Cold Springs (29 page)

31

Ann Zedman didn't arrive on the noon plane from San Francisco.

When she finally appeared in the airport terminal, a little after one, she walked up from the wrong direction—from the ground transportation exit, trailing a small overnight bag on wheels. Her caramel hair was swept back in a ponytail, no makeup. Denim jacket. Green T-shirt tucked into faded jeans. She might've passed for a college student.

She stopped a few feet away, took off her glasses and folded them into the pocket of her T-shirt.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “They sent me to the other terminal.”

“The other terminal?”

Her eyes were puffy, hay-fever red. “I told you the wrong airline. It took me a while to figure out what had happened. I'm not thinking straight.”

Chadwick had planned on being reserved when he saw her. He had prepared himself all the way into town, rehearsing how he would be. But he reached out his hand, and she took it, laced her fingers in his.

He told her the news about Mallory—that she was safe, that Pérez had only meant to take her back to her father. He left out the parts where Pérez tried to kill him, and Chadwick released him without bringing him to the police.

The good news seemed to kindle some light in her eyes, but she still looked shaken, more than ever like a kid who'd gone through Cold Springs—as if she'd been forced to reevaluate everything, deconstruct her life, put the pieces back together according to someone else's outline.

“Thank God you found her,” she said. “But where . . . ?” Her eyes scanned the gate area.

“She's back in the program. She wanted to go straight to the school.”

“I want to see her.”

“That's not possible now.”

Ann unlaced her hand from his. “She's my daughter. You brought me all this way . . .”

“She's on Survival Week. Out in the woods.”

“Are you insane?”

“They have her under surveillance. Most of the staff will be out patrolling the perimeter all night. She'll be safe.”

“After what happened, you can promise me that?”

“Asa Hunter is on this personally. I've never known him to fail a kid.”

Ann's cheeks colored.

Chadwick realized he'd sounded as if he were drawing some kind of comparison.

“So what am I supposed to do,” she said. “Get back on the plane? I haven't taken a hotel room yet . . .”

She let the statement hang in the air.

Chadwick was suddenly ashamed of the plan he'd made—a reservation for her at the Hill Country Sheraton. Hunter had an account there, held admissions events in the ballroom, sometimes put his more important visitors up in the suites. Chadwick had booked a night for one, in Ann's name, figuring it was the least Cold Springs could do to compensate her.

He told himself he would not go up to the room with her. He would take no chance that his intentions would be misconstrued. But his right hand knew damn well what his left hand was doing. He had told Kindra about the hotel room, suggested that in case of an emergency, that's where Mrs. Zedman might be found. Implying that he might be there.

Kindra had said, “You scare me, Chad.” But she'd agreed to keep the information to herself, and to pick up Mallory personally when the girl emerged from the woods.

“Let's find a place to talk,” he told Ann.

“No. I want to see Cold Springs.”

“Ann—”

“I don't mean Mallory. Just the school. I want to see where you live. Isn't that allowed?”

Chadwick wanted to tell her there was nothing to see of him at Cold Springs. He'd spent his new career here in this airport, stepping on and off planes, flying from crisis to crisis, leaving as little mark as the changeable placards at the gates.

But instead he nodded, and made silent plans to cancel the Sheraton reservation later.

On the road to Fredericksburg, he tried to talk to her about John's disappearance, the missing school money, the Montrose murder investigation. He asked her what was happening in San Francisco. He told her about his conversation with Mallory and Pérez. But Ann participated in the dialogue the way a yarn-holder participates in knitting a sweater—giving material when asked, keeping her end of the line from going slack, but her mind nowhere near the task, paying no attention to the patterns he was struggling to create out of threads. She kept her eyes on the line of iron clouds rolling in from the north, sealing off the winter sun.

By late afternoon, the flatlands around San Antonio had rippled and swelled into the Hill Country, the highway shearing through fifty-foot ravines, curving under the shadows of granite peaks dotted with live oaks. In the valleys, cattle huddled for warmth, and swarms of blue dragonflies hovered over the watering holes. Mesquite smoke curled up from every ranch house chimney.

As they got into Fredericksburg, they passed the truck stop where Chadwick had assaulted the rednecks, the convenience store where Pérez had almost killed him. Chadwick pointed out the historic homesteads instead. The wildflower gardens, now dormant.

Another five miles, and they drove through the gates of Cold Springs.

“The property goes back over the tops of those hills,” he told her. “Mallory can walk all day and just get to the middle.”

But he saw what Ann was noticing—the surveillance cameras on the front gate, the wire fence cut free from brush and floodlit, just like a minimum security prison.

Inside the grounds, the only people visible were a group of gray levels, fixing a barn door down by the horse pasture, trying to get their work done before nightfall. Chadwick didn't need a forecast to tell him it would be freezing rain tonight. Possibly even snow.

Flurries weren't unheard of in the Hill Country, but they were rare enough to be talked about for weeks whenever they happened. The last time had been seven years ago. Chadwick remembered the lodge's aboveground water tank cracking wide open like a hatched egg in the cold.

He thought of Mallory out in the woods tonight. He decided not to discuss the weather with Ann.

The Big Lodge was deserted. Hunter would be out in his jeep, overseeing the solo treks, tracking the GPS coordinates of the black levels, keeping in touch via walkie-talkie with each counselor, who would be trailing his or her charge through the woods at a distance of half a mile, just in case. The black levels would feel alone—they would
be
alone. But the safety net would be there, invisible, in case something went very wrong.

Nobody was at the main desk, so Chadwick turned the logbook around and signed out a room for Ann in the staff dormitory, a few doors down from his. It wasn't much of a liberty. Parents stayed here from time to time, though usually not until the end of White Level, when the kids were getting ready to transition back into the outside world.

Tonight, with no other visitors and most of the staff working, they would have the dorm wing almost to themselves.

He showed Ann some of the empty facilities—the computer lab, the library, the gym. In the art therapy room, she picked up a red-clay figure from the table by the window—a limp human form that had been pulverized by a fist, its head caved in.

“I had a student last year,” Ann said, “molested by her stepfather. The therapist did this—had her make an image of her abuser, then tear it apart. To empower the child.”

“Good therapy is good therapy.”

She set it down, pressed her hand over the boy's handprints stained on the butcher paper. “Somehow, I didn't expect Dr. Hunter to know that.”

“Ann, his program works. It's strict, but it doesn't ignore the kid's needs. You did the right thing sending Mallory here.”

She looked at her fingers, now stained with red. “Eighteen years, I fought to keep Laurel Heights alive. I believed kids were good, creative, able to make choices. And my school is dying. Meanwhile this . . . this kind of school is thriving. Should I feel good about that? When my own daughter needs a drill sergeant more than she needs me?”

Chadwick took the handle of her suitcase. He'd been up thirty-six hours straight now, and his blood was turning to helium. “Let me show you your room. It's not exactly five-star, but it's a place to sleep.”

“Where do you stay? Let me see that first.”

The light was fading outside when Chadwick opened the curtains of his dorm apartment. It seemed impossible to him that this was the same day he'd watched the sunrise in Fredericksburg with Kindra Jones.

As Ann stared at the books on his shelf, Chadwick excused himself. He went into his bathroom and splashed water on his face.

He noticed a streak of mud on his sleeve, a missing button on his shirt collar, a piece of hay from Joey Allbritton's barn stuck in his pocket. He'd gone to pick up Ann looking like this. He probably would've had food in his teeth, too, except he hadn't eaten all day.

He examined his wet face in the bathroom mirror, rubbed at the wrinkles, thinking for the millionth time that his eyes were too close-set, too comically mournful. His heavy jawline was starting to thicken into the slight jowls, making his resemblance to George Washington even more pronounced.

He shook his head.

You're almost fifty,
he told himself.
You're not an adolescent.

Back in the main room, Ann was sitting at his desk, looking at the picture of Katherine. Chadwick fought down a swell of resentment, as if Ann were trespassing. But of course, she wasn't. She'd taken that picture.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“Did I smell cafeteria meatloaf downstairs?”

“Afraid so.”

“I'll pass.”

His own stomach was knotting up, but he sat down on the bed across from her. Clouds continued to thicken outside, a cold metallic energy seeping through the glass window and the heated air of the lodge.

Ann traced her finger across the old eighth-grade class picture—the kids in colonial costume. Chadwick knew she could name each child, their parents, their siblings. She could list the colleges they had gone to, and what jobs they had now.

“I saw Norma this morning,” she said. “She warned me not to come. Said I was a stupid damned optimist.”

“My ex-wife. Always the diplomat.”

Outside, the dusk dissolved the trees and the sky. An instructor's whistle blew three sharp notes, signaling the end of the tan levels' workday.

“And are you really happy here?” Ann asked. “Is this what you want to do?”

“Been a long time since I thought in those terms.”

Heat kindled in her eyes. “And why is that?”

“This is where I need to be.”

“Because you couldn't send Katherine here, so you had to come yourself?”

“Ann—”

“Katherine's suicide wasn't our fault, Chadwick. It's cost us so much time.”

“You sound like you blame her for dying.”

“I loved her, Chadwick, but not enough to give up our relationship. You shouldn't have left me. You shouldn't have spent the last nine years punishing yourself, punishing me.”

“Was it my idea to put Race Montrose at Laurel Heights?”

“I didn't mean—”

“You called me—begged me to help, because you thought Mallory had been involved in the murder. Was that my idea?”

Ann stood, as if she were about to yell at him.

Voices came from down the hallway—two people talking, a man and a woman. Counselors, Chadwick thought, though he couldn't place names to the voices.

As they reached Chadwick's room, the man said, “I don't think he's here.”

There was a knock on the door.

Chadwick and Ann locked eyes. He shook his head, and she tacitly agreed. Neither of them could stand company at the moment.

The woman's voice said, “Maybe he's on a pickup or—”

“No. Jones is here.”

“Oh, right. We could ask her. Or maybe Hunter . . .”

The rest was muffled as they drifted down the hall.

Ann touched her cheeks with the back of her hand. “God. I haven't felt like this since I was sixteen. The high school broom closet.”

“Who were you in there with?”

“None of your damn business.”

“Rah-Rah Lucas,” Chadwick guessed. “The butt-ugly football player.”

Ann slapped him on the shoulder, and he grabbed her wrist. Their eyes met. He drew her down next to him on the bed, nestled her against his shoulder while she trembled, her tears damp on his shirt.

She pulled his chin down, found his lips. Chadwick felt himself borrowing her sense of direction, letting her guide him, as she'd so often guided him before.

She pushed him down on the bed, moved on top of him, her breath in his ear, her skin salty.

“How much of a loser am I?” she taunted, and bit his ear. “I wait thirty years for someone, and it's you.”

There was a knock on the door once more during the night, and they fell silent until the footsteps went away, trembling for fear of discovery like they were teenagers in a high school broom closet, or guilty adulterers in a sleeping bag at Stinson Beach.

For the first time in seven years, snow began to fall over the Hill Country, so quiet and natural that all the hot summers of the interim might never have happened.

32

It was goddamn typical. Not only had she gotten shot at twice in twenty-four hours, yelled at, sleep-deprived and starved. The minute they sent her into the woods for her wilderness overnight, she started her period.

The med kit had supplies for that, but Jesus Christ.

Mallory tried to imagine Leyland teaching them some survivalist tip for dealing with menstruation.
And, um, ladies, this is how the Indians used to do it.

That thought lifted her spirits just a little, but the cramps were bad, like a rhinoceros using her pelvis for a skateboard.

She remembered her monthly ritual at Laurel Heights, ever since sixth grade, spending lunch break curled over in pain in the school office, tears streaming down her face, the other kids poking their heads in the door to ask if she was okay—her mom uncomfortable, having her so close, leaving it to the secretary to reassure the kids that Mallory just had a stomachache. Everything would be fine.

Her mom had never dealt well with female stuff. She was too damn busy being headmistress to be female. Maxi-pads? Trainer bras? Forget it. Mallory remembered how ashamed she'd felt, walking into the lingerie department by herself because her mom wouldn't take her, and then walking out again, scared of the salesclerk. Finally, Norma had taken her under her wing, bought her the right training bra—Norma Reyes, the woman who had lost her breasts to cancer. She could buy a bra, and her mom couldn't. Thinking about it still made Mallory angry.

Of course at the moment, everything made her angry. Her hormones were boiling over. Maybe all the women at Cold Springs were on the same cycle—her, Morrison, Olsen—all of them ready to tear somebody's throat out. Maybe Hunter had been wise to send them off into the wilderness for a while.

She skirted the base of a large hill, using a dry creek bed for a road. She wanted to avoid the underbrush—dense pampas grass and wild rye that grew waist-high on either side. Leyland had warned them about rattlesnakes. They were less active in winter, but they were still out there, living in the high grass.

How far had she walked? Miles, anyway. She hadn't known there were still open places like this in the world, where you could walk all day and see nothing—no people, no buildings, no civilization.

Her calf muscles were sore. Her knife chafed against her thigh. She'd eaten her only ration bar three hours ago, and now her stomach was a hole, slowly burning larger and larger.

Still, she'd felt proud of herself, for the most part. They had taken her compass away before she set out, but she'd used stick-and-shadow readings to find her cardinal directions. She was fairly confident she had remained on an eastward course, though the clouds had rolled in during the afternoon—and she could now only guess she was heading the right way.

Her stomach did a slow twist, trying to write the word
FOOD
on the back of her rib cage. They should've given her two ration bars. They should've taken into account she'd been on the run all night with nothing to eat, unlike the rest of the team. It wasn't fair.

Nothing's fair,
she told herself.
Stop blaming and find a solution.

Water. Her canteen was empty. She should find a way to fill it. At least that would give her something to put in her belly.

She followed a streak of slushy gravel up the creek bed to a bathtub-sized puddle of standing water. The surface was webbed with floating algae that piled up at the edges, making shirred lace on the granite. Young frogs darted around in the silt. Water bugs streaked through the ripples. It seemed strange that there could be so much life in the middle of winter. Surely it would freeze tonight. Could frogs live under ice?

Mallory knew she shouldn't drink from here. Amoebas, bacteria—shit like that could make her sick. Then she noticed the capillary of water trickling into the pond, feeding it. She followed it up into the rocks and found the spring, almost choked in moss, but there it was, bubbling right out of the ground—one of the cold springs the school was named after. Supposedly hundreds of these sprouted up all over the ranch, lacing together to form the river. But this was the first one Mallory had seen. Weird, that something so small could make a river.

She squatted down and the cramps tightened. Black spots danced behind her eyes. She wrapped her fingers around the GPS bracelet on her wrist, squeezed the metal band. But she wouldn't push that button. She wasn't going to give up. Not this time.

She steadied her breathing, looked for something to focus her eyes on. The ground here was littered with flint chips. Chert—worked stone, just like Leyland had told them to watch for. Several pieces had been chipped to a point—discarded Indian tools. She was kneeling at a two-thousand-year-old drinking fountain.

She cupped her hand into the water and took a drink. It tasted cold, earthy—what the heart of a tree would taste like, if you could drink it.

Her dizziness subsided. She filled her canteen.

Under her hand, the moss felt like a horse's muzzle, and she remembered the evening she'd stood with Olsen at the pasture, feeding apple slices to the filly.

She thought about Olsen's secret—her stepfather, her little sister.

Mallory didn't want to be anybody's substitute little sister. She'd played that part before, with Katherine.

But she also couldn't help being touched that Olsen had opened up.

She'd never had a girlfriend—like a real slumber-party paint-your-nails kind of friend. Katherine had ruined that for her. Mallory got too close to another girl and she started thinking about the silver chain around her neck. She backed away, found a boy to hang out with, like Race.

She was sorry she hadn't told Olsen her own secret—about Katherine's last night, the figure on the Montroses' porch. But she felt relieved, too.

How could she be sure of a memory from when she was six? Her parents used to tell her things she did when she was small, until she started to believe she remembered them. The dream about the Montroses' porch could be the same kind of thing. A traumatic experience, combined with a new situation—you superimpose someone's face and start believing they were there.

She wondered how Olsen would react—whether she'd laugh it off, or take her seriously, or maybe even get angry. The hungrier Mallory got, and the more tired, the more reasonable her dream seemed. She'd heard Katherine—she'd called her friend
she.
Mallory was sure of that. But if Mallory said something, and she was wrong . . .

She decided to climb out of the creek bed, see where she was going.

She hiked up the hillside to an outcropping of boulders that looked like the head of a turkey.

From there, she had a view of the whole valley—the low hills, the dense carpet of live oaks turning chameleon gray under the clouds, a darker strip of green cypress trees that marked the river's course up ahead, and maybe, a little farther toward the horizon, a ribbon of brown—the access road.

Race had kidded her once, when she'd suggested they take a trip to the woods. She'd had this idea they'd hitchhike to La Honda, where the hippies used to experiment with LSD. They'd score some cheap wine and pot and spend the night in the redwoods. Race had laughed, a little nervous.
You in the woods? Man, the raccoons would eat you.

Now, Mallory smiled.
Screw you very much, Race.

She hadn't thought of him in days—not like she used to, anyway. It had only taken one night of sex to convince her they weren't in love. Weird how that had worked—like, now that it's too late, here's the emotional proof you just made a mistake. She didn't hate him. She didn't really believe he'd killed his mother. She just . . . wanted to avoid him. Their friendship had become dangerous, like the heroin. Most of the time, she no longer craved it, but if she got close . . . if she saw a bag of smack, she wasn't sure she'd be able to resist.

Maybe Race felt the same way. Finding his mother in all that blood—how could you share that experience with someone and not have the image burn in your mind, every time you looked at her? Mallory wondered where they would be now if Chadwick hadn't snatched her—if she and Race had taken that money and caught a bus out of town. They would've failed eventually, made each other miserable. She knew that now. Cold Springs had saved her. All she could do was hope Race would find something like that, too.

An icy wind was picking up, turning her cheeks and the end of her nose to sandpaper. She was about to rise, get moving again, when she heard a loud skittering noise—dislodged rocks rolling down the hillside in the woods behind her. Her fingers strayed to the hilt of her knife.

“Hello?” she called.

No response. Just the sound of a few last pebbles coming to rest. Mallory could see nothing that hadn't been there before—the trees, the cliffs, the afternoon growing steadily darker under dense gray clouds.

You won't meet any people,
Leyland had promised.
This is all private land. Posted and patrolled. We're taking pains to make sure no one bothers you.

Could she trust that?

Probably, if Hunter and Chadwick were on patrol. Chadwick had taken out that one sniper, Hunter had assured her, like it was nothing. And Mallory figured Hunter was just as tough. You could tell by looking at him—the guy was a predator.

Mallory tried to relax. Probably an animal had slipped. Do animals slip? Or maybe the rocks had come loose on their own.

But her heart still fluttered. Maybe it was just her hormones again, but she felt . . . anger in the silence, directed at her. She felt watched.

She found a dead mesquite branch, about four feet long, two inches thick. She broke the twigs off of it, hefted it. It would make a good walking stick. That's all. Just in case.

She made her way downhill.

She walked for another hour or so. The air turned colder and heavier, and it began to smell like snow. Mallory put on her jacket.

Her cramps flared up, rolling through her like lava lamp goo, and with them, the old withdrawal pains from the heroin. That didn't help her paranoia. Whenever she looked back, she could swear she saw flickers of movement in the trees. She heard the distant crack of twigs.

A counselor following her? No, a counselor would hang back. This was something pressing in—a presence on her back, as threatening as the cold front.

Another snap in the woods behind her—maybe fifty yards away. Mallory started jogging.

By the time she saw the river in the distance, she was shivering, her face drenched in sweat.

The river was narrower here than it was at camp—maybe thirty yards across—but the water roared in a swollen stretch of rapids. The banks were cut steep into the mud, the exposed roots of cypresses making basket nets along either side. It was too far to jump, too icy to swim. And it was in Mallory's way.

The daylight was fading, but she had to cross. She wasn't going to stay on this side all night—not with those sounds, the thing that was stalking her.

She picked her way downstream until she came to what she needed—a fallen tree, the trunk making a bridge across to the other side.

She didn't wait to get up her nerve. She could be across in three big steps.

But she'd underestimated how slick the bark was, how much it would bend and shift under her weight. She was halfway when she slipped, threw her walking stick into the air, and pitched into the water.

Her arm struck something hard. Water surged into her nostrils. Her clothes weighed her down; the current spun her and rushed her backwards downstream. She tried to stand, only to be swept back in. Finally, she clawed herself to the bank, pulling herself up by a tree root, and collapsed in the mud, gasping and nauseated.

Stupid. Race would laugh in your damn face.

She had no idea how far she'd been carried. She couldn't see the tree trunk she'd tried to cross. Her whole body trembled, and she wasn't sure whether it was from the cold or the shock, but she realized it didn't matter. She needed to move. She needed to get warm immediately.

And then she noticed her backpack was gone.

She walked downstream for a long way, but there was no sign of the pack. It had been ripped off her back and carried away.

Now, for the first time, Mallory felt truly alone. She looked at the GPS bracelet—that small green eye glowing at her, daring her to give up. She was in deep trouble. She could die out here. Just her goddamn luck, to freeze to death in Texas.

No,
she told herself.
You can do this.

But the darkening sky and the river and the trees seemed to be telling her otherwise.

She tried to remember what Leyland had told her to do in an emergency.

S.O.S. Survey. Organize. Strategize.

Okay, the survey was easy. Night was falling. She was wet and cold—her clothes soaked through, her backpack and med kit and thermal sleeping bag gone. Her limbs felt numb.

Mallory organized her supplies. She stripped off her jacket. She checked her leg sheath to make sure the knife was still there. The metal match they'd shown her how to use was still in her pocket. That was it. That's all she had.

Strategize? She needed warmth, right away. She needed to make a fire.

The only good thing that had come from her river ride was that she seemed to have lost whoever or whatever was following her. She couldn't hear it anymore—didn't feel its anger. Fire light might attract it to her again, but she had no choice. She had to have warmth.

After a fire, she'd create a shelter. She'd have to spend the night here, move on in the morning. Thirdly—only thirdly—she'd need to satisfy the gnawing hunger in her stomach.

She'd done lots of fires in base camp. It had been one of the prerequisites for the solo trip. Nevertheless, she had to remember the steps, mentally walking herself through.

She found an enormous tree that was hollow inside and decided that would be her shelter. She'd build her fire next to it. She used the hard dirt as her platform, put down a wrist-sized branch for the brace, piled the tinder on this. It took her three strikes to spark a flame to the tinder, and by that time her fingers were losing feeling. In a few minutes, though, she'd started a curl of fire and began to add the kindling. She got to the fuel stage, began adding larger twigs, then small logs.