Page 15 of Silver Linings

I stopped myself, realizing it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell him how my mother and grandmother had disappeared in the woods, not when he’d just been asking Eliza the day before…only half jokingly, according to her…whether there had been any Bigfoot sightings in the area.

My customer waited, gaze questioning, but it seemed clear to me that he wasn’t going to probe, not when doing so might make our exchange even more awkward.

“Then I had to come home and take over the store,” I finished.

Something in his expression told me he’d already guessed there was a whole lot more I wasn’t letting on, but he only gave a sympathetic nod.

“It’s tough when life interferes with our plans,” he said. “I hope you’ll be able to go back and finish your degree at some point.”

That was a hope I’d held in the back of my mind as well, but with every day that passed, it grew dimmer and dimmer. Some people might have said it was entirely possible that my mother and grandmother would reappear just as precipitously as they’d vanished, and yet I wasn’t sure whether I could allow myself even that faint hope.

Also, even though unicorns were magical creatures and could communicate in their own way, that didn’t mean they could talk. Whatever information the one I’d seen the day before might possess, I doubted he would be able to express it in a manner I could fully understand.

“Maybe,” I said, about the only response I could offer. “Do you want your receipt in the bag, Mr. Sanders?”

“Ben,” he said immediately, with another one of those smiles that did uncomfortable things to my midsection. “And in the bag is fine.”

I slipped the receipt in with his binoculars and bird book, then handed over the bag. “Have a wonderful rest of your day.”

The standard thing I said to almost all my customers, but Ben didn’t appear to look at the comment that way. “I plan to. Thank you for all your help…?”

His words trailed off, and he gave me an inquisitive look.

“Sidney,” I supplied. “Sidney Lowell.”

“Then thanks, Sidney. I’m sure the book and binoculars will come in very useful on my hikes.”

He lifted his free hand as if to say goodbye before heading out the door. As it closed behind him, I couldn’t help shaking my head.

I didn’t know for sure what he was looking for out there, but I knew damn well that it wasn’t birds.

Chapter Six

So that was Sydney. Ben had recognized her the second he set foot in the pet store, since she didn’t look too terribly different from the girl he’d seen in the photo her father had dropped. Older, of course, and with a certain tense set to her mouth and a wariness in her eyes that he guessed hadn’t been there when she graduated from college. She’d hinted at some sort of emergency that had forced her to leave veterinary school — at UC Davis, he guessed, since it was the closest university to offer a vet program — but hadn’t said much more than that, which made sense. Even the chattiest shop owner probably wasn’t going to drop all their life secrets to someone they’d just met.

Maybe it was all personal stuff, something to do with her family, in which case, he might not be able to find out much about it unless he could get Mabel or Eliza or one of the other people he’d met in Silver Hollow to spill the beans.

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t poke around online, just in case.

He hit pay dirt right away. Apparently, Sidney Lowell’s mother and grandmother had disappeared in the woods around three months ago, with not a trace of them ever found. The FBI had been called in, teams of trained dogs had been set loose to locate whatever evidence they could, and still, it seemed as if the two women had vanished into thin air.

The story had been unusual enough that it had made the national news and become a new topic for the various “unsolved mystery” Reddits and blogs and Discord servers to go wild over it for a few weeks before they moved on to the next new and shiny thing. And while speculation abounded — it seemed the reigning theory was human traffickers, with UFO abduction a close second — none of those Monday-morning quarterbacks had come up with anything particularly useful to add to the discussion.

Well, that would explain why Sidney had been forced to drop everything and come back to Silver Hollow. According to what he’d read, the pet store had been in the family since the early 1960s, and he doubted Sidney would have wanted to let such an important institution go, not when she’d already lost so much.

No brothers or sisters, from what he’d been able to tell, so with her father estranged and her mother and grandmother gone, it did seem as if she was truly alone in the world. Maybe living in a small, close-knit town had given her something of a support system, but he still couldn’t help experiencing a pang as he thought of her having to navigate all this mostly on her own. While his little sister Liane loved to tease him about his chupacabra fixation, he still knew she was the one person he could call in the middle of the night to bail him out of jail or pick him up when his truck broke down.

Not that he’d ever been arrested for anything, but he could attest to her assistance in terms of vehicle mishaps, since his old Nissan wasn’t the most reliable thing in the world and she’d come to his rescue more than once over the years.

There had been a lot of wild speculation about the incident on those Reddits and blogs, but as far as Ben could tell, no one had ever mentioned an encounter with Bigfoot or some other cryptid as the reason for the older Lowell women’s disappearance. Maybe that was a bridge too far for even the conspiracy theorists.

However, no one could deny that something very strange had happened here. Couple that with the one cryptic comment he’d found about someone spotting a glowing white horse in the woods outside Silver Hollow, and most people would have to admit this didn’t seem to be your ordinary, run-of-the-mill disappearance.

When he got back to the bed-and-breakfast, he didn’t see any sign of Mabel, although, as promised, some cheese and crackers and veggies and dip had been set out in the small salon to the right of the foyer, a place that seemed to function as the B&B’s public space for its guests.

Standing there and munching on a carrot stick was a man Ben hadn’t seen before. He looked as if he was maybe in his late fifties, with gray-streaked dark hair and the kind of mostly handsome features that were often associated with stock photos of CEOs.

That turned out to be not far from the truth, because when Ben went over to introduce himself, the man smiled and said, “Victor Maplehurst. I’m an executive with Northwest Pacific Lumber.”

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