Page 55 of The Girl in the Mist

“I’ll do what Ican.”

“Thank you. I really appreciateit.”

“What do you think, Emma? What’s your feeling about it?” heasks.

“I don’t know. It’s definitely something. There is a link or a connection, something we’remissing.”

“Do you think it’s possible Garrison is right and Merriweather actually didn’t commit those murders? Maybe this is the sameperson?”

“I think it’s possible. But it’s also possible that he just has a crazy conspiracy theory like people come up with when things like this happen. There’s not enough either way. I have a hard time believing somebody could just stumble on that body and then come up with the idea of confessing to take the pressure off a family who had been missing their child for a decade. Why wouldn’t he just tell the police where the body was and let them at least investigate it before he made a confession if he didn’t actually doit?

“And at the same time, I haven’t been able to find anything that would explain why he committed the murders. Yes, he was apparently reclusive. He didn’t like to leave the area; he never went into town. He wasn’t exactly social. But that doesn’t mean he’s a murderer. He was never violent. He didn’t threaten people. There was nothing else in his past to indicate that he was capable of walking into a summer camp and slaughtering thirteenpeople.”

“Maybe he was angry that they told him to stay off the land,” Dean suggests.

“But they’d told him to stay off before. And it wasn’t like he was just showing up and peeping through the cabin windows or trying to swim with the campers. He would sometimes wander out of the bounds of his property. According to Garrison, the camp director at the time would just have a chat with him, tell him he needed to stay off the property, and that was it. There wasn’t anything tumultuous about it,” I say. “Nothing that would make him snap likethat.”

“Do you know anything about the land he was living on? Was it in his family for generations? Did he live there when the camp was firstbuilt?”

“As far as I know, the camp had been there for about thirty years. So, it was there before he was born. I don’t know about his family’s land, though. If I had to take a guess, I would say they were probably there for a long time,” I say. “Merriweather himself wasn’t very old. Only in his twenties when the massacre happened. And because of the way he was described, I don’t think he was the kind of guy to strike out on his own and buy a huge plot of land when he was that young. I would guess he was probably born there and his family was there for a while. But because the camp was already there when he was born, why would he have anything against it? He would have been used toit.”

“But the camp was only active during the summer, right? Which means he had the rest of the year without anyone around,” Dean points out. “He probably wandered around without any restrictions during that time. I’m not saying he went to the camp and played dodgeball against himself. But if there weren’t any people at the camp during those times, he didn’t have to worry about walking around the woods or using thelake.”

“That’s true,” Iacknowledge.

“And summer camp has changed a lot since the forties,” he goes on. “I’m guessing when he was younger there wasn’t as much action during the camp session and that changed as he was getting older. That might have felt disruptive, especially if he was as reclusive and resistant to people as Garrison makes him out to be. He might not have been aggressive toward the police, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t simmering every time he had to stay away from places he liked because of the camp.”

“I need to look into him more. I don’t know who lives on his land now, if anyone. No one seems to know much about him. The stories still go around that the killer was never found and that the crazy person who walked through the woods all the time is still roaming out there with his bloody hatchet. Merriweather was arrested, tried, convicted, and died in prison, and people still ignore that he even existed. It’s going to be difficult to find out much about him,” I say. “But there’s so little to go on about anything else in this case, it’s really all I can do rightnow.”

“I’ll try to find out what I can about Cornelia’s,” Dean offers. “Hopefully I can find where it is and if it’s still open, get you some information on who you’d need to talk to find outmore.”

“Thanks. Now I just have to figure out what it is that I need to find out,” Isay.

I get off the phone feeling slightly more optimistic because I know Dean is fantastic at what he does and has a knack for finding information no one else can find. But that’s about the limit of my optimism. Until I have something concrete, a verifiable direction to go on, the edge will be there.

My next call is to the hospital to request access to their birth records. Mike told me he was born in April of 1961, which gives me a month of baby boy birth records to check. They tell me I can come whenever would be convenient for me and go through the records morgue. It turns out that description is quite kind toward the recordsroom.

The dark, musty cave-like room feels haunted even to someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts. Shelves and shelves of boxes containing records from the last nearly seventy-five years, and though they’ve tried to keep it somewhat organized, there are definitely some cobwebs up there on the ceiling that I’d bet nobody has cleared away in decades. There’s one steel-nerved woman sitting at a table right beside the door, the dim light around her augmented by a single lamp. This is where she works every day, keeping the records organized and updating them as needed. The thought of it gives mechills.

I tell her what I need and she directs me toward a section of the room where she says I’ll find all the records for that year. It would be so much more convenient if there were individual records organized by medical event or situation, but that’s not how medical records work. Instead, I am faced with several shelves worth of boxes marked only by letters coordinating with the last name of the patient records inside.

Apparently, this hospital had a habit of archiving records at the end of the year, carrying only a brief set of notes into the next year’s folder. They thought it would keep the records more organized and manageable, but I can’t imagine the frustration of having to explain health issues to a doctor multiple times and the effort it would take to go through trying to find patient records to cross-check details everyday.

Fortunately for the hospital and its patients, this practice ended about a decade ago. Now patient records are maintained for the life of the patient or until they get too full and they need a subsequent folder. Unfortunately for me, I have about three dozen boxes to go through with patients having names that start with “K” in an effort to find Mike’s birth certificate.

He gave me his birth information, but I want all of the personal details the certificate can offer. If someone knows Mike has been covering up who he actually is, this is the first place any of that could beproven.

Two hours later, I haven’t had any luck. I narrowed down the boxes to the “M” names to look for Mike or Michael, but haven’t found one. It’s possible he has a different first name and uses his middle name. But that puts me back at the beginning. At least there is a color-coded tag on each file indicating whether the patient is male or female. That at least helps me trim down the options.

“Emma?” I hear a somewhat muffled voice call out. “Babe?”

I realize it’s Sam and I stand up from the cramped position I’ve been poised in while I dig through the boxes and go to the end of the shelves.

“Right here,” I callover.

He pokes his head around the corner and looks relieved to see me.

“Hey. There you are.” He comes up and kisses me, looking around as he steps back. “This place iscreepy.”

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