I'm here about the bear, I told the woman in the ranger station.

She didn't react, her eyes, not even leaving the computer monitor she was working at.

I was about to ask again a bit louder when she slowly turned a silver chair in my

direction. She looked at me for the first time. You're here about the bear? She asked looking unconvinced.

Yeah, I said, I'm press.

She perked up at that, sitting straight and nodding like if something she'd been expecting.

Her demeanor became distinctly more professional.

You're late, she said.

Just wait there, they'll be with you in a second.

I'm going to be honest. I work for one of those spooky tabloid sites. The name of it is something

along the lines of The Dark Herald. And my work mostly involves driving long distances in a terrible car to interview lunatics who claim to have seen the mothman.

Provided those lunatics have at least a tangential relationship to the New York City metropolitan area.

I was sure that no one from my publication had been called ahead, but I wasn't above profiling a misunderstanding.

So I sat down in one of the cracked plastic chairs and waited.

The walls of the waiting room were covered in posters.

A colourful one told me what to do if I encountered a black bear.

Another advertised Haitian Lake is a place where Franklin Roosevelt got polio.

Another had a picture of a man in a baseball cap who had been missing for three months.

I found the reason I was here, smiling out at me from a sheet of freshly printed computer paper.

A young woman, Mary Santarelli, had vanished without a trace only a few weeks back.

There had reportedly been a tagged bear in the area where she had last been

seen, so I was meant to drive out, take some videos, and ask questions exploring the bear

...