Read The Girl in the Woods Online
Authors: David Jack Bell
The Girl in the Woods (23 page)
"What?" Diana said, venom in her voice.
The man pulled back in, shutting the door and locking it behind him.
He had the right idea, Diana thought.
Stay the hell away from me.
Stay the hell away from me.
Part Two:
Recoveries
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ludwig's wagon sputtered, and the gears ground as he shifted. He realized that the car made him something of a cliché, the college professor in the Volvo, but that thought didn't faze him as much as his wish that the car would survive just one more year. He'd had it for ten, and if he could get one more out of it, he'd be happy. He took his hand off the gearshift and patted the dashboard encouragingly.
"Come on, little car. Give me another year."
Is this what my life has become?
He was on yet another county road, out amidst the corn stubble and the farmhouses and the wide, empty fields that stretched beyond the horizon. He had his maps and his papers on the passenger seat, the windows rolled up to keep them from flying away. He'd been driving around like this for weeks, ever since the Foley girl had disappeared, and he was beginning to wonder if he had any sense or sanity left at all. Here he was, two years from retirement, a time in his career when he should be relaxing and enjoying the years of hard work in the rearview mirror and anticipating his escape from the world of student papers and committee meetings and departmental backbiting. He had seen a number of his colleagues retire and move away. To Florida, the Carolinas, Vermont or Tennessee. And he had enough money and a nice enough pension to make the same choices. He was single, in good health, and soon to be free.
So what did he do with his time instead?
He drove around the middle of nowhere Ohio looking for the origins of a group that may never have existed, gathering the loose strands of rumor and innuendo and fear and trying to weave them into something coherent and sensible. And so far, not only had he not succeeded, but he had begun to wonder if his entire enterprise was simply a fanciful lark, a goofy dream that he had allowed to consume his life. He had nothing to show for it except extra miles on the Volvo and countless hours studying documents that didn't add up. And not only that, but his professional reputation had suffered. No one had come out and said it directly, but he recognized the looks and comments from his colleagues. They thought he was off his rocker, pursuing lowbrow research into a silly local legend, the kind of thing that would never get funded or published or respected. They might be right, Ludwig thought, but he really didn't care anymore. One of the benefits of being old and having tenure was that he just didn't have to listen to what anybody else said. He was the captain of his own fate, and if the ship went down, at least he'd been the one whose hands were on the rudder.
He turned on the radio and found a news station. It was the top of the hour, and despite the stream of information slowing to a trickle regarding Jacqueline Foley, Ludwig still felt compelled to listen to the news whenever he had the chance. What if something changed? What if something broke? He wanted instant knowledge, instant gratification, just like the students he complained about so much with their text messages and emails and internet addictions. But the news came and went without even a mention of Jacqueline Foley. Her case had reached that stage where they didn't even mention her name anymore. How long before she'd be forgotten, erased by the tides of time and progress? Maybe he was the one who would keep her from disappearing. Maybe that's what he was supposed to do with the end of his career.
He had been out in the countryside for close to an hour already. It was getting on toward noon, and his stomach started to grumble, making him wish he had bothered to bring something along to eat. So many times he worked through meals and ended up not eating at all. At times like those he wished he had someone looking after him—a wife, a girlfriend. He'd even settle for a nagging mother or aunt. But they were all gone now, leaving him to live out his days as a lonely scholar, crisscrossing roads that seemed to be leading to nowhere.
He found himself back on County Road 600, the road Jacqueline Foley was presumed to be riding on when she was taken. But if there were no witnesses how did anyone know for certain she was taken there? The police surmised, based on the girl's usual route, rate of speed and time of departure, that she would have been in the vicinity of County Road 600 when she was taken, but they had no real way of knowing. But despite the fact that it was simply a guess by the police, people in town and at the college had latched onto it. Ludwig cruised down the road, the fields on either side cordoned off by raggedy and rusted barbed wire, until he saw the makeshift shrine that had sprung up in honor of Jacqueline Foley. He stopped, turned the car off and climbed out.
The air was turning cooler. The sky was clear and blue, the sun shining bright, but the air had a cold bite to it, an indication that fall had settled in, and soon enough, he would have to turn the heat on in his house and prepare for the inane parade of trick-or-treaters and their parents who liked to beat on his door and beg for candy. His scuffed shoes scrunched across the roadside gravel as he approached the shrine.
The local paper had done a story on the shrine as soon as they became aware of it, and Ludwig read it with fascination. What motivated people to spontaneously gather at a place that may not truly harbor any real significance? Why the intensely human desire to cling to any hope, be it false or imagined? It started with flowers left by the Foley girl's sorority sisters, but then townspeople drove out and left notes and teddy bears. They burned votive candles at night and prayed. Ludwig bent down and examined a water-stained piece of paper attached to a withered rose.
We're praying for you
, it said. He found another attached to a small wooden cross.
Come home soon, girl. We'll party again.
He wanted to shake his head and scoff, to take the academic's pose and look down his nose at the pipe dreams of the masses, but he stopped himself.
We're praying for you
, it said. He found another attached to a small wooden cross.
Come home soon, girl. We'll party again.
He wanted to shake his head and scoff, to take the academic's pose and look down his nose at the pipe dreams of the masses, but he stopped himself.
Who was he to criticize someone else's pipe dream? Who was he to scoff at someone who still believed in the impossible? Wasn't his whole life—professional and personal—dedicated to the pursuit of proving the impossible?
He straightened up and returned to the car. He wore a light sweater, but the cool breeze actually felt good. He pulled the passenger side door open, making sure that the breeze didn't sweep the papers away, and pulled out a thin file folder. He stood by the side of the car and carefully opened the file, using his right thumb to hold the all-important documents in place. They were maps of the locations in the county where he thought The Pioneer Club might have held their meetings. There were about ten possible locations, ten really good options, and over the course of the past few weeks he had been traveling to them and checking them out, crossing them off as they proved to be nothing worth pursuing further. Eight of them down, two more to go. Of course, Ludwig wasn't much of a hiker or outdoorsman, and given the remote locations and the difficulties associated with traveling to some of them, he had decided to leave the most difficult, the most remote areas for last. Not the most logical course of action, he knew, but he had clung to the naïve hope that he would find The Pioneer Club meeting ground on the first try and save himself weeks of pulled muscles and torn clothes from wandering through the underbrush.
No such luck. So he was back for more today.
And he had reason to believe that today's investigation might prove more fruitful than the ones from the past. He had pinpointed an area in the woods approximately one mile from the shrine to Jacqueline Foley, a plot of heavily wooded land that had belonged to the same family for close to two hundred years. The Donahues. At one time, they were movers and shakers in the New Cambridge area. Thaddeus Donahue ran a livery stable at the time of the township's founding, one of the first businesses to thrive in the new settlement. And his son, Thaddeus Junior, served three terms as mayor in the years prior to the Civil War. But as was so often the case, the family's fortunes ebbed over the course of generations. A family that had once been the equivalent of royalty in New Cambridge had now simply become another, run-of-the-mill country clan, their numbers and resources diminishing as the town around them changed and evolved. They still owned the land—Ludwig had researched the deed at the county courthouse—but little else. At various times over the past twenty years, the taxes on the property had been delinquent, but somehow, the family always avoided foreclosure. Perhaps they managed to scrape together enough of a living to pay the bill, or perhaps the county simply had no interest in reclaiming land that couldn't be used for much of anything. Someday a motivated developer would come along and buy it, but until then, the current owner of the Donahue property—someone named Roger Donahue who the clerk at the courthouse told Ludwig was a "grade A odd duck"—would be allowed to stay on it, maybe even unaware of the rich history his family once lived out.
Ludwig took a deep breath. He was a fool for doing all of this, he knew. Trespassing on someone's land on a cool autumn day just might get him an ass cheek full of buckshot or a couple of blackened eyes. And even if he avoided those pitfalls and found the location where The Pioneer Club met, what would he do with that information? He could only do what he had always done in the past—write a paper. But who would want to publish it?
The
National Enquirer?
Would the headline read: "Bizarre Cult Once Operated in the Woods"?
The
National Enquirer?
Would the headline read: "Bizarre Cult Once Operated in the Woods"?
His hunger gnawed at him. He had never fully appreciated that expression until today when it felt as though a small, furry rat resided in his belly and nibbled on his insides with sharp, pointed teeth. He really needed to eat, and it would be so easy just to cross this stop off the list without even looking. After all, no one was waiting for his report. No one cared if he found the location or not. For all intents and purposes, he was a scholarly tree falling in an empty forest. If he didn't achieve his goals, no one in the greater world would care.
So what's it going to be, Nate old boy?
The wind picked up. It rustled the tall weeds at the roadside, as well as the faded ribbons on the memorial shrine for Jacqueline Foley. She was dead. He knew it. Everybody knew it. People didn't disappear for weeks at a time and then show up alive. And that thought made him feel very, very lonely, like he was the only man left in the world, the lone occupant of a spinning planet that occupied a cold and empty corner of the universe. Not far from the truth, he thought. In so many ways, not far from the truth at all. And something about the loneliness, the sense of being a man on a pointless crusade, an eternal tilter at windmills, appealed to the iconoclastic renegade inside of him. He liked that role, relished it even.
So why turn back now?
* * *
He left his car on Connors Bend Road, a north-south stretch with barely enough room for two cars to pass at the same time. A farmer—Ludwig didn't know who—had a long, narrow rectangular field plowed next to the road but beyond the field began a thick stand of trees which he figured—based on the county records—to be the beginning of the vast acreage still owned by the Donahues. Somewhere in there, if he was right, might just be the place he was looking for.
The farmer's field had an irrigation ditch down the middle, a narrow strip of unplowed land that Ludwig felt comfortable walking through. He hoped the farmer, whoever he was, intended to stay away and work a different area that afternoon. This late in the season, with almost everything harvested and put away, chances were good he'd be left to his own devices. He didn't imagine any farmer in the county, men who were naturally suspicious of the activities that went on at the college, would take kindly to an eggheaded professor who had never worked with his hands wandering through his field.
When he reached the tree line, he stopped. He had hoped—the foolish hope of the uninitiated—that there would be a path, a simple clearing through the trees and brush that he could follow like a Cub Scout in pursuit of a starter badge. But there wasn't any such thing. Fortunately, given the time of year, much of the undergrowth had died or been thinned out by the cooler temperatures, and after examining the land that stretched out before him, he decided that it wouldn't be as challenging as he thought to walk through this section of the woods.
It wasn't too late to walk back to the car. His hunger pangs had subsided for the moment, but he knew they'd come back soon, probably when he was at his farthest point out in the woods, farthest from the car and what passed for civilization in a small, Midwestern college town.
"In for a dime, in for a dollar," he said and entered the trees.
* * *
For a long time, he simply had the sound of his own crunching footsteps and the scattered chirpings of birds to keep him company. As a native of Washington, DC and the son of a history professor at Georgetown, Ludwig had spent most of his childhood in the streets of a large city rather than in the wide-open spaces of the suburbs and small towns. His family had taken an occasional family trip to a state park, but even there, they clung tightly to the designated paths and, when finished, they hustled back to the car like frightened refugees, eager for an escape route back to the city and the familiar terrain of concrete and sidewalk. These days and weeks trudging through the woods, accumulating scrapes and burrs, never growing even somewhat accustomed to the chorus of animal and bird sounds, had been akin to being an explorer on an alien planet. Every moment he expected something large and enraged—a bear? a cougar?—to emerge from behind a tree and zero in on the vital veins and arteries that passed through his neck. That he had seen nothing more threatening than a small fox scrambling away at his approach brought him no comfort. As far as Ludwig was concerned, the longer one went without encountering trouble, the more likely it became that trouble waited around the next bend.
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