“You mean that you’re in love with me?”
She bites her lip, acutely aware of Hunter watching her. “Don’t call me again,” she says.
When she hangs up the phone, she smiles apologetically at Hunter. “Sorry about that.”
“That’s pretty odd,” he says. “Calling you out here.”
“Well …” She hesitates, her heart pounding in her chest. “I haven’t been completely honest with you. Jack and I saw each other briefly, and it didn’t work out. He’s become kind of obsessive.”
“Funny, I never thought of Jack Ledbetter that way.”
“Neither did I.” She shrugs. “The things you find out about people.”
“How did he know you were here?”
“He must’ve guessed. I haven’t made a secret of the fact that I’m … interested in you.”
“In what way?”
She swallows. “I think you know.”
He gazes at her for a long moment. Then he turns away. Glancing out the big window, he says, “The light is fading. If we’re going on a walk, we should do it soon.”
“We don’t have to,” she says.
“But you came all this way.”
She nods. Then she turns to get her bag.
“Oh, leave that,” he says.
“But-”
“Where we’re going you won’t need it,” he says. “It would only get in the way.”
THE WOODS ARE full of sounds. Hunter points out each one: the call of the whippoorwill, the pecking cuckoo, the low buzz of mosquitoes, the lapping of the water on the shore, the occasional rumble of a truck or car in the distance. He shows her how shadows fall according to the time of day, and how certain plants grow in specific conditions. He demonstrates how to move like a deer through the forest with a soft, sure step, how to move like sunlight, cloaking yourself in shadow.
She follows him silently, nodding now and then to show she’s listening. She had thought she’d be scared to be alone with him like this, but she isn’t. Instead she’s remembering what a good teacher he was—how patiently he explained things in class, always checking with the students as he drew diagrams on the board to make sure they understood. He turned social studies into Trivial Pursuit; he delineated the structure of government with a dominoes game.
“Look,” he’s saying, “here—this is what I call a desire line. Strictly speaking, it’s a landscape-architecture term for the paths people create when they cut across the grass instead of taking a prescribed route-people who follow their desires, if you want to be literal. But I just use it to describe any foot trail that’s relatively new and hasn’t been formalized by markers or maps.”
At first she doesn’t see it; she has to let her eyes adjust before she can discern the faint path of broken twigs and matted leaves. He bends to run his finger through a bald patch of dirt. “If you’re lost, you can follow this line to safety. It will take you somewhere someone else has been.”
“This must be yours,” she says.
He nods.
“Where does it go?”
Straightening up, he says, “Why don’t you find out?” He steps back and lifts his hand.
“Aren’t you going to lead the way?”
“I know the way,” he says. “This is your adventure.”
She turns uncertainly and examines the area in front of her. It’s hard to make out anything now. She glances from side to side, but it all looks the same. Suddenly the trees feel like people in a crowd, pushing and jostling.
“Relax,” he says. “Take your time.”
She shuts her eyes for a moment, then opens them. There, to her right, is the broken twig she noticed before. She looks beyond it and sees another dangling stalk and some matted leaves. Suddenly, as if she’s looking at a picture that contains a hidden image, Kathryn’s eyes adjust, and she can see the path. She traces the twig to a trampled leaf, and then, farther ahead, a patch of dirt and a heap of vines pushed aside by a careless foot. Slowly she begins to move forward, using each visual marker as a stepping-stone to the next. After several dozen yards something unexpected happens: she realizes that she can see the path stretching ahead, winding around to the left and out of sight. She begins to walk faster, her eyes traveling quickly from marker to marker as she makes her way through the woods.
Behind her, Hunter’s step is so quiet that for a moment Kathryn forgets he’s there. “You’ve got it,” he says in a low voice, his praise warm on her back. This must have been what it was like for Jennifer, she thinks—this sudden ordering of the universe, this exquisite clarity.
All at once, without warning, Kathryn finds herself in a grassy clearing. She looks around at the pines ringing the perimeter, the birches poking up behind. It seems familiar, somehow, as if she’s been here before. She breathes deeply, smelling the pine and the sour grass. Hunter steps into the clearing, and Kathryn turns to look at him. “I recognize this place,” she says. Shutting her eyes, she turns slightly, listening to the sounds of the forest. “I must have been dreaming. I know it so well. I’m in the middle of this clearing, and I’m turning …”
In the distance, a train whistle sounds. Kathryn feels a chill through her. She stops and opens her eyes.
Footprints disappearing into the grass, an open window, an outstretched hand, miles of highway, a shallow grave. It isn’t until now, this moment, that she knows for certain. Jennifer is dead. She isn’t hiding out somewhere; she didn’t run away. She’s dead, and she’s probably been that way for a long time.
Ten years of waiting, and it comes down to this.
Hunter looks at Kathryn curiously. Everything is still. “I think I know what happened,” she says.
He doesn’t answer. His face is blank, expressionless.
“When she left us that night, she went to meet you,” Kathryn says. “You picked her up on Griffin Road and drove her out here. And then …” She pauses. Vaguely, from the depths of her memory, Jennifer’s words that night by the river float into her consciousness: You know there’s a path you’re supposed to be following in life—but somehow, maybe because you wanted to, or maybe because it happened so slowly you didn’t even realize it, you’ve moved farther and farther away from it….
“She brought her passport,” Kathryn says slowly. “You must have been planning to go somewhere. But she changed her mind. It wasn’t just going away. It was everything.” She hesitates, watching his reaction. “She thought she could just leave, that she didn’t owe you anything. After all you’d done for her,” she says, her voice rising. “You had given her so much. And she was going to just walk away.”
“It wasn’t the way you think.”
His words knock the breath out of her.
“We’d made all these plans,” he says. “We were going to go to Mexico—I knew the International School needed teachers down there, and she wanted to take a few years off before college.”
Frowning, Kathryn shakes her head. “But Jennifer wouldn’t have done that. She wouldn’t have done that to Will. She never said a word about going away.”
“Will knew she was unhappy. He probably knew she wanted to leave. And it wasn’t going to be forever, just a year or two. She’d written him a letter, explaining everything, that she was going to mail when we got there. She wrote you one, too, I think.”
Kathryn feels a pang in her chest. “Really? Where is it?”
He shrugs. “I never saw it. She just told me about it. Who knows, maybe she was lying. Because when we got back here that night, it was clear she’d been thinking about the whole situation, and she wasn’t going anywhere.”
Kathryn nods. “So,” she says haltingly, “you … got angry?”
He steps back with his hands up, as if he’s been stopped by the police. “See, that’s the thing. You’re always jumping to conclusions.”
“I’m not,” she says. Calm down, relax. “I’m listening.”
He looks at her, the muscles in his face twitching, and takes another step back, as if he might turn and go.
>
Kathryn reaches out and touches his arm. “Rick,” she says in a low voice, “I’m sorry.”
Slowly, he shakes his head.
“I am listening.”
For a long moment neither of them says a thing. Then he looks at her intensely, his eyes probing hers as if he’s searching for something specific. She resists the impulse to turn away. “I just don’t know,” he murmurs.
“Yes, you do.” She pauses, trying to form the right words. “Remember how you said that Jennifer had an internal compass, that no matter how lost she was she could always find a way out? Well, you have that. You know.”
He lifts his hand, and she recoils slightly, then steadies herself, hoping he didn’t notice. Running his fingers through his thick, dark hair, he sighs loudly. “I don’t want you to interrupt.”
“Okay.”
I mean it.
She nods.
He takes a deep breath. “We did get into an argument,” he says carefully. “She’d been drinking—we both had. Anyway, she took off; she ran out into the woods, and I followed her. It was pitch-dark and she was crashing through the trees and I was just trying to get her to slow down; all I wanted to do was talk to her, reason with her, but she was beyond that.” He looks off into the distance, as if he’s trying to remember how it happened. “It was like she was running from everything—everything she was afraid of, everything she couldn’t control. There was no reasoning with her. She just … lost it.
“I didn’t know about the asthma,” he continues. “I mean, I knew about it—she’d mentioned it before—but I didn’t know how serious it was. If I’d known what could happen, I never would have let her go. Because when I finally got to her, she was having a full-blown asthma attack. She didn’t have an inhaler, and I had no idea what to—”
“Get her out of here,” Kathryn breaks in; she can’t help it.
He stares at her coldly. “It wasn’t that easy,” he says. “She was gasping like a fish, and we were in the middle of the woods. It was so sudden. By the time I got her out, it would’ve been too late. She was … dying, for God’s sake.”
“Of an asthma attack?” Kathryn says sharply. “That’s absurd.”
“I couldn’t believe it either,” he says.
“So what you’re saying is, you just let her die.”
“No. There was nothing I could do.”
“Well, then, why didn’t you tell someone what happened?”
“I almost did. I thought about it long and hard. But in the end, I just didn’t see the point.” He sighs, looking from side to side as if the trees might back him up. “She was my student,” he says. “It didn’t look good. I would’ve been blamed for it, when it wasn’t my fault….”
“They would’ve been able to tell if it was asthma,” Kathryn says.
“Not necessarily. And even if they could, even if they proved it had nothing to do with me, I’d still have been implicated. It would’ve ruined my life.”
“Ruined your life,” she echoes, the cool neutrality she’s aiming for undermined by a hostile edge.
“Listen, Kathryn.” His voice is brittle and cold. “Nothing I could do was going to bring her back. Why should I pay the price for something I didn’t do?”
“Didn’t you care about the fact that all of us were going crazy looking for her? Jennifer’s family spent months trying to find her. People’s lives were torn apart.”
“Would it have been better to know she was dead?”
“Yes. It would have been better.”
“I don’t know how to make you understand,” he says. “And maybe I’m just a romantic. But you see, all the stuff that took place after the fact was meaningless. Jennifer was gone; she didn’t exist anymore. What happened between Jennifer and me had nothing to do with anybody else.”
Kathryn’s head is spinning. The trees are closing in again. The sky is far away, a distant blue. It almost seems inevitable, being here like this with Hunter, circling the ring in a cautious dance, sniffing the air for Jennifer’s scent. She tries to comprehend what he’s saying, but his words don’t make sense to her. The lyrics of that song on the tape he sent are running through her head: “There’s a message in the wild and I’m sending you the signal tonight….”
Slowly, she looks around the clearing at the patchy grass and small outcroppings of rock. One corner, across from where they’re standing, is barren of trees and bushes and even grass. In the thin afternoon light, there are no shadows. The trees seem to be whispering, passing a secret around. “Jennifer is buried here, isn’t she?” Kathryn says softly.
A plane buzzes overhead, and Hunter looks up. He watches it cut through the sky, trailing a faint line of white, until it’s gone. Then he looks at Kathryn and shrugs. “She could be anywhere.”
Something snaps inside her. She backs away, shaking her head. “This is bullshit,” she says. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe she just died like that.”
“I don’t need you to believe me,” he says calmly. “Then why did you tell me that story?”
“Because you seemed to want one so badly.”
“But it’s a lie.” She can feel her heart beating in her chest. “I want to know the truth. I want to know why you killed her.”
“I told you,” he says, putting his hand up again, as if warding off her words, “you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. That gets me very upset.”
“Why did you call me and threaten me?” she asks, her voice rising in anger. “Why did you leave that stuff in my car?”
“I wanted you to leave it alone.”
She tries to look in his eyes, but they’re unreadable. All at once, she realizes how hard he’s worked to keep this a secret. Rachel’s unwillingness to say what she knows about him suddenly makes sense. “You’ve been sleeping with Rachel to keep her quiet, haven’t you? You were afraid she’d tell what she knew.”
“Rachel doesn’t know anything about this.”
“But she knows about you and Jennifer. She knows enough for it to be a problem.”
“You shouldn’t … do this,” he says, his voice laced with warning.
“What are you going to do? Make me disappear?” She stares at him, her heart pounding. Then she turns recklessly, blindly, to find a way out, hitting her forehead on a branch. The leaves in front of her are a blur of green. She breaks into a run, moving forward without sense, tearing through brambles and stumbling over bushes, the sound of her feet pounding in her ears. All she knows is that the sun is to her left, sliding down the late-afternoon sky, and the cabin, and possibly Jack’s car, are ahead of her in the distance. Her legs are strong; when she finds her gait she feels like a deer, slipping between trees and dodging branches with instinctive ease.
Hunter is behind her. She can hear his footsteps amplified in the quiet, thudding through the underbrush. He knows this forest; he will catch her if she slows, so she picks up the pace, working her way into the densest area she can see.
Suddenly she stumbles. She feels her foot give way and then splay to the side, and she sprawls forward, her leg stuck at an awkward angle in a rut of vines. She lands, hard, on the rocky ground. For a moment she just sits there, breathing hard. Struggling to stand, she puts weight on her foot, but pain shoots up her leg, making her head swim. She leans back against a birch, gripping her ankle.
All at once Hunter’s hand is on her arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. He pulls her around, and she cries out in pain and sinks to the ground. He crouches over her, his face contorted in anger, his hands rough around her throat, and she turns her head away, feeling his grip tighten on her neck. There is a way in which this, too, feels inevitable, as if her worst fears were destined to come true, as if what happened to Jennifer must also happen to her. Why should she deserve anything different? Part of her almost welcomes this, doesn’t care what happens next. It is tempting to imagine what it would be like to disappear, to escape herself, to leave everything behind. She looks up at the web of branches under a canopy
of leaves, the flitting birds and specks of blue in the distance, and then turns her head, against the pressure of his hands, to look Hunter in the eye. She thinks of her mother and Jack and, strangely, randomly, something the Bass Harbor sculptor said as she pointed out the large window of her studio at the rocky Maine coastline: “This is life. This is all I need.” She thinks of Jennifer’s voice on the tape, pleading, What do you want me to say? She thinks of Jennifer laughing. And then, abruptly, she comes to her senses. Dying this way would be meaningless—another girl buried out here in the woods, and for what? She owes it to Jennifer, and to herself, to get out of here alive.
“Rick,” she whispers, struggling to speak.
“No,” he says through clenched teeth.
“Wait-”
He clamps his hand under her chin.
She tries to swallow. Saliva pools in the corner of her mouth, runs in a trickle down the side of her face. “Please,” she manages. “I know … how … it happened.” A branch is digging into her back and she attempts to move, but he has her pinned. “I know … why you told me.”
“Stop,” he warns.
“I—I loved her, too,” she says.
He doesn’t shift his position, but his hands loosen slightly on her neck. Wind moves through the trees, a chorus of whispers.
“I know how she was,” Kathryn says. “How nothing you gave could ever be enough. You were only useful to her as long as you could help. And it was inevitable that sooner or later she’d figure out that you were no different from anyone else; you couldn’t help her any more than anyone else had.”
“I wanted to … help her,” he says, almost inaudibly.
She nods slightly, as much as she can.
“You know too much. I never meant to tell.”
Kathryn shakes her head. “She wanted to disappear. She would have found a way to do it. You were just the most convenient form of escape.”
The words are so easy to say—just words, after all, nothing more. But even as she speaks them, Kathryn recognizes the cowardice behind them. They’re the words of a rationalizing teenager, accurate enough in their own small way but in no sense true. Kathryn knows exactly what Hunter wants to hear because she wants to hear it, too: She wants someone to absolve her of responsibility for losing Jennifer. Blaming Jennifer for her own disappearance is easy enough, if you look at half the evidence.