Chapter 15
Destiny
The woman in white hovered in the woods. This was Destiny’s chance. The one shot she had. She grabbed her things and left without leaving Walker a note. Not the brightest thing to do, but hopefully, she wouldn’t be going far. Hell, maybe she’d even make it back before Walker. She needed to, in the event he’d found Putnam. She’d need to explain her side of the lies.
Putnam hadn’t sent her the picture of the ghost. She’d taken it herself when she was a little girl in the woods. She never really questioned things until she’d found a picture in her father’s study. A picture of the woman in the woods she remembered from years ago. Only the picture didn’t show a ghost. The woman had been alive and breathing and standing next to her father while wearing one of his political pins attached to her shirt.
He knew something and this was the only way she was going to find out the truth. There, the color picture in her father’s study was the same woman from that camping trip years ago. And she was not only alive but it appeared she’d worked on her father’s campaign.
Even that wasn’t the real kicker. That had come instantaneously when the resemblance was uncanny. Destiny was related to the woman somehow. She knew it deep down in her bones.
She swallowed around the lump in her throat and tried to calm her racing heart. She was so close to finding all the answers she needed. All the answers that mattered most.
The woman’s bones were up here on this mountain, probably somewhere close. The lady in white she’d seen when they’d hiked in confirmed it. Her answers lay somewhere in this vast wilderness buried in the dirt, and she’d spend the rest of her life searching if she had to.
First, there was only one lady in white, and then there were two as Destiny started off in the direction, she’d seen the ghost. She carried a shotgun in one hand and a shovel in the other. The first ghost had flowing red hair and a soft face. The second was a blonde who looked a bit younger and more like she would be the first to attack.
“You’re the ghost I’d see in these woods as a child?” Destiny asked.
“Yes,” the ghost answered.
“What are your names?”
“We don’t remember,” the lady in white from the first night answered. “We don’t remember anything.”
Destiny could feel the sadness radiating off of them both.
“How about, until we find out, I’ll call you Jane.” Destiny gestured to the first woman and then the red headed woman. “And I’ll call you Hope.”
They didn’t disagree.
“You two realize you’re both dead, right?”
“We’ve been in these woods for a long time,” Hope answered.
“Too long,” Jane said.
“Why stay? Why didn’t you go into the light?”
“We don’t know,” Hope answered.
“There’s a pull to find answers before we can leave. Some questions we don’t know how to ask,” Jane said.
Destiny glanced back toward the cabin once more.
“He isn’t coming,” Jane announced. “He doesn’t play with us anymore like he did when he was a little boy. Walker is helping a lost man and the Banshee of the woods.”
“Banshee? Don’t they predict death or maybe eat their prey?” Destiny asked, trying to hide her smile and knowing she’d never be that lucky.
“We don’t know. She runs screaming from us,” Hope answered.
“She lives on the mountain?” Destiny asked.
“Not on the mountain. She lives in the mountain, all alone,” Hope answered.
“You don’t know how or when she came?” Destiny asked.
“No,” they answered in unison.
