VIVIAN OWENS stepped from the bus at Mount Hookey with two black eyes and five hundred pictures of her twin brother bundled under her arm. The journey had been almost eleven hours, including the hour-long interchange at Lewiston, which she’d spent in the post office getting her brother’s poster photocopied. The pictures hadn’t even come out right. The toner was faded and smudged and made him look more like an escaped convict than a missing person, but she hadn’t had the time or the energy to ask the little man behind the counter to do them all over again. She’d just thanked him and gone back to the bus station, where she’d picked up the black eyes.
The bus pulled away and left Vivian squinting in its exhaust. It was nearly midday and the street was baking. Apart from the backdrop of the mountain, the town of Mount Hookey was like all the others she’d passed through on that interminable bus ride, not much more than a stretch of highway huddled with tall billboards and squat, nondescript buildings: two bars, a thrift store, a supermarket, a gas station, a Chinese restaurant called Wing’s, closed and shuttered. There was a single traffic light dangling above the interchange at the far end of town, and beyond it the motel where she was staying, Cedar Lodge, whose sign was held aloft by a carved wooden bear. After that the town stopped. Five hundred posters was too many, she thought. That was twenty-five dollars she’d never get back.
