Chapters (95)
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Video #1
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Video #2
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-One
- Fifty-Two
- Fifty-Three
- Fifty-Four
- Fifty-Five
- Fifty-Six
- Fifty-Seven
- Fifty-Eight
- Fifty-Nine
- Sixty
- Sixty-One
- Sixty-Two
- Sixty-Three
- Sixty-Four
- Sixty-Five
- Video #3
- Sixty-Six
- Sixty-Seven
- Sixty-Eight
- Sixty-Nine
- Seventy
- Seventy-One
- Seventy-Two
- Seventy-Three
- Seventy-Four
- Seventy-Five
- Seventy-Six
- Seventy-Seven
- Seventy-Eight
- Seventy-Nine
- Eighty
- Eighty-One
- Eighty-Two
- Eighty-Three
- The Final Video
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Back Cover
Daniel’s invocation of our childhood moviemaking adventures has the intended effect. I give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s a small benefit, maybe about five minutes long, but I’m willing to extend it to him.
I let out a long-held breath. “Okay. I’ll watch. But just a little.”
Daniel claps his hands together. “I knew you would. And guess what? You’re not going to be disappointed.”
He turns back to the laptop and starts tapping away. Then, with a dramatic flourish, he hits the play button. And his movie begins.
Twenty-One
It takes a moment.
Then some cheesy and ominous music starts playing. It really does sound like a low-budget horror movie, the kind that are all over Netflix.
“The soundtrack isn’t great,” Daniel says, his eyes still on the screen. “I’ll have to pay somebody to do something better. I just goofed around on the piano in the other room.”
Images start flashing across the screen. A baby. A child with blond hair. An older child with two missing teeth, smiling at a fair.
Chloe. They’re photos of Chloe.
There’s an image of Chloe standing in between her parents at a church, all of them grinning.
“Wait,” I say. “How did you…did her parents…”
“Instagram, man. Or Facebook. I’ll have to get their permission later, of course. This is just a rough cut.”
The photos of Chloe’s life move forward chronologically, including ones that start to show her and I together.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past ten days looking at photos of Chloe online. But seeing them in Daniel’s room, filtered through his perspective, somehow makes them even more poignant. The stream of photos makes the magnitude of her disappearance more real.
A pain grabs me in the center of my body. It’s like someone’s twisting a corkscrew into my chest.
A voice comes from the screen.
“On October 7, seventeen-year-old Chloe Summers disappeared from the small, bucolic town of Bentley, Kentucky, where she lived with her parents.”
Bucolic?
It’s Daniel narrating. His voice is thin, reedy, nothing at all like the kind of voice that would ordinarily narrate a documentary. He sounds like he’s twelve years old.
As if reading my mind, he looks back at me.
“Yeah, I need to hire a narrator. If someone buys it, they can get a famous actor to do it. I was thinking someone like J. K. Simmons. You know?”
But my eyes are on the screen, and I’m not thinking about Daniel’s pipe dreams.
It’s the site of the accident. County Road 250, a stretch that runs through a heavily wooded area north of town. The images of the road and the trees make me shiver. The camera zooms in on one tree in particular. The bark is shredded, a big gash in the trunk. The tree we hit…