BEHIND THE RED DOOR

A woman comes to believe she may have witnessed a kidnapping 20 years earlier. Now that the victim has gone missing again, she begins a frantic search to remember what happened then.

When Fern Douglas sees the news about Astrid Sullivan, a thirty-six-year-old missing woman from Maine, she feels an inexplicable certainty that she knows her. However, Fern has no memory of what the news says next: Astrid was famously kidnapped twenty years ago, lived for a month in a locked basement, and was mysteriously returned to her hometown in New Hampshire, without a trace of evidence leading back to her masked abductor. Fern's husband insists that Astrid's kidnapping dominated the news two decades ago - that, in fact, Astrid Sullivan is a household name - but Fern doesn't remember anything about that, tugged instead by an instinctive connection to the woman whose face appears on her screen and who has now gone missing again. It's only once the images come to her - Astrid's bound arms reaching out, Astrid pleading with Fern - that Fern realizes she might have been the only witness to Astrid's original kidnapping twenty years ago, an experience so traumatizing that she managed to repress all memory of it.

As Fern returns to her own hometown (forty-five miles from the location of Astrid's first abduction) to help her psychologist father prepare for a move, she struggles to uncover her buried memories, hopeful that if she can remember the face of the person who took Astrid twenty years ago, she can help the police discover who has her now - before it's too late. But as Fern reads through Astrid's recently published memoir, which confirms there was a witness to the kidnapping that Astrid has previously not revealed, Fern discovers more about her own past than she ever bargained for, and the disturbing truths she unearths will change her forever.

Megan Collins is the author of The Winter Sister, which was an official Book of the Month Club selection. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared in many journals, including Off the Coast, Rattle, and Spillway.