NorthWest (John Hazard - Book II) Read Free

some résumés.
    Walking briskly down the busy street, Emily looked up at the clear blue sky and smiled. As bad as things were for her right now, she was not even close to approaching the circumstances of that obviously destitute old man, and if things turned out as she expected, it might be a good day after all.

 
    Four
     
    It was a beautiful, quiet day at the community college. Many of the students were attending a rally at the stadium and most of the people left on campus were professors and students who were just not that involved in political issues. The atmosphere on campus had been charged for months now, and it was beginning to wear on the nerves of even the passive and uninvolved.
    Professor Macy Renner was sitting in her cluttered office filling out a spreadsheet of expenses that had so far accumulated for her documentary field trip project, and her face revealed her frustration. Rays of afternoon sun spiked into the room illuminating specks of dust that floated through the air like snowflakes every time she lifted a sheet of paper.
    She had made reservations for a private plane to fly her class up into the national forests of the Pacific Northwest, somewhere between the states of Washington and Oregon. She’d ordered supplies and rented equipment, and even covered accommodations for an overnight stay before heading off into the wilds of the forest.
    This had stretched her budget to the limit and now she had to figure out how to pay a videographer to film the adventure. Without proper documentation, it wouldn’t matter what they discovered if there was no proof of it to bring back.
    The student who had volunteered to go for free backed out at the last minute and now she would actually have to pay someone to take his place. Macy was determined to make this field trip for her students happen, and she had personal reasons for doing so. That was why she had placed the ad.
    She had been following a strange phenomenon for several months now. There were reports of missing aircraft, hikers and hunters in about a hundred square mile area of national forest. They had disappeared without a trace and all search and rescue operations had been abandoned in each incident. It was as though they had dropped off the planet.
    Macy had analyzed all of the information she had gathered and found similarities to disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. She figured if she could get some half decent footage, she could distribute the film. It could be a documentary on the case of the NorthWest Triangle, a place where things simply vanished forever. Maybe they’d call it “Renner’s Triangle.”
    Just thinking about having the phenomenon named after her was enough to bring a smile to her face. It could finally be her chance to get some personal recognition and bring attention to her program. It might guarantee her funding at the university for years to come. Her career surely would benefit, but some of the details in the case reminded her of the horrible events that had occurred during her childhood.
    The unexplained disappearance of her twin sister at the age of thirteen continued to haunt her. How could anyone shake the loss of a sister who would never be seen or heard from again? She was her twin, her other half, and the only real friend that Macy had ever had. Her loss had a chilling effect on everything in her life in the years that followed.
    She picked up the framed photo of two little girls playing together, which sat at the corner of her desk. Gazing at her twin, she thought about all the secrets, the special ‘twin signals,’ and good times they had shared. What happened to you?
    The involuntary cry from her heart reaffirmed why she had started this two-semester course in the first place. It wasn’t because she thought it would be interesting to study paranormal phenomenon, though that was true enough. It was because she could still remember, in brief flashes of fragmented memories, the terrifying strangers that took her