past the Overlook Park earlier, on her way to Culmination. Three years later, it was still the same burned down landscape.
"Does the postcard show anything on the front?" Steph asks.
"Just random rocks, water. Sunset."
"Anything else anywhere on it?"
"'Wish you were here. Love, Rach.' The date: August 24, 2011. And before you ask, no, I have no idea what happened on that date."
Steph shakes her head, shrugs, writes in her notebook. Trail's End, Arcadia Head, Seaside, OR. She chews on her pen, as Chloe circles the lot, then writes a bit more and shows Chloe the result. She added "To reach" , "from" and "to" in between existing words, resulting in "To reach Trail's End from Arcadia, Head to Seaside, OR."
"Damn, Steph," Chloe laughs in spite of her mood. "Talk about a reach."
Steph grins.
"I'll look up those motels."
"Yeah. Let's do that."
She banks right and leaves Blackwell behind once again. The lighthouse watches until they duck below the tree line. Even after, though, she can see glimpses of it between the foliage for a long time.
Through the foliage, she sees her. A small, lithe figure under the giant white oak, facing it, facing the spot where the woman in white had waited. The spot where the man in a suit kissed the woman. Rachel. Facing off against all of them. Alone. It's dark, but she sees her clearly, brightly, as if there is a glow around her. Somehow, she's not surprised. Somehow she knew she would find her there. From a dream, after which she woke up in the junkyard with an irresistible urge to walk all the way back to Overlook.
"You're here," Rachel says without turning around. "I'm glad."
She phases back to the cabin of her old truck driving through rundown streets of Arcadia Bay and tries to remember more, remember how long it took her to hike over there that time, remember if she ever saw the old abandoned hut. It took a while, she assumes, rather than recalls. Funny shit, memory. Strange. Kinda useless, too, since it's an actual memory of something that's already happened and, therefore, can hardly be a clue to finding Rachel in the here and now.
Still, it's nice, the memory. Despite the tears, despite the screaming, which, if she's honest, scared the shit out of her at the time and made it seem like it sucked the air right out of her lungs, despite setting the forest on fire.
That whole day - and night - was life. The day before, Firewalk at the mill - that had seemed like part of a dream, but that next day, starting from the moment Rachel appeared in the doorway at Blackwell and grabbed her hand, felt like she woke up and lived. Really lived, for the first time since the logging truck t-boned her dad into another universe.
The memory also reminds her that she's no stranger to being compelled to act by weird dream clues, so maybe she wasn't entirely talking out of her ass when she told Nathan it wasn't just about the drug.
Not that that's a good thing, necessarily.
The signpost at the turnout to Overlook Park is hijacked by warning signs. They even nailed an extra board to it, just so they could fit a couple more stupid signs.
Park Closed. No Trespassing. Danger. No Entry. Caution.
Just like at the old mill.
Somebody's sure as hell making a ton of money on these things in Arcadia and environs. Gotta be the fucking Prescotts. Who else?
Imagine following the signs. What a life. Especially when the flimsy plastic barrier that is supposed to physically block entry is lying flat in the middle of the road. Knocked over by an invisible ninja from the sea.
The parking lot is halfway up the hill, near the shelter where Rachel played dead to steal picnickers' wine. The shelter is gone. They cleared the rubble, which left only the concrete square of the floor. Tobanga's cousin managed to survive, though the sign next to it burned down . Some of the paint melted, making its many faces appear tearful. The trees along the path from the shelter to the observation point are black, lifeless. The ground is green with grass and wild flowers, though. Bees are buzzing around in alarming numbers.
Ezekiel Blackwell and his sextant are both intact, so are most of the wooden barriers around it.
"Chloe, do you think Blackwell could be called 'The Head of Arcadia'?"
She looks up at his hatted, bearded mug, and shrugs.
The viewfinders also seem fine, except the one on the left must be still out of order. As if to confirm this, someone leaned the OUT OF ORDER sign - the same one Chloe found in the dust after the thing ate their only quarter - against the viewfinder's stand. The metal plate Chloe used to release the captive quarter is lying next to it. "Arcadia Bay's greatest son." Martin Lewis Prescott, Arcadia Head?
And at the other viewfinder, Rachel and Chloe are standing real close, heads touching, spying with one little eye each, improvising the unsuspecting victims' lines.
"And the Lord saideth: thou shalt make a burnt offering of thy firstborn son..."
"Who are you talking to, dad?"
"No one, son. Now lean into the grill and see if the fire started. Farther. Farther..."
Rachel smells like jasmine and she, Chloe, like cigarette smoke and yesterday's beer.
"It's like they were joined at the heads," Joyce Madsen-Price says to Max Caulfield the Timelord in her kitchen some three and a half years later.
Arcadia Heads?
Presently, about 5 months before the kitchen conversation, and in the real world, Chloe hesitates, because it's embarrassing, wonders if she should make a joke about it or prelude in some other way, but finally just silently drops a quarter into the slot.
Steph doesn't say anything. She doesn't really know. In fact, she doesn't even see it, because she's reading the signboards.
The viewfinder does not reveal the future, or the past, or show the location of Rachel's dark room, if in fact it exists. She sees the old white oak, the one that started it all, or rather the husk of it, burned and black, and for some reason split down the middle. The view includes the river, which is clear here, and fast, and shallow. The trashcan Rachel lit up and knocked over is somehow at the bottom of it now, near the bank.
She tries to turn it, to look around the park a bit more, but it's a hard no. The viewfinder must have rusted stiff and will not be moved. The burned oak and the trashcan is the last view it ever found. She wrestles with it for a few seconds, then slaps it, feeling ripped off and stupid. And now her stupid hand hurts on the palm side, too.
"Nothing here that I can see," Steph announces. "How about you?"
"Nothing," she says, though it's not entirely true. "Just ashes and bullshit. Let's get out of here."
"Bullshit," Nathan says from the booth at the Two Whales diner. "My dad doesn't hire. He owns. And these pigs know better than to narc on me."
"Do they?" Max Caulfield says. She's wearing Rachel's clothes. "I hope that means Frank won't get busted."
"Eventually he will. Guy is into some freaky shit. He told me once he took a weird blood oath for Rachel… Uh, forget I told you that."
As they rejoin the two-lane coastal highway that can't decide between the coast and the woods and turn north, Chloe thinks about blood oaths and what sort of fucked up places it's going to take them if it turns out to be an actual clue. It better not. But what if it already did? she wonders, suddenly remembering the dead doe in the cave, which she and Steph still have not gotten around to discussing somehow. Been busy and all. She looks over at Steph, whose nose is deep in her phone. It can wait.
"So how bad is it, Steph?" she asks instead.
Steph winces.
"Chloe, you're not gonna like this."
"I already don't like this, so just tell me."
"Sixty-one."
"Fucking what?" she almost runs off the goddamn road.
"Between inns, hotels, motels, and cottage rentals."
"Sixty hotels in the fucking Seaside, Oregon? Arcadia has like two!"
"I guess it's considered a resort town…"
"Fuck! How are we supposed to search sixty-one hotels?!"
"Maybe once we're there you'll get another clue..." Steph offers.
Chloe lights up a cigarette and smokes in silence for a few miles.
"No. No. OK, wait," she says suddenly. "It's not that bad, Steph."
"No?"
"No! We don't need to go door to door. We just need to check the parking lots."
After a pause, Steph points.
"His bike!"
"Exactly. Now, sixty parking lots is still a shit ton, so we need to trim that list. Eliminate all of the major hotel chains. Keep just the cheap stuff. Stuff that has weekly and monthly rates."
"See what I can do, skipper."
By the time they pass a plain green sign ENTERING SEASIDE, the sun is finally starting to hint at setting. The town looks a lot like Arcadia Bay at first, except there's a quarry instead of a logging mill, and next to the rundown barn on the right, in a small clearing cut in tall grass that seems to be overrunning everything, sits a red helicopter. Also, they immediately pass four motels. Then another three.
Chloe keeps driving straight.
"Grab some food before we start," she half-asks, half-explains. "Decide where we start, too."
"Good idea," Steph says, her tone making Chloe want to ask how the trimming of the old list is going. Making her not want to ask, also.
They drive past at least a dozen restaurants on both sides of the road, all of which seem reasonably able to facilitate "grabbing of food," but Chloe keeps driving on, not really knowing why. After watching a few of those places roll by, Steph glances at her, then returns to her phone.
Another mile down, the road forks into two. In the delta between them, there is a shrub bed with a more festive Welcome to Seaside sign on a big wooden board, showing two street lamps and a curved white railing against the backdrop of sky, ocean and a green blob that may be a mountain. Behind this work of art is a gas station. Chloe pulls in, because the light's been blinking.
"Feed the beast first," she says when Steph looks up. "Unless you feel like some gas station sausage."
"Not into sausage, but I could slay a few bags of junk food."
"Cool. I gotta take my paper money inside anyway."
"I got a card, you know."
"No, I got this. I gotta buy smokes, too."
"Fine, but I'm buying the junk food."
Inside, Chloe pays for gas and a pack of Rorschachs. The attendant is a long-haired bro with a soul patch. Chloe is listening to Debbie Downer voice inside her head telling her what the odds are of Tommy being out when they drive through his parking lot, the odds that he's not in Seaside at all, when Steph runs up with a postcard instead of armfuls of chips and jerky.
"Chloe, look at this."
"What?"
The card is showing a roundabout of some sort, on the beach, with a white railing and street lamps around it. In the distance behind it is a large forest-covered rock jutting out to sea.
"Hey, that kinda looks like the sign over there."
"Flip it over."
She does, and there it is, except it's a little off. Trail's End and Tillamook Head. Seaside, Oregon.
"Holy shit, Steph. Hey, what is this?"
The bro furrows his brow. "Trail's End?"
"What trail?"
"Pfft. What trail? The Oregon one. Lewis and Clark?"
Chloe remains civil enough to obtain directions. They munch chips out of a family size bag on the way there.
The Trail's End is really not much - it's about a hundred feet across, with benches and the railing and the lamps and the statues of Lewis in Clark on a pedestal in the middle - but it's crowded. Vacationers are crawling all over the place, walking in circles, taking pictures with their phones and pointing at everything. The place is right on the beach, and the beach is kind of packed, too, despite it not being the season yet. Those sixty hotels aren't staying empty, it seems.
The turnaround is an actual road, so Chloe circles the statues slowly in her truck, counterclockwise, staring at the tourists as if expecting to see Rachel out there posing for photos, too.
Rachel twirls, laughing. She's wearing a short white summer dress. She's barefoot, ankle deep in ocean water. Her hair is flying everywhere, her blue earring is like a tiny sail. The spray she kicks up shines, caught in the sun rays.
"Take the shot!" she yells.
"You're gonna have to be still," Chloe says, looking through the viewfinder of her father's Polaroid. "This isn't one of those cameras you can take a million pictures per second."
"Just take it!"
She's not there.
They park three blocks away and go back on foot. This part of Seaside no longer resembles Arcadia Bay. There are buildings that are like seven stories tall. There's a promenade along the beach instead of the railroad. People are everywhere, which kind of freaks her out. This shop they pass, called "A Whisper in Time Photography," doesn't exactly help, either. LA Steph, though, world-weary Steph, seems in her element.
"There's gotta be something there," she says, dodging a tourist in a triple-XL Badlands t-shirt.
Chloe grunts assent.
They elbow their way to the statues and walk around with the rest of the crowd and read everything and look at all the pictures - the pedestal under Lewis and Clark has these carvings of dudes in canoes harpooning giant fishes - and scan the pavement and the beach and the sea and the sky and the seven-story face of the town.
There's nothing.
There's nothing, and it's stupid and exhausting to think that they still haven't even started looking at the hotels. They sit down on a bench facing the Tillamook Head, which looks more like a loaf of Tillamook Bread, and crunch some chips. It's the golden hour, though it doesn't feel like it.
"OK," Steph is saying, "So if we remove all of the major hotel chains..."
I need something else, Chloe thinks. I'm not seeing it. Not getting whatever it was you wanted me to see in that postcard. I need something else. Another sign.
There's no flashback. No answer. Just silence from Steph, who has stopped talking and watches her face. Behind Steph half a block south on the Promenade is a wide one-story building with a blue metallic roof and windows for walls. The sign that flickers on at that moment, on account of the sun setting soon, reads:
TILLAMOOK VIEW
BAR AND SEAFOOD
Steph follows her gaze, and they both get up.
"Maybe grab some food there," Chloe says.
"Yeah," Steph agrees. "My treat."
There is a five-step concrete stairway leading up to the plain glass door. People in polos and shorts are sitting on three of those steps.
"Hold on," Chloe says, "Let's... uh..."
They go around back, but there's no parking lot. There is a seven-story hotel attached to the back of the diner, which has a two-story garage. They split up and wander up and down both floors, but don't find a parked red Indian with tassels.
The foyer is full of people. The walls are thickly covered with Thunderbirds merch, which reminds her of Max. In between the blue and teal prints, jerseys and pennants, hang the vaguely tribal sepia drawings of stick figures in canoes hunting the big fish.
The wait is twenty minutes.
"We'll wait at the bar," Chloe says, walking away before the hostess starts doubting her age. Steph hurries after.
The huge windows facing the ocean are pretty, but aren't necessarily a great idea during a sunset. The barroom is flooded with sunlight to the point where it hurts the eyes. A lanky, Eastern-European-looking busboy in a black t-shirt is drawing the pulldown tint screens. Despite the no bike thing and the blinding sun, basically involuntarily, Chloe scans the room, matching the clientele to the mental picture she created of a muscular, bronze-skinned dude with a man-bun, dressed in black leather jacket and boots. None of the blurry patrons match it.
"I'm gonna need to see some ID," the bartender says, squinting and emphasizing "some." He's about seventy years old and has a stark white mustache.
"We just want to wait here for the table," Chloe says.
"Can we have two sodas?" Steph says, climbing up on a stool.
The bartender looks at them both in turn, sigh and goes to get a pair of tumblers. There's a sound of ice being scooped.
"Thirsty?" Chloe asks.
"You always buy a drink before asking barkeep questions. It's tavern 101."
"We gonna ask him questions?"
The bartender returns with clear bubbling drinks.
"Five dollars," he says.
Chloe rolls her eyes. Steph gives six.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"It's a free country," he says.
"Do you happen to know a guy named Tommy Hill?"
"Doesn't ring a bell. Should it?"
"He lives in Seaside. We thought he might come to the best bar in town."
The old man cracks up.
"OK. You're alright, kid. But no, I don't know him. We don't really get regulars here on the island. Some hotel staff now and then, but mostly it's the tourist crowd. If this friend of yours is a drinker, the locals mostly go to places on the mainland. The other side of the bridge. Let me know if you need anything else."
He's about to walk away, when Chloe stops him.
"Hotel staff? Any of them ride an Indian?"
His white eyebrows climb up his wrinkled forehead. Chloe feels like the floor is about to drop from under her boots.
"An Indian?" he echoes, and for a split second, which to Chloe last about a year, looks off to the left.
Her head turns so fast in that direction that something cracks, reverberating through her skull.
There's a man sitting by himself at the far table, veiled by sun's rays slicing through the gaps between the frames and the edges of the blinds. He's facing away from the bar, facing the ocean and the mountain. He's wearing a blue uniform that looks a lot like Sam Taylor's, and a matching baseball cap.
"Chloe, let me..." Steph begins to say, but somehow Chloe is already standing at his elbow. Teleportation, possibly.
"Tommy Hill?"
He keeps looking into his glass for a moment, then cranes his neck to peer at her from under the peak. His eyes are foggy, incredulous. His goatee is wispy.
"What the fuck?" he says. "You're Chloe Price."