Fran is from Luisville, Kentucky. She's accustomed to travel, as she's been going across America to collect mythos and legends and write them up as horror stories for pulp magazines. She doesn't like to travel alone which is why she has advertised and brought all of you along.
Fran looks up from writing in rapid shorthand in her notebook, adjusting her glasses as she surveys the others. "As Mr. Stafford says, it is unfortunately hogwash." she says. "However, what's intriguing is the way he told us his tale, as if he were desperate, as though we were a life raft in the ocean, and his only hope of salvation. He was not always like this, something happened to him."
Shaking her head, Fran continues. "I have been from one end of this country to th'other, and I've seen it before. The best stories I've ever been told, that I've tried to convey my own self, are the ones that show how easily any of us can slip into that belief. Listen, now."
Quietly, Fran puts down her notebook, making sure the others are paying her mind. "Last year, there was a murder, up New York... A 13 year-old girl was abducted. Whole town searched and searched, newspaper even had a reward offered... Her body was found after a few months, in a forest by some people pickin' mushrooms. Body was rotting, declothed. This happened in the evening, and a single policeman is out there in the forest, because someone has to stay with it."
"And he waits. With the body. Until the morning when detectives would arrive. And about 2 or 3 in the morning, back at the station, and in the other patrol cars, his voice comes broadcast over the radio, to anyone who would listen. He's completely alone with the corpse of this poor girl, and he comes on the radio, and he announces to everyone that he would like to relieved, that he is unfit for duty. He says 'I can hear a girl's voice asking me for help'."
"This is in the middle of a forest, in upstate New York, there is no girl, there is no one. But he believes there is, and how scared must he have been to announce this over the radio? Some of his colleagues served in the Great War. And this is a profession that's like the army itself - not only the machismo, but you have to trust that the people around you can do their jobs, that they can be depended on. You can't admit that you're hearing voices. But he does, he's that scared."
"And the worst part is.... that even after he comes on the radio, and announces that he can hear this little girl asking for help, he still has to wait... and wait... and wait... for someone to come and relieve him. And every second must feel like an hour, driving him more and more certain of what he's experiencing."
"That's why we went to Lima, and that's why we're goin' to Indianapolis."
