Chapter 1
The cicadas were swarming the summer Marit disappeared. Magicicadas, the longest-lived of their kind, culminating their seventeen-year cycle in a massive, desperate orgy as they struggled to secure their next generation before they died.
They were an ancient race, the cicadas. A species that had washed up and down the continent like a wave in the wake of expanding and retreating glaciers over hundreds of thousands of years. They grew slowly, cloistered in the warm safety of the soil beneath tree roots, morphing from writhing white larvae into fully-armored adults with a singular purpose: to reproduce en masse.
Children and dogs all over the Midwest would spend that summer happily torturing the poor creatures as they emerged, huge and black and shiny, from their underground bunkers. Each one a time capsule, unaware of the conditions on the surface, saved from certain extinction only by the sheer vastness of their numbers. Children would sit at the base of an infested oak or maple, hidden from the malevolent sun, and watch the monstrous creatures climb up from their burial sites, the earth first dimpling and then crumbling inward as though sucked down into a drain.
The forelegs of the insect would emerge first, followed by its massive flat head and thorax. Then the wide, translucent wings would shake themselves free, revealing a net of thick blood-red veins. They were an abomination begging to be squashed. Dogs would snatch them up, enjoying the buzzing sensation of their enormous wings fluttering against the roofs of their mouths. Children were more creative. They might pester them with a stick, or spear them on a skewer until they had a whole stack of them, writhing and very much alive, as a gory trophy. They might pull off their wings and tape them into notebooks. Or they might simply squash them, smiling at the satisfying crackles of the shattering exoskeletons.
Some people called them locusts, a common mistake. Cicadas and locusts occupied completely separate branches on the tree of life. Locusts were a swarm of angry grasshoppers that ate everything in their path. Cicadas were merely ugly and loud. Legends warned of locusts destroying entire fields and villages. The stories about cicadas, meanwhile, were always about excess and abundance. There were so many of them. So fat. So stupid.
Marit didn’t know any of this, of course. To her, and to most of the young people living in Beaver Creek that summer, their call was simply a part of the air, a droning racket so ubiquitous it became invisible. That summer when the cicadas came out of hiding would have been the second time she’d heard them, the first being the summer she was born.
On the hottest day of that summer, David Westby stood on the drooping porch of his tired farmhouse, watching a police car roll up the drive. Charles, five, sat next to him dragging a plastic toy truck around in a dusty loop. The dog had deposited a cicada in the truck’s bed a few days ago as a sort of offering, still wriggling then, now stiff dead. Charles was acutely aware of the petulant droning of the Magicicadas, so loud as to be unbearable, but since none of the grownups seemed to react to the noise he didn’t either. He was also aware that he hadn’t seen his older sister for several days, but since none of the grownups were talking about it, he didn’t either.
Mr. Westby had called too late, he knew. Should’ve done it days before, when he first knew something was wrong. But this was Beaver Creek, where no one got lost and nothing ever happened. He’d swallowed down the panic when it rose in his throat, smiled and fed Charles his breakfast like it was nothing. Like she’d come bursting through the door any second now, tangle-haired and mud-kneed, and tell them a tall tale about her adventures in the woods that lay between their farm and the town of Beaver Creek. How she’d gone camping and forgotten to leave a note. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
* * *
The vehicle stopped just a few feet from the edge of the porch. Investigator Kathryn Barnes, neatly dressed in navy blue pants, a bun and a grey button-down shirt, stepped out and surveyed the scene before her: the house, the man, the dog, and the boy. They seemed like a mirage born from the angry heat and the inescapable droning of the cicadas. The house’s paint, where it still adhered to the siding, was a dirty off-white that peeled like bark off a birch tree. The man was tall and gaunt, a skeleton someone had quickly slapped some flesh onto, but the boy and the dog looked clean and well-fed. Glossy hair, happy smiles, even in this heat.
Investigator Barnes climbed the porch steps, shook hands with the tall man who barely glanced at her. He had the tight look to his features that suggested decades of peering into old machinery through dust and dim lighting. He barely glanced at her before turning back to stare out over the horizon.
“Mr. Westby, I’m sorry to be meeting you under these circumstances,” she began.
He waited. He looked down at Charles, still pulling the train around in tight loops as though performing this ritual would somehow protect him from the encounter occurring just above his head.
She made a foray into small talk, quickly realized that he wasn’t interested in conversation. She decided to get to the point.
“Mr. Westby, is it normal for your daughter to disappear for days at a time?”
Mr. Westby tried to meet her eyes. He noticed a scar at the top of her left cheek, a long indent where the skin had puckered inward. He stared at that instead, pondering what to say.
“I wouldn’t say –“ he began, but was interrupted by a tug on his pant leg.
“Da,” said Charles, looking hard into his father’s face.
“Yes?”
“Da, I hafta pee.”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Westby gave the officer an apologetic look.
She nodded. The man pulled the solid boy up by the hand and led him into the house. After the screen door had slapped shut behind them, Investigator Barnes leaned against the porch railing and turned her attention to the brown yard, and the brown field beyond that, and the brown woods beyond that.
She picked at a loose curl of paint and tried to remember what she’d been told about Mr. Westby and his wife. They had been a mismatch, age-wise. What had Liam told her? Nine years? Ten? And when she had disappeared, well… the stories she’d been told about that were varied, and completely unfounded as far as she could tell. She knew there was no evidence of foul play at the Westby house.
“But now the daughter, too?” she wondered aloud. From inside came the high, clear sound of Charles calling out for juice. On the porch, the dog silently lifted his head to examine the dark portal of the screen door as though contemplating whether a bark was in order. He must have judged against it, she thought as he lowered his head back down to his paws.
She found herself circling the property, looking out at different angles. Was there a place where an assailant could hide? The landscape was completely barren for hundreds of yards in all directions. Maybe in a corn year these fields could have obscured an unsolicited visitor, but this was a soybean year. No cover whatsoever.
She stepped on a live cicada, grimaced at the feeling of its insides squirting out of the cracks in its broken shell. She wiped her shoe on the bristly grass, turned back to the porch. There was nothing to see out here.
* * *
David observed officer Barnes through the kitchen window. Charles, appeased with a glass of juice and a coloring book, took no interest in the goings-on of the woman outside. David knew she wouldn’t find anything, but didn’t bother to interrupt her search. He waited until she came back to the porch and opened the door.
“Come in?” he asked.
“Thanks.”
He wanted to show her upstairs, to Marit’s room, but she wanted to explore the downstairs first. She took note of the few belongings his daughter had left scattered around: a warped guitar leaning against a rocking chair; a half-used pad of watercolor paper. And on a little table covered with crocheted doilies, a photo of a small girl in a swimsuit with inflatable rings on her arms, holding the hand of a smiling woman with curly black hair.
“Your wife?” the officer asked him.
“And Marit,” he added.
The officer picked it up, and he had to stifle the urge to snatch it from her.
“When did your wife disappear?” she asked.
“Sarah. That was the last photo of them, together. Fourth of July, thirteen years ago.”
“And Charles?” Her forehead creased in confusion.
“My niece’s child. She died right after he was born.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
She did seem sorry, which made David uncomfortable. He wasn’t accustomed to receiving anything other than disdain from law enforcement. This officer was new; the old-timers wouldn’t have bothered to ask questions about his family. He’d had some goats stolen from the back pasture a few years ago, and the only response he’d gotten from the sheriff was that he should only expect as much as a murder suspect. They seemed satisfied in blaming him for whatever had happened to her. Saved them the effort of a real search.
“Mr. Westby?” Officer Barnes interrupted his thoughts, “May I see Marit’s room now?”
“Of course.”
He trailed her up the squeaking stairs, leaving the dog to watch Charles at the kitchen table. The fourth step from the top made an ominous clanking noise when she stepped on it, she didn’t know to step toward the wall where the board hadn’t yet pulled away from the base.
***
Kathryn started by taking pictures of everything she could see from the doorway, then put on a pair of purple nitrile gloves and began picking through the pile of dirty clothing at the foot of the unmade twin bed. She stuck her hands into pockets and pant legs, looking for more elusive clues. She acted on autopilot, performing by rote the actions she’d performed dozens of times before in missing persons cases. She didn’t expect anything obvious to turn up, it was never that simple. All she could do was take photos, pick at things, take notes. Put scraps of paper into baggies. Put it all together back at the office, where she could consult with colleagues who hopefully had a better perspective than her on what was normal for a teenage girl from the Midwest. Eventually she stood, jotted a few notes into her spiral-top book, and turned toward the gaunt man in the doorway.
“Mr. Westby? Does anything look out of place to you?”
“Honestly?” he raked his hand through his graying hair, “I wouldn’t know. I never come in here. But all the clothes look like hers. At least, I’ve washed them all before. And I don’t see any pictures of anyone I don’t know. So, I guess nothing stands out.”
“And when was the last time you remember seeing her?”
He answered with a heavy certainty she recognized, the sound of someone who’d been counting the minutes since their loved one’s disappearance.
“Around bedtime, five days ago. Nine, maybe nine-thirty. She liked to be in bed by ten. Liked to get up early. She gave me a hug at the kitchen table and went to her room.”
“And did she say anything to you? Or did she just give you a hug?”
“She said that she’d probably be up before me, so don’t bother to make breakfast for her.”
“Was that normal?”
“Yeah, ever since I leased out the last of the pasture, I haven’t had a reason to get up early for anything. But Marit was almost always up before sunrise. Reading, painting, building things. She had her own plans, sometimes she’d tell me, sometimes not.”
“Can you give me an example of something she didn’t tell you about?”
“Well. She fixed up an old canoe two summers ago, dragged it to where the stream was a bit faster and got going all the way to the Wisconsin. Didn’t hear from her till a lady down by Stevens Point called to tell me a girl had turned up in their yard and asked for them to call me.”
“So she has disappeared before?”
“Sure, yeah. But not usually this long. And I almost always get some hint that she’s gone off somewhere. I knew about the canoe, figured she’d find a pay phone when she got stuck. This isn’t like the big city, you know. People know each other around here. She’s never really been alone anywhere. Someone’s always watching out for her.”
Mr. Westby was a naïve man, thought Kathryn Barnes. She knew she would have more questions for him soon, but for now, she stuck her pen in the top of the notebook, thanked him, and walked back down the creaking steps to her car. Mr. Westby followed her out to the porch, and as she reversed down the drive she saw that he was standing in precisely the same position and attitude he’d been in when she had pulled up an hour earlier.
She peered at the woods as she drove past them on her way down the dusty drive. The Westby property wasn’t remote, but it was sheltered from the rest of town by a stretch of trees guarding the little stream that the town took its name from, reduced this year to a muddy trickle by the unending heat. She wondered if the sheriff would want to conduct a search. She wondered, her mind returning to the photograph of the woman in the living room, if Mr. Westby’s wife had also had a disappearing habit.
***
Mr. Westby watched Officer Barnes drive away, tamping down the sickness rising from his stomach. He tried to hum a quiet rendition of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Marit’s favorite song, first unironically, then ironically, then back to unironically again. He had the feeling that the cicadas, hearing him, would begin to hum along, and the sound would travel out to wherever his daughter was.
Out in the brown woods beyond the brown field on the edge of the Westby property, the small trickle of water ambitiously called Beaver Creek was making its tortuous way south. By the grace of God it would find its way toward a slightly larger trickle of water, a creek named Ox, which would in turn flow east into the Baraboo River, and then on to the Wisconsin. This would eventually form a great delta with (what else?) the mighty Mississippi which, with the power of the Wisconsin in its veins, would roar south through cities and farmlands all the way down to where oil rigs rocked perilously in the storm-strewn waters of the Gulf. The cicadas resided all along this trajectory, different broods erupting from the thick clay earth in a yearly succession, starting at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico and rolling north to the banks of the Great Lakes. If one were to walk, very slowly, along its length, they would never be out of the range of the raucous mating calls.
If Marit was in range of the cicadas, she gave no sign of it. No secret signal passed between father and daughter, no final verse hummed back over the voices of the magical insects. No matter how hard he listened all he heard was the incessant weeooh-weeooh-weeooh that had been going on for weeks. Wherever she was, she was quiet.
The cicadas were swarming the summer Marit disappeared. Magicicadas, the longest-lived of their kind, culminating their seventeen-year cycle in a massive, desperate orgy as they struggled to secure their next generation before they died.
They were an ancient race, the cicadas. A species that had washed up and down the continent like a wave in the wake of expanding and retreating glaciers over hundreds of thousands of years. They grew slowly, cloistered in the warm safety of the soil beneath tree roots, morphing from writhing white larvae into fully-armored adults with a singular purpose: to reproduce en masse.
Children and dogs all over the Midwest would spend that summer happily torturing the poor creatures as they emerged, huge and black and shiny, from their underground bunkers. Each one a time capsule, unaware of the conditions on the surface, saved from certain extinction only by the sheer vastness of their numbers. Children would sit at the base of an infested oak or maple, hidden from the malevolent sun, and watch the monstrous creatures climb up from their burial sites, the earth first dimpling and then crumbling inward as though sucked down into a drain.
The forelegs of the insect would emerge first, followed by its massive flat head and thorax. Then the wide, translucent wings would shake themselves free, revealing a net of thick blood-red veins. They were an abomination begging to be squashed. Dogs would snatch them up, enjoying the buzzing sensation of their enormous wings fluttering against the roofs of their mouths. Children were more creative. They might pester them with a stick, or spear them on a skewer until they had a whole stack of them, writhing and very much alive, as a gory trophy. They might pull off their wings and tape them into notebooks. Or they might simply squash them, smiling at the satisfying crackles of the shattering exoskeletons.
Some people called them locusts, a common mistake. Cicadas and locusts occupied completely separate branches on the tree of life. Locusts were a swarm of angry grasshoppers that ate everything in their path. Cicadas were merely ugly and loud. Legends warned of locusts destroying entire fields and villages. The stories about cicadas, meanwhile, were always about excess and abundance. There were so many of them. So fat. So stupid.
Marit didn’t know any of this, of course. To her, and to most of the young people living in Beaver Creek that summer, their call was simply a part of the air, a droning racket so ubiquitous it became invisible. That summer when the cicadas came out of hiding would have been the second time she’d heard them, the first being the summer she was born.
On the hottest day of that summer, David Westby stood on the drooping porch of his tired farmhouse, watching a police car roll up the drive. Charles, five, sat next to him dragging a plastic toy truck around in a dusty loop. The dog had deposited a cicada in the truck’s bed a few days ago as a sort of offering, still wriggling then, now stiff dead. Charles was acutely aware of the petulant droning of the Magicicadas, so loud as to be unbearable, but since none of the grownups seemed to react to the noise he didn’t either. He was also aware that he hadn’t seen his older sister for several days, but since none of the grownups were talking about it, he didn’t either.
Mr. Westby had called too late, he knew. Should’ve done it days before, when he first knew something was wrong. But this was Beaver Creek, where no one got lost and nothing ever happened. He’d swallowed down the panic when it rose in his throat, smiled and fed Charles his breakfast like it was nothing. Like she’d come bursting through the door any second now, tangle-haired and mud-kneed, and tell them a tall tale about her adventures in the woods that lay between their farm and the town of Beaver Creek. How she’d gone camping and forgotten to leave a note. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
* * *
The vehicle stopped just a few feet from the edge of the porch. Investigator Kathryn Barnes, neatly dressed in navy blue pants, a bun and a grey button-down shirt, stepped out and surveyed the scene before her: the house, the man, the dog, and the boy. They seemed like a mirage born from the angry heat and the inescapable droning of the cicadas. The house’s paint, where it still adhered to the siding, was a dirty off-white that peeled like bark off a birch tree. The man was tall and gaunt, a skeleton someone had quickly slapped some flesh onto, but the boy and the dog looked clean and well-fed. Glossy hair, happy smiles, even in this heat.
Investigator Barnes climbed the porch steps, shook hands with the tall man who barely glanced at her. He had the tight look to his features that suggested decades of peering into old machinery through dust and dim lighting. He barely glanced at her before turning back to stare out over the horizon.
“Mr. Westby, I’m sorry to be meeting you under these circumstances,” she began.
He waited. He looked down at Charles, still pulling the train around in tight loops as though performing this ritual would somehow protect him from the encounter occurring just above his head.
She made a foray into small talk, quickly realized that he wasn’t interested in conversation. She decided to get to the point.
“Mr. Westby, is it normal for your daughter to disappear for days at a time?”
Mr. Westby tried to meet her eyes. He noticed a scar at the top of her left cheek, a long indent where the skin had puckered inward. He stared at that instead, pondering what to say.
“I wouldn’t say –“ he began, but was interrupted by a tug on his pant leg.
“Da,” said Charles, looking hard into his father’s face.
“Yes?”
“Da, I hafta pee.”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Westby gave the officer an apologetic look.
She nodded. The man pulled the solid boy up by the hand and led him into the house. After the screen door had slapped shut behind them, Investigator Barnes leaned against the porch railing and turned her attention to the brown yard, and the brown field beyond that, and the brown woods beyond that.
She picked at a loose curl of paint and tried to remember what she’d been told about Mr. Westby and his wife. They had been a mismatch, age-wise. What had Liam told her? Nine years? Ten? And when she had disappeared, well… the stories she’d been told about that were varied, and completely unfounded as far as she could tell. She knew there was no evidence of foul play at the Westby house.
“But now the daughter, too?” she wondered aloud. From inside came the high, clear sound of Charles calling out for juice. On the porch, the dog silently lifted his head to examine the dark portal of the screen door as though contemplating whether a bark was in order. He must have judged against it, she thought as he lowered his head back down to his paws.
She found herself circling the property, looking out at different angles. Was there a place where an assailant could hide? The landscape was completely barren for hundreds of yards in all directions. Maybe in a corn year these fields could have obscured an unsolicited visitor, but this was a soybean year. No cover whatsoever.
She stepped on a live cicada, grimaced at the feeling of its insides squirting out of the cracks in its broken shell. She wiped her shoe on the bristly grass, turned back to the porch. There was nothing to see out here.
* * *
David observed officer Barnes through the kitchen window. Charles, appeased with a glass of juice and a coloring book, took no interest in the goings-on of the woman outside. David knew she wouldn’t find anything, but didn’t bother to interrupt her search. He waited until she came back to the porch and opened the door.
“Come in?” he asked.
“Thanks.”
He wanted to show her upstairs, to Marit’s room, but she wanted to explore the downstairs first. She took note of the few belongings his daughter had left scattered around: a warped guitar leaning against a rocking chair; a half-used pad of watercolor paper. And on a little table covered with crocheted doilies, a photo of a small girl in a swimsuit with inflatable rings on her arms, holding the hand of a smiling woman with curly black hair.
“Your wife?” the officer asked him.
“And Marit,” he added.
The officer picked it up, and he had to stifle the urge to snatch it from her.
“When did your wife disappear?” she asked.
“Sarah. That was the last photo of them, together. Fourth of July, thirteen years ago.”
“And Charles?” Her forehead creased in confusion.
“My niece’s child. She died right after he was born.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
She did seem sorry, which made David uncomfortable. He wasn’t accustomed to receiving anything other than disdain from law enforcement. This officer was new; the old-timers wouldn’t have bothered to ask questions about his family. He’d had some goats stolen from the back pasture a few years ago, and the only response he’d gotten from the sheriff was that he should only expect as much as a murder suspect. They seemed satisfied in blaming him for whatever had happened to her. Saved them the effort of a real search.
“Mr. Westby?” Officer Barnes interrupted his thoughts, “May I see Marit’s room now?”
“Of course.”
He trailed her up the squeaking stairs, leaving the dog to watch Charles at the kitchen table. The fourth step from the top made an ominous clanking noise when she stepped on it, she didn’t know to step toward the wall where the board hadn’t yet pulled away from the base.
***
Kathryn started by taking pictures of everything she could see from the doorway, then put on a pair of purple nitrile gloves and began picking through the pile of dirty clothing at the foot of the unmade twin bed. She stuck her hands into pockets and pant legs, looking for more elusive clues. She acted on autopilot, performing by rote the actions she’d performed dozens of times before in missing persons cases. She didn’t expect anything obvious to turn up, it was never that simple. All she could do was take photos, pick at things, take notes. Put scraps of paper into baggies. Put it all together back at the office, where she could consult with colleagues who hopefully had a better perspective than her on what was normal for a teenage girl from the Midwest. Eventually she stood, jotted a few notes into her spiral-top book, and turned toward the gaunt man in the doorway.
“Mr. Westby? Does anything look out of place to you?”
“Honestly?” he raked his hand through his graying hair, “I wouldn’t know. I never come in here. But all the clothes look like hers. At least, I’ve washed them all before. And I don’t see any pictures of anyone I don’t know. So, I guess nothing stands out.”
“And when was the last time you remember seeing her?”
He answered with a heavy certainty she recognized, the sound of someone who’d been counting the minutes since their loved one’s disappearance.
“Around bedtime, five days ago. Nine, maybe nine-thirty. She liked to be in bed by ten. Liked to get up early. She gave me a hug at the kitchen table and went to her room.”
“And did she say anything to you? Or did she just give you a hug?”
“She said that she’d probably be up before me, so don’t bother to make breakfast for her.”
“Was that normal?”
“Yeah, ever since I leased out the last of the pasture, I haven’t had a reason to get up early for anything. But Marit was almost always up before sunrise. Reading, painting, building things. She had her own plans, sometimes she’d tell me, sometimes not.”
“Can you give me an example of something she didn’t tell you about?”
“Well. She fixed up an old canoe two summers ago, dragged it to where the stream was a bit faster and got going all the way to the Wisconsin. Didn’t hear from her till a lady down by Stevens Point called to tell me a girl had turned up in their yard and asked for them to call me.”
“So she has disappeared before?”
“Sure, yeah. But not usually this long. And I almost always get some hint that she’s gone off somewhere. I knew about the canoe, figured she’d find a pay phone when she got stuck. This isn’t like the big city, you know. People know each other around here. She’s never really been alone anywhere. Someone’s always watching out for her.”
Mr. Westby was a naïve man, thought Kathryn Barnes. She knew she would have more questions for him soon, but for now, she stuck her pen in the top of the notebook, thanked him, and walked back down the creaking steps to her car. Mr. Westby followed her out to the porch, and as she reversed down the drive she saw that he was standing in precisely the same position and attitude he’d been in when she had pulled up an hour earlier.
She peered at the woods as she drove past them on her way down the dusty drive. The Westby property wasn’t remote, but it was sheltered from the rest of town by a stretch of trees guarding the little stream that the town took its name from, reduced this year to a muddy trickle by the unending heat. She wondered if the sheriff would want to conduct a search. She wondered, her mind returning to the photograph of the woman in the living room, if Mr. Westby’s wife had also had a disappearing habit.
***
Mr. Westby watched Officer Barnes drive away, tamping down the sickness rising from his stomach. He tried to hum a quiet rendition of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Marit’s favorite song, first unironically, then ironically, then back to unironically again. He had the feeling that the cicadas, hearing him, would begin to hum along, and the sound would travel out to wherever his daughter was.
Out in the brown woods beyond the brown field on the edge of the Westby property, the small trickle of water ambitiously called Beaver Creek was making its tortuous way south. By the grace of God it would find its way toward a slightly larger trickle of water, a creek named Ox, which would in turn flow east into the Baraboo River, and then on to the Wisconsin. This would eventually form a great delta with (what else?) the mighty Mississippi which, with the power of the Wisconsin in its veins, would roar south through cities and farmlands all the way down to where oil rigs rocked perilously in the storm-strewn waters of the Gulf. The cicadas resided all along this trajectory, different broods erupting from the thick clay earth in a yearly succession, starting at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico and rolling north to the banks of the Great Lakes. If one were to walk, very slowly, along its length, they would never be out of the range of the raucous mating calls.
If Marit was in range of the cicadas, she gave no sign of it. No secret signal passed between father and daughter, no final verse hummed back over the voices of the magical insects. No matter how hard he listened all he heard was the incessant weeooh-weeooh-weeooh that had been going on for weeks. Wherever she was, she was quiet.
