When Greer finally saw the envelope on the car seat next to her, she ran a red light, barely missing being T-boned by a dump truck. She pulled over at the casino, Treasures of Gold, and parked between two large pickups well hidden from the road. She stared at the envelope. Had someone slipped it in the car at the museum, or had the cops done it when she got pulled over?
Her heart jumped into her throat. The true weight of father's disappearance started to take over, an awful, acidic realization - if all these people were coming after her, what had happened to him?
She looked around again. Her heart bouncing in her chest, she carefully lifted the envelope and slowly pried it open to find a photograph and a single piece of paper with a typed message.
I WANT TO HELP WALTER. LOOK INTO GROUND-BASED
RADIO FREQUENCY ARRAYS.
Ground-based Radio Frequency Arrays?
Greer held up the photo, a clear blue sky with two contrails forming an X.
Of all the things that had flashed through her mind, a picture of the sky was not one of them.
What the actual F had she gotten herself into?
She looked at her iPhone. In the movies, people were always ripping out their SIM cards when they didn't want to be tracked, but she didn't see a way to open the phone, then remembered that SIM cards were digital now, not physical. Probably it wouldn't do any good, but she turned off the phone.
The woman at the library's internet desk, who looked like a Hobbit, surveyed the reservation sheet and announced in a tone that conveyed Greer's unbelievable luck that #5 was open.
Greer signed in as Cruella McStunning, then typed in "Ground-Based Frequency Arrays.”
Ground-based frequency arrays, often implemented as phased arrays, are interconnected antenna systems placed on the earth's surface that steer radio beams electronically for radar, communications, and imaging without physical movement. These arrays operate across a range offrequencies for applications such as 5G MIMO, satellite communications, planetary radio astronomy, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR).
She looked up Walter’s name and found a few articles. In one from a year before, about an oversight committee for Lab safety, Walter was pictured with a fellow microbiologist named Marsha Kingman. The name rang a bell.
She put it in, and it was the scientist who had just fallen off the cliff!
She typed "murdered, missing, scientists."
The first few pages had very little, but then she dropped down the rabbit hole, which ended on WeAreTheLoosh.com, a creepy, tacky site with angels and demons flying around a list of scientists who had met unfortunate ends.
Edward Yang – UCLA. Geophysicist. Expert in planetary fluid dynamics (interaction between the mantle and the core). Found in garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. (Ruled a suicide, but there was no note and no apparent reason. Everyone who knew him said it was completely out of character. He left behind a wife and a son. The wife was pressing to reopen the case).
Mark Lee – Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Position/expertise unknown. Found ritualistically murdered in his vacation home in Florida. (Son and friend arrested for his murder).
Travis MacMahon - Private Virginia lab. Climate Scientist. Found suffocated in an airtight compartment at the lab. (The keypad to unlock the door and the ventilation system failed when there was a power outage, and the backup generator also inexplicably failed).
Misha Levy – University of Texas. Nuclear Physicist. Drowned in a boating accident.
Pavar Mistry - MIT. Plasma Physicist. Shot during a robbery.
María Flores - Los Alamos Lab. Administrative Assistant. Disappeared on a hike.
Marsha Kingman - Kirtland Airfare Research Laboratory. Fall or suicide off a cliff in the Sandia Mountains.
General Forland - Retired. Numerous high-level positions for top-secret programs. (Disappeared after walking out of Albuquerque home with no phone and no wallet).
When she got to the bottom of the list, she froze. It said:
Walter Lodge. Los Alamos Lab. Missing. (Information developing).
Greer heard someone breathing behind her. She clicked out of the screen.
"Time's up," the Hobbit said.
At the base of Sis and Walter's hill, three media trucks were self-importantly parked in the middle of the road. In front of one of them, a woman with Farah Fawcett big hair was breathlessly reporting under the lights.
No way Greer was going to run that gauntlet. She parked around the backside of the hill, putting the envelope and the printout from the library under the passenger's seat. She looked up at her parents' house, and it didn't look that steep or far.
But once she began to climb, she realized she was scaling a dirty, rock-filled Everest and began to regret the lack of days at the gym and her marijuana habit.
Halfway up, she stopped to catch her breath. She looked over her shoulder at Santa Fe, calm and welcoming.
She heard a rattle and froze.
Fuck.
Her breath pounded out of her mouth, and she tried to control it and scan the ground with her eyes.
No snake.
It rattled again like a creepy baby toy.
The sound seemed to come from behind her.
Oh god. She was going to die because the press sucked.
She took a chance and burst forward, scrambling up the hill, the rattle going again, louder and more insistent as she fell forward, digging her hands into the dirt and pulling herself forward as though her life depended on it.
Near the top, she lost her grip and skidded back toward the unseen snake before catching herself. She crawled the rest of the way until she fell onto the grass that surrounded her parents' pool.
She looked back down, heart pounding, barely able to get breath, amazed at the distance she had just climbed in seconds.
"Bushwacking?"
She spun to see Fake Jay hanging onto the side of the pool.
"What am I going to do next?" she asked.
"Your mother is drinking too much. I'm worried about her."
Greer couldn't think of anything to say.
Jay grimaced at the dusty dirt covering her from head to toe as though she were carrying a disease.
"Any news about my dad?"
"Juan maced a reporter who climbed the gate."
"That's good."
Fake Jay nodded. "Leeches and parasites."
Greer did not point out the irony, but she must have made a face.
"I know you think I'm a scammer."
"If by scammer you mean that you make shit up to extract money from people, then yes."
"Sweetie, the thing is, I definitely have the gift. I've seen things that would make your hair fall out, make you pray nonstop to Jesus."
"Like what?"
Jay shuddered. "Let's not bring them in right now. Thing is, I can't control it. So, do I make educated guesses to give clients what they want? Only when I have to. But I can look through the veil to other worlds." He looked at her, concerned. Tears actually came into his eyes. "I see you there."
"I see dead people," Greer said.
Jay ignored her. "Hit me the moment I saw you yesterday, clear as day. You are on a journey, and you have one foot in the next world. Don't take that last step."
She stared at him. It wasn't cool what he was doing. Like a threat. "If you can see so much, where's my dad?"
He took a breath like he was preparing to accept an award. "He's alive. I'm ninety percent sure of that. But, like you, he is only halfway here. I see fire around him, a raging hellish inferno."
Greer found Sis, carefully tucked in, everything she could possibly need arranged neatly on a tray next to the bed. Fake Jay might have been a creep, but he was a thoughtful creep.
Greer wandered into Walter's office, the emptiness of it overwhelming. She suddenly felt the same hollow emptiness inside, expanding each moment he was gone. Like an icy breeze in her mind, it occurred to her that her father really was dead. She brushed away a tear.
"Pull it together, Little Stuff," her Dad had said when one of her fish had died. Sis had cooed and hovered, telling her to feel her feelings, but in the end, her father's kind but brusque advice had served her well.
Pull it together.
She glanced around; someone, the authorities or Sis, had carefully gone through everything already. Books that had been perfectly organized by color on built-in shelves were now stacked on his desk, yellows with blues, reds mixed in among greens. Walter's patterns and rules were so strong and consistent, it felt wrong. An invasion.
She sat at her father's desk and opened the top drawer, filled with pens and pencils, each grouped together and bound with a color-coded rubber band. A large drawer was full of files labeled in Walter’s impeccable hand, standard ones like ‘taxes’ and ‘receipts’ mixed with ones not so normal like ‘hair transformation,’ which chronicled Walter’s hair changes from his teenage years to the present. She pulled a file entitled ‘Hemlock,’ and found all kinds of information on suicide and euthanasia, including an analysis of different self-inflicted ways to die, drowning, shotgun in mouth, head in oven, etc.
The document was dated three days before.
Had her father walked into the desert and embraced Ambrose Bierce's "good, kind darkness?"
A large safe sat in the corner. Greer squatted next to it. She thought for a moment and tapped in the eight digits of her mother's birthday. The safe opened with a soft click.
"Sweet...."
Inside were only two things: a holstered handgun and a tube of papers bound with tan rubber bands. Hard to imagine her father firing a gun; he hated loud, startling noises of any kind. She unrolled the papers, wind charts for New Mexico, summarizing data from 2001 to the present, and a map of New Mexico with 17 X's, each numbered. She recognized two of New Mexico’s main highways, 285 and 25, snaking their way away from Santa Fe, which was represented on the map by a small square. Not too far off one of the highways was X1, which looked to be in the Tamawan reservation. She took a picture of the map.
Greer stared at the gun.
Instinctively, she grabbed it and slipped the holster's clip onto her pants. She covered the gun with her jacket.
"You figured out how to open the safe!"
Greer jumped and whirled around.
Sis stood in the doorway. Had she seen her take the gun?
"Combination is your birthday."
"Anything in there?" Sis looked in at it and dropped it into a chair. "Walter has things hidden all over the place. Once, I found a key ring with ten keys to storage units. Who knows where they are or what's in them." Sis smiled sadly. "Maybe you should just leave town. Go somewhere until we know what's going on. You know, not stir things up too much."
Here it came. Sis's go-to whenever things got hairy.
"Honey, I just want what's best for you. You know, when the stress gets too much, like in college...."
"Mom, I voluntarily committed myself. I haven't had an issue in ten years."
"Of course not. It's just... things keep getting stranger and stranger, like we've all entered some alternate timeline where things are different and we'll never get back." She paused like she had more to say.
"What?"
"I'm getting calls with no number on them. I can hear the person breathing, then they just hang up. I think... it might be Walter."
"Dad wouldn't do that! Could be anyone!"
"Even so..."
"Don't answer unless you recognize the number."
"But if it's Walter, I want to be there for him. This caller breathes just like him."
Greer suddenly felt exhausted.
"I don't know what to do. FBI wants my permission to trace the calls. They're urging me to make a video appeal." Sis leaned unsteadily against the doorjamb.
"You're drinking too much."
Sis sniffed. "And the press is relentless. True News offered an exclusive interview. Turns out Walter was involved in a lot of off-the-book programs, maybe UFO stuff. Supposedly, he even met with the President a few weeks ago. Someone's been leaking to the press."
"Aliens and the President?"
Sis threw her hands in the air.
"Is it possible he was kidnapped? I mean, all these things coming out, I'm sure a lot of countries would like to talk to him."
"Could be anything." Sis flinched as the doorbell rang, then turned away.
"Who is it?"
"Probably Detective Quintana."
"Mom, wait." Greer hurried over and hugged her mother, who felt like she had a bird's hollow bones.
"I'll go with you."
They found Detective Quintana staring down at the media trucks outside the front door.
"Ma'am. Miss." He tipped his hat, smelling of tobacco slightly scented with flowers. "I'm afraid we have nothing new, really. Dogs followed Walter's tracks to the road, where they lost the scent. No one seems to have seen anything."
"Were there other tracks?" Greer asked.
"No. And between you and me, the Federal authorities aren't being helpful at all, so there is very little to go on. If you have any contact at all, please let me know."
Sis cleared her throat. "If you had to speculate-"
"I don't like to do that, Ma'am."
"Please."
Quintana sighed. "With your sophisticated security system showing only one exit of the house and no entrance, it's clear he left of his own volition. With the few surveillance pickups we retrieved along his route, I'm reasonably confident he was the only one in the car and was not physically coerced into driving to the location. At his abandoned Mercedes, there is no sign of his meeting another person or group of people, but that could have happened, and the individuals were careful." He hesitated. "Satellites were used to track his vehicle retroactively, but we could only piece together pictures every three minutes, and they missed the timeframe when he left the car. There are three likely scenarios. 1. He rendezvoused with someone as part of a prearranged plan, possibly a love interest."
"Impossible," Sis said.
"While there are no indicators of affairs with coworkers or others, this is the most likely explanation. We have also combed through Mr. Hearst's financial transactions - no red flag withdrawals or evidence of travel. However, given Mr. Lodge's significant holdings, it would not be difficult to establish a separate, hidden financial structure. 2. Mr. Hearst met a contact for drugs, and it went bad. You would expect some sign of this, but we found nothing."
Sis covered her face and squinted her eyes, and Greer wondered if she was laughing.
Quintana's eyes narrowed, and he continued. "3. He walked out into the desert and ended his life."
Sis uncovered her face.
"Where's the body, then?" Greer asked.
"Desert's awfully big, Miss. There are crevices you can drop into and never be found."
"What about a scenario related to his work?"
"There has been a lot of focus among the press and public about this angle, but it is the least likely path, in my opinion. If it was related to his work, why leave in the middle of the night? Why abandon his car?"
"He met with unknown actors and went with them willingly or through force, same as your first two scenarios." Greer thought about mentioning the other dead and missing scientists, but didn't. The detective seemed earnest, but there was something slightly unsettling about him.
"Miss." He gestured at her jacket. "Is there a reason you're carrying a weapon?"
"Greer!"
"I found it in Dad's safe, Mom. I'll put it back."
Sis stared at her.
"It's a felony to carry an unlicensed concealed weapon."
"She'll return it, detective."
Quintana nodded. "If there's anything at all, maybe something you accidentally left out that could help us pinpoint Mr. Hearst's whereabouts, perhaps other guns or potential evidence in the house, please let me know." The detective glanced at each of them, but seemed to look a few beats longer at Greer.
The door shut. Greer and her mother fell onto the couch, exhausted.
"Why didn't you tell him about the papers from the safe?" Greer asked.
"Just science stuff. He's got tons of that around the house. Why'd you take the gun, honey?"
Greer didn't want to tell her mom she'd been chased. "I don't know."
"Just say the word, and I'll send you anywhere you want to go," Sis said.
"I'll say the word if I need to. Promise." She took her mother's hand and gave it a squeeze. "Don't do the True News thing or any legacy media. They'll just slant it for whoever they really represent, which isn't you or Dad."
Sis nodded, closed her eyes, and almost immediately began to gently snore. Greer left her sleeping and walked out into the backyard. She kept the gun.
Fake Jay was thankfully gone from the pool. She found a much shorter section of hill that looked less snake-infested, then slid down with no falls and no rattlesnakes. But when she got to Arion, a reporter jumped from behind a tree and ran toward her before she could get the key in the door.
"Johnny Flores from KBLC. Aren't you Greer Hearst, daughter of Walter Hearst?"
Greer got her key in the door, but saw Flores leaned up against it. She ran around to the other side of the car, and the reporter chased her. She jammed in the key and flung the old, heavy door open. Before she could shut it and slide across to the driver's side, he leaned in. "Look, I'm a friend, and I want to help."
There was something hard and feral in his face, as though he had sacrificed part of his humanity and would never be the same. At least there was no cameraman, but then she noticed the small cameras in the corners of his Ray-Bans. "Step away from the car or I'll press charges."
He stepped back, and she slammed the door shut. As she pulled away, she saw him positioning himself for the perfect shot of her car descending the hill.
When she got out of the neighborhood, she parked and did a breathing exercise.
According to Fake Jay, she was about to die.
And her mother thought she was too unstable to stick around at the exact moment she needed to be there.
This was a phone-a-friend moment, but it suddenly occurred to her in a way that hadn't seemed important before that in the two years since she moved to Santa Fe, she had made no real friends. And even if she had, her phone was turned off. She looked at it, seeming sad and lonely, unattached from her hand on the car seat. It wouldn't hurt to turn it on for just a moment.
The instant it came to life, it dinged with a selfie of Trevor, the guy she had met the night before, at a restaurant called Tonight. The caption read: "Where are you?"
Crap. She was about to come up with an excuse, but her stomach grumbled, and she was pretty sure her fridge was empty.
Could be her phone-a-friend - she texted back her ETA.
The restaurant was one of those places that felt warm and welcoming without trying. Trevor was at a table in the back. He leaped to his feet. Good breeding - she remembered Sis saying something about Harvard and wealthy parents.
"Hey!" he said. "The twig in your hair is a new look."
She yanked the stick out and realized she had never cleaned up after her fight with the hill. "I fell at my parents. With all that is going on, I forgot."
He looked at her, perplexed.
She stared at him. "My father's missing. It's all over the news."
"Oh, my gosh... I had no idea. Was hiking all day out of cell range." She glanced at his clothes, which were indeed hiking attire. He paused. "We should do this another time."
"I just need to eat."
"Of course." Trevor flagged a waiter who came to the table.
She scanned the menu. "Cheeseburger, please. With the fries and the chop salad," she said.
"The same. With the chocolate milkshake."
"Whip cream?"
"Of course." Trevor's face turned serious. "I'm so sorry, Greer."
She waved her hand like they were talking about a bad grade on a test, not a missing father. "I know it sounds dumb, but I'm actually investigating it myself."
"Find anything?"
"Not my father."
"Any way I can help?"
They stared at one another. He adjusted his glasses, and she knew that despite all that was going on, she was attracted to him. He was easy to be around. "Weird to be on a date," she said.
"I haven't been on one in forever."
"Not to be pedestrian, but you don't look like you do construction."
"Work for my father. Super boring. Make parts for electric cars."
"I sell vintage everything. Nice watch."
He looked at it with genuine affection. "Grandfather gave it to me."
The food came, and they were silent while they ate.
"What are you going to look into next with your father?"
"I just need to go home and sleep. Could you do something for me?"
"Yes."
"Could you follow me home? Not to hook up. Just get me to my house?"
"Of course."
Trevor followed Arion in his jeep and saw her to her door. He was five inches taller than she, broad-shouldered, and in great tan-skinned shape. In other circumstances, she might have asked him in. She noticed a tube in his breast pocket.
"What's that?"
"Oh, forgot I had it." He hesitated.
"C'mon."
He lifted it out. "It's this special weed a friend gave me. Was going to smoke it on the hike, but forgot."
She stared at him. He was perfectly imperfect. "Let's smoke it now."
"You sure?"
She reached back and opened the door, and pulled him inside.
The pot was indeed special.
Between the two orgasms and the brain-altering substance, she almost forgot that her father was missing.
But as she drifted off to sleep next to Trevor, all she could think about was whether her father was still alive, and if he was alive, where he was that moment.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I am writing and publishing this suspense novella chapter by chapter here on X, so please follow along if you like. Any feedback and plot suggestions are welcome. If you would like updates, you can also email me through my website gmholmes.com
While this story is taken from the headlines, it is entirely fiction.
Thanks for reading and please look out for Chapter 5!
