Page 50 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

“Don’t worry about it, Wren. I’ll start the sketches tonight,” Toby says, and I can hear the grin in his voice. “I’ve always wanted to be the man who faked Bigfoot.”

I hang up and lean back, the adrenaline finally starting to cool into something cold and analytical. I have the forgery brain. I know how to layer the deception. I need a paper trail—invoices with backdated stamps, email threads I can ‘accidentally’ leave open on the lobby computer, and a narrative that fits perfectly into the holes of the crew’s own story.

They saw a nine-foot figure. My story: the suit was built with mechanical limb-extenders and a pneumatic frame to simulate muscle mass. They saw it move through mud. My story: the performer is a park ranger with a background in high-altitude endurance athletics we hired for the season. The rescue? A happy accident. The performer, ‘Rowan’—I’ll have to give him a fake last name, something mundane like Smith—saw the hiker in trouble and didn’t have time to take the suit off. He just did what any hero would do.

The beauty of it is that it protects Rowan’s reality by validating the witnesses’ experiences. They aren’t crazy; they just didn’t see what they thought they saw. It’s the ultimate gaslight, wrapped in a bow of heroic marketing.

I spend the next three hours at the desk, drafting the brief for the marketing campaign that never existed. I use the lodge’s old stationery, the stuff with the fading hemlock logo. I write about engagement metrics and target demographics, using the corporate buzzwords I learned in that one elective I thought was a waste of time. I create a world where Rowan is just a line item in a budget and clever engineering.

By midnight, the office is thick with the smell of old paper and the cold dregs of my coffee. I have a folder full of “evidence.” I have Toby working on the physical “proof.” But as I look at the screen, at the paused image of Rowan’s eyes, the coldness in my chest slips. This is the only way to save him, but it feels like another betrayal. I’m turning him into a costume. I’m taking the most real thing I’ve ever known and making it a joke.

I get up and walk to the window. The storm has moved on, leaving the forest dripping and silent under a thin, watery moon. Rowan is out there somewhere. He’s probably watching the lodge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, convinced that I’m the one holding the hammer. He doesn’t know that I’m currently the lead architect of his erasure.

I think about the way he looked when he told me he viewed humans like weather—temporary, loud, and prone to passing. He was wrong about me. I’m not passing. I’m digging in. If I have to lie to the entire world to keep him safe in that forest, then I’ll be the best liar the Cascades have ever seen.

I walk back to the desk and pick up the phone. It’s time to call Sarah Vance. I don’t want to wait until I see her in the morning. It’s easier to lie over the phone. She wants a story. I’m going to give her a masterpiece.

My thumb traces the desk as I listen to the phone ring before Sarah Vance’s voice crackles through the line. She sounds like a woman who hasn’t slept, but whose adrenaline is currently doing the work of three pots of coffee. There’s a frantic clicking of a mouse in the background, the sound of someone refreshing a trend.

“Wren? It’s midnight. I hope you’re calling because you’ve looked at the analytics. We’re passing five million views on the raw clip alone. My inbox is full of network requests. Even the BBC is asking for high-res stills.”

“I’ve seen them, Sarah,” I say, pitching my voice to that specific frequency of exhausted resignation. I need to sound like a woman whose secret just got dragged into the light, not a woman who’s currently building a cage for that light. “That’s why I’m calling. We need to talk about the morning press release. Specifically, the part where you take credit for the reveal.”

The clicking stops. “Take credit? Wren, the footage speaks for itself. We were there. We caught the biological event of the century.”

“No,” I say, sharpening the edge of my tone just enough to make her hesitate. “You caught the most successful practical-effects test in the history of viral marketing. And if you go on the Today Show tomorrow claiming you found a real species, you’re going to be the laughingstock of the industry. I’m trying to save your career, Sarah. And mine.”

There is a long, heavy silence. I can almost see her leaning back in her chair in the darkened media trailer, her eyes narrowing as she tries to figure out which way the wind is blowing. This is the moment where the Forgery Brain takes over. A good forger doesn’t just mimic the brushstrokes; they understand the desire of the buyer. Sarah doesn’t want a monster. A monster is a legal nightmare, a scientific impossibility, and a logistical trap. What Sarah wants is to be the smartest person in the room. She wants to be the one who pulled back the curtain.

“What are you talking about, Wren?” she asks, her voice dropping into a dangerous, low register.

“Six months ago, before I even launched the hotline, I realized the lodge needed more than just a phone number. It needed a face. A myth. But it had to be tactile. It had to withstand the scrutiny of high-definition cameras. So I contacted Toby Richter at Richter Effects. We’ve been collaborating on a prototype suit for a season-long narrative arc. We call him ‘The Guardian.’ We hired Rowan Smith, a former high-endurance athlete who is now a park ranger. We hired him for the season.”

I feel a sharp, cold pang at the name, but I push through it. The lie has to be specific. It has to have the boring, gritty details of a production budget.

“The rescue?” Sarah asks, her skepticism fighting with a sudden, desperate hope. “The way he moved through that mud? The hiker, Jason, said he felt like he was being lifted by a crane.”

“Jason was in shock and suffering from a Grade-2 concussion,” I counter smoothly. “And the suit is built on a pneumatic exoskeleton. It’s designed to allow the performer to navigate rough terrain and lift significant weight to simulate the physical presence of a cryptid. The rescue wasn’t part of the plan, Sarah. That was Rowan making a split-second decision. He saw a man dying and didn’t have time to peel off three hundred pounds of silicone and carbon fiber. He just went in.”

“If this is a lie to protect him from being hunted⁠—”

“Check your email,” I interrupt. “I just sent over the initial design brief from Richter Effects dated last April. You’ll also find a series of wireframe rig concepts and a scan of the ‘Rowan Smith’ nondisclosure agreement. I’m giving you the story of the year, Sarah. You didn’t find Bigfoot. You found the future of immersive marketing. You found a hero who did the impossible while wearing a masterpiece of engineering. Which headline sounds better for your shareholders? ‘Documentary Crew Fooled by Forest Spirit’ or ‘Exclusive: The Secret Genius Behind the Viral Bigfoot Hoax’?”

I hear the rapid-fire tapping of keys as she opens the files Toby and I just spent the last hour creating. I know exactly what she’s seeing. Sketches with deliberate coffee stains. Invoices with believable, non-round numbers. A fabrication timeline that accounts for the exact level of detail seen in the 4K footage. I’ve layered the provenance like an Old Master painting: base coat of truth, layers of technical jargon, and a top glaze of professional vanity.

“Richter Effects,” she mutters, more to herself than to me. “I know their work. They did the creatures for Dead of Night.”

“Exactly,” I say. “Toby is a perfectionist. That’s why the footage looks so real. It’s supposed to. But now that the ‘hero’ element has happened, we can’t keep the secret anymore. If we don’t come clean now, and someone spots a seam in the suit later, the lodge is dead and your documentary is a joke. If we come clean together, it’s a triumph.”

I hold my breath. My professors always told me that the most successful fakes aren’t the ones that look the best, but the ones that confirm the expert’s existing biases. Sarah wants to believe she was part of something huge, but she’s terrified of being the punchline. I’ve just given her a way to be the one holding the punchline.

“I’ll need to see the suit,” Sarah says. Her voice has changed. The panic is gone, replaced by the shark-like focus of a producer who has just spotted a new, more profitable angle. “And I’ll need an interview with this Rowan Smith. On camera. In the suit.”

“Rowan is... shaken,” I say, and that, at least, is the god-honest truth. “He’s a private person. But I can get you the prototype pieces from the basement tonight. I’ll have Toby send over the rest of the fabrication photos by dawn. As for the interview, we’ll do it on my terms, after the press cycle has settled.”

“Fine,” she says. “But if I find one hole in this story, Wren, one single thread that doesn’t match, I will bury you and this lodge so deep the bank will forget you ever existed.”

“I expect nothing less,” I say, and hang up.