I grew up in Drisking, Missouri, which is the kind of small mountain town where everyone knows everyone and some things are known without being discussed.
Three rules every child in Drisking learned before they learned to read: don't go past the Prescott farm on Route 9. Stay off Solidarity Hill. And if you hear the Borrasca — the sound, deep and tonal, that rises from somewhere in the mountain in certain weather — you stop whatever you're doing and you go inside.
We didn't ask why. Children in Drisking didn't ask why about certain things.
I asked why when I was seven, the summer my sister Whitney went missing.
She was twelve and she went into the woods on a Saturday morning and didn't come back. There were searches. There were dogs and volunteers and my father not sleeping for four days. Whitney was not found. The town had a memorial. We moved a year later, my parents and I, to a city where there were no mountains and no Borrasca sounds and no rules children weren't supposed to ask about.
I moved back to Drisking when I was twenty-four. I'd told myself I was going back for my own reasons — job, cost of living, whatever. I know now that I went back for Whitney. I went back because I'd spent seventeen years not asking and I was done with that.
What I found in Drisking over the following months, through the friends who'd stayed and the ones who'd disappeared and the things that happened to girls in that town across decades — I'm not going to tell you all of it. Some of it, the courts will deal with. Some of it I can't write.
What I can tell you is that Solidarity Hill is real, and what's on Solidarity Hill is real, and the reason they tell children to stay away from it is not because it's dangerous terrain. The reason is what's inside it.
And the Borrasca — that sound from the mountain, that deep, awful tonal sound — that's a signal. It's been a signal for a very long time. Not a warning. A call.
I know now what they were calling.
I know because I found it. And because I found it I know where Whitney went and I know why she didn't come back and I know that the men who ran Drisking were very, very careful to make sure children learned three rules and never learned why.
Some of them are in custody now. Some of them are not, because some of them died before I could make them answer for it, and that's the other thing about small mountain towns: people live long lives there when they want to.
Whitney deserved better than Drisking. So did all of them.
I'm done being quiet about it.