Winter turned into spring in River Falls, and I was still on leave. I would drop by the office every now and again, ostensibly to pick up something I'd forgotten in a desk drawer, or just to chat with Dan – but the real reason was so I could try to keep an eye on whether or not they knew of any new developments in the investigation. The FBI was in charge of most aspects of it, but I figured it couldn't hurt to keep Jerry and Dan familiar with my face – and with the idea that I would be back, and as soon as possible. The date appeared to be April. Or May. Jerry wanted me to jump through some hoops, confirm I wasn't going to rock any boats.

I kept looking into things on my own, of course. After Katie Wallis and the piece of jewelry from the Renner property didn't seem to pan out I moved online, trawling through post after post on true crime forums, trying to discern if there were any amateur, internet-based sleuths who actually had any plausible ideas. It was though this late-night surfing that I discovered I wasn't the only one who wasn't buying the kidnapping narrative – nor the only one who had started to speculate about other, seemingly more likely circumstances. It seemed the cult narrative was popular among the more hard-headed of those looking into the case themselves.

Perhaps, a lot of posts suggested, both girls had run into a particularly persuasive cult leader – someone who was not only able to lure them away from their families but, in Paige's case, to lure the family themselves away. It would explain the sudden change of heart in the Wallis family, to believe that they'd been informed that their daughter was alive, and safe. It would explain it even further if they'd been threatened somehow, forced into silence.

I went to far as to join some of these communities, under the handle 'concernedcitizen838,' and would often find myself hunched over my laptop after Ashley's bedtime, my face illuminated by the pale glow from the screen. I got to know who was who in the biggest communities following the case, and to discern the smart and serious members from the more conspiracy-minded ones.

It was in one of these online communities – True Crime Online or TCO for short – that I ran into someone I was about eighty percent sure was Katie Wallis. The username was male – 'JimmyOcean' – but whoever it was behind the internet persona, they seemed at times to have an uncanny amount of knowledge not just about the case but about Emma herself. And when I looked into their comment history I was able to see that the dates of the earliest comments lined up perfectly with the Wallis family's return to the UK.

JimmyOcean was extremely sensitive to even the slightest hint that Emma Wallis might have been up to no good, or may have intentionally left her family in the dark. 'He' showed up quickly whenever anyone dared to speculate about Emma's motives, or to suggest that perhaps her relationship with her family hadn't been as wholesome as it had been portrayed.

"She left England to study in the US, didn't she?" One comment from another poster asked, late on a Thursday night. "If you love your family so much, why would you move halfway across the world to get away from them?"

Amongst the many responses from people who had done just that, and not because they hated their families, JimmyOcean's popped up within ten minutes:

"Emma gets along just fine with her family. To suggest otherwise is baseless speculation, Please check your facts before you go spouting off about a topic you have no personal knowledge of."

Two minutes after that comment was posted, it was edited so the first sentence read: "As far as we know, Emma got along with her family just fine."

The tense was changed, and the wording, to make it sound more like JimmyOcean was just another commenter. I saw the same thing happen multiple times over the course of a few weeks, up to and including their participation in a newly posted speculation thread wondering if there was a portal to another world located somewhere on or near to the Renner property.

JimmyOcean typed the following comment three minutes later: "You might be surprised. :)" And two minutes after that, it was deleted.

I was certain, by then, that JimmyOcean was Emma Wallis. But I still wasn't at a point where I could look at that statement – 'You might be surprised' – and truly give the possibility that something deeply and completely strange was afoot a chance in my mind. It was still off-limits, outside the realm of reality.

And then, as the personality-disordered days of early April – the ones that never know if they want to be chilly or mild – turned into the real warm days of late April, and Jerry Sawchuk began to make noises about letting me come back to work just as soon as I saw the counselor, Professor Foxwell called me one day in the middle of the afternoon.

"Hello?" I said, not really expecting any useful information and too preoccupied with the grocery shopping I was in the middle of to pay too much attention. "Professor Foxwell? How are you?"

We went quickly through the preliminary small-talk and then I asked him, because I still had to go to the bank and the pharmacy and I was in a bit of a rush, if he'd found out anything about the piece.

"Well," he replied, pausing the way one does before delivering interesting news. "I actually have. It's really – Sophie, it's really quite extraordinary."

I didn't know William Foxwell very well. I didn't know if he was the kind of man to exaggerate or dramatize. "What's that?" I asked. "Did you find out what the piece comes from? Is it a –"

"We still think it's part of a brooch," he replied. "Silver, so it will have belonged to someone of means. But the finding that I have to admit I'm actually having some trouble believing has to do with the soil we tested, found on the piece itself."

"Oh?" I replied, plucking a gallon of milk off a shelf and putting it in my shopping cart. "What did you find?"

"Well," Dr. Foxwell continued, "we had it – the soil – radio carbon dated. We did it twice, when the results the first time seemed impossible to believe. But they came back just the same the second time. It would seem, Sophie, that the soil on that piece of broken jewelry you brought me dates back to the 8th century. Well, 8th or 9th – possibly even the 10th, but –"

"The 8th Century?" I asked, still slightly too distracted to properly take in what I was being told.

"Or the 9th, possibly even the 10th," the professor repeated, waiting for a response to what he clearly considered to be astounding news.

I grabbed a container of strawberry flavored yoghurt and put it in my cart, and then went over what he'd just said in my mind. And then I stopped in my tracks.

"What?" I asked. "I'm sorry, I think I misheard you – I'm in the middle of some errands right now. It sounded like you said the soil on the brooch comes from the – the 8th century?"

"Yes," Dr. Foxwell replied. "Around then."

"But," I started, furrowing my brow and dragging my cart to the side of the aisle when an older man sighed audibly at my being in the way, "how is that possible? How can something I found in the woods in River Falls in 2018 have soil from so long ago on it? That's – the 8th century? Isn't that over a thousand years?"

"It is."

"So how did it – how did it get onto the brooch? How did –"

"I have absolutely no idea. I'm calling to tell you what we found, but I'm also calling hoping maybe you can shed a little more light on the situation."

I chuckled, shaking my head. "I don't know about that – I just found it. I don't know anything else about it – that's why I brought it to Barry O'Dell in the first place. Are you sure the test was accurate?"

"I had it tested twice. I've ordered another test, on a different soil sample from the brooch, but these things are usually very accurate. Can you remember when you found it – was it buried? Or did you just find it lying on the ground?"

"Lying on the ground," I told him, remembering back to the strange light-headed episode I'd had in the woods and the feeling of the jewelry piece, cold against my palm, when I placed my hand on the ground. "It wasn't buried at all. It was just – lying there."

"Amazing," the professor said. "It must – someone must have dropped it. But I can only imagine the kind of person who would be carrying around a seemingly freshly excavated piece of Anglo-Saxon silver."

"How about someone like you?" I suggested, unable to come up with an alternate explanation while I was standing in the middle of the dairy aisle. "A professor, I mean? An academic?"

"That's the only thing I could come with myself," Professor Foxwell replied. "But even then, these pieces are usually cleaned before being taken anywhere – especially before being sent abroad to a conference or something like that."

Extraordinary soil findings or not, I had errands to complete and the professor had work of his own to get back to. We talked for a few more minutes before hanging up but neither of us could come up with any remotely plausible reason for a piece of Anglo-Saxon jewelry, with soil from the same time period stuck in its grooves, to be lying in the woods in New York in 2018. None that didn't involve absentminded professors dropping precious research items in the middle of the private property at the center of a massive investigation, and even that felt far-fetched.

That evening, over dinner of baked chicken breasts and broccoli salad, my daughter asked why I wasn't listening to the story she was telling me about one of the other kids in her class throwing up in the coat closet that day.

"I'm sorry, Ash," I apologized, feeling guilty because she was right – I wasn't really listening. "I have a lot on my mind right now."

"Is it the case?" She enquired, stabbing a piece of broccoli with her fork. "Is it that man in the woods?"

Ashley was obviously too young to be told about the gory details of my job, but I did try to tell her as much as I could. I didn't want to raise her completely insulated from the real world – or from the fact that sometimes, bad things did happen. I'd told her about the man in the woods – not that he'd tried to come after me, or that I'd had to shoot him – but just that he had been there, in his strange furs, and that he'd seemed particularly interested in a car that had happened to be driving by at the time. She'd thought it was funny, laughing at my description of his expressions and his outfit. I hadn't mentioned him for a few weeks, though, so my ears perked up when she brought him up during dinner that night.

"The man in the woods?" I asked. "We haven't talk about him for weeks, Ash. Mommy's not in any danger, you know. He can't do anything to –"

"I know. I was just thinking."

"Oh were you?" I smiled. "Well that's enough of that, kid. Finish your broccoli first, then we can get back to thinking."

"Mom!" Ashley laughed. "I am eating my broccoli. I can do two things at once, you know."

We kept eating, but I was still distracted. It was just as I was about to ask her if she wanted frozen yoghurt for dessert when she looked up at me, a thoughtful expression on her face, and asked if the man in the woods was a Viking.

"A Viking?" I replied, taking our cleaned plates into the kitchen and chuckling at my daughter's quirky imagination. "What makes you say that?"

"Well you said he was wearing furs, right?" She called after me as I rinsed the dishes and took the frozen yoghurt out of the freezer. "And you said he had a sword, too?"

"Yup," I called back. "A big sword – so big I don't even know how he was carrying it."

"Well we're learning about the Vikings in class," my daughter continued. "They wore fur and they had big swords. And they –"

"I don't think there are any Vikings in New York, sweetie."

" – lived over a thousand years ago, mom! A thousand years! That's a really long time, isn't it?"

A thousand years. Something about that specific phrase focused my attention. When I brought our bowls of frozen yoghurt back to the table and sat down, I remembered where I'd heard that phrase recently – it had come out of my own mouth that very afternoon, during my conversation with Professor Foxwell.

"What is it?" Ashley asked, noticing the look on my face.

"Uh," I replied. "Nothing. Nothing, sweetie."

But it wasn't nothing. It was one hell of a coincidence. And even as I thought about it, about the strangeness of finding the piece of the brooch, the one that apparently had soil from a thousand years ago stuck to it, in almost exactly the same spot that the man – who Ashley had just suggested was a Viking – had appeared, I was smiling to myself. It was even more absurd an idea than aliens.

But that night, when Ashley was in bed and I was settled down in front of the laptop, I didn't go straight to the TCO website to check on what JimmyOcean AKA Katie Wallis had been posting. No, I went to the Wikipedia entry for Vikings, still amused by Ashley's suggestion that the man in the woods might have been one.

And on that Wikipedia page, right at the top, I read that Vikings were Norse seafarers from northern Europe who raided and traded throughout the rest of Europe in the "late 8th to the late 11th centuries." I re-read the sentence again. Late 8th to late 11th century. That was almost exactly the time period Professor Foxwell had said the soil on the brooch was from.

I sat back on the sofa, shaking my head. But then I clicked over to TCO and found that post from JimmyOcean, the one in the thread about there being a possible portal to another world on the Renner property:

"You might be surprised. :)"

"No," I said out loud, getting to my feet and setting the laptop down on the coffee table. "Nope, Sophie. That's enough internet for tonight."

I busied myself in the kitchen, wiping down the countertops and then preparing Ashley's lunch for the next day. After that I tried, unsuccessfully, to find something to watch on TV. And even as I occupied myself with everything that wasn't related to the totally and unequivocally insane idea that had already begun to take form, I couldn't quite put the pieces of the puzzle entirely out of my mind. A strange man in the woods with a huge sword and dressed in furs – a man who seemed to be shocked by the sight of a car. A piece of Anglo-Saxon jewelry not just over a thousand years old but with thousand year old soil embedded in it. Two missing girls, both of whom had returned before going missing a second time, almost as if it had been a choice. Internet speculation about portals to other worlds.

No. It couldn't be. Jerry Sawchuk was right, I was getting too involved. Way too involved.

I knew what I was going to do. I was going to go see that counselor, and then I was going to back to work. I would call to make the appointment the next day.