Chapter 10
Nate Dowering came out of the double doors of the hospital lobby, his eyes scanning the parking lot in search of the two girls who had just left. He spotted them running across the parking lot toward the freeway.
“Damn, they’re fast,” Nate’s cameraman, Lenny observed.
“Let’s go,” Nate said. He jogged toward his car, which was parked a few rows deep in the parking lot. They jumped into the gray Ford Explorer and Nate navigated the vehicle out of the parking lot while Lenny kept a close eye on their quarry.
Nate allowed a car to pass before turning right toward the freeway. The red haired girl was well ahead of her friend, who had stopped in the middle of the overpass to look at something in the distance. Nate’s eyes followed her gaze, and he balked.
“They are in some real trouble,” Lenny observed with a worried tone.
A dust storm raced toward them in a large menacing swirl of sand and debris, a huge looming cloud that blanketed everything in its path. “Yep,” Nate agreed as the girls took off running. He gunned the engine, racing toward the freeway, but had to brake hard as the light before the overpass turned red.
Nate’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel impatiently as the wall of dust came upon them, obscuring the girls from view.
“Seems a bit late in the year for a storm like this,” Lenny said uneasily. “It’s spooky.” He peered out into the brown air, willing his eyes to see through the cloud. As they sat waiting at the light, both of their phones started chirping with the familiar emergency alert sound in response to the sudden storm.
The light changed and Nate nervously eased the car out into the intersection. His headlights lit up thousands upon thousands of motes of dust as they danced around the car, allowing him to only see about thirty feet ahead of the vehicle. He hoped there wasn’t a car stopped ahead as he accelerated once again to try to catch up with the girls. “Keep an eye out for them,” he growled at Lenny through a tense jaw.
“There!” Lenny cried, pointing. The girls were sprinting along the sidewalk on the right hand side of the road. Then, Lenny yelled, “The tree!”
Nate slammed on the brakes and they both watched in horror as a tree uprooted in the yard next to where the girls ran. The tree made a screeching, wrenching sound as the wind swirled up under its canopy of leaves and ripped the tree out of the ground, sending it pitching toward the girls. As they looked on, they saw the red haired girl raise her arms up over her head just as she was obscured from view by the reaching arms of the tree branches.
Then, to Nate and Lenny’s amazement, the tree lifted up and twisted away from the girls, seemingly of its own accord. It landed a few feet away in a flurry of leaves and cracking bark. The girls stood on the sidewalk, unharmed. For a second, the red haired girl’s skin seemed to be slightly luminescing, as if she had absorbed a little bit of moonlight.
Outside, the wind howled, dust battering the car as it sat idling in the middle of the street. Inside the car, there was dead quiet as the two men absorbed what they had seen. Dumbly, Lenny asked, “Did she just push that tree out of the way?”
Nate bit his lower lip as they lost sight of the girls as they ran around the tree and down a side street. “It really looks like she did,” he said, turning onto the street where they had disappeared. His eyes darted around as he looked for the girls, with no luck.
They continued slowly down the street, searching. As they looked, Lenny said, “And just to be sure, she was glowing, too. Right?”
“You saw that, too?” Nate demanded enthusiastically. “I thought my eyes were just messing with me.”
“No, man, I saw it. What the hell was that? What is she?”
“I don’t know, but we have to find out.” Continuing down the street, Nate felt himself becoming increasingly frustrated as he failed to spot the girls. After what he had seen with the tree, he felt even more desperate to find the red haired girl and learn more about her.
They had reached the end of the street, and Lenny asked, “Do you wanna turn around and look again?”
“For all we know they went into one of the houses,” Nate said through clenched teeth, thinking out loud. “But maybe they didn’t.” He swung around and made a U-turn, once again driving slowly down the street, looking for the girl and her friend.
They passed an old style sedan as they drove, not paying it much attention as they looked into the yards and porches of the ranch-style masonry homes on the street. Back at the beginning of the street, Nate cursed, saying, “We lost them.”
Nate turned right onto the main street and drove for a few blocks, discouraged and at a loss for what to do next. On their left was an all night pancake place, and he pulled in. “I could really use some coffee,” he explained. The clock on the dash read 9:59 PM.
A clean-cut hostess with a blonde ponytail led them to a booth against the front window, and they sat staring at their own reflections and the hood of Nate’s car. The dust obscured the rest of the parking lot from view. The server came and took their orders, making small talk about the inclement weather, which they responded to amiably.
Nate’s mind churned over what he had seen. How had that girl pushed the tree away from them without even touching it? Why had she been in the hospital? Was this the same girl with the mysterious extra organ? He burned with curiosity, simultaneously hoping that she and her friend were all right, while also realizing what this potential story could do for his career if he were the one to break it, whatever it was. Sharing his thoughts with Lenny, he said, “We really have to find those girls. After this, let’s head back to the hospital and ask around. Maybe we can get a name.”
Lenny scoffed. “Yeah, you can do that, along with everyone else.”
“Got a better idea?” Nate snarled. He softened his expression as the server returned with their coffees. He smiled politely and waited until the server had left before continuing, “I’m all ears, man. I don’t know what I saw, but whatever it is, it’s big.” He added cream and sugar to his coffee before taking a large gulp.
Lenny sipped his own drink, contemplating their next move. In his mind, the hospital was out. They’d been there all afternoon without a scrap of information to show for it. In fact, people were coming up to them for information. Suddenly, he sat up straight and slapped his palm on the table with a loud thwack. A server who had been rolling silverware a few tables over jumped in her seat and gave them a dark look.
Nate flashed her an apologetic smile and then asked Lenny sourly, “What?”
“You remember that red-haired guy who was nosing around for information this afternoon?”
“Yeah, so?”
“He was acting kind of squirrelly, if you ask me.”
The corners of Nate’s lips curled into a sly smile. “And he did have red hair, just like our mystery girl.”
Lenny shrugged. “He used your phone, right? Who’d he call?”
Nate was already pulling his cell phone out of his pocket. Scrolling through his call history, he found the number and jotted it down on one of the napkins on the table. “All right,” he said when he was finished. “Let’s head back to the office and see what we can find out.”
Nate tossed a ten-dollar bill onto the table and shoved the napkin into his pocket, sliding out of the booth. They nodded to the hostess on their way out, and were soon back on the road and headed down to the station. It took them twice as long as normal, as Nate drove slowly through the dust storm. He wisely decided to stay off the freeway entirely, making his way into downtown Phoenix using only surface streets.
Once they reached their building, they parked as close to the entrance as they could, jogging through the storm and trying not to breathe in the dust. Fortunately, the storm seemed to be subsiding as they finally reached the relative quiet of the lobby. They took the stairs to the second floor, where there was a large sea of cubicles. Only a single fluorescent light remained lit this late at night, and Nate made his way to his workspace in the relative
dimness.
Nate sat down at his desk and wiggled the mouse to wake the computer up from its power saving mode. While he waited for the machine to come alive he pulled the napkin out of his pocket, pressing it carefully on his desktop to remove the wrinkles. As the monitor lit up, Lenny leaned over his shoulder, eagerly looking at the screen.
“Dude, you’re breathing in my ear,” Nate said grumpily.
“Sorry.” Lenny took a step back while Nate typed the number into the search engine that they used to do a reverse look-up on phone numbers.
“It’s a cell phone number, registered to a woman named Amelia Carpenter,” Nate said after a moment, knitting his eyebrows together in concentration. He tried to recall what he had overheard of the red-haired guy’s conversation. The guy had asked the woman to come down to the gift shop, so it probably wasn’t the daughter’s number. “Her mother, perhaps?” he mused out loud.
Lenny made a noncommittal sound.
A few more clicks and Nate had Amelia Carpenter’s address, which was down in Ahwatukee. “Fancy,” he muttered. Ahwatukee was an affluent suburb of Phoenix known for its large homes, abundant parks, and good schools. “Wonder if our girl has a silver spoon up her ass?”
Lenny snickered and flopped down into a rolling office chair that he pulled over from a nearby cubicle. “So you wanna go knock on the door at mom and pop’s house or what?”
Nate leaned back in his chair, thinking. “Not yet. I don’t want to tip our hand. Right now that guy is probably hoping that we’ve forgotten all about him, and I think it would be good for us to let him think that we have.” He paused for a moment, running his hand through his hair. “I’ll tell you one thing though, this story is way more than some side-show medical case. You saw what she did with that tree.”
A small smile played across Lenny’s lips as he thought about it. “Man, I wish I’d had the camera rolling on that.” He restlessly turned back and forth in the office chair while chewing on a thumbnail. “Maybe a gust of wind picked the tree up before it landed on them.”
“I don’t think so--Mother Nature’s just not that convenient. We both saw her push the tree off. And that still wouldn’t explain how she glowed. Honestly, with what’s been going on in the world lately, I think I’d believe just about anything at this point.” Nate turned away from the computer screen to face Lenny, casually crossing an ankle over his knee.
“You think this girl is connected to the rain and earthquakes?” Lenny’s eyes widened incredulously as he asked the question.
“No, not even I believe that someone can control the weather. But still, the last few days have shown us that there are a lot of weird-ass unexplainable things out there. Maybe she’s one of ‘em.”
“Okay, so this girl is special. But it’s not like we can just show up at her house and wring a story out of her. We need a game plan,” Lenny stopped fidgeting and leaned forward earnestly.
Nate rolled his eyes. “Obviously.”
“Well let’s hear it then, genius.”
Nate was silent, thinking.
Lenny smirked. “That’s what I thought.”
“Shut up, Len. We need to find out more about Mystery Girl. We got her mom’s name--well, maybe her mom’s name--but we can start there. I want to know who that girl is, who she hangs out with, how she spends her time, anything. I’m going to hit the internet hard and see what I can find.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go watch the parents’ house and see if she comes home. While you’re waiting you can keep track of who shows up and who leaves.”
Lenny stood up with a sour expression. “If I hadn’t seen that shit with the tree, there is no way I would bother with this. I hope it ends up being worth our trouble.”
“I have a feeling it will.” Nate watched passively as Lenny walked down the row of cubicles and back toward the stairwell. Just before Lenny was out of sight, Nate called, “And Lenny?”
Lenny turned back with an expectant expression. “Yeah?”
“We don’t know what to expect from this girl, and don’t want to miss anything. If you see her, keep the camera rolling.”
Lenny nodded and gave a small salute before disappearing.
Nate turned back to the computer and steepled his fingers under his chin, leaning his elbows on the desktop. “So, Mystery Girl,” he said to himself. “Let’s find out more about you.” With that, he set to work.