Ren Had Been Telling the Wrong Story for Twenty-Four Hours
“The asylum doesn’t exist,” Ren said, once they were back in the car.
“Never did,” Yusra said. She was looking out the window at Walt’s house, where he had returned to raking with the same unhurried patience. “Someone posted it online in 1999. Created the whole thing — the name, the institution, the 1904 crash, records in a library that also doesn’t exist. By the time anyone checked, the story had been circulating for a decade.”
“How do you know this?”
“My mother looked into it when I was a teenager,” she said. “She grew up with the legend and it bothered her — the specificity of it, the way the internet version had dates and names. She spent a summer checking every detail. Found a researcher at Fairfax County who’d spent years on it. None of the institutions named in the online version existed. Lorton Prison, which the story mentions, opened in 1910 — six years after the supposed bus crash. The math doesn’t work. The records don’t exist. The name Douglas Grifon appears nowhere in any Fairfax County court document.”
“The fake version is a better story,” he said.
“It resolves,” she said. “That’s the only reason. The real version doesn’t resolve, and people are uncomfortable with that.”
He started the car. “Where next?”
She checked something on her phone. “There’s a park in Fairfax where there were reported sightings in the weeks after the incidents. It’s on the way to Clifton.” She paused. “If you want to keep going.”
He glanced over at her. In the morning light, with the October maples moving behind her through the window, she was looking at her phone with a small concentrated frown that he was already beginning to recognize — the expression she wore when she was deciding whether something was worth her time.
“I want to keep going,” he said.
