The Telling (35 page)

I notice Carolynn's hand on Duncan's shoulder as she leans her weight into him. He's being serious, devising a plan, sober for one of the first times since we found Maggie. This is the Duncan that Carolynn wishes he'd be all the time.

“Sounds good,” Josh says with a clap.

Rusty swings the bat west to east. “We'd cover more ground if we split up into groups.”

“No,” Josh and I say in unison. Josh waves for me to continue. “If I'm right—and I really think I am—then whoever
He
is could be out here. Remember, this is where Maggie was poisoned. We're only safe because there are five of us and one of him. We stay together.”

“Stay together, stay alive,” Rusty says as a grim little motto.

Rather than walk in a line, we fan out, leaving no more than five yards between us to cover slightly more ground. We all keep in the sight line of whoever flanks us. Other than our footfalls our group is quiet.

The woods aren't as damp as when we last visited the spring.
The trees grow in varied density. We move in and out of the sunbeams that penetrate the sparser foliage. For a full minute the forest floor becomes a dark mash, and we blindly stomp through ferns and spiderwebs, their invisible threads tickling my exposed neck. The trees thin and an abrupt breeze rustles my ponytail. It flattens my hoodie, pressing it to my skin as a body slipping by me would. I check over my shoulder. We're covering more ground in this formation, but there's no one watching our backs.

Carolynn looks my way as I look hers. “It's been about fifteen minutes. Almost a mile,” she says. Duncan is beyond her and Rusty beyond him. Josh is on my other side. His path has gradually veered farther from me, and I keep losing sight of him as he passes behind trees. Whereas most of the forest is made up of straight pines with boughs that appear hung with green tulle ballerina skirts, all swinging dizzily in the wind, their trunks decreasing in diameter as they grow skyward, there's a malformed group of ten or twelve trees growing in a cramped ring. Their trunks are grayish and smooth; their branches with the look of scarecrow arms, stray fingers splayed and grasping shaggy clumps of mistletoe. I notice them because the tops of their root systems are exposed. The segments aboveground look like spines with knobby vertebra shooting from the soil. A ring of skeletons digging themselves up and escaping from their graves.

My brain names them cedars—a factoid I must have picked up in biology or from Willa's encyclopedic brain. I rub heat into my arms and look up to see what Josh makes of them. He isn't there. He must have veered off on the cluster's far side. I continue on our course, but when I start to leave the mass behind, Josh isn't keeping pace.

“Josh,”
I call. A sideways wind scatters my bangs across my forehead as I approach the clump of trunks. They jut up, impossibly tall. Shards of light filter through their branches. “Josh?” I call louder. I check that Carolynn's stopped and is watching me. She snaps at Duncan for him to stop, and he shouts at Rusty.

Shadows pool in the space between the trunks, and I could slip through the roots and pass right through the circle. I don't want to. I walk counterclockwise around their perimeter.

“Josh?”

I stop in my tracks. He's standing with his back to me, facing the shore he can't see because there's half a mile of forest blocking it. “Look,” he whispers.

I stand at his side and follow the length of his pointed finger. It's almost indecipherable from the spectrum of brown columns of tree trunks. I probably wouldn't have noticed. It's distant—maybe as far as fifty yards. The sun glints off a corner of a tin roof, and a narrow, cylindrical chimney puts out a thin white squiggle of smoke.

“Holy shit,” a loud voice exclaims. Duncan's hands are on his head. “There's someone in there. There's smoke coming from the chimney.”

“Shhhh,” Carolynn hisses. “If you can see them, they can see you.” We draw back to the other side of the small grove of trees.

“We need the police,” Josh says urgently.

Duncan's the quickest draw with his phone. “There's no service this far out.”

“Just like there's no service at the spring,” Josh says, dragging his hand down his chin.

Still, Rusty, Carolynn, and I pull our cells from pockets, and there's
a lot of holding them up an extra foot or two. Rusty jumps in place, as if that could be the difference.

“Duncan had service on the trail. We've got to go back,” Josh declares.

Carolynn shakes her head. “No. What if whoever it is leaves the cabin? What if we lose him because we retreated and he has time to get away?”

“He doesn't even know we're here,” Josh argues.

“You saw the cabin.” She jabs his chest with her nail. “You were in his line of sight. You don't know what he saw.”

“She's right, man,” Duncan says, hands up in a peacemaking gesture. “Best-case scenario is we find a signal back where we looked up the map. It will still take the cops fifteen or twenty minutes to get out here. They're the ones who were supposed to search the preserve in the first place, and instead they had hard-ons to suspect us.”

“Plus, they've got a suspect in custody,” Carolynn says. “They found bird beaks in Skitzy-Fitzy's pockets. They'll send
one
officer out here, if we're lucky”—her thin, shaking arm points in the direction of the cabin—“and whoever is hiding will hear the siren coming.”

Josh looks around our group, torn. “Okay, what if you”—he jerks his chin at Duncan—“run back to where you had a signal, and we hide in the trees to watch the house? We'll make sure no one leaves.”

“Stay together, stay alive,” Rusty parrots himself. He isn't being sarcastic anymore.

“The four of you will be together,” Duncan says, punching Rusty playfully in the shoulder. “I can sprint to the trail and be back here within ten minutes, easy.”

Carolynn cocks a skeptical eyebrow.

“Okay, twelve minutes, max,” Duncan says with a wink.

There's an awful moment where we're all trading uncertain glances. It's important that the police know where we are and what we found. One cop is better than none. Duncan shoves his cell into his pocket, smashes his lips to Carolynn's cheek, whirls around, and barrels off the way we came.

“Shit,” Josh says under his breath.

We shield ourselves amid the trees. The shadowy place between the circle of trunks seemed foreboding, but now their malformed roots are our cover as we keep watch. Our view of the cabin is distant and fractured. The white curl of smoke is framed perfectly by a window of blue sky between trunks.

There's the background roar of the waves beating the shore and the scampering squirrels. My hand is braced on a tree trunk until I focus on the foamy egg sacks of insects better left unidentified on the bark. I shuffle farther from it and just as I do, I catch a flash of movement out of the corner of my right eye. I turn fast. Between the trunks I can make out slim bars of the forest beyond.

Do I catch the tail end of a shadow? Or do I see a dark form because I worry that it's there? It's impossible to know, and no one else noticed, so I turn back and squint at the cabin.

I think I detect a new background noise. The buzz of a beehive, possibly. “Do you hear that?” I whisper. Carolynn moves alongside me and stretches forward so her head is between trunks. She listens.

All at once the sound is undeniable. The first sharp crack is followed by several more in rapid succession. A flock of birds shoots from the understory to the canopy. Their shrill caws
spread in a relay as other birds of the forest screech in response. I blink hard. It's becoming difficult to focus on the cabin. Its lines are going runny. The air is shimmery. Only with the first puff of black smoke from the chimney stack do I connect the sound with the changing air.

“Fire,” I say. I brush by Carolynn, duck under a waist-high loop of root, tear out from behind the trees, and dart toward the cabin. I close half the distance fast. There are rogue bolts of flame through its blackened windows. The chimney puts out a steady black stream. There's flickering light from the cabin's door, which appears to have been left wide open. Was it like that when we first spotted it? I can't say. That daring voice in my head just keeps howling that the cabin is going to burn to the ground, along with clues left behind in it. I take the cabin going up in flames as proof that
He's
been using it as a hideout. He's burning it to the ground because he must have spotted us. Heard us.

The sun flashes through the breaks in the canopy. I run blind for feet at a time. Messy footsteps gain on me. Rusty, who is built for stealing bases, must be at my heels. I chance a look over my shoulder. Carolynn. Josh is a few yards back, with Rusty directly behind him. The boys look intent on stopping me. Carolynn's eyes drill the cabin.

The edges of my vision pulsate as I close in on it. Embers float from the open door and land in the dirt with the look of angry red ants. I catch the black glitter of exoskeletons as spiders crawl away. The cabin's two soot-blackened windows remind me of soulless doll eyes gaping at the forest.

I pass through the open door. The heat slaps me in the face. The flames lick the walls from the floor to the exposed wood eaves of the ceiling. It's
one cramped room. An ancient-seeming bench with cushions is being devoured, the upholstery charring like the flesh of a petrified marshmallow. Beside a wooden counter and a basin sink are cans and cans of crushed pineapple. Maggie loved pineapple. Her lip gloss was tropically scented, her drink of choice was pineapple-flavored rum, she'd eat the canned kind by the bucket. Maggie was here.

I step over the rotted floorboards. “Watch it,” I tell Carolynn behind me. A wooden ladder leads up to a loft. I make for it. The air's full of cinders, and I'm coughing as I jump up on the first rung. The flames poke through the wood of the ceiling like dagger tips dragging and sawing. The roof won't stay up much longer. I picture Maggie sleeping in the loft, leaving her things and the album stored there. She only had the backpack with her. She must have taken more to this hideout for seven weeks in the woods.

“It isn't worth it,” Carolynn shouts. I hesitate and turn on the bottom rung. Rusty and Josh are shouting from the outside, voices barely audible over the sputter of the flames. Carolynn extends her hand up to me. “Lana, it isn't worth it.”

“Get out of here,” I shout at her.

She makes to follow me up the ladder. There's one long groan, and then the floor under us shakes. I reverse fast. Carolynn jumps down from where she is, pauses to make certain I'm coming, and sprints for the door. I'm dizzy and hacking, tripping forward. I only see it because I'm doubled over, holding my stomach. There, by the door, resting on top of a pile of old magazines, is Ben's leather photo album.

I grab it the second before I jump over the threshold. Twenty feet away I let the album thud at my feet and brace my hands on my
knees, scrunching my stinging eyes shut, hacking up smoke. At my back there's a thunderous rumble as the wood of the structure is consumed by a single, violent burst of fire. I stumble a few feet forward from the resulting push.

Josh helps me upright, his face soot-stained and grimacing. “Is that it?” he asks.

Carolynn cuts me off as she shouts, “Why hasn't Duncan gotten back?” She pitches in a halting zigzag between us and the direction of the path. Her hair is streaked with cinders and she's drained of energy, her shoes dragging. She visors her hands at her brow even though the sun has passed behind a cloud. I look up. No clouds; only a billow of gray smoke above us. “How long has it been since he left?”

“Who the fuck knows?” Rusty says. “You guys literally just made it out in time.” He waves his bat at the flames.

Carolynn whirls around. “I know that, Rusty. Someone set that fire, and they weren't in there, so
where are they
is my point.”

Josh spins slowly, regarding the woods.

“He's out here,” I whisper. “With us.”

“And Duncan's alone,” Carolynn adds.

Though we're in no shape to run, we do. My feet shuffle one after the other, and I'm struck by the sense that something is very wrong. The fire was a distraction.
Look over there.
Look at the spit and spark of hundred-year-old wood breaking apart while I run through the trees, chasing down your living, breathing friend.

My thighs and lungs burn by the time we reach the path. We converge on it as one. Heads snap to the left, then the right. “Which way?” Carolynn screams.

“Toward the car,” Josh shouts.

“What's wrong?”

We look up. There, coming around the bend, is Duncan. He jogs bouncily to meet us. His gelled hair is in place; his aviator sunglasses are gleaming and hooked on the collar of his V-neck. “Jesus, what happened to you, Car?” he asks. He takes us all in, legs slowing. “What the hell, guys?”

Josh doubles over wheezing, half supporting himself with a hand on a tree trunk.

“Why did you take so long?” Rusty asks, less out of breath, wielding his bat in Duncan's direction.

Duncan holds his phone up. “My cell died and I had to run all the way to the friggin' car to plug it into the charger and call the cops from there.”

We drag along the path to the SUV. Every few yards I think I catch that flash of shadow in the trees again, this time mirroring our progress. Duncan is unharmed, but that doesn't mean that the fire wasn't a distraction. It doesn't mean that the fire wasn't a sleight of hand. At the very least we were drawn toward the fire while
He
escaped.

I stop a few times to squint when a shadow looks opaque and darker than the rest. I wait for a man to take shape. Nothing comes of it. The wind blows and the boughs shift and the sun refracts on the glossy leaves of a fern or stump.