Chris Holm - The Big Reap

No one believed their story. Not even me. I mean, who pries open a second-story window in a quiet, closely packed development with no trees or hedges to speak of and absconds with a freakin’ six-year-old girl and her trusty stuffed rabbit without raising enough ruckus to wake the whole damn block? The way I saw it, the parents had to know more than they were letting on. They seemed all lovey-dovey on the surface, sure. But once the media spotlight blistered off the thin veneer of normalcy they’d overlaid onto their life, the rot beneath only served to make them look even guiltier than the hard-to-swallow lack of evidence.

No wonder Ada’s pop decided to eat a gun six months into the investigation.

Anyways, given the lack of evidence, the leads dried up pretty quick, and once every speck of dirt in the Swanson family’s life had been well and truly inspected by the tutting masses, folks lost interest. Then some nutjob psychiatrist in Fort Hood went on a rampage that left thirteen soldiers and civilians dead, and America moved on. The grand pageant of misery had found another head on which to rest the crown. Funny to think the well-coiffed anchors said the shooter-shrink’s name a thousand times, but the victims in that case were nothing but a hashmark on his tally. At least when a kid went missing, they were given the dignity of being exploited by name.

So what’s any of that got to do with Topher and Zadie and Nicholas-you-guys-not-Nicky? That’s easy. See, two weeks ago, the three of them were trudging through the chill Colorado wilderness, hot on the trail of some nothing-at-all they were convinced had to be Sasquatch (a local hiker snapped a blurry photo of something brown and maybe moving, which didn’t seem that remarkable to me, since damn near everything in Colorado that isn’t snow is brown, and half of it is moving) when they, uh, found her. Or she found them. Or not, depending who you ask.

You wouldn’t think the event would be so contentious, so up for debate. I mean, Nicholas-not-Nicky caught the big moment on camera, and once word spread, the footage was picked up by the mainstream media, first local, then national. The handheld camera jittering in time with the sound of trundling footfalls, crunching over dead leaves and crusted, desiccated snow as dry and noisy as breakfast cereal. Topher’s breath pluming as he whispered his narration — all mixed metaphors, malapropisms, and “majesty of nature” monologuing. Zadie with her emphatic “Nicky! Nicky, are you hearing this?” as their bull-in-a-china-shop parade through the stunned silence of the old growth forest was joined by a fourth set of footsteps — crazed, ragged, and coming ever closer. Topher, Nicholas-not-Nicky, and Zadie crouched for a moment, silent, behind a thicket of brambles, beyond which that fourth set of footfalls shuffled out a confused solo while it tried to figure out where its accompaniment went. Topher prattled on in a reverent whisper about how they were going to change the course of modern science when they revealed the gentle giant behind these bushes — this missing link between man and beast — to the world.

The big moment: Nicholas-not-Nicky’s hand reaching out past the lens to push aside the branches. Zadie gasping. Topher shouting, “What the fuck?”

And then the three of them gang-tackled by a gaunt, hunched, and apparently stark-raving-mad woman — ninety years old if she was a day — with wild eyes, tattered pajamas, and matted hair that looked like strands of iron and steel against her blue-tinged hypothermic skin, which was speckled white with frostbite. She smashed head-first into the camera, mashing a cheap pink plastic barrette into the lens. The four of them went ass-over-teakettle — the five of them if you count the old lady’s stuffed bunny — and slid down a small embankment to a creek. The whole while the three monster hunters are screaming, and the woman’s prattling on the same nonsense five-syllable phrase over and over again. “Ahwahmahmommee!” stacked end-on-end, without so much as a pause for breath. She mouthed the words with every inhalation as well, sounding like a cross between a bullfrog and a set of soot-choked bellows. When they finally came to a rest at the bottom of the embankment, snow-dusted and sprinkled with pine needles, Topher and Zadie tag-teamed trying to calm her down, one soothing while the other asked Nicholas-not-Nicky if he was getting this. It didn’t take, so Topher — fed up, I guess, or else he spent too much time in college watching soaps — slapped her. America didn’t like that much, as it turns out, and he later admitted on the Today show he shoulda maybe had Zadie do it. But still, it did the trick; the old lady stopped talking.

“Now,” he said to her, eyes glancing all can-you-believe-this at the camera the whole time, “nice and slow, how bout you tell us your name, and what it is you’re trying to say, okay?”

The old woman swallowed hard and licked her cracked, bleeding lips, calming by degrees. Then she looked directly into the camera lens, and said, with all the attitude of a pissed-off tween diva, “My name is Ada Swanson, and I want my mommy.”

Once the video hit the web, the response was full-on nuts — as, most assumed, was the old lady herself. But the obvious falsehood (in most folks’ eyes, at least) of her claim aside, the fact remained that she was found in pajamas consistent with those Ada’d been wearing the night of her abduction, and she’d been carrying Ada’s stuffed rabbit, Admiral Fuzzybutt, when she’d been found by these yahoos. Not a similar one, mind you, but the real effing deal, as identified some hours later by her mother. Seems the Admiral had himself a craft-project mishap one day when Ada was three — by which I mean his left ear was lopped off with a pair of scissors — and Ada’s mother was forced to reattach the ear with the only thread she had on-hand, a royal blue. She did so inexpertly, though not without a certain flair. Anyways, her choice of thread and lack of skill were distinctive enough to convince Mom and cops both. They took the woman into custody and interrogated her for hours in an attempt to find out who she was and where she got the bunny.

But if the news was to be believed, her answers made no damned sense. She stuck with her story of being Ada Swanson, taken from her bed by dark of night. By whom? She didn’t know, exactly. Seems she could only see them when the moon was full, whatever that means. Taken where? A cabin nestled in the woods as hard to look at as her captors or maybe not, she claimed, seeming confused and unsure because she also spoke of spending her nights beneath the stars, of bare dry earth beneath her feet (even on those rare instances in which it rained), and of the watchful eyes of animals in the darkness. When pressed on the question of where this maybe-cabin was, she couldn’t say.

And how had she happened upon the Monster Mavens? Why, she’d escaped, of course, or maybe been let go, only to wander for days through the frigid Colorado wilderness, parched and starved and hypothermic, before finally running into the first people besides her elusive captors she’d seen since she’d been taken. Which was how long, exactly? Days, she thought sometimes, or maybe months, or maybe decades. Her story was vague and unhinged, full of nightmares of bloodletting and half-glimpsed half-human creatures who brushed her hair and cooed over her and plumped her up inside their imaginary cabin with stolen sweets and wild root vegetables and the spit-roasted meats of countless tiny woodland creatures even as they slowly drained her dry — but word for word, unnamed sources told the papers, it matched the big bucket of crazy she’d unloaded with scarcely a pause for breath straight into Nicholas-not-Nicky’s camera as they’d trudged back to the Monster Mavens van with her in tow.