In the spring of 2001, novelist Benjamin Hale’s six-year-old cousin, Haley Zega, wandered from her grandparents during a hike in the Buffalo River National Wilderness in the Ozarks. Her grandparents hollered, they searched, they mashed 911. As day darkened into night, sheriff ’s deputies and volunteers combed the woods; emergency vehicles rumbled up and down the steep dirt roads while heat sensor–equipped helicopters buzzed the valleys; and what would eventually become one of Arkansas’s largest search-and-rescue operations began taking shape. Another day passed. Haley’s mother, Kelly, waited for news inside a tiny backwoods church converted into a command center. As hounds tracked Haley’s scent to a local highway, where it seemed to disappear, Kelly fielded a call from an Arkansas mother whose six-year-old daughter had been abducted six years earlier, in a notorious cold case, reaching out to offer advice. Another night passed.
It spoils nothing of Hale’s Cave Mountain to disclose that Haley Zega was not abducted or grievously harmed. On the third day, she was reunited with her family and is alive and well today. Hale is essentially done with that story, as a story, by page sixty-two. What he’s far from done with, however, are all the portals—psychological, geographical, metaphysical, historical, theological, and more—cast open by Haley’s vanishment. Trying to make sense of all the fear, guilt, and varieties of faith, he probes every one of them. Cave Mountain becomes a book of rabbit holes: fascinating, maddening, maundering, and often electrifying.
Chief among those portals is the eerily aligned disappearance of another girl, three-year-old Bethany Alana Clark (a pseudonym Hale explains), whose fate in those same mountains, twenty-three years earlier almost to the day, was the obverse of Haley’s. Bethany was shot multiple times by members of a Christian doomsday cult with, prosecutors claimed, the tacit approval of her mother, and buried in a plastic bucket. What sends Hale down that grisly rabbit hole is something Haley told her parents: that a dark-haired, incorporeal girl with a flashlight named Alecia had guided her through the woods. Bethany had often made a play on her middle name, “All I see,” which sounds like Alecia, and, frightened of the dark, slept clutching a flashlight. Goose pimples become hard to suppress…