The next few weeks were hell as I waited for any kind of news. I couldn’t focus on my classes or homework, could barely eat, in fact. Every few days, I’d check in with Sheriff Flood. Finally, near Christmas break, when not a single sign had appeared in more than a month, he said, “We’re still going to keep looking, Anna. But some part of me is starting to wonder if Hap meant to leave the trail that day. He might have been trying to take his own life.”

I was on a pay phone in the hall of my dormitory. As Ellis went on, I wedged my body into a corner and shook, not caring who saw or heard me. If Hap had wanted to die, this was the way he’d do it, of course—in the woods alone, on his own terms. No drama or fanfare. No goodbye. As much as I wanted to believe he would never abandon me, no matter how unhappy he was, I was eighteen now, and no longer his ward, at least as far as the state was concerned. He’d fulfilled his promise to me.

In the corner, as tears streamed, Ellis’s words continued to echo through the phone, stealing the air from my lungs. “Will you have a funeral?” I managed to ask him, feeling strangely hollow.

“In cases like this, it takes many years until someone is declared dead by the state. But there’s talk of a memorial service. I’ll keep you posted so you can come home for it.”

Home. Somehow the word had altered completely in a single moment. Without Hap and Eden, Mendocino was just a place—anyplace—or so it seemed as I tumbled through grief. “Sure,” I said, then thanked him and hung up. I never went back.

(fifty-seven)

When I leave the grove, I head straight for Navarro Beach, south of the village, to meet up with a team of searchers. The little beach parking lot is at the end of an overgrown road that takes me past an old inn, here since the lumber boom in the nineteenth century. Back then the coast was pocked with dogholes, as they were called, tiny shipping points where millworkers sent boards down rickety flumes to the transport schooners that waited. Later there were whalers, rumrunners, women of ill repute. For seventy-five years or more—an entire generation—this area had grown and flourished, supporting saloons and little subsistence stores and homes that were more like camps. Now there’s just this haunted inn to show for it, a broad spread of beach full of driftwood, and twenty or thirty searchers readying themselves in the parking lot.