Chapter Text
Wallow Creek, Maine · May 7, 2012
Whenever something strange happened in the States, eyes turned to Maine.
At least Aurora Hund’s did. She had left the state fifteen years earlier, and now the wheels of her car were pointing her back toward Aroostook County. There was an option to refuse. Quantico had people closer and people more qualified. Something told her to volunteer anyway.
Maine had always had a high missing‑persons rate. Too much forest, too few people, too many roads that ended in nothing. But five hundred cases was not a normal statistic. That was already a pattern.
When she had seen the nameWallow Creek in the report, she hadn’t bothered to finish the paragraph.
Aurora hadn’t set foot in her hometown since 1997, when she had decided to leave for good and not look back. But places like that have a way of biting you in the ass the moment you turn around. And that was how she found herself driving Route 11 — a two-lane road through nothing but forest, eighty miles of state roads from I‑95. In winter the route was usually impassable. It was hidden so deeply.
The familiar scent of wet wood, gasoline, and lake water worked its way through the vents. Aurora switched off the AC before she could think about why. And when the buildings rose up suddenly along the road, with no welcome sign, she knew she had come home. Then her eye caught a minimalist — frankly, ugly — billboard at the town limits. The lime‑green color stood out against the spruce. In the middle, only two words:
NOTHING WASTED
And the logo of a company she didn’t recognize.
“Something’s actually changing in this town,” she said quietly to herself, slowing to thirty. The posted limit.
Her hometown sat between two lakes: the smaller Bullpond — for most of the year more bog than lake — and the northern Lake Wallow. Aurora turned left before she reached the first buildings. Mill Street could wait. She wanted to see the water first.
Aurora Hund didn’t pull the Ford over until she reached the shore. She got out and looked for a long moment into the deep water. Wallow’s bed was made of silt and peat — dark even at the edges. Reed beds ran the length of the eastern shore; she couldn’t have counted the evenings she’d watched moose there at dusk. It was one of the rare moments when Wallow Creek looked like somewhere a person might want to be. Now it was utterly quiet. No birds. Not even wind in the branches.
Beyond, only the spruces grew, their long roots reaching down into the lake. Among them stood three summer cottages. Forgotten for years.
Her gaze went down. Her tactical boots were already caked in sticky mud after just a few steps.
When the cold began to cut through her jacket, it forced her back to the car. She sat for a moment doing nothing, trying to drown out the fresh, living smell of the pine with air freshener clipped to the vent.
She didn’t have all day. It was time to turn around and head for Mill Street.
The mill had been gone since 1987, when it burned. Aurora had been nine then, but she remembered it was a miracle that the other buildings hadn’t gone with it. The nearest fire station, after all, was in Presque Isle — forty miles away.
The street was a little over a thousand feet long, and the asphalt gave way to gravel quickly enough. Brick buildings stood on either side. The paint on them had been changed so many times that none of them looked original anymore.
On the corner stood the Baptist church. She parked her Ford F‑150 in its lot. To her surprise, the notice board still held serviceannouncements from 2010 — soaked through by rains and stuck on like flaking skin, forgotten for two years. The doors had been boarded over.
The rest of the street contained exactly the buildings you’d expect of a town like this. Between Patterson’s general store and the sheriff’s office stood the Hund & Son butcher shop. Aurora slowed without meaning to. The sign was faded, but the name still legible from the far end of the street. She made herself keep walking toward where she’d been heading: Rena’s Diner.
The neon sign greeted her with only some of its letters still lit, spelling out “RE A.” The same sticky note hung on the glass door with the hours: five a.m. to six p.m., every day. The inside was just as nostalgic — the worn red booths in that gaudy American style. And the black‑and‑white tile... A classic in itself, down to the stench of burnt breading and boiled potatoes.
Only one smell didn’t fit the rest — grease, a shade too rich, as though it came from something they hadn’t used to fry here. Aurora chalked it up to the road and to hunger.
She sat down on a swivel stool at the counter and waited for Rena Kowalsky to come out of the kitchen. Rena was the owner, the only cook, and the only waitress. Once she had hired her granddaughter on weekends, but Aurora would have bet the girl had also fled Wallow Creek.
A man in a work jacket sat at a booth in the back. He did not look up when Aurora came in, but for a fraction of a second he stopped slicing whatever was on his plate. Then he started again, exactly as if nothing had happened. Aurora registered it without comment.
“Welcome, sweetheart, we don’t get many strangers here,” the old woman in the apron said, after she had delivered a plate to the booth and come back behind the bar.
She had gray curls, glasses on a chain, and a burn scar on her left forearm. Her gaze was filled with the kind of amusement reserved for outsiders — half curiosity, half pity.
“Good morning, Mrs. Kowalsky,” Aurora said, and sighed. “What’s for lunch today?”
There had never been a real menu at Rena’s. She cooked what she felt like cooking, and the customer chose — eat it or go hungry.
“Oh, forgive me, honey — I don’t think I remember you.”
Rena wiped her hands on the apron stained with grease and stepped to the other side of the bar, studying the woman with no small interest now.
“Aurora Hund.”
Shock spread across the old woman’s face and quickly gave way to disbelief, and then to joy.
“Oh, is it really you, Angel? Your father was sitting right here an hour ago.”
Aurora raised her eyes.
“Still drinking the same thing?”
“Everybody drinks the same thing here, Angel.” Rena reached under the counter and set a cup down in front of her. Lime green, the same shade as the billboard. On the side, in a plain typeface, two words: NOTHING WASTED. “And how’s life in the big city?”
“I’m alive.” Aurora allowed herself half a smile. “They just don’t feed me.”
“Ah, yes, of course... Such a skinny thing... I’ll make you something good.”
Aurora couldn’t blame a woman near seventy for having her habits set in the past. She let it slide and tried to forget it. The third fluorescent tube from the left flickered. Probably the same as fifteen years ago. She tried to count how many seconds passed between flickers, but a different memory carried her off.
***
From the kitchen of the house on Trout Road, you could see the lake between the trees — a black flash of water through spruce branches. Aurora rested her freckled face on her hands and stared at the view as though she loved it. After school she did this for as long as she could, putting off her homework. She used to draw the view almost every day. Then the notebooks had begun filling up with numbers instead of trees.
Her daydreaming was cut short by the odor — cheap beer and tobacco. And something much more disgusting underneath. The butcher shop. Dad was home. She heard his steps and jumped down off the counter. By the time he came into the kitchen, she was already at the table with her nose in her books.
“Sitting there staring again,” Carl Hund muttered, opening the fridge to grab another can of beer.
“And you’re not at work again,” teenage Aurora shot back.
“What?” her father asked, his voice rising, but she had already learned to ignore it. So she answered him with a long silence. “People do things after school. You could at least help out at the shop.”
“Do we even have anything to sell?”
This time it was Carl who answered with silence. And though she was trying not to react, she watched him out of the corner of her eye, making sure to know where he was standing. After a moment she heard only the familiar hiss of the can and his muttering as he staggered back to the living room.
The girl stood up, unhurried, from the table, leaving the notes she hadn’t even been reading. Out of habit, as though she did it regularly, she crouched to pick up a photograph that had slipped off the fridge door onto the floor. Three faces — hers, her father’s, and one that hadn’t been in this house for a long time. She looked at it for a moment, then put the photograph back.
***
Behind the diner stood Rena’s house. Upstairs she kept rooms to rent — rarely used, but that was where outsiders slept, if any happened to wander into Wallow Creek. Aurora could have spent the night at Rena’s, or drove out to Trout Road. She put off the visit to her father and took the room with the view of Patterson’s. She drew the navy curtains shut to cover the small windows.
The room was dusty, close. Flowered blue wallpaper and a chipped vase with no flowers. But it had a bed and even an old cathode‑ray television. She hadn’t seen one of those for some time.
Aurora Hund hadn’t come here to rest, though. She took out her work laptop and the case file and set them on the coffee table. The paper was still white, the corners sharp, the rubber band tight. She could go to sleep, get some rest before the next day. Instead she sat down on the rug and opened the first folder. Numbers, codes, no solutions — she already knew this material very well. She went to take a cold shower in the hallway bathroom so she could focus for a little longer on the same words over and over again.
The third fluorescent tube from the left no longer interested her. Here, in the room, only the lamp above the table was lit, and under it the paper shone like something nobody had touched yet. Her jaw began to hurt.