“You’ve been surveilling your own daughter,” Ben said flatly.
A shake of the head. “No,” Finn Lowell replied at once, “protecting her. There’s a difference.”
Ben crossed his arms. “Is there? Because from where I’m standing, it looks a hell of a lot like stalking.”
“From where you’re standing, you don’t have the full picture.” Finn glanced at the sky, at the green lightning that crawled through the clouds, and then back to Ben. “We should talk. Not here.”
Did this guy really think he was that stupid? “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said shortly.
“Then we’ll talk here.” Finn took a step closer, and Ben held his ground, even as the charge beneath his skin began to intensify. “You felt the tremor. You know what’s waking up under this town. What you don’t know is that I’ve spent the last seventeen years trying to make sure my daughter would survive long enough to face it.”
Ben gave a harsh laugh. “You left when she was ten years old. You missed her entire adolescence, her college graduation, the disappearance of her mother and grandmother. You missed all of it. And now you show up three weeks into apocalypse weather, and expect us to believe you’ve been protecting her this whole time?”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything.” Finn’s dark eyes were steady on Ben’s face. “But I do expect you to listen, because you’re not as uninvolved in this as you think you are.”
A finger of cold trailed its way down his spine. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The older man was silent for a long moment. Behind them, a car drove slowly past on its way toward the center of town, and Ben caught a glimpse of the driver — Linda Fields, the realtor, her Mercedes SUV looking almost as out of place in Silver Hollow as Finn’s surveillance vehicle. Luckily, she didn’t seem to notice the two men standing on the sidewalk, since her attention seemed to be focused on the phone mounted to the dashboard.
Once the sound of her engine had faded, Finn spoke again.
“Six months ago,” he said, “you were in San Francisco for a cryptozoology conference. You went to the hotel bar afterward, and a stranger sat down next to you. He made a comment about how all you people were looking in the wrong place, how ‘the real thing’ wasn’t too far away.”
Ben’s mouth went dry. He remembered that night with perfect clarity now — the mediocre turnout for his chupacabra presentation, the Scotch and soda he’d been nursing, Prentiss MacAfee holding court in the corner booth with his Bigfoot devotees. And the older man who’d taken the barstool next to him, dark-eyed and slightly disheveled, who’d seemed three sheets to the wind.
“That was you,” Ben said. Now he understood why Finn Lowell had seemed so familiar…but also why he hadn’t recognized the stranger right away. This man, with his neatly combed dark hair and no-nonsense demeanor, seemed a world apart from the person he’d met, someone who’d looked like your regular barfly.
Finn nodded. “That was me.”
“You weren’t drunk at all, were you?”
“Stone cold sober.” His expression didn’t change. “I needed you to think I was just some sad guy rambling into his Scotch. Someone you’d feel a little sorry for, maybe, but wouldn’t take too seriously.”
More details from the encounter began to surface — the way the stranger had clammed up when pressed about what he meant, and the twenty he’d left with some reluctance on the bar. And then….
“The photo,” Ben said slowly. “Sidney’s graduation picture. You dropped it on purpose.”
“I did.”
“You wanted me to find it and see ‘Silver Hollow’ written on the back.”
“I wanted to see what you’d do with it.” The other man’s voice was calm, almost clinical. “I wanted to see whether you’d hand the photo to the bartender and forget about it, or whether you’d be curious enough to dig deeper. A lot of people would have just let it go.”
But Ben hadn’t let it go. He’d gone back to his hotel room and spent hours researching Silver Hollow, falling down a rabbit hole of tourism websites and Reddit forums until he’d found that one buried post about a glowing white horse in the woods. He’d changed his flight the next morning, maxed out his credit card on a rental car and a room at the only bed-and-breakfast in town, and driven into the mountains to chase a rumor that had seemed too strange to be true.
And all of it — every single step — had been orchestrated by the man standing in front of him now.
“You manipulated me,” Ben said, his voice flat. “That whole thing in the bar, the dropped photo — it was all a setup to get me to come here.”
“No,” Finn said calmly, “it was a test. I needed to know what kind of person you were before I pointed you toward my daughter. Whether you were the type to chase a mystery for the truth of it, or whether you’d just be looking to turn whatever you found into your next viral episode.” He paused, and the faintest hint of a smile touched one corner of his mouth. “You passed.”
“I passed.” Ben allowed himself a chuckle, the sound harsh even to his own ears. “And what if I hadn’t? What if I’d just handed that photo to the bartender and gone home to Yucaipa like I was supposed to?”
“Then I would have found another way…or another person.” Finn Lowell’s dark eyes…so unlike his daughter’s crystal gray…were steady on Ben’s face. “DAPI had already flagged you as a potential asset. If you hadn’t come to Silver Hollow on your own, they would have recruited you eventually, would have sent you here with a handler and a set of protocols and your first loyalty to the agency instead of to Sidney.”
“How do you know that?” he demanded.
Finn reached into his jacket pocket and Ben tensed, but all the man pulled out was a phone. He tapped the screen a few times and then held it out for him to see. “This is from a database I’ve had access to for years. It’s a list of persons of interest flagged by DAPI’s recruitment algorithm.”