Close Encounters Read online

  “Sure,” she said. A minute later she had surfed her way right onto the site of the county’s highway department and downloaded a map depicting every back road within twenty miles of Brody’s Junction.

  George printed out the map on her portable printer. “Good luck,” she said, handing it to me.

  Stuffing it into my pocket, I doubled down the stairs and ran smack into Izzy Sanchez. “Where were you this morning?” she asked. “I mean after that dognapping incident, which, by the way, will make great footage. My guys are on the scene now.”

  “So they already know about Aldwin going missing?” I asked, avoiding her original question.

  Her eyes widened. “That old farmer?” She sounded shocked, but I had a hunch she knew all about Aldwin’s abduction. “Did they get him, too?”

  “Whoever ‘they’ are, yes, they did. If your guys want to help find him, they should check their footage for clues—that is, if he went missing after they began spying on his farm.” The fact that I’d emphasized the word spying didn’t escape Izzy’s notice.

  “Nancy, why are you so negative about the show, about us, and more important, about the aliens?”

  I felt like I was being interviewed, but then I reminded myself I had signed the release. “Off the record?”

  She gave a reluctant nod.

  “Okay. I like reality TV shows just fine. But I never wanted to be on one. In some ways I’m a private person. I only agreed to let you film me so I could prove the sightings are faked.”

  “And what have you found so far?” Izzy asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I answered. I wasn’t ready to admit to her I was beginning to consider that the sightings might be the real McCoy.

  Izzy shrugged. “Off the record, where did you hear about Aldwin going missing?”

  “In town, from his sister.” Suddenly inspiration struck. I’d figured out how to divert Izzy. “But I’m surprised your crew wasn’t there to cover the break-in.”

  “We’re already spread pretty thin. They can’t be everywhere,” Izzy said, then frowned. “Wait a minute—what break-in?” This time her surprise seemed genuine.

  “At Winnie’s café. You should check it out. Some people are blaming it on the UFOs.” I purposely didn’t mention a thing about the bear.

  “Uh, thanks,” Izzy said, sounding puzzled. She pulled out her cell and speed-dialed someone. When I walked away, she was talking quickly to whoever was on the other end. I climbed into my car convinced that I’d sent her on a wild goose chase and maybe wrangled some time alone away from Reel TV’s prying eyes.

  Using George’s map, I chose my route and headed off. Frequent checks in my rearview mirror proved my theory was right. I had ditched the TV crew, at least temporarily. All too soon, though, they’d learn that Winnie’s break-in had nothing to do with aliens—real or imagined.

  My route took me past Aldwin’s farm and the vegetable stand. As I went by the vegetable stand, I slowed down and took a good look out the window. The pickup truck was parked in the circular drive in front of the rental cabins. Nathan and Addie were already back home.

  According to the map, the road in front of the Nichols place encircled Brody’s Peak. A small logging road cut through the state forest that bordered both Aldwin’s land and the area I’d explored earlier, behind the roadblock.

  Looking for the logging road, I drove past the farm, the cabins, and a WELCOME. BRODY’S PEAK STATE FOREST sign. The country road continued up the hill. After negotiating a hairpin turn, I spotted the logging road. I turned onto it but parked a few yards in from the main highway. The dirt road was too deeply rutted for my low-slung car to manage, so I had to make my way back to the meadow on foot.

  Since I wasn’t interested in exploring the forest itself, I decided to leave the logging trail. As I trekked uphill toward the meadow, I made sure I kept the paved road in sight. The last thing I needed was to get myself lost and become the subject of a mountain rescue.

  As I neared the meadow, the trees thinned but were replaced by stands of dense brush. To my right I spotted the gleam of sun on metal. Trooper cars, I realized. At the same moment I heard the voices of the state police officers manning the roadblock.

  As they chatted companionably, I managed to approach unnoticed. I moved as quietly as possible, watching where I stepped, careful not to tread on any fallen branches.

  With the troopers distracted I decided I could risk a more careful inspection of the meadow. Bess said that pieces of metal like the one she’d found were all over the place. If I found more of them, maybe I’d be able to figure out what they were.

  Hugging the shadows of the pines, I crept forward. From the shelter of the brush and trees I saw the glint of something shiny in the grass. To reach it I’d have to crawl beneath the police tape—and hope the troopers were still distracted by their own conversation.

  I took a deep breath and was about to kneel down, when to my left something rustled in the brush.

  I froze. Had the troopers followed me?

  The rustling grew louder, and a pungent odor wafted in my direction. Heart pounding, I turned around . . .

  And found myself face-to-face with a huge black bear.

  11

  Unusual Suspects

  I gaped at the bear. The bear gaped back.

  We both froze.

  He stood so still, he resembled one of his stuffed relatives at the River Heights Natural History Museum. His nose twitched, though: a clear reminder he was no more stuffed than I was from Mars. And he smelled awful, like a person who hadn’t bathed for a year.

  As the bear sized me up, I almost hoped a UFO would materialize and abduct me!

  Vanishing into thin air apparently also appealed to the bear, because at that moment it bolted away, crashing like a runaway semi through the brush. I bolted in the opposite direction, making an even bigger racket.

  I tore back toward the logging trail, with no thought of evading the troopers. I heard them laughing above the sound of my panicky footsteps. Obviously they’d heard the ruckus in the woods. “Guess a bear spooked someone. Probably one of those campers,” one voice said.

  “Should we go check it out?” a second trooper asked.

  “Nope. The bear did it for us,” the first voice answered. “Doubt they’ll be snooping around up here again.”

  They were so busy laughing, they didn’t even bother to look my way as I ran toward the logging trail.

  I was halfway up the trail before I let myself slow down. I was pretty sure I had set some new world record for a through-the-forest dash, and I was still breathing hard when I got back to my car.

  A welcoming committee was waiting for me, consisting of Mayor Brody, a state trooper, and, oddly enough, Izzy. Apparently my attempt to lead her on a wild goose chase back to Winnie’s hadn’t worked. Her cameraman, Frankie Lee, was with her. He held a video camera on his shoulder and was already filming.

  “Nancy, are you okay?” Izzy asked. She sounded concerned, but she motioned to Frankie to keep the camera rolling.

  “I’m okay,” I said, brushing my hair off my face. “I just had a run-in with a bear.”

  “Ah, a bear,” she said. “This is bear country. But you know that already.”

  Mayor Brody cleared his throat. “You’re lucky that’s all you ran into.” He looked more annoyed than worried.

  “As opposed to aliens?” I shot back. I was coming down from a serious adrenaline rush, and my patience was wearing thin.

  “Both Nichols and his dog have been abducted,” the mayor snapped. “Clearly, something dangerous and out of the ordinary is going on in this town.”

  All too aware this sequence was being filmed, I tried to tone down my response. “Yes, I’m aware of that. Which, by the way, is why I was in the woods.” I turned to the trooper. “Have you searched this area for something other than signs of space invaders? Has it occurred to anyone that Aldwin and his dog might be the victims of foul play of the human kind?”

&nb
sp; The trooper looked insulted. “We know how to do our job, Ms. Drew. We’re always on the lookout for illegal campers, but we haven’t found any recently, or even signs that they’ve been up here. All we’ve turned up lately are more of those tracks, like the ones we found at Mr. Nichols’s farm.”

  “You found tracks like the ones in the kennel? Here, in the woods?” This was news to me.

  “Not in the woods,” Mayor Brody said, “but in the meadow. Not that we owe you an explanation.”

  The state policeman looked grim. “You, miss, had no right to bypass that roadblock and traipse around on your own up here.”

  “I had permission,” I said, resenting being scolded.

  “You weren’t given free range,” the mayor said.

  “Sorry, Ms. Drew,” the trooper interjected. “The situation has grown more dangerous over the past twenty-four hours. With folks vanishing into thin air, we’re tightening our security. No one’s allowed up in this area, and that includes you.”

  “But Captain Greene said—”

  “He’s been overruled,” the mayor told me.

  I wondered by whom. Part of me wanted to press the point, but I was still too shaken up from my encounter with the bear to argue. Besides, I didn’t like the idea of Izzy filming Nancy versus the Mayor. “Okay” was all I answered.

  “I’m going back to the inn,” I told the film crew as I got into the car. “You can follow me there or not, your choice. You can hang around outside my room, or find something better to do while I hit the shower.” I slammed the car door and drove off.

  I arrived back at the inn still peeved and with the stench of bear in my nostrils. But a hot shower followed by a generous dousing of Bess’s aromatherapy body lotion did a great deal to cheer me.

  I came out of the bathroom and found George putting a file folder and CDs into her knapsack. Her laptop was open on the dresser. “You look better,” she remarked, looking up as I reached for my lucky blue sweater.

  “I feel like a new woman!” I told her as I finished dressing, then stashed Bess’s souvenirs and the maple syrup on top of the wardrobe.

  George grinned. “You should have worn that earlier. Maybe it would have kept away the bear.”

  “Or the aliens,” I laughed. I showed George the typewriter case I’d bought for Ned at the Antique Attic.

  She eyed it approvingly. “He’ll love it,” she said. “Too bad it’s too heavy for my laptop.”

  “You’d probably start a trend,” I said, looking for a place to stow it. Finally I settled for the top of the wardrobe next to Bess’s souvenirs.

  “What’s happening with Winnie’s website?” I asked.

  “All done!” George answered. “I finished tweaking it. Now when people google restaurants in Vermont, hers will be right there in the top two or three.” George slipped into her moccasins and got up and stretched. “Better yet, I installed enough high-powered software to safeguard her computer from all but genius hackers. When we get back to the café, I’ll adjust the security settings for her broadband connection. One reason she got hacked is that she hadn’t secured her wireless network.”

  “What in the world does that mean?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you,” George said. She turned on her laptop. After it booted up, a little window opened, informing us that other wireless networks were in the vicinity. George clicked her mouse again. “This is a list of networks within range of the gizmo that lets me connect wirelessly to the Internet—it’s called a router,” she explained. I noticed each network had a name, ranging from arbitrary numbers and characters, to nicknames to real names. Some of the names were followed by the icon of a padlock; others weren’t.

  “Some are labeled ‘unsecured,’” I noticed.

  George nodded. “Right. Newbie users don’t realize that leaving their networks open means that anyone in the neighborhood can use their service, and with even minimal know-how someone can hack into their machine—even into their e-mail.”

  “That can’t be legal,” I objected.

  George shrugged. “It depends. There are some people who leave their networks open on purpose, just to encourage free traffic on the Net. But hacking definitely breaks the law. I wouldn’t hack into someone’s system unless it was absolutely necessary. However, I did write a program that lets me ‘sniff’ around other people’s computers—I’ve used it to help you solve cases before.”

  “I don’t want to know the details,” I protested, getting a distinctly uncomfortable feeling that any kind of hacking by anyone other than the government was breaking the law.

  “You wouldn’t understand them anyway. But just by hitting this key sequence I can get there.”

  “It’s my phone number!”

  George grinned. “Clever, isn’t it?” She punched in her password.

  “Hey, could I get on there for a minute?” I asked.

  “Sure,” George said, handing me the computer. I went online to check out Nathan Blackman. The search engine quickly led me to his fairly sophisticated website.

  “Who would have guessed?” George remarked as she looked over my shoulder at the screen. “He’s a real science fiction writer.”

  “Published by some pretty decent houses, too,” I noted. He had a few good reviews, but there wasn’t much personal information on him. I scanned the list of his titles. “All his books are about UFOs, George. And aliens.” I scrolled down further. “Here’s one called The Roswell Hoax.”

  George looked thoughtful. “To write that,” she said, “he’d have to investigate the how-to of hoaxes.” She tapped the screen with her finger. “But look: This guy prefers to write on an old 1940s Underwood typewriter rather than a computer. It sure doesn’t sound like he has the ability to fake the sightings, Nancy.”

  “He could always be in cahoots with someone else who had the technical know-how to fake sightings.”

  “But who?” George asked.

  “Someone else who would benefit from the publicity,” I answered.

  George chuckled as she shut down her computer. “That’s only about half the business owners in this town.” She frowned. “But seriously, if Blackman faked the sightings, how exactly did he do it? And who would have had the know-how to help?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” I took my notebook out of my purse. I turned to the page where I’d copied down the info about UFOs that I’d googled the night before. “Apparently all you need is a helium balloon, a fishing rod, and a small flashlight. You turn the light on, put it inside the balloon, and inflate it with helium. Tie it with a long fishing line—”

  “Sure, the plastic filament kind—that wouldn’t be visible,” George added.

  “Right. I guess that’s attached to a fishing rod, so you can move it around. You hold it out the window of a car and move quite fast on a back road, and voila—glowing, floating spheres.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty low-tech,” George commented. “Low-tech enough for Nathan to pull it off on his own.”

  I went back to my notebook. “If you want it to crash, you can shoot it down with a BB gun. The whole idea can work on a bigger scale too, with a weather balloon—though you’d need more than one person to move an object that size.”

  “What would be really cool is if you used one of those flashlights that you use in emergency work—the kind where the light pulses.”

  I cracked up. “You’re not supposed to be inspired by all this.”

  George winked. “Hey, it all could be fun.”

  I checked over my notes. “Besides hoaxes, of course, there are genuine mistakes. For instance the government might be testing some new top secret aircraft. If people saw the craft when light hit it in a certain way, they would think it was a flying saucer.”

  “And of course, officials would deny its existence,” George said. “Maybe that’s why the FBI is here. Maybe there’s no hoax, Nancy. Maybe it’s some kind of government cover-up.”

  “Could be.”

  “But you don
’t think it’s likely,” George stated.

  “Not likely, no.” I shrugged. “If they aren’t genuine spaceships, then I’m sure they’re part of some kind of scheme to benefit someone.”

  “And you think that someone may be Nathan Blackman?”

  I nodded. “But all I have is a hunch and no evidence.”

  “Then our next step is to get some,” George declared.

  We decided our first stop would be Winnie’s café, to see how she was doing. If the place was back in decent shape, and if Winnie could spare her, we’d pick up Bess.

  Afterward we could go together to check out Nathan’s cabin. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to confront Nathan Blackman on my own in such a deserted place. If he happened to be home, so much the better; a conversation with the science fiction writer might give me a better idea of exactly what he was up to—if anything.

  We left the inn, and within minutes we were back on Main Street. The entrance to the café parking lot was blocked by an idling minivan with no driver inside. I began grumbling about inconsiderate polluters who didn’t give a hoot about the environment, but I broke off when George spotted a parking space.

  George and I got out of the car and were headed down the sidewalk when a woman’s shrill scream pierced the air.

  “Up there!” she shrieked. “Up there!”

  I looked up and shielded my eyes. Bands of gray clouds half-masked the afternoon sun, but the grayish sky was still bright.

  After a second I spotted a slender disk hovering above Winnie’s café. First it hung suspended in silence over the café, and then it zoomed upward with a loud whooshing sound. The spacecraft suddenly shifted to one side, then U-turned back east and vanished in a flash of light.

  “That’s the second daytime sighting. The first one I got on tape!” Izzy’s voice sounded out behind me. It was only then I realized that the whole time I was observing the UFO, a camera was panning around me and the crowd.

  “What’s your reaction?” Izzy asked.

  I braced myself to give some sort of noncommittal answer. As I turned, I saw her holding a microphone up to another onlooker. Maybe she’d given up on me.