Nine
It’s a ninety-minute drive to Acacia Pines with the sun in our faces. The town was named after two of the three most common trees surrounding it, the third being Douglas fir, but locals normally refer to it only as Acacia. It sprang up a hundred and fifty years ago, the sawmill the heart of the town with the town expanding around it, but then sixty years ago the sawmill got shifted twenty minutes south and the town kept growing. Acacia is like a cul-de-sac, with one road in and that same road out. Behind it is nothing but trees and lakes and beside it nothing but trees and lakes, and in front of it with the road splitting it right down the middle are more trees and lakes. The nearest town is an hour away. We drive past big hills and bigger mountains, there are long rivers and giant lakes, and the highway curves and straightens and curves some more, all of it under a wide blue sky, all of it shimmering in the heat. We have the windows down and the air is fresh and I feel like I’m being detoxed.
We start off talking about the town. About the people I used to know. About her children. Damian is seven and he’s going through a Superman phase. He sleeps in Superman pajamas and takes his lunch to school in a Superman lunch box and he has Superman figures scattered all through his room. Her younger son, Harry, is heavily into a group of superheroes I never heard of before, each with different powers ranging from whatever it is that superheroes have to whatever it is the rest of us wish we had. I figure if any of these people were real, they’d have found Alyssa Stone within minutes of her going missing. I figure they’d have stopped it from happening.
Maggie tells me Sheriff Haggerty retired a year ago after he had a stroke. He still has a presence in town, but is a shadow of the man I used to know. In the twelve years since I left town, he’s never mentioned my name once, not after those first couple of days. It was only a few days after I left town that I learned no charges were going to be laid against Conrad Haggerty, and that there wouldn’t be any charges against me either. The investigation was closed, which told me Sheriff Haggerty knew his son had been responsible. Drew was lucky to hang on to his job, though I’ve always suspected it wasn’t just luck, but the town being unable to lose two of its deputies at the same time. Now Maggie tells me there are some who believe Conrad’s story about overhearing the two men at the bar, and some who don’t, and over the years the town has let those events fade from its collective consciousness. Conrad, like me, now works behind a bar. It makes me cringe to hear we’re doing the same thing in life. Then she tells me that I sound different, that I’ve replaced my small-town accent with a big-city accent. She doesn’t say if she likes it or not.
She’s still practicing law. Mostly it’s dealing with property boundary issues and prosecuting drunk drivers and wife beaters and people for theft. Her parents are still alive, and I’m glad to hear it. My own parents passed away when I was in my twenties. My dad drank himself into an early grave, and all that drinking broke my mother’s heart and she joined him the following year. Drew is sheriff now. She says he’s a good man and people love him. We go through all sorts of names and the road winds on and Acacia Pines gets closer. We reach the turnoff to the sawmill. I can hear machinery from a mile away. I remember on summer days when the breeze was just right you could hear the mill from town. She tells me a new sawmill has just finished being built, one double the size of the original. She says they’re in the process of transferring machinery and stock from one building to the other, and as she says it, we catch up to a truck turning into a new turnoff a few miles past the old one, a turnoff that back in my time didn’t exist. She says the old building will be left empty for nature to reclaim.
Then she tells me a similar thing is happening to the quarries we passed a little further back up the highway, that they’re expanding out into the forests. She says there are days when the road we’re on is full of trucks.
We pass the gas station. Earl Winters is out front patching up gunshot in the store sign, collateral damage from where somebody has shot out his lights. He’s probably so used to it that it doesn’t bother him anymore. He looks as old as he did back when I knew him, but Winters has been an old man ever since I was a kid. Something out in these hills stops him from aging. Could be the fresh air. Could be the occult. Whatever it is, it keeps his mind sharp. He has this thing he can do with numbers. You can throw any combination of numbers at him and he can add or divide or multiply them in his head as fast as a calculator. He can see how things work. He can tell you what’s wrong with your car by listening to it. He also has a memory for grudges. He’s an almanac for who pissed off who and when.
I tell Maggie about Lego, about the countries I’ve seen, about the bar, about how Scott and I are looking at opening a second bar. She asks if I’ve ever thought about getting married again, and I tell her it’s not something I really think about, and she asks what I’m waiting for, and I shrug off the question because I don’t really know.
We catch up to an overloaded SUV, plastered with bumper stickers faded beyond recognition. Tents and backpacks have the windows bulging. Maggie can’t get past it. Sometimes these SUVs and cars will come into Acacia and refuel on gas and food, the occupants getting one decent meal into them before heading out to go hiking and camping. Thankfully this one doesn’t. It takes the turnoff to the hiking tracks. I wonder if people get lost out in the Green Hole like they used to, or if technology and GPS have made that a thing of the past. I guess GPS can’t help you out against bad luck, or running into a bear, or falling down a slope, or getting caught in a surge of water when crossing a stream. I remember begging my dad to take me camping when I was a kid. For months on end I wouldn’t shut up about it, and finally he gave in. I was ten years old. We got two miles down the track when he leaned against a boulder and said he needed a drink. Turned out he needed more than one. We ended up camping in that spot and the following morning I begged for us to go back.
As we get closer to town, a ball of apprehension tightens in my stomach. We pass big farms and large fields that merge into smaller farms with smaller fields. We pass the Kelly farm, where I found Alyssa. The For Sale sign out front is at an angle because one of the wooden legs is rotting. Fifteen years of sun and wind and rain have stripped away the words. The paddocks are overrun with weed. I can’t see the house behind the big oak trees, but assume it’s been swallowed into the earth.
“There’s never been any interest in the place,” Maggie says. “People say it’s priced too high.”
“What about the daughter? What’s her name again — Julie?”
“Jasmine,” Maggie says. “She hasn’t been here since you left. I couldn’t tell you where she is these days, or what she’s doing. My guess is she’s hoping the town will keep expanding and one day the land will be worth something again.”
The farms end and the houses start earlier than the last time I was here. Maggie tells me the population has grown from twenty thousand to thirty thousand. People move to Acacia for the lifestyle. They move here for the peace and quiet. There are new schools, a new swimming pool complex, new movie theaters and gyms, and the town library is now twice the size it used to be. The supermarkets are bigger and there are more of them. The sheriff’s department is bigger too. A few years ago Acacia got featured on a travel show as the place to go to get away from it all, and now summers see tourism booming, and motels and bed and breakfasts have sprung up all across town.
“There are more restaurants and bars too,” she says. “There’s a lot you’ll recognize, and some you won’t.”
We come to the bridge over the river that separates Acacia from the world. Red paint is flaking off the metal trusses. Slivers of it form metal puddles in the weeds alongside. Maggie says it hasn’t been repainted because it’s going to be replaced within the next year, that it’ll be wider and stronger. The banks of the river are wide and the water is dark and when I was a kid I used to come here with Drew and we’d go fishing, and never once did we catch anything. We go over the bridge. It’s Acacia Pines, but it’s not Acacia Pines. There are bigger buildings, new facilities, more people on the streets. We pass a car dealership that wasn’t there when I was here, and Maggie tells me that’s where her husband works. I take it all in. Some of the shops are the same. Other people too. The roads. The skyline. The big blue sky.
“It