“Sure is. As long as you’re inside by a fire or under a blanket looking out at the scenery. But I can’t complain. I’d rather be up here than down in a smoggy, crowded city.” Her face smoothed, and she drew her lips tight as we reached an intersection.

There was only one vehicle at the stop sign, an old pick-up truck that looked as if it had seen its share of miles on the road. It rumbled loudly as it rolled past. Everly averted her eyes, but my gaze was drawn to the driver. His hair was shaved close to his head and gray beard stubble covered his chin. His dark, angry eyes nearly bore a hole right through me as he rolled slowly past. An unexplained shiver racked my body, and suddenly, the cold outside was nothing compared to the icy feeling in my chest. I startled as the truck roared and sped off.

“Wow, who was that? He looked extremely unfriendly.”

“That, my friend, was Alcott Wolfe, Jem’s dad. And yes, you’re right. Extremely unfriendly.”

We turned the corner. A table of books, bookmarkers and other knick knacks one might find on a shelf sat on the sidewalk in front of Alice in Bookland. I wondered if there were many Blackthorn citizens that frequented the place. We had a bookstore in The Grog that was always crowded. It was sort of a gathering place on Saturdays. From what I’d seen so far, this town didn’t seem very bookish. We reached the shop door, and the place looked empty. I wasn’t terribly surprised.

We stepped inside. There was row after row of old books, their spines neatly lined along each slightly dusty shelf. The books were so tightly packed it was a wonder anyone was able to pull one free. But the most interesting thing about Alice’s Bookland was the fragrance. One would expect the slightly musty smell of yellowing book pages and dried ink. Instead, there was a sweet, fruity aroma that took me a second to recognize.

I looked at Everly. “Is that coconut?”

“Yep. Alice is a big proponent of the health benefits of coconut. And just like the Native Americans used every part of the buffalo, Alice uses every part of the coconut—oil, milk, flesh. She even grinds up the shell for her plants.”

With a shop named Alice in Bookland, an obsessive need to collect old stuff and the unexpected ambience of a tropical island, I expected Alice to be one of those eccentric looking older women with brightly dyed red hair and a purple shawl draped around a flamboyant dress. Instead, a stout woman with a tightly bound school teacher’s bun and incredibly smooth pink skin walked out from the backroom.

“Everly, how nice of you to visit.” She walked out from behind her counter. Her one contribution to my earlier vision of the more ‘colorful’ Alice was an apron with the Mad Hatter printed all over it. Her round cheeks were shiny with what I could only guess was coconut oil.

“Hi, Alice, how are you doing?” Everly asked.

“I’m fine, dear, and how’s your mom?”

Aside from the short account of her mom living in a group home for recovering alcoholics, Everly never talked about her. “She’s doing really well. Hopefully she’ll be home for Christmas.”

Alice nodded half-heartedly as if she doubted it. She reached down and took hold of Everly’s scarred hand. “Have you been rubbing coconut oil into these burn scars like I suggested? I think you’d find a significant improvement in the elasticity of your skin.”

Everly tapped her forehead with her free hand. “Keep forgetting. But I’ll definitely give it a try.” Everly shot me a quick eye roll.

Alice looked at me over the metal rims of her glasses. “And who is this?”

Everly reached back and took hold of my arm. “Alice, this is Tashlyn. She’s new in town, and she’s staying with me. She is very interested in looking at old newspaper articles.”

Alice’s oily pink face lit up at the mention of the old newspapers. “Wonderful, a historian. I’ve got papers that date all the way back to the mid fifties.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “But I’m mostly interested in papers from the late nineties.”

Her soft, white eyebrows knitted together. “The 1890’s?”

“Actually, the 1990’s.”

Her brows remained pinched but then she laughed. “I guess for a young person like you, the 1990’s are history. They seem like just yesterday to me. But I’ve got those as well.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to your research,” Everly said. “Afterward, come by the market, and we can have some lunch.”

“Sounds good.”

Everly walked out and I followed Alice down a long corridor that was lined with stacks of magazines. The rich, oily fragrance of coconut swirled around everything. We stepped inside a room where a faded floral print sofa, a coffee table and a fake green fern were completely surrounded by shelves packed with boxes. Each box was labeled with a month and date.

Alice traveled along the shelves and pointed up to a box. “That box with the yellow label is January 1990. That’s where you can start.” She walked farther along the shelf and shook her head as she pushed several boxes back on the shelf. “The 1990’s are popular today,” she mumbled to herself. She pointed to a three tiered stepladder leaned up in the corner of the room. “Be careful when you climb up there. Oh, and watch out for spiders and cockroaches. They love to climb inside the old boxes.”

“I will definitely keep my eyes open for crawly things.”

“I’ll be at the front counter if you need me.” She left with a big grin, taking most of the coconut aroma with her. But it seemed that the fragrance had penetrated everything in the store.

I walked past the first boxes. I was seven and just about to start second grade when my dad died. I remembered it well because instead of returning to my old school with my old friends, I’d had to start a new school near Aunt Carly’s house. Social services had made me go through a doctor’s physical and a series of visits to a lady with rectangular black glasses and a wall aquarium that took up half her office wall. The tiny pink seahorses swimming in the tank almost made the awkward visits to her office bearable. She was always chewing on the end of her pen as we sat and played games and talked. I figured out years later that she’d been a psychologist, but she’d never been able to unlock those lost days from my memory. While there was no real physical evidence of trauma on my body, the doctor had theorized that something so terrifying had happened to me, I’d buried it deep. Aunt Carly had finally stepped in and put an end to the sessions. She decided what I needed most was to feel secure and loved and then everything that was supposed to surface would come out naturally.

I spotted August 1999 on the shelf. Fortunately, it was on top of other boxes. I grabbed the stepladder and climbed up. I sneezed twice from the dust. I pulled the box off the shelf and noticed right away the handprint in the collected grime on the lid of the box. The layer of oily dust seemed consistent with a box that had been untouched on a shelf for sixteen years. But the large handprint looked fresh.

The descent down the rickety stepladder was much harder with an unwieldy box. I reached the floor and carried it to the table. I was never one to run screaming from a room if a spider crawled across the floor, but I made sure to lift the top carefully. The papers were even in order by day, with the first of August right on top. Apparently there had been a small brush fire on the side of the highway the day before, and it had made front page news. That seemed like a perfectly respectable headline for a small town like Blackthorn Ridge, only now, after Everly’s horrifying tale of the missing girls, I knew there was a lot more to the place than an idyllic setting and sawmill.

August 18th. Most of that terrible period of time was a blur, but I knew the date that my dad died. It had been etched on the small marble plaque they put on his marker in the mausoleum. The fire in the truck had been so complete and consuming, there were hardly any remains left to bury. Several of his coworkers, truckers for the same company, had made the burial arrangements. The rest of the details were smeared away with the lost chunk of time.