Ink and Bone(33)

She listened as he recounted what she’d already read online. A young man had stopped Wolf Gleason about a mile down the trail, pretending to be lost. While they spoke, someone hiding in the trees shot Gleason in the leg. He fell off the path, down the slope. The children had gone up ahead but came running back at the sound of gunfire. Gleason’s son was shot; the girl was taken. It was four hours and near dusk already before the ranger came looking for them.

“Local and state police were out here three days looking. Dogs. Choppers,” said Jones. He walked as he talked, looking everywhere—down on the ground, up into the sky, farther up the path. “The whole thing. Ten miles north through the trees. I was one of the volunteers.”

He shook his head, looking back at her. She dug her hands deeper into her pocket, feeling useless, searching for warmth.

“There must have been a vehicle waiting,” he said. “They could have been long gone by the time anyone started looking.”

He took out his flashlight, and they stepped onto the trail, started walking. They walked for a while, Finley clutching the girl’s change purse in her hand. Jones moved up ahead of her just a bit, now shining his flashlight about, though he really didn’t need it, the sky still held a little light. What was he looking for? She was about to ask.

It happened just like that, as if she had stepped through a doorway. Suddenly the sun was brighter, and she was moving fast, breathless. Up ahead, a man old, skeletal but strong, his face a jagged mountain, yanked a screaming girl by the arm up the path. He was dragging her as she kicked and fought like a wild animal.

“I swear to you,” he said through gritted teeth, yanking her hard. “I’ll kill you, you little brat.”

He had a rifle strapped around his back. “Then I’ll go back and kill your family.”

The girl quieted for a moment, whimpering. But then she dropped her weight to the ground. She was tiny, with a wild mass of blonde hair.

“Daaaaadddddyyyyyy,” she shrieked, desperate, panicked. The sound cut through Finley, sharp, serrated. “Daaaadddddyyyyy.”

The old man delivered a hard blow to her face, and the girl opened her mouth wide in a silent wail of pain and misery.

Finley was there, but she wasn’t there. She moved to stop the man, but she had no body, no will. She was just an observer. The helplessness of it was excruciating. She’s a child. Let her go! The words were loud, but she had no voice to speak them.

“Go back and finish it,” the man growled at someone Finley couldn’t see. He expertly removed a hunting knife from a sheath at his waist and handed it over, never losing his grip on the child who thrashed and shrieked.

“I don’t want to, Poppa.” It was a young voice, but thick and slow.

“Do it.”

Finley felt a churn of petulant anger, a sullen resistance, but also the cold finger of fear poking into her belly. Then she was moving back down the path away from the man and the girl. A disembodiment, a floating.

Up ahead, a boy, towheaded and slender, lay on the path, his expression blank and glassy, a great stain of blood on the thigh of his khaki pants, his shattered glasses next to him on the path.

“No,” he whispered. “Bring her back. Mommy.”

She wanted to go to him, to comfort him somehow. He was so young and so frightened, in pain. She ached with it. Do something for him!

“Leave him alone,” called a distant voice. At the edge of the path, she looked down at the man twisted, down on the slope off the path, his face obscured by the trees. He tried to claw his way back. Moving so slowly, grunting with effort.

“Where’s my daughter?” he managed. “Where is she?”

There was a blade in a young man’s hand. Was Finley in him? Beside him? Finley didn’t know. She could see his dirty, calloused fingers wrapped around the black handle, as if they were her own. Not a man’s hand, a boy’s thick, soft fingers. Oh, God, thought Finley. I don’t want to watch this. I don’t want to be in this.

You can look away, Eloise had said of her own visions. But if you do, you risk missing what you’re there to see and you’ll have to go back again and again until you figure out what you missed.

But whoever Finley was in (or near, or above, or what?) just sat down on the edge of the path, watching. He lay the knife down beside him. The little boy on the path closed his eyes after a time; he stopped whispering. The man on the hill stopped struggling, lay still. Do something!

But there was nothing she could do.

What do you see? Finley tried to quiet the roil of panic and anger, and be present. What do you see? The black-handled hunting knife. It’s late afternoon, the sun golden and low in the sky. She could still hear the girl screaming distantly, which meant that she and the old man were on foot. The man on the slope didn’t look like the pictures she’d seen of Wolf Gleason, but it was hard to tell.

Then Finley heard it, the sweet song of the rose-breasted grosbeak. It was quiet except for that, and the wind in the leaves.

His thoughts and feelings were hers. He liked to be alone in the woods, liked nothing better. He didn’t want to hunt like Poppa. He didn’t like to watch the light drain from things that never hurt anyone, that flicker of pain and terrible fear just before the end, the convulsion of life leaving. Where did they go? He had so many questions and never any answers. The world was such a confusing place and there was so much pain.