The Seeker A Novel (R. B. Chesterton) (18 page)

That image got me moving. Pumping my legs as hard as I could, my feet slipped off the edge of the blacktop and I nearly twisted my ankle, which would have been a harsh irony.

The landscape ended ten feet in front of me in a curtain of white. It was impossible to see anything. The inn was a good three miles away, and without landmarks I couldn’t be sure I was moving in the right direction. It would take everything I had to get there, but the alternative was to stop and freeze to death. The denim pants I wore were soaked and icy. I pushed myself forward, thinking about the little girl in the cabin.

Mischa Lobrano, if that was who she really was. She’d never answered my question about her name. In fact, she’d told me nothing about herself, and she knew a lot about me that no one should.

My abortion was a secret I’d shared with no one except the father, Bryson Cappett, and he hadn’t told anyone. I’d been a kid. Sixteen, away at boarding school without anyone who cared about me. The girls at school hated me. They took every opportunity to show it, too. Bryson was the best-looking and most popular boy at school. When he asked me out, I thought it was a joke. I figured Kimmie, one of the popular girls who made it a point to torment me, had put him up to it to humiliate me. I declined his offers of dinner, skating, hockey games, and parties.

He worked on me relentlessly for three weeks, telling me that he was sorry the other girls were so mean, that he thought I was beautiful, and that he liked my accent and how it made me unique. He was kind and gentle and interested in me, and he made it clear that I was his number one priority.

Three months later he was telling me how much of a stupid hick I was because I hadn’t been on the pill. It had never occurred to him that I wouldn’t know enough to use protection because I’d never needed it—until him.

Struggling against the snow, my stomach cramped at the memory of the whole sordid mess. I’d been such a rube. I’d swallowed his lies and basked in his compliments. He made me feel so special. And I’d given in to his demands for sex, not because I couldn’t control myself, but because I was afraid if I didn’t let him, I would lose him.

Who would have thought a privileged young man with cars and boats and money for entertainment would wage such a long and single-focused campaign to have sex with a girl he didn’t even like?

In the end, abortion was the only answer. If I’d gone home pregnant, it would have broken Granny’s heart, and my unbalanced relatives would have hunted Bryson down and killed him. He wasn’t worth that price.

Also, if my pregnancy had become public knowledge, I would have been kicked out of school. So would Bryson, which is why he gave me the money for the abortion and kept his mouth shut about the pregnancy. A week later, he was killed in a skiing accident.

I never told a single soul. Not one. And Bryson wasn’t a fool. He’d died with my woeful past untold.

Yet Mischa knew. A child dead for years knew my darkest secret.

The puzzle was so intriguing, I wanted to sit down and reason it through. I couldn’t figure it out while I was slogging through the snow. It required too much energy to walk and think. If I could rest for a little while, I would be stronger.

The temptation to take a breather, even for a moment, was great, but I beat it down. I would die in this snowfall and never understand who had killed Mischa or how she knew my secrets. A part of me didn’t care, but another rebelled. I couldn’t just quit. I had to keep fighting.

Far in the distance I heard a motor. I remembered the racket of the trucks my male cousins drove, glasspack mufflers echoing across the valleys so that it was impossible to tell if they were near or far away. The snow had something of that effect.

Or perhaps it was just an aural mirage, a manifestation of my desperate need to hear help on the way.

My foot slipped and I landed facedown into the snow. My feet were completely numb, my leather boots worse than useless. Needles of pain prickled my feet and lower legs. How much easier it would be to stay down, just for a little while.

The vehicle seemed closer. I forced my body up to my knees and turned around. Headlights approached, and the noise of a big motor reverberated off the snow. Not a car but a snowplow. As it crept forward, the blade scooping, rolling, and parting the snow, the danger struck me. If I didn’t stand up and move, I’d be buried by manmade snow mountains. I struggled to my feet.

“Aine!”

I continued to thrash away from the dangerous machine.

“Aine Cahill.” A hand gripped my shoulder.

I spun to confront Will McKinney. His mouth, moustache, and nose were covered by a muffler, but I recognized his eyes beneath a heavy winter hat. “What in the hell are you doing out here?” he asked.

“Freezing,” I replied.

He hustled me toward the snowplow, but my feet refused to work properly. I couldn’t make them move. He picked me up and carried me to the cab. In a moment I was sitting in the passenger seat with hot air blowing over me. Funny, but it was colder in the heated cab than outside.

“You could have died from hypothermia,” he said when he was behind the wheel. “Do you realize how lucky you are that I came along? I don’t normally run the plow, but the snow came down so hard and fast we didn’t have time to get emergency crews in.”

I closed my eyes and my head flopped against the seat. I could hear him, but I didn’t care what he said. There were no answers to explain what had happened to me at the cabin in the woods. I didn’t care. I only wanted to sleep.

26

My recollection of the next few days was limited. Strange dream images tormented me, and I remembered struggling against the heavy covers, pushing them aside from my sweating body, only to take a chill and beg for warmth. I didn’t know the people caring for me, and I cried out for Granny Siobhan and even for my father.

Joe was there at times. And Patrick. And women who bathed my forehead with cold cloths and forced medicine into me, even when I fought them. They told me their names, but I couldn’t remember.

At times, I sauntered along the green-canopied trails of the Kentucky mountains. Sunlight warmed me, and I could hear the gurgle of a running creek. The beauty of my surroundings saddened me, and I couldn’t remember why I’d left.

Other times, I was in the forest at Walden Pond. I saw the blond child. She watched me from the safety of the thick trees. “I know your secrets,” she said. “I know all the things you wish to hide.” Her dark eyes seemed to absorb the light. “I know things you wish to know.”

“Who killed you?” I asked her. “Tell me.”

“I know secrets,” she said. She taunted me and darted away whenever I tried to talk to her.

I woke up, a swimmer held underwater and struggling for air, with two strong hands holding me down in the bed.

“For god’s sakes, let’s take her to the hospital.”

I recognized Joe’s voice. I tried to reach for him, to put my hands on his face, but he grabbed my wrists and held them so tightly that my fingertips went numb. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t feel my feet. Had they been amputated? For a moment the dream blizzard howled around me. I saw the blackened lumps that had once been my feet. Frostbite. They had taken them off.

No matter how I screamed and thrashed, I couldn’t get away. Exhausted, I drifted into sleep.

Dorothea told me my fever spiked on Thanksgiving Day at 104.5. Afterward, I began to feel better and think more clearly, and was greatly relieved that all of my limbs were intact. I realized the women caring for me were nurses monitoring drips and medicines prescribed by Dr. Wells, who had visited me several times each day. Instead of sending me to the hospital, Dorothea had taken it upon herself to make sure I had the best medical care. She and Joe and Patrick and her friends.

“You were like a woman possessed,” Dorothea said as she fed me chicken soup after she’d helped me into clean pajamas. “We had to hold you in the bed. You were all upside down about some girl in the woods. You kept talking to her, asking who killed her. You were convinced she knew secrets and you had to ask her questions.”

I watched her expression and saw no sign that I’d blurted out my past. “It was a dream,” I said. “What else did I say?”

“Most of it was gibberish. You cried for your grandmother. And your dad. And you talked about Kentucky. I think you’re a little homesick, Aine. Do you want me to call anyone for you?”

“No. There’s no one to call. Granny is dead, and my dad too. He had a strong fondness for the whiskey. Took out his liver. The males in my family tend to die young, either from drink or dangerous miscalculations.”

Dorothea closed her eyes and her lips moved.

“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned by her strange conduct.

“Just saying a prayer of thanks for you, girl. You scared me. I was afraid you might not come back, but you sound like your old wicked self.” Dorothea put the backs of her fingers against my cheek. Her cool hand felt wonderful. “I should call Joe. He sat with you during the nights. He’ll be relieved to hear you’re coherent.”

“How long have I been sick?” Looking out the window, I saw snow on the ground and bright sun.

“Two days.” She smoothed the covers. “You missed Thanksgiving, but I saved turkey and dressing for you.”

I tried to sit up. “It’s Friday?” I’d gone to Yerby Lane on Tuesday. I’d lost two complete days.

“It is indeed. You’ve missed nothing except acres of snow, so don’t try to jump out of bed. You need to get your strength back.”

Panic flooded over me at the thought of all the things I hadn’t done. For all practical purposes, I’d lost a week of work on my dissertation. “Would you hand me my computer?”

“Aine, you need to rest.” She offered the soup to me so I could feed myself. “What were you doing so far from the inn? Chief McKinney said he had no idea where you’d come from.”

Though I wasn’t hungry, I focused on the soup while I tried to compose an answer. She wouldn’t be the only person asking that question. Had any of the events really occurred, or was I already sick, my imagination fevered, before I found the shack and the child?

“I was looking for a building where an artist used to live.”

“Out off Yerby Lane?” Dorothea’s expression said it all.

“Roger Brent. Have you ever heard of him?” Dorothea knew the merchants of the town, she might know the artists.

She took the soup that had grown cold and placed the tray on my desk. Her back was to me when she answered. “I never heard of a Roger Brent, and I can tell you there’s been no one living on Yerby Lane for the past fifty years. How did you come upon his name?”

I told her about the shopkeeper. I almost showed her the scrimshaw tooth, but the tooth was between Mischa and me. Perhaps it was nothing more than a lure to get me to Yerby Lane. But it might also be a clue.

“So that’s what you were doing way out there. Why didn’t you call me or Patrick to come after you?” She sat in a chair someone had placed beside my bed.

“No cell phone reception. And the snow started coming like someone had unzipped the clouds. It got bad before I realized it. By then, there wasn’t anything to do except start walking.”

Dorothea picked up my hand and held it between her own. “What did you hope to find, Aine?”

“Evidence of what happened to Mischa Lobrano.”

Dorothea reeled back in shock. “What kind of evidence?”

“Of who might have harmed her.”

“You think this artist, this Roger Brent, is responsible for Mischa’s disappearance?” Hope lit her features. “No one even brought up his name in the investigation. What makes you suspect him?”

Caution ruled my answer. The tooth was impossible for me to explain. What if Mischa had stolen it from the museum? I would look like the guilty party. No one would believe a dead girl had committed theft and I somehow ended up with the stolen object.

“The shopkeeper said Roger Brent sometimes used young girls as models. He lived out by Walden Pond.” I pushed back the covers and sat up. “I went looking for him.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No one has lived there for a long time.” The interior of the ramshackle cabin came back to me. “Roger Brent lived alone out there. I wonder where he went.”

“Maybe Chief McKinney can track him.”

“I doubt your chief has a lot of respect for me right now.” I could only imagine what he thought of a woman in leather boots and a wool coat out in a blizzard. It certainly wasn’t a reflection of “good Yankee sense.”

Dorothea offered a steadying arm to help me to the bathroom. My weakness troubled me. I was like an old woman tottering along.

“You aren’t from these parts, Aine. You probably haven’t witnessed the violent turn the weather can take in the blink of an eye during the winter.”

“I won’t be that careless again.”

“That’s all that matters,” she said as we walked slowly across the cabin to the bathroom. “You’ll get stronger and before you know it, you’ll be back at work on your dissertation. Just give yourself a few days to heal.”

I didn’t have the time to waste, but I kept this to myself. As soon as she was out of the room, I’d begin a search for Roger Brent online. If he was still alive, the chances were good he was somewhere on the Internet.

After fussing around the cabin tidying up the bed with fresh linens and insisting that I let her wash my clothes, Dorothea left. Ten seconds after the door shut, I got my laptop and searched for a Concord artist named Roger Brent.

Not a single result popped up. I expanded the search. Nothing. If Roger Brent had lived and worked in Concord, he’d failed to use the most basic tool of promoting his art—the Internet. Often if an artist or writer didn’t create a page on the Web, a fan would. Not in the case of Roger Brent.

I was still sitting in bed with my laptop when a knock came at my door. To my surprise, Chief McKinney entered.

“How are you, Aine?” he asked.

“Better. Thank you for bringing me here. I might have died had you not come along.”

“I’m glad you realize that.” There was no lecture in his words. “The weather here can turn in an instant.”

“So I understand. I won’t make that mistake again.”