The Hunter In Me

4 - Unnoticed

Why was I so comfortable with this guy? If this was a movie, this was the part that'd make me yell at the screen. No idiot! Don't go down the stairs!

I took my time testing each step as I descended, unsure the creaky things would hold me. Downstairs, Owen sat at a desk in a clean, windowless room. Oil lamps lit near him softened his edges and faded his appearance making him much more ghostlike. Nerves bubbled in my stomach at the sight, but I tamped them down until the feeling of safety washed over me again.

Scanning the space, there were several enormous wooden trunks stacked against the far wall, and a small bookshelf stood behind the desk. The bright spines of the piles of books it held were the only splashes of color in the entire room. A couch and a big cozy chair, both in shades of brown and tan, were the only other pieces of furniture.

A familiar furball slept snuggled in the chair. It lifted its head to peer at me before curling back up, unimpressed.

Leaning against the far wall, I spotted the missing front door. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but it appeared to be a reddish brown wood and a carved pattern of vines framed its edges. "Shouldn't that be upstairs, blocking the big hole in the front of the house?" I asked.

Owen glanced at it, and his shoulders dropped a fraction before he straightened and said, "It got in my way."

"How does a door get in the way?"

"Is that important right now? Or do you want to hear about why you're here?"

I stayed quiet, and Owen stood and motioned for me to take his seat while he dug through a drawer. When I sat, he piled newspaper clippings on the desk and shuffled through them, selecting four and lining them up with only the pictures showing. "What do you see?"

I studied them under the light, and my chest tightened at the too familiar scene. "Search parties near wooded areas. The police are scanning maps and forming groups. These two are older than those."

"You're right, those are the newest I have, but they're from fifty years ago. What else? Focus on the faces."

I examined the crowd in the first pictures while blocking all thoughts of the missing people. These photos were old—Ford produced the shiny new police car before 1920. Whatever happened, they'd resolved these cases long ago, and there was no reason to equate them to Mom's disappearance. Slow breaths helped to keep my heart rate in check.

Squinting at the grainy images, I was about to ask for a hint when I saw it. "Her." I jabbed my finger at a specific woman, then dragged it across the paper. "And these two guys are in both pictures. Were these searches in the same area?"

"No, they were a couple of towns apart. Now, the other photos."

These seemed like they were taken in the sixties. The dresses were shorter, and there were hippies in bell bottoms. If Owen had been waiting fifty years, this was when he was alive—that was a weird realization.

I tried memorizing the faces in the first image to compare them to the second picture from this year and my mouth fell open—I'd already found it.

"The same woman and two men are here." I held an older photo next to a newer one and looked at them. "The same people, but they didn't age!"

"Yep." Owen took the photos. "This one's from 1919, and this one's from 1969. That's fifty years with no aging. They're mimics." He pointed out two more males that hadn't aged. "You missed these guys."

"So, four men and one woman?"

"Here, but there are more. Altogether, the last I heard, there were between twenty-five and thirty."