Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Storyteller Corner: An Admittedly Infuriating Interruption
Storyteller Corner: A Less Infuriating Interruption (I Hope)
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Storyteller Corner: Apologies
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Storyteller Corner: One Last Postcard
Chapter Forty-two
Storyteller Corner: The End
Golden Apple Christmas Cake Recipe
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_147674617_
To my sister
And to everyone still searching for their Shanandoah…
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
—C. S. Lewis
PROLOGUE
Fifteen Years Before Our Story Begins
Once upon a time in West Virginia, two boys went missing.
They’d been missing since May, vanished during an end-of-school field trip to Red Crow State Forest.
They were gone long enough that people had stopped referring to them as “missing,” which implied a temporary state of being, and now simply called them “lost.” You looked for missing children. You mourned lost ones.
By that November, the boys’ missing posters on the signboard at Red Crow had faded and wrinkled behind the protective plexiglass. When Maggie and Tom noticed the posters while looking for the trail map, they remembered that they’d forgotten all about the lost boys. Because that’s how it worked. First you were missing. Then you were lost.
Then you were forgotten.
Maggie hadn’t paid much attention to the story even when it was fresh news. That morning, standing at the signboard while Tom retied his boots, she really looked at the two boys for the first time. One was a blond who seemed incapable of smiling, the other a redhead wearing a shit-eating grin. The class clown and his quiet sidekick, she assumed.
Ralph Stanley Howell, d.o.b. 6/15/92, 5'4, 118 lbs. Caucasian. Blond hair. Blue eyes.
Jeremy Andrew Cox, d.o.b. 5/28/92, 5'6, 129 lbs. Caucasian. Red hair. Hazel eyes.
“They never found those boys?” Tom asked.
“Nope. Probably never will.” Maggie was a nurse, and because she’d seen the worst, she knew to assume the worst. If the boys went missing in the Crow, odds were they’d died the first or second night. If they weren’t missing but kidnapped as some had theorized…they probably wished they were dead. She didn’t say that part out loud to Tom. It was only their fourth date, and she didn’t want to spoil the mood.
Holding hands, Maggie and Tom strolled the main trail to a scenic overlook. Below and before them lay the still autumn-lovely woods. Trees upon trees upon trees rising and falling in endless waves, an ocean of forest, and two boys drowned in it.
Before leaving the scenic overlook, Tom took pictures with his digital camera. It was the last day he would have that camera. The police would take it from him, and he’d never get it back.
Two hours and a bucket of sweat later, they reached the Goblin Falls, a small waterfall in a hidden ravine deep in the woods where the air always smelled like moss and cold rain, and the rock formations looked like little men with strangely twisted faces. Maggie squatted next to one of the goblins and made a face while Tom took her picture.
“Nice.” He laughed.
