A History of Wild Places(12)

Out here, in the middle of nowhere, seven hours deep into the woods—the sunrise surely close—I have come upon signs of life.

Something is out here after all.



* * *




A chill scuttles through me, that itchy needles-against-your-skin-before-you-walk-down-into-a-basement feeling. I’ve felt it before—many times—it means I’m close.

Maggie’s afterimage flickers on the road ahead of me, only a few steps from the fence, and for the first time, she looks back over her shoulder: ice-blue eyes and flushed cheeks, sunlight winking through the tree branches against her freckled nose. My heart stalls against my ribs. It feels like she’s looking right at me, a dead unmistakable stare, and for a half second, her gaze seems unsure—like she’s considering something. She’s wondering if this is a bad idea, if she shouldn’t have come so far into these woods on her own. I’ve seen this look before. That moment when something doesn’t feel quite right, when she could have turned around, saved herself. But Maggie blinks, shakes her head—as if shaking away the creeping sensation that had settled against the back of her throat—then says aloud to herself, “No turning back now.”

Maggie’s stare reminds me of her mother’s—cool and precise—a woman I met two weeks ago when I took the ferry across Puget Sound to Whidbey Island, off the mainland of Washington State. Maggie’s childhood home had that damp wool smell, rain shedding over the roof, and I sat on the overly cushioned couch while Mr. St. James recounted the facts of his missing daughter’s case—the police reports, the news coverage, the items left in her car. He was a likeable man, with warm, sad eyes, and when he reached into his pocket and pulled out the small, silver book-charm the police had found outside Maggie’s abandoned car, his voice broke.

But his wife, Mrs. St. James, watched me dubiously. I knew she didn’t want me there, this was her husband’s idea—hiring someone like me instead of a real PI. They hadn’t agreed on this. But at the end of our meeting, Mr. St. James stood and shook my hand, handing me a check for half my payment, and a photograph of Maggie—the hard lines of Maggie’s face just like her mother’s.

I left the St. Jameses’ home and drove the ten minutes back to the ferry station, parking my car in the short line of vehicles waiting to board the next ferry service that would arrive in half an hour. I had time to kill, so I walked to the edge of the wharf overlooking the bay. Across the channel, I could see the mainland, a gray fog settled over the row of waterfront homes.

I was feeling that old tug against my ribs, the pain wanting to settle back in, telling me I didn’t need to take this case, I should just go north once I was off the ferry and slip back into the darkness of my own thoughts, when a voice spoke behind me, as if summoned up from the cold sea. “Mr. Wren.”

I turned, and she was standing a few paces behind me, now wearing a long gray wool coat and a checkered scarf in deep greens and Prussian blues. Yet Mrs. St. James looked just as displeased to see me here as she did in her home, and I wondered if her husband knew where she’d gone when she left the house and came after me. Or if she lied and said she was running to the market to pick up a few things for dinner. A bottle of wine maybe. A quick, easy lie.

Her hands were deep in her pockets, shoulders set. “My husband hired you, not me,” she said sharply, like she needed to get it out of the way.

My first instinct was that she’d come to ask for the check back, and tell me they no longer needed my services.

“I know it can be hard to believe in what I do,” I said. Because I understood her misgivings—most people were reticent at first, skeptical, until I found their loved one and made the call to let them know, their grateful sobs gasping on the other end. “But you don’t need to believe in what I do for me to find your daughter.”

Mrs. St. James cast her gaze out over the water, seagulls spinning above us, looking for scraps of fish on the docks left behind by fishing boats. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” Mrs. St. James said, keeping her eyes averted from mine, watching the fog settle and then part as boats passed through.

I’d found countless missing family members—husbands, wives, brothers—who boarded a bus or a plane or just walked out of their old lives and into a new one. People sometimes vanished and constructed better, untarnished lives: new bank account, new dog, new six-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets, and a monthly water bill under a fake name. It’s what my sister tried to do many times until the last time.

So I knew it happened.

“Do you not want me to find Maggie?” I asked.

She shrugged, an odd gesture, like she wasn’t sure what she thought. “Some things should remain hidden.” A wind stirred up from the water, coiling over the wharf. It caught Mrs. St. James’s scarf and pulled it free from her neck, carrying it softly away from her toward the water. She reached for it but missed, and it tangled itself around the wharf railing. I unwrapped the scarf from the wood post and held it briefly in my hand—a quick glimpse of Mrs. St. James shuddering through me. They were distant, broken images: she was much younger, pregnant with Maggie, and she was standing in a kitchen that was not the one I had seen in her home a half hour earlier.

“You lived somewhere else when you were pregnant with Maggie,” I said aloud.

Her eyes went wide and she took a step closer to me, snatching the scarf from my hand. She coiled it back around her neck and crossed her arms. But she peered at me differently, not warily, but with interest.