When a young girl vanishes, a haunted cop burdened by a past mistake finds himself entangled in the dark secrets lurking beneath Westville’s quiet facade. As the missing girl’s best friends embark on their own search, they uncover something malevolent and hungry stirring in the shadows of the woods. New installments of this serial by Lowell author Ryder Jones will be published each Friday, and you can find past episodes on the Westville Substack. Parent discretion is advised.
It was too dark to see.
The air, thick and humid. A familiar sound she couldn’t place, but mangled, distorted and oppressive, like a constant exhale, warm fetid air blowing against her cheeks.
Something was wrapped around her head, and she could barely move. She was somewhere between sleep and dreaming.
There was a pressure in her arm, something pressed into her skin. A voice, resonating, and echoing, said, “Collect what you can. Then give her a break.”
She felt the pressure acutely, and then it pulled on her arm, tugging and tearing.
Something warm dripped on her leg, and she heard the tap, tap, tap of the drips on the floor. She wanted to go home. She wanted to wake up from this nightmare.
Something deep inside her said, she wouldn’t be doing either.
Chapter 6
Fluorescent lights buzzed above Casey as he took a steadying breath and slid Millie’s yellow Discman across the counter.
The sight of it—a little scuffed, left out overnight in the cold—gnawed at him just as it had hours earlier when he’d first found it. He tagged it with a label before logging it in.
“Let’s get some men over on the scene,” Chief Frank Hart said to Gail, his voice gruff and low. “Put a call into the county sheriff’s if need be.”
“Johnson’s there now,” she replied, picking up a ringing phone, “and DeYoung’s on his way.”
Hart wore remnants of his hunting gear—boots dusted with mud and a jacket reeking faintly of wood smoke—though his badge was now pinned to his shirt pocket. Hart had cut his weekend short when he got the call, showing up in his usual fashion: ready to drop everything for the town and the people in it. Casey admired the longtime Westville police veteran but saw the cost of that kind of diligence—a mustache of far more salt than pepper, short fading hair, and permanent bags of fatigue hanging beneath pale hazel eyes.
He nodded at Casey as he strode out of the admin office. “You look like you’ve seen better days,” he said.
Casey let out a low sigh. “You could say it’s been that kind of night. Or morning, I guess.”
Chief Hart pulled him aside, his face tight as he relayed the latest. “We got a call from Francine Meyers. Says her husband Howard didn’t come home last night. We’re looking at two people missing now.”
Casey’s jaw clenched. Howard Meyers was a bus driver and youth leader at the Methodist Church, a staple in the Westville community. “Someone at the Shell station reported seeing Millie talking with Howard last night. He was running his shuttle route for the game.”
A muscle in Casey’s neck tensed. A missing girl and now a missing bus driver, both last seen in the same place. “We thinking he’s a suspect?”
Read the rest of Rumor Mill on the Westville Substack.
Ryder Jones is the author of the ongoing paranormal mystery thriller serial, Westville, as well as the forthcoming Remnant Divine series of fantasy novels. He was born and raised in Lowell, MI, where he still lives with his wife Jessica, two daughters and son.
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