The Missing Groom's Map

Pauline had been driving the dirt road for twenty minutes before she saw the lake, and when it finally appeared through the trees, silver and flat in the late afternoon light, she let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. She was twenty-three years old, freshly divorced, and this weekend was going to be her proof. Proof to Martha, proof to the wedding guests, and mostly proof to herself that a woman could come out of eight months of marriage at twenty-two and still be fun, still be light, still be the DJ who used to pack a dance floor at two in the morning.

The cottage sat at the end of the road with its shutters half open and only Martha's truck visible. That was the first strange thing. Martha had said the whole wedding party would be arriving Friday afternoon, and it was Friday afternoon, and the gravel circle in front of the place held exactly one truck and a bicycle leaning against the rain barrel.

"Hello?" Pauline called, hauling her duffel out of her ancient little hatchback. "Anybody home?"

The answer came from around the side of the cottage, and it was not the answer she expected. A man in a faded green shirt came around the corner carrying a cooler under each arm, and she recognized him before he recognized her. Colton. Her neighbor from the lake subdivision back home, the crop duster pilot who had moved in two years ago and who she had spoken to maybe a dozen times, always in passing, always about nothing.

"Pauline, right?" he said, squinting at her. "Unit eleven?"

"The very same." She set her bag down. "What in the world are you doing here?"

"Martha hired me to fly some of the guests up from the city." He nodded at the coolers. "And then somebody had to haul the beer up the hill, so here I am. You're one of the bride's people, I guess."

"Bride's side, yeah. I've known her since our club days." Pauline looked around at the empty gravel, the empty windows, the empty everything. "Where is everybody, though? She said three o'clock."

"She did say three o'clock." He set the coolers down and wiped his hands on his jeans. "I got here at two and I've seen exactly one gardener, and he left. It's kinda spooky, honestly. Whole place feels like it's holding its breath."

That was exactly the feeling Pauline had been pushing down since she turned off the paved road, and hearing it said out loud made it worse. The cottage was beautiful, she had to admit that. Old stone, deep eaves, a view straight down the lawn to the water where a half-finished wedding venue stood at the far shore, a chapel with no roof and a big white tent that looked like it had been pitched and then forgotten. That was supposed to be the ceremony site. The tent flapped once in a wind she couldn't feel.

"Well," she said, "I'm gonna go find Martha and figure out the rooms before everybody else shows up and I'm stuck sleeping in the car."

"Fair warning, I already claimed the room with the good mattress." He grinned at her, and she remembered why she'd always liked running into him at the mailboxes, because he had that easy way about him, unhurried, like the day was going to wait for him. "Kidding. I'm in the annex with the pilots. Probably."

"Probably," she echoed, and carried her bag inside.

The cottage smelled like beeswax and cold stone, and the doors stood open onto empty rooms with made beds and no people. Pauline walked the ground floor twice, calling Martha's name, and on the third try she heard a phone ringing from somewhere upstairs and followed the sound to a small office where Martha sat behind a desk that had clearly been dragged in from another room entirely. Martha was twenty-eight and wore the look of a woman who had been on the phone all day, which she had.

"Oh thank God, a friendly face," Martha said, hanging up without waiting for whoever it was to speak. "Pauline. You look incredible. Divorce agrees with you, is that a horrible thing to say?"

"It's the best thing anyone's said to me all year." Pauline sat on the edge of the desk. "Where is everyone? The place is a graveyard."

"That's actually what I need to talk to you about, and I need you to stay calm while I say it." Martha folded her hands on the desk, which was a bad sign, Pauline thought, because people only folded their hands like that when they'd practiced. "Christopher is missing."

"Missing. Like, late missing, or missing missing?"

"Three days." Martha's voice went flat and careful. "He drove out here Wednesday to oversee the last of the venue setup, the caretaker saw him arrive, and nobody has seen him since. His car is still in the lot by the tent. Doors unlocked, keys in the ignition, phone on the seat."

Pauline felt the skin on her arms prickle. "That's not a man changing his mind, Martha. That's a man who didn't get to change his mind."

"That's what the local police keep telling me, in their polite way, which is that there's nothing they can do until he's been gone longer." She rubbed her eyes. "The family wants the wedding to go ahead, quietly, no scandal, and I want that too, but mostly I want to find him alive. I've been calling everyone on the guest list trying to get a search organized for tomorrow morning and getting voicemail after voicemail, because apparently half the party decided to make a weekend of it in Barcelona first."

Pauline stood up. She had come here to be fun and light and free, and here was a real problem, a serious one, sitting on this desk between the seating chart and the cold coffee. She thought about the version of herself she was trying to build, the woman who could handle things, and she heard herself say the words before she'd fully decided them.

"I'll help. Colton's here too, we can start in the morning, first light. He's got a plane, Martha. A crop duster can see a lot of woods from up top."

Martha looked at her the way people look at a rescue. "You'd do that? You barely know Christopher."

"I know I couldn't sit at a wedding wondering." Pauline squeezed her shoulder on the way to the door. "Get me a copy of whatever map you've got of the property and the trails. We'll start at his car and work out from there."

Downstairs, the light had gone long and gold across the lawn, and Colton was leaning against her car with a bottle of water, watching the empty tent across the water flap in that same windless way. She told him all of it in one breath, the missing groom, the locked car, the useless police, and he straightened up through the whole telling, and by the end he was nodding.

"First light works for me. I can take the plane up and grid the shoreline while you two walk the trails." He hesitated, then went on. "There's one thing I didn't mention. When I got here, a fella from the venue crew told me Christopher had been acting strange. Asking about the old paths, the ones that aren't on the official maps. Walking into the trees at dusk with a lantern."

"With a lantern," Pauline repeated. "In a suit?"

"That's the part that got me too." Colton finished his water and looked at her, and for a moment the flirtation that had been sitting quietly between them all afternoon got pushed aside by something more practical, though not gone, she noticed, not gone at all. "Get some sleep, Pauline. Tomorrow's gonna be a long one, and those woods out there don't look like they give things back easy."

She looked out at the dark treeline, at the white tent lifting and settling like something breathing, and believed him.

Pauline didn't sleep, not really. She lay in the narrow bed in the room Martha had given her, listening to the lake lap at the shore and the tent across the water doing its slow breathing, and somewhere around two in the morning she gave up on it entirely and got dressed. If she was going to be useless in the morning, she might as well be useful now.

The cottage was quiet in the way old stone buildings get quiet, all the sound pressed down into the floors, and her socks made no noise on the stairs as she went up to the floor where the wedding party would have slept. Christopher's room was the third door on the left, Martha had told her that much, and it was unlocked, because apparently nobody had thought to lock anything around here, including car doors with keys in the ignition.

She pushed it open with her knuckle. "Christopher? It's Pauline, Martha's friend. I'm just going to look around, okay."

Nothing answered her, which was somehow worse than something answering her.

The room was neat in the way of a man who had stopped caring about being neat, if that made any sense, his suit bag hung on the door and his shaving kit sat open on the dresser and his shoes were lined up under the bed with a strange exactness, two pairs, all facing the same way, like he'd arranged them before he left and then never come back for them. On the desk by the window there was a lantern, old brass, the kind you'd buy at a hardware store, except the glass was smoked black on the inside like it had burned something that wasn't paraffin.

And under the lantern, weighted down with a pocket watch that wasn't ticking, there was a map.

It was hand-drawn, that was the first thing she noticed, drawn in ink on heavy paper with the kind of care that takes hours, and it wasn't a map of the property Martha had given her, not exactly, though the lake was there and the dirt road and the half-finished chapel. Beyond the chapel the paper kept going, into woods that weren't on any official map, and the paths through those woods were marked with symbols she didn't recognize, little hooked crosses and circles with dots and one mark that looked like a woman's body drawn in a single continuous line, arms up, hair out, like someone dancing.

At the far edge of the map, where the paths all converged, someone had drawn a small square ruin and written beside it in a careful, cramped hand: the old altar. And under that, smaller, almost hidden in the margin: I have to know what I am before I can promise myself to anyone.

Pauline stood there holding the paper and felt her chest go tight. That wasn't the note of a man running away from a wedding, she thought. That was the note of a man running toward something.

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody, because saying it out loud made it real in a manageable way. "You went into the woods. Fine. We'll come get you."

She took the map downstairs and out to the gravel circle where the moon was doing its best through a high thin cloud, and she had the door of her hatchback open and the map laid across the passenger seat when a flashlight clicked on behind her and she nearly jumped out of her skin.

"Easy," Colton said, coming down the steps of the annex with his jacket half on. "It's me. Saw your light go on and then saw you come out. Figured either you were running away or up to something, and your car's too ancient to run away in."

"I found a map," she said, and held it up. "In his room. It shows paths through those woods that aren't on anything official, and there's a place at the end marked the old altar, and there's a note, Colton, and the note doesn't sound like a runaway. It sounds like a pilgrim."

He came around the hood and leaned over the map in the dome light, and she watched his face do the thing faces do when a person decides to take something seriously that he'd rather joke about.

"Dancing lady," he said, tapping one symbol. "Hooked crosses. That's not Boy Scout stuff."

"No!"

"There's old stories about this valley," he said slowly, straightening up. "Guys at the airstrip talk. Mostly I figured it was the kind of talk guys at airstrips do. But there's supposed to be something older than the chapel out there, from before the church, and the locals don't cut wood in that part of the forest." He looked at her across the roof of the car. "You're gonna go out there tonight, aren't you. I can see it on your face."

"He's been gone three days, Colton. Every hour matters."

"Yeah." He sighed and pulled his jacket the rest of the way on. "Well, you're not walking into some heathen altar woods alone at three in the morning, so I guess I'm coming. Wait here while I get real boots and a proper light."

They went in past the tent, which had gone perfectly still now, which Pauline decided not to think about, and past the chapel with its open roof full of stars, and then the official trail ended and the map began. The paths Christopher had drawn were real, was the unsettling part, real enough that Colton kept checking the map against what his flashlight showed and kept saying things like, well, that's right, and, there's the split, dancing lady says left.

The woods got older as they went. The pines gave way to something darker, oaks maybe, or