Jim is trying to explain what happened, but he wasn’t expecting to be interrogated when he reported his family missing.

“So let’s go through this again,” the detective says for the seventh time. “You were supposed to be going where?”

“We were going on a camping trip,” Jim says.

“How long were you going to be on the trip for?”

“A week, I think.”

“A week.” The detective stares at him. “And were your kids okay with this?”

“I guess.”

“You guess? I don’t know very many teenagers who would be happy about going camping with their parents for an entire week.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say they were happy,” Jim says.

“But you just said they were okay with it.”

“Are ‘okay’ and ‘happy’ the same thing?”

“I don’t know,”the detective says, leaning forward. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Look,” Jim says, “I just want to find my wife and kids.”

The detective sits back again. “Alright,” he says. “You were getting ready to go. Then what happened?”

“We were almost done packing the car,” Jim says, again. “I went inside to grab my bag.”

“What was in the bag?”

Jim is struggling to not show his frustration with the detective.

“Just my clothes and stuff,” he says.

“What stuff?” the detective asks.

“I don’t know, just my toothbrush and a book. Just stuff.”

The detective slaps down a pad of paper and a pen.

“I’m going to need you to write down every item you had in that bag,” he says.

“This is pointless,” Jim says. “I’m trying to tell you what happened and you just keep interrupting me with annoying questions about things that aren’t important.”

“I will decide what’s important,” the detective says. “You expect me to believe that you were just bringing your bag to the car, and you came out and they were just gone?”

Jim closes his eyes. He can still see the empty driveway. The car wasn’t even down the street at the stop sign or around the corner. They just were no longer there

“Yes,” he says. “That’s what happened.”

He had tried to call all of them, but none of them answered their phones. He thought that they would turn around and come back when they realized he wasn’t there, but they never did.

His phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket.

“It’s my son,” he says, surprised.

“Put it on speaker,” the detective says quickly.

Jim does as he says, in case it helps the police find his family.

“Hello?” he says.

“You forgot me.” Cam sounds upset.

“Cam?” Jim says. “Where are you guys?”

“What do you mean?” Cam screams into the phone. “Where are you?” The phone cuts out.

“I’m going to need to take that to see if we can trace the call,” the detective says. He leaves with Jim’s phone.

When he comes back, another detective is with him.

“We need you to tell us again about this campground you were going to,” the second detective says. “What was it called again?”

“I already told you, I don’t remember,” he says. “My wife was the one who booked the campground. I found the message where she sent me a link, but the website won’t load.”

“We can look at that now that we have your phone,” the second detective says. She taps a pen on a pad of paper. “We need you to tell us everything you remember your wife saying about it. The area, the activities offered, any details that might help us locate it.”

“She said it was about two hours away,” he says. “I think we were going up north.”

“Two hours north, that’s good,” she says as she writes on the pad. “Did she mention if they had a pool or a beach? Were there any specific activities nearby?”

“It was on a lake,” he says. “I don’t remember anything about a pool.”

“It was on a lake,” she says while writing. “That sounds nice. Did your wife or kids talk about anything that they were looking forward to?”

Jim hesitates and then says, “There was a true crime connection.”

“A true crime connection!” the second detective says, surprised. “Is there a true crime fan in the family?”

“My wife, Meg,” Jim says.

“Did she tell you what the connection is?”

“She did.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“I’ll try,” he says. “There was an inn there. I think it was the 17th or 18th century?”

The second detective’s hand is almost a blur as she writes. “Go on,” she says.

“It was kind of in the middle of nowhere, but it was on a road, so they got some guests, but not a lot. At one point the family who owned it figured out that they would make more money if they robbed their guests.”

“That doesn’t sound good for business,” the first detective says, raising an eyebrow.

“They didn’t have online reviews back then,” the second detective quips.

“The guests wouldn’t have been able to leave reviews anyway, because the family would murder them before they robbed them,” Jim says.

“Wow, way to bury the lede, Jim,” the second detective says.

“I’m just telling it based on what I remember my wife telling me,” Jim says.

“Of course, please continue.”

“The family would ask the guests if they wanted to see a waterfall,” Jim says. “Then they would take them into the woods and kill them, empty their pockets, and then bury them.”

“So there’s a waterfall nearby,” the second detective says, writing.

“I don’t know if there was really a waterfall or if they just told the guests that to get them out into the woods.”

“So how did they get caught?” the first detective says. “I assume that they did if people know this story.”

“One of the guests escaped,” Jim says. “He rode back home and told everyone what happened. A big group of his family and neighbours returned to the inn in the middle of the night. They boarded up the windows and doors and burned it down with the family inside.”

The first detective stares at him. “I’ve never heard that story before,” he says. He turns to his colleague. “Have you heard that story before?”

“Not this particular one, but it was surprisingly common to board buildings up and burn them down with people inside back in the day,” she says.

“What happened to the guy who burned the inn down?” the first detective asks.

“I don’t know what happened to him,” Jim says.

“How did the inn keepers kill their victims?”

“I think they bashed their heads in with a mallet or a rock or something,” Jim says. A whisper of a memory sneaks into his brain. “Now that I think about it, my wife mentioned something about the name of the campground having something to do with the way the victims were killed.”

“That seems like a strange thing to name a campground after,” the second detective says.

The first detective leans forward again. “Is that how you killed your wife and kids? You bashed their heads in with a rock?”

“You heard my son on speakerphone,” Jim protests. “They’re not dead.”

The second detective is mumbling under her breath while using her phone to search for the campground. “Skullllll— bashing— campground,” she says. “Murder— inn— fire— camping.”

“Can I go now?” Jim asks.

“Of course,” the second detective says, looking up from her phone. “You could have left anytime.”

Jim leaves the police station. He eventually has to get a new phone because he never gets his back.

He starts driving around on the weekends looking for campgrounds, trying to see if he can find one with a name that sounds familiar. None of the names do, but he still stops at every single campground so he can show people pictures of Meg, Cam, and Iris. Nobody recognizes them.

Months go by. Everyone thinks that Jim killed Meg and the kids, including his own mother. He doesn’t get mad at people for coming to this conclusion. He can see things from their point of view.

The police want to arrest him, but they don’t have any evidence.

Two years after his family’s disappearance, Jim is driving around again. The highway cuts neatly through stacks of pine trees. He sees an exit that he hasn’t seen before.

The road he is on now is not on his GPS. It shows him driving on a blank, white area like a sheet of paper.

He sees a driveway with an old, empty booth. There’s a sign post with a piece of ply wood hanging from it. He pulls over. Perhaps the plywood once had a sign attached to it. He drives slowly into what looks like an abandoned campground.

He pulls over at the first campsite. A broken picnic table sits next to a ring of rocks that is partially hidden by weeds.

He walks to the next campsite and finds a similar scene.

He walks around the campground for an hour, combing each campsite for clues. When he has finished with that, he comes to a trail in the woods. He doesn’t know why, but he feels pulled to it, like someone is gently taking him by his hand and leading him.

The woods are peaceful and dark, with sunlight shimmering down through the heavy tree canopy overhead. The only sounds are his foot steps on the dry leaves and the birds singing to one another. The ground feels soft under the rubber soles of his shoes, but then he steps on something hard.

He crouches down and moves the leaves and dirt to the side. He picks up a small, rectangular object and turns it over to inspect it.

It is Iris’ cell phone.

The screen is cracked and it is caked in dirt, but he is sure that it is hers. He scrapes the dirt off of the case so he can find confirmation, and he does find it: a picture on the back of a unicorn with a rainbow bursting cheerfully out of its ass.

Jim takes out his own cellphone so he can call the detectives working on the case to tell them about what he found, but there’s no signal.

He goes back to his car and drives away. He pulls over periodically to check for a cellphone signal, but there’s still nothing. When he gets to the highway, he pulls over at the first rest stop and calls the detectives.

It takes them three hours to get to the rest stop. He shows them the cellphone that he found and tells them about the exit and the road and the old, closed campground. He agrees to show them where it is.

He gets in his car, and they get into theirs. They follow him to the exit, which he almost misses. He keeps his eyes open for the small booth and the empty sign, but he doesn’t see them. They arrive at a gas station that he didn’t see before. He pulls in and gets out of his car. The detectives get out, too.

“I must have missed it this time,” he says. They all get back into their cars and drive back the other way.

Jim pulls over just before the entrance to the highway.

“I swear it was here,” he tells the detectives.

“Are you sure it was this road?” the first detective says.

“I’m positive,” Jim says.

“Well, it is dark now,” the second detective says. “Let’s try again tomorrow.”

They return the next day, but Jim still can’t find the campground.

Now that the detectives have Iris’ cellphone, they decide that it is a good time to arrest Jim. They let him go after one night because it is determined that the cellphone is not enough evidence.

Jim returns to the road every weekend, driving slowly and looking for the missing campground. He does this until he passes away at the age of 73.

He never finds what happened to his family.