desert gorge

chapter two

Liz regretted not watching Aspen walk inside, now that she looked back on it. She was full of maybes—maybe if I stayed, maybe if I'd walked her in, maybe if I'd called her after—but it was too late.

Aspen went missing at noon on May 24th, last known location in the driveway to her own house.

She had no reason to leave voluntarily. She had a girlfriend, plans to go to the renaissance fair in Gold Canyon the next week, and she was friends with nearly everyone in her neighborhood (let alone their school, with its graduating class size sitting at a mediocre 62).

The police determined that she was most likely taken. The search was on.

Except for the fact that Aspen's mom refused to file anything with the police department and told anyone she could, mostly through social media rants, that Aspen was "just the type to run away, what a shame, must have inherited it from her father, such a stupid little brat".

God, Liz hated that bitch with a burning passion.

Every time she picked up Aspen to go out or for school, Ms. McCormack was sitting on the porch with a cigarette and a beer in hand ready to scream after them incomprehensibly until the car left her sights, and even then she would wait for them to get back (fresh beer in her hand, of course) to scream some more.

Honestly, Liz would rather listen to Ms. McCormack's screams than be here without Aspen. sitting alone waiting for a call, any call. Good or bad. Anything.

Her phone surrounded her with a dim glow, illuminating the piles of clothing littering the ground and hastily-closed blackout curtains, and Liz shot up to check—just a notification from some stupid crossword app. She lobbed her phone across the room into a laundry basket and punched her pillow a couple times. Fuck.

It had been thirty-seven hours (and forty-two minutes, but who counted those, right?) since Liz had been the last person to see her girlfriend, and she was terrified. Her thoughts bounced around in her head like ping pong balls, annoying and not helpful at the moment.

Where could Aspen be?

They'd seemingly checked everywhere. The police had sent out notices to all of the surrounding counties, just in case someone had seen her or the person who took her, and the school hosted a huge search party for the desert that surrounded them for miles.

Except...had anyone really, truly searched the gorge itself?

Desert Gorge, Arizona. Aptly named for its two most prominent landscape features, the town was nestled gently into the very beginning of a rather terrifyingly large canyon, or gorge. It was hundreds of miles long, and so deep that when Liz and Aspen parked the car at the ridge and looked down they couldn't see the bottom.

The desert, well, it's Arizona. What do you expect?

The gorge was named Antelope Canyon and it consisted of two separate sections, an upper and a lower. The upper, or "the Crack" as the locals knew it by, was a tourist attraction because of its beauty, and because it's accessible from the ground level. As the canyon extended further downward, so far that nobody had ever reached the bottom or even seen it, people required the use of ladders to climb up and down. It would be the perfect spot to hide a body.

Now that Liz thought about it, nobody had checked the gorge at all, not even the police.