It’s surprisingly cool. I’d thought the top—white with a trim of green leaves and brown pinecones—was painted wood, but with my cheek on its smooth surface I realize it’s actually enameled steel. My grandmother had a table like it in her Brooklyn kitchen. It had two folding leaves like this one that could be let down and then, when you sat underneath it, you felt like you were in a little house. The scalloped edges of the leaves looked like the trim on the cottages of fairy tales. A word was stamped on the underside of the table: Porceliron. I had thought it sounded like a fantasy kingdom, but my grandmother told me it was the brand name of the table because the top was iron coated with an enameled layer of porcelain. That was why I loved those Le Creuset pots when I grew up; they had that same odd marriage of delicate porcelain over hard steel. Right now the cool surface of the table feels like my grandmother’s hand on my forehead when I had a fever. The aroma of some herb in Dymphna’s stew steals out of the pot on the stove and I feel the fatigue lift off me just a little. Enough to get me to my feet. I’ll go get Sally and serve us dinner on our old scratched dishes. Hot stew and homebaked bread with coffee and apple cake for dessert. We’ll be okay, I say to myself for what might well be the millionth time since Jude died. We’ll get through this.
The narrow stairs are pitched so steeply I can feel the muscles in the backs of my legs pinching by the time I reach the second floor. What a strange little house. Nothing about it—windows, door frames—seems to be built according to any standard. It feels like a child’s playhouse put together from odd bits and pieces. The steps creak and bow in the middle. The newel post at the top of the stairs is carved in the shape of an owl. The second-floor hall slopes down to a narrow window seat squeezed under the sharply pitched eaves. Peering through one open door I see an empty bedroom that’s all angles and corners. Good thing I ditched our old bedroom set—nothing would have fit. Besides, it looks like there are cabinets and shelves built into all those nooks and crannies.
It’s charming in a way, and I find myself hoping as I knock on the second bedroom door that Sally has found it so. Probably it’s a good sign that she’s shut herself into her new room. This could mean she’s settling in. I knock again, louder, in case she’s plugged in to her iPod or fallen asleep, but the only sound coming from behind the door is the Clash singing “London Calling.” She must be asleep. I turn the knob—tarnished brass with some design of vines and leaves—and open the door.
Whatever image I’d had in my head of Sally settling in is instantly vanquished by the bare mattress and unopened boxes on the floor. The only light in the room comes from Sally’s open laptop where her screen-saver cycles through images of outer space. Nebulae bloom and gas giants explode in the time it takes me to realize that the room is empty. Sally’s gone.
It takes only a few minutes to go through the whole cottage: two upstairs bedrooms crammed under the sharply sloping eaves, a bathroom fitted with a stained clawfoot tub (no shower—what must Sally have made of that?), then kitchen, parlor, and pantry downstairs. I even check the closets. I don’t check the basement because there’s no way Sally would ever go into one of her own free will. Ditto the garage, which I haven’t even had the nerve to go into yet. The thought that her absence might not be of her own free will licks at the corners of my mind with the same darting stealth as the flame on the gas range, but I draw back from it just as quickly.
No, this is just Sally punishing me for bringing her here. I can already imagine her defense: I thought you wanted me to get acquainted with our new home. I’ll yell at her for not leaving a note, and she’ll shrug and say she forgot. It’s such a familiar scenario that I’m almost comforted until I step out into the darkness that’s fallen over the campus.
Beyond the wedge of light spilling out from the cottage door, the night is as dark as the outer reaches of space moving across Sally’s laptop screen in the empty room above me. Darker. There are no exploding gas giants here to light my way. When I close the door behind me and step off the front stoop I can’t even see as far as the car.
The car. Was it still in the driveway when I came back from the dean’s? I can’t remember. Does Sally have a spare key? I remember now that Jude had had a spare stashed somewhere in the house, but I hadn’t been able to find it before moving. Had Sally? Has she been secretly holding on to it all this time and planning her getaway?
It’s an elaborate plot I never would have suspected her capable of a year ago, but she’s done a lot I wouldn’t have thought her capable of over the last year. She’s memorized my credit card number and ordered concert tickets over the phone and then taken the train into the city to see the concert while claiming to be at the local movie theater. She’s hidden report cards, intercepted phone calls from teachers, forged my signature, hacked into my AOL account to buy several hundred dollars’ worth of CDs and XBox games from Amazon.com, and impersonated me on the phone to get her out of taking the bio Regents. She’s become such an expert at subterfuge and clandestine activity that I might have suspected car theft would be her next move.
I stumble down the front path in the direction where I left the Jag, tripping twice over the uneven flagstones, and run straight into the jagged edge of the broken passenger door. The pain is almost welcome. At least wherever Sally is she’s on foot, not trapped in a twisted metal wreck.
On the other hand, if she’d taken the car I could at least have called the police and given them a license plate to track down.
The thought of the police reminds me that there is a town sheriff somewhere on the campus: the blond, green-eyed man I saw in Dymphna’s kitchen. I even recall his name—Callum Reade. I get out my cell phone from the car before remembering that there’s no service, which means that I won’t be able to reach Sally on her cell phone. I could go inside and call the police, but what will I say? My sixteen-year-old has been missing for—how long? I have no idea when she left the house. I imagine the amused and condescending look that will appear in the sheriff’s eyes. I’ll look like an idiot, when probably all Sally’s done is go looking for me at Beech Hall … or gone to the library in search of a wi-fi connection. The thought cheers me up for the three or four seconds it takes to remember that she would have brought her laptop along if that’s where she was going.
Still, I decide it’s worth looking in the library before I call Sheriff Reade and brand myself a nervous, neurotic mother in front of the whole town and my new colleagues.
I remember that Jude always kept a flashlight in the glove compartment. I take it out and switch it on, amazed that it works. Jude must have changed the batteries not long before he died; it was the kind of detail he attended to. I also get out an old Pratt sweatshirt from the trunk, less to keep me warm than for its smell of motor oil that reminds me of Jude.
The library, I recall, is the imposing Gothic edifice I saw looming behind the copper beech tree. I consider driving there, but if Sally’s already coming back on the path I’ll miss her. And since I’ve already walked the path once it shouldn’t be too hard to find my way on it. At least I’m beginning to get adjusted to the dark—aided by a full moon just risen over the tree line.
It turns out, though, that even finding the entrance to the path in the dark is a chore. Between two oak trees catty-corner to Fleur-de-Lis’s front door is hardly a map. Would it kill them to nail a sign to one of these precious trees with a destination and an arrow—MAIN CAMPUS THIS WAY? Under the beam of my flashlight the line of trees appears unbroken and monolithic, a legion of forest guards standing at attention. Their rough bark faces stare back at me impassively, defying me to find a hole in their ranks to slip through. For a moment I have the ridiculous notion that the path I took earlier today somehow closes at nightfall, sealing the cottage off from the rest of the world. Then I realize that the idea comes from a line in The Changeling Girl. As she approached the witch’s house she thought she heard the trees moving behind her and when she came out of the woods and turned around she saw that the path had vanished
and she had lost her way home. I picture Sally on that path now, being swallowed up by the woods.
But then my flashlight finds a space between two broad trunks that are smoother than the pines’—oaks, surely—and I dive into the gap as if it were going to vanish if I don’t move fast enough.
It’s like stepping into an unlit closet. The dense canopy of pine trees blocks the moonlight. There’s not a single light marking the way. Really, I think as I aim my flashlight onto the pine needle–covered path and start walking, what boarding school doesn’t light their paths? No doubt Ivy St. Clare would cite some harebrained rationale along the lines of electric light diminishing the sylvan idyll, but hasn’t she heard of campus crime and date rape? Sally was right; this is a school for losers.
And what a crock that eleven and a half minutes was! There was no way that anyone could make this walk in under fifteen minutes no matter how light on their feet they were—no matter whose little sparrow they were!
My anger at Ivy St. Clare and the Arcadia School in general speeds my steps and keeps my fear at bay for a little while, but then I start to picture some of the ways Sally could come to harm: she could have been attacked by a local psychopath or she could have fallen and be lying at the bottom of a steep ravine. Wasn’t that how Lily Eberhardt had died? And somewhere near here. As my heart starts to race at these images I recall something my mother used to say to me when I woke up at night screaming because I was convinced there were monsters under my bed and lurking in the closet. “You have a powerful imagination. You can use it to tell good stories or you can use it to tell bad ones.” I’m pretty sure my mother would say that imagining Sally dead is telling bad ones.
It is not my imagination, though, that the path has lengthened since I took it during the day. A journey in the night always seems longer than one in the day. The line appears in my head and it takes me a minute to remember that it’s also from The Changeling Girl. It’s from the part I didn’t get to today in the car. The rest of the story comes back to me now as I travel the dark path.
After the witch told the captive girl that she had given the changeling “running legs” by washing the root in running water instead of well water, the girl waited every day at the edge of the woods for the changeling to come back. She watched the leaves on the trees turn red and gold and then fall to the ground, she watched snow fill up the woods and hang heavy in the pine boughs, and then she listened to the slow drip of the melting snow, always listening for the sound of footsteps coming through the woods, waiting for the changeling girl to return. Could her family really have accepted her as a substitute? Wouldn’t they have noticed she was a thing made out of wood and magic and not flesh and bone? One day the girl saw a flash of color in the woods and thought that it was the changeling girl’s calico dress, but it was only a patch of wildflowers spreading over the forest floor. The cool blue and white and purple flowers of early spring turned into the blazing red and yellow and orange of high summer and still there was no sign of the changeling girl’s return. On the day the first leaf changed color, the witch came to her and told her that her family had accepted the changeling girl now as their own. There was no sense waiting for her any longer.
But the girl could not believe this. That night she stole a lantern from the witch’s larder and filled it with hazelnut oil. She had overheard the old witch muttering to herself that the only way to find one’s way back through the forest was to light the path with a mixture of hazelnut oil and a drop of one’s own blood. So the girl pricked her finger and let a drop of her blood fall into the oil. The light that fell from the lamp became a ghastly red that frightened the girl, but when she held the lantern up to the trees they parted before her, showing her the path back to her home at last. As soon as she stepped onto the path she could hear a heavy shuffle behind her. The trees were closing the way back. But she didn’t care. She never wanted to go back to the witch’s house. She held the lantern before her and followed the blood-lit path deep into the woods. The way seemed much longer than it had when she had first made the journey, but a journey in the night always seems longer than one in the day, she told herself. She went forward bravely until the light from her lantern began to wane and, looking inside, she saw that almost all of the oil was gone. Only then did she realize that if she burned through all of the oil before she made it home she would be trapped inside the forest forever.
I’m beginning to feel that I’m going to suffer the same fate. Much more than fifteen minutes have gone by and the path hasn’t come out onto the lawn in front of Beech Hall. Could it be the wrong path? I recall now that the path branched in two directions. Had I taken the wrong branch? Or could it be, as in the fairy tale, that the trees have rearranged themselves at the witch’s orders to confuse me? The latter idea, although patently ridiculous, lights a spark of fear in my brain. I even imagine that I can hear the trees behind me closing rank, sealing me into the woods forever, and that the light from my flashlight glows a garish red on the pine needle–littered path. I should, I know, turn back if this is the wrong path, but instead I go faster, breaking into a run. When the path slopes suddenly down—proving it’s the wrong path since the one I took today was level—I lose my footing and land on my hands and knees in the dirt. The flashlight flies out of my hand, rolls into the woods, and goes out, leaving me in the pitch-black dark.
But not alone. Now that the noise of my steps is silenced I realize that I hadn’t been imagining the sound of footsteps after all. I hear them crunching through the underbrush somewhere behind me. Sally, I think hopefully. But as I listen to the heavy footfalls I recall that Sally hasn’t worn anything but flip-flops in months, and these steps sound as if they were made by heavy workboots. Or, my frantic imagination suddenly insists, like trees uprooted and dragging their heavy limbs together to trap me in the forest. Another sound is beneath the sound of the footsteps, a low roar like some kind of wild beast growling.
Still crouched on my hands and knees I turn around to stare into the woods behind me, but of course I can’t see anything in the impenetrable dark. I can hear the steps approaching me, though, and feel their vibration through my hands pressed against the ground. Suddenly I remember the picture that Ivy St. Clare was drawing today—of the beech roots turned into creatures that swarmed beneath the sleeping girl.
Something skitters across my hand and I scream. The footsteps crash through the trees and then I’m blinded by a flash of light. Behind it the woods flare into looming shadows that bear down on me. Tree-shaped and man-shaped shadows. I get to my feet and step backward. The man-shaped thing stops and lowers the blinding light. A face that looks like it was carved out of pine wood, with hair like gold pine needles standing straight up, emerges out of the gloom, its eyes gold in the flashlight’s beam.
“Stop right there,” the man tells me. “Don’t move another inch.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, my fear turning into outrage at the man’s brusque tone. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” I notice that the lettering on the man’s jacket reads ARCADIA FALLS SHERIFF, and the fringe of blond hair and pale green eyes are familiar. “Reade, isn’t it?” I say. “You’re the town sheriff. I’m the new English teacher.”
“Yes, I know who you are, but I don’t think you know where you are. If you’ll stand still for a second …” He holds up his hands as if he were approaching a skittish horse and takes a tentative step in my direction. When I don’t move he approaches me cautiously. I feel ridiculous, but something in his intent pale eyes keeps me rooted to the spot. When he’s reached my side he holds his high-powered lantern over my head, illuminating the woods behind me.
But there are no woods behind me, only empty space. Three feet from where we stand the ground falls away into a deep chasm hewn out of black rock. The roar I’d heard before was the stream of water that leaps from rock to rock like a silver snake and crashes somewhere far, far below us.
“Witte Clove,” the guard tells me. “Two more steps and you would hav
e broken your neck down there. What in hell are you doing wandering up on the ridge at night?”
“I’m looking for my daughter, Sally,” I say, trying to hold on to the anger I felt a minute ago to steady my voice. “She wasn’t at the cottage when I got back there. I thought she went to the campus, but I must have taken the wrong path…. Oh my God, if Sally took this path …”
“How long has she been gone?” Reade asks me. He lowers the lantern and rests his other hand on his holster. The gesture, perhaps meant to reassure me that he’s able to protect us from predators, makes me wary instead. What is there in these woods that we would need protecting from? I wonder suddenly what kind of trouble Dymphna was referring to earlier today.
“Since before dinner … I think. I mean, I thought she was there when I got back, but then she wasn’t….”
“So you really don’t know how long she’s been gone?” He crosses his arms and leans back on his heels. Then he rocks forward and sniffs the air. With a flash of anger I realize he’s checking my breath to see if I’m drunk.
“What difference does that make? She’s out here somewhere wandering around an unlit campus. Haven’t you people heard of security lights? This campus is a crime scene waiting to happen!”
A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, but he purses his lips to hide it and nods his head. “I’ve voiced the same complaint to Dean St. Clare. You’re absolutely right. Why, right now the rival gangs of Arcadia Falls, New York, are getting ready to rumble. I haven’t seen anything like it since my days walking the beat in the South Bronx.”
“Oh, so you’re a retired city cop. I should have known. So what did you do to get yourself exiled up here to the boondocks?”
He flinches as if I’d hit him and hardens his mouth. “I’m sure you wouldn’t find it as interesting as the fairy tales you’ve been hired to teach. And besides, I thought you wanted to find your daughter. I have a pretty good idea where she’s gone off to.”