“No.”
“It will be fine.”
“Did they see any ghosts?” Bobby cut in, snickering, clearly too focused on his mozzarella sticks to clock the serious turn the conversation had taken.
Dad glared at Leonard. “I don’t give a fuck about made-up ghost stories. I’m worried becauseit’s not safe,” he said, not lowering his voice. A few people turned to look. “The last time someone stayed in that tower, they disappeared. That girl who just went missing was hiking Dead Man’s Creek trail. I won’t have Reece up there all alone without a vehicle.”
“Don’t pretend we don’t know what really happened to that lookout, Mike,” Leonard growled.
A hush fell over the restaurant. The tinkling cutlery and quiet murmurs ceased, pushed to the edges of the room by the giant elephant that’d just trundled in.
People in Ponderosa don’t talk about Tower Seven’s last lookout.
Dad’s eyes flicked over to me, full of an emotion I couldn’t quite place. I saw the denials he’d so confidently proclaimed on our drive fall away, shattered by the reality thatI’dbe the next person to walk into those woods without an easy escape, not some nameless stranger. “We don’t know that for sure,” he said, turning back to Leonard. “Especially now, with more missing?—”
“It’s not the same thing,” Leonard hissed, real anger in his voice. “Don’t you start with everyone else in this paranoid fucking town. It’s an unfortunate coincidence, that’s all. We need all the eyes we can get this season, or there might not be a town if the fires get out of hand.I’mthe one who’s responsible for that.”
“You don’t need?—”
Leonard cut Dad off. “I tried to keep Tower Seven empty. I did. But we can’t risk a fire getting out of hand before it’s spotted, and that lookout’s viewshed has the least amount of overlap with any of the others. Besides, Reece is an adult. He can decide for himself whether he stays there or not.”
They both turned to me.
Tower Seven, colloquially known as Dead Man’s Lookout, weaved through the fabric of Ponderosa as tightly as the six missing hikers that haunted the psyche of everyone who lived there, almost forty years later.
Tucked high up on the peak of Nowhere Ridge, it’d sat empty after its last lookout, Charles Randolph, disappeared one late summer night in 1986, never to be heard from again. Shortly thereafter, the police declared the six missing hikers deceased, and the investigation was suspended indefinitely. There was never an official statement, but the rumors quickly spread anyway.
Some speculated he’d skipped town and changed his identity after the pressure of the investigation into the disappearances became too much. Some whispered he’d thrown himself from the tower onto the jagged rocks below, the guilt over what he’d done vanishing along with his body in the bellies of roaming wolves.
In the end, it hadn’t mattered. A mysteriously missing man can’t be prosecuted, even if he was guilty.
The very real horror of that summer morphed over the years into a ghost story. Whispered under lantern-lit sleeping bags and across crackling campfires, it resurfaced in the paper every few years when a group of foolhardy teenagers ventured into the woods and came out screaming about a knife-wielding ghost chasing them down.
Sometimes it was a hatchet.
The weapon of choice changed depending on who told the story, mostly because no one knew how the hikers had actually died.
A chill ran down my spine, not unlike the one I’d felt earlier at the thought of a predator nearby. I was meant to live in that tower for the next five months. Would I be chased from my bed by the ghost of a hatchet-wielding murderer?
Get yourself together.
Ghosts weren’t real. No one haunted that lookout—it was just old, a little run down, and needed new life breathed into it.
I could fucking relate.
“It’s not the same thing,” I said, parroting Leonard’s words. “I’ll be fine. It’ll be good for me.”
Dad looked ready to argue.
“I’ll befine,”I repeated. “There’s power. I’ll have the signal booster for my phone and the radio. If anything happens, I’ll call you. I promise.”
Leonard nodded. “Then it’s settled.”
Dad didn’t acknowledge him. “Anything out of the ordinary, and you call me. I can get a bird out to you in half an hour,” he said, gripping the edge of the table hard.
“Anything out of the ordinary, and I’ll call,” I agreed.
Hopefully, I wouldn’t need to.
