Whether he was or he wasn’t, she was out of alternative plans that didn’t involve a jail cell and eventual prison. At this point, it was find Brian in Maine or game over.
“Here we go,” she whispered. She got back in the car and drove away.
Above her, the sun was on the run.
She left 201 at a place called The Forks. Not The Fork, singular. The Forks. It was so named, she suspected, because if you wanted to enter the wilderness by trekking northeast from here, the roads, as faint on her map as veins in an X-ray, splintered off 201 and then off one another and then off one another’s progeny until it appeared the only way back would be scent trails or prayer. It was full dark now, the dark of Germanic fairy tales and solar eclipses.
She turned onto Granger Mills Passage and drove along it for several miles—or it could have been just a couple; it was slow going up here—before she realized she must have missed the turnoff for Old Mill Lane. She turned back and drove through the black until an anorexic sliver of road appeared on her left. There was no marker to tell her what the road was or where it went. She turned onto it, drove about four hundred yards, and it ended. She flashed her sole high beam and all she saw beyond her grille was an embankment about four feet tall and a field on the other side of it. The road had never been a road, just the idea of one, soon abandoned.
There was no place to turn around, so she put the battered, creaking SUV in reverse and tried to navigate her way back through the pitch with one shattered brake light. Twice she drove into the shoulder. When she reached Granger Mills Passage, she drove back the way she’d come for about three miles until she found a cutout alongside some farmland. She pulled in there and killed the engine.
She sat in the dark. There’d be no more driving tonight. She sat in the dark and prayed that movement would be just as impossible for him, at least until morning.
She sat in the dark and realized she hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours.
She climbed into the backseat, pulled her coat from her backpack and wrapped it around her, and used the backpack as a pillow.
Lying in the dark now, as opposed to sitting in it. Closing her eyes.
The sun woke her.
She looked at her watch. It was six-thirty in the morning. A low mist hung over the fields, beginning to smoke along the upper edges as the sun burned it away. A cow stood about ten feet away, on the other side of some loose barbwire fencing, staring through her with cow eyes, its tail swishing at a small squall of flies. She sat up and the first thing she wished was that she’d thought to pack a toothbrush. She drank one of the bottles of water, ate a power bar. She stepped out of the car and stretched and saw more cows in the field across the road, more smoking mist. It was cool, even with the sun, and she tightened the coat around her and breathed in the clean air. She peed by the side of the car under the steady, disinterested gaze of the cow, its tail still swishing like the needle of a metronome, and then she got back in the car, U-turned, and headed off.
It was only twenty-five miles to Baker Lake, but it took her three hours. Anything one would call a road gave way to what one could only charitably call trails, and she was forever grateful she’d stopped last night because she would have ended up in a ditch or driving into a pond. Soon she was so deep into the wilderness that the trails lost their names and some that appeared on the map had been reclaimed by the weeds and the brush. She relied on the SUV’s compass to continue heading due northeast. The rocky dirt paths crunched under her wheels and the chassis rocked from side to side like a child’s carnival ride, exactly the type of motion that often nauseated her, but she gripped the wheel and stared through the window for the next hard curve or sudden rock formation, and she felt fine.
The farmland had given way to tumultuous fields of overgrowth and those eventually gave way to the return of woodlands, the kind of woodlands Brian had always claimed to be part and parcel of his family history and subsequent career. She realized now that Brian had chosen a symbol to represent himself that was the exact opposite of who he actually was. Wood was dependable, sturdy, you could place your faith in it for generations.
Brian, on the other hand, was the biggest liar she’d ever known. And as a reporter, she’d known a lot.
Then how did he manage to deceive you?
Because I let him.
And why would you do that?
Because I wanted to feel safe.
Safety is an illusion we sell to children to help them sleep.
Then I wanted to be a child.
The path ended in a small clearing. There were no other paths beyond it. Just the small oval of weeds and sand and then the next forest. She checked her map, but it wasn’t detailed enough to include this. She checked her satellite photos and felt hopeful that she’d reached a pale spot on one of them that, if she were correct, would mean she was about three miles south of the hunting camp. She changed into her hiking boots and checked that the safety on the P380 was on before she slipped it into her waistband at the small of her back. She’d barely walked ten feet before the rise and fall of it back there grew uncomfortable and she moved it to the pocket of her coat.
The trees were gargantuan. Their canopies blotted out the sun. She presumed bears lived in these woods, and she had a moment of panic when she couldn’t recall how recent her last period had been. But then she remembered—it had been about ten days ago, so at least her blood wouldn’t attract a predator. By the looks of these woods, though, the scent of her flesh might be enough; nothing human had passed along her footpath in a long time. And whatever hunter may have done so in years past, she was fairly certain he’d been quieter than she. She pushed through like the awkward city girl she was, crunching leaves, snapping twigs, breathing audibly.
She heard the lake before she saw it. It wasn’t gurgling or lapping against the land. It presented itself as a pocket, a lack of density that removed pressure from her left ear, pressure she hadn’t even known was there until it wasn’t. Soon small patches of blue winked through the tree trunks. She turned toward them. In fifteen minutes she stood along the water’s edge. There was no shore, just the edge of the forest and a six-foot drop to the water. She made her way along it for another half an hour before the light changed ahead of her, the trunks of the trees brightening with it, and she picked up her pace and stepped through the last of them into a clearing.
The first cabin she encountered was missing all its windows and half its roof. One wall was caved in. The one next to it, however, was the one Gattis had described—faded green trim, faded red door, but clearly kept up, no sense of the land reclaiming it, no cracks in the foundation, the steps leading up to it swept clean, the windows dusty but intact.
The boards croaked when she climbed the four steps to the door. She removed the pistol from her jacket and tried the door. The knob turned in her hand. She pushed the door open. It smelled of must inside, but not mold or rot, and it smelled of the forest, of pine and moss and bark. The fireplace was swept clean. It didn’t smell as if it had been used in a while. In the tiny kitchen, the counters bore a thin film of dust. The fridge was stocked with waters, three tall cans of Guinness with the plastic ring still holding them together, and some condiments still shy of their use-by dates.
The den, also small—the entire cabin wasn’t more than five hundred square feet—sported a cracked brown leather couch and a small bookcase filled with adventure novels and positive-thinking manuals. This was Brian’s place, all right. In the bathroom, she found the toothpaste and shampoo brands he preferred. In the bedroom, she found a queen-size brass bed that squeaked when she sat on it. She walked around a bit more but found no evidence anyone had been there recently. She went outside and looked for footprints around the cabin but found none.
She sat on the porch as exhaustion found her bones and her brain. She wiped at a tear with the heel of her hand and then another, but then she sucked hard through her nostrils and stood and shook her head like a dog who’d been caught in the rain. It
wasn’t just that she would have to trek to the car and drive back toward civilization with not enough daylight to reach it before she’d probably have to pull over with her one working headlight and sleep along the side of the road again. It was that she had nothing to return to. By now they’d have found Caleb and would have ascertained that she’d been in Providence the same time Nicole Alden had been murdered. The circumstantial evidence might not be enough to convict her in a trial, but she would most definitely go to jail until such a time as that trial was held. Could be a year or more. And who’s to say that the circumstantial evidence wouldn’t be enough to convict her? Certainly for Caleb’s murder; a policeman would go on record saying she’d lied about the victim being alive in her condo when, at that point, he’d been dead. Once they had you on record lying about anything, they could convince a jury you were lying about everything.
So she had no home. No life waiting for her. She had two thousand dollars in cash. She had a change of clothes in a bag in a car she’d have to abandon in the first city where she could find a bus terminal.
But a bus to where?
And wherever she got, how was she going to survive on two thousand dollars with her picture on every TV screen and every Internet news site in this country?
Trudging back through the woods, she rifled through her options until she came to the grim conclusion that she had only two—turn herself in or take the gun from her pocket right now and use it on herself.
She found a rock and sat. The lake was an hour back. All she had to look at were trees. She took the gun out of her pocket, hefted it in her palm. Brian, by this point, was probably a continent or two away. Whatever scam he’d been running through Alden Minerals and that mine in Papua New Guinea, he’d run it. And run off with the profits.
She’d been played. That was possibly the worst of it. That she’d been used and discarded. To what end, she had no idea, couldn’t see what her role had been in all this. She was simply the dupe, the rube, the unforgivably innocent pawn.
How long would her body lie among the trees before it was found? Days? Seasons? Or would animals come to feast on it? Years from now someone would find a bone or two and the state police would arrive to find the rest. And the mystery of the missing reporter suspected in the murders of two people would finally be solved. Parents would tell it as a cautionary tale to wayward teens. See, they’d say, she didn’t get away with it. Justice prevails, the status quo is reaffirmed, she got what was coming to her.
Widdy stood about fifty feet away and smiled at her. Her dress was not bloodied, her throat was intact. She didn’t open her mouth when she spoke, but Rachel heard her more clearly than the birds.
You tried.
“I didn’t try hard enough.”
They would have killed you.
“Then I should have died.”
And who would tell my story then?
“No one will care about your story.”
But I lived.
Rachel wept into the dirt and the dead leaves. “You lived poor. And black. On an island no one gives a shit about.”
You gave a shit.
She stared through the trees at the girl. “You died because I convinced you to hide. You were right. If they had found you earlier they would have raped you, but they wouldn’t have cut your throat, they wouldn’t have, they would have let you live.”
What life?
“A life!” Rachel screamed.
I wouldn’t want that life.
“But I want you to be alive,” Rachel begged. “I need you to be alive.”
But I’m gone. Let me go, Miss Rachel. Let me go.
Rachel was staring right at her. And then she was staring at a tree. She wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve. She cleared her throat. She sucked the forest air into her nostrils.
And she heard her mother’s voice. Jesus. This had to be dehydration or exhaustion or low blood sugar or maybe she’d already put the gun to her head and fired and she was already dead, but here came Elizabeth Childs and her nicotine vocal cords.
Lie down, her mother said with a distinctly weary benevolence, and soon we’ll be together again. And it’ll be like that week you were sick in bed and I never left your side. I’ll make all your favorite foods.
Rachel caught herself shaking her head, as if her mother could see her, as if the trees could, as if she were anything but alone. Was this how people went crazy? Ended up talking to themselves on street corners, sleeping in doorways, skin covered in sores?
Fuck that.
Rachel pocketed the gun and stood. She took in the woods all around her. And she knew she wasn’t going to die to make life easier for Brian or Kessler or anyone else who assumed she was too weak for this world.
“I’m not crazy,” she told her mother, told the trees. “And I don’t want to be with you in the afterlife, Mother.” She looked at the sky. “One lifetime of you was fucking plenty.”
It was one o’clock by the time she reached the SUV. It would take two hours to get back to 201. Three hours on 201 until she hit a town big enough to have a bus station. She’d have to hope buses ran through that small town after six in the evening. That’s if she were lucky enough to get from here to there without being pulled over for driving an SUV that looked like it had been dropped from a crane.
She got behind the wheel and pulled out onto the dirt road. She’d driven for about a mile when the man lying on the backseat said, “Fuck happened to Caleb’s car? You look good, by the way.”
He sat up, smiled at her in the rearview.
Brian.
30
PRIMAL SELF
She stood on the brakes, slammed the gearshift into park, and unlatched her seat belt. Brian sat up halfway in the backseat as she came through the space between the two front seats and punched him in the side of the face. She had no experience with hitting someone, particularly with a closed fist—it stung her knuckles far worse than she would have expected—but she knew a direct hit when she heard one, and her fist connecting with Brian’s face made a sound as sharp and solid as any she’d ever heard. She watched his eyes water and grow disoriented.
So she hit him again. She pinned his shoulders with her knees. She punched his ear and his eye and the side of his face again. He bucked at her with his upper body, but the weight imbalance was all on her side and she knew the only rule at this point was to not stop until something forced her to. She heard his voice asking her to stop, her own voice calling him motherfucker over and over, saw his eyes scrunched up against the flurry of her fists. He squirmed his right shoulder free and that turned her awkwardly to her left, and he pushed off the foot well and the seat. She fell back through the space between the two front seats and he loomed up in the backseat, surging toward her.
She kicked him in the face.
If anything, it connected more thoroughly than her first punch. Bone or cartilage cracked, and the back of his head slammed into the window. He opened and closed his mouth several times, as if he were nibbling on the air, and then his eyes rolled back to the whites, and he lost consciousness.
I. Knocked. Someone. Out.
A small laugh popped from her mouth as she watched Brian’s eyes flutter under his sagging eyelids. Her right hand was already swelling and was slick with blood. His blood. His face, she realized with both shock and surprising concern, was battered. And she was pretty sure it hadn’t been battered five minutes ago.
I did that?
She took the car key and the gun with her and got out of the car and stood on the road. She experienced the worst craving she’d had for a cigarette since she’d quit seven years ago. She inhaled the impossibly fresh forest air instead and she couldn’t relate even a little bit to the person she’d been just hours ago, the one who’d contemplated suicide, the one who’d thought of giving up.
Fuck giving up. I’ll give up when I die. And it won’t be by my hand.
His door creaked open and his palms appeared above the window. The rest of him stayed
below the roofline. “You done?”
“With what?”
“Beating the shit out of me.”
Her right hand was screaming now, but she wrapped it around the pistol just the same. “Yeah, I guess.”
He raised his head above the roofline and she pointed the pistol at him.
“Jesus!” He ducked down again.
She came around the car in three long strides and trained the gun on him. “Blanks?”
He lowered his hands from around his head and straightened from a crouch, resigned to his fate suddenly. “What?”
“Did you put blanks in this gun too?”
He shook his head.
She pointed the gun at his chest.
“No, really!” He raised his hands again. So maybe not so resigned after all. “Those are real fucking bullets in there.”
“Yeah?”
His eyes widened because he could see hers suddenly, could see what was in them.
She pulled the trigger.
Brian hit the ground. Well, he bounced off the vehicle first, trying to break to his left to escape the bullet. Bounced off the SUV, landed on the ground, hands still up in the universal, if wholly ineffectual, please-don’t-shoot-me gesture.
“Get up,” she said.
He stood, looked at the chunk of bark she’d shot out of the thin pine to his right. Blood dripped from his nose, over his lips, and off his chin. He wiped at it with his forearm. He spit red into the green grass by the side of the road.
“That looks like real blood. How’d you fake the blood in your mouth on the boat?”