Just the Nicest Couple(15)

“Do you think this is the path you took?” I ask gently.

“Maybe,” she says. Lily takes a closer look, trying to decide. I know she’s trying. She shakes her head, disappointed in herself. “It all looks the same, Christian,” she says.

“I know. It all looks the same to me too. Would you remember if we walked a little ways in?” I ask. From here, the trail aggressively thins so that only one person can pass through at a time.

“Maybe,” she says, but I can sense her hesitation. It’s darker down the trail, chilling in light of what’s happened. “I could try.”

“You sure?” I ask, and she nods. I don’t want to make her do anything she doesn’t want to do.

“I’ll be right behind you,” I say. I hold the tree branches back with a hand and let Lily go first. We have to walk single file. I don’t know that I want Lily to go first because I’m afraid of what we’ll find. I don’t want her to see something she can’t handle seeing. I want to see it first, so I can prepare her and protect her from it. But I also don’t want to lose her if she’s the one following behind.

The terrain is uneven. Lily has to use her hands to clear the brush as she walks. “I don’t remember it being this wooded,” she says.

“Maybe this isn’t the right path.”

“I don’t know. Jake went first and I followed. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember. He was blocking my view of it.” Lily followed him blindly into the woods. Jake is a big guy, something like six foot one and two hundred and ten pounds. His body would have filled the path.

He would have easily overpowered Lily.

“You want to go a little further?”

“Maybe,” she says. “Just a little.”

Lily walks awhile further. After some time, she stops walking and decides, “I don’t think this is it.”

“No?” I ask. “It still doesn’t look familiar?”

“I just remember that after a while, there was a clearing in the trees. I don’t see it.”

“Could the clearing be further down?”

“I don’t remember going this far.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for, babe. Let’s go back. We’ll try another path. We’ll keep looking. It’s fine.”

What are we looking for exactly? I don’t know. A body, blood, the bloody rock, or maybe nothing more than peace of mind.

I hang back and let Lily pass in front of me. We follow the footpath back to the main trail. From there, we walk further along the trail until we come to another one of these unmarked paths about a quarter mile down.

“What about this one?” I ask.

“Maybe.” Again it’s hard to tell. This one looks no different from the last. But we try. Same as last time, I let Lily go first and I follow behind. This path is different in that it isn’t narrow for long. A hundred feet into the trail, it widens so that Lily and I can walk side by side. It’s better this way. I like having her by my side.

Lily is quiet, but there’s a change in the way she walks, more mindful, more alert. “You recognize something,” I say. It isn’t a question.

“Yeah,” she says. “I do.”

“Do you think this is where you were?” I ask. She never has a chance to tell me.

“My God,” she says and she stops.

About ten feet away, the grass is discolored. The discoloration is clearly blood. The redness of it is a disturbing divergence from the greenish-brown grass. There looks to be a large amount of it, enough that I swear under my breath. A small smear heads deeper into the woods, though the blood in the grass, like the blood on Lily’s shirt, is still hard to quantify. It may just look like more than I think. Maybe. It’s possible.

Lily and I see the blood at practically the same time, Lily just a millisecond before me. Our feet come to rest a few meters before it. We say nothing at first. We stare down at the blood, Lily’s hand rising to her mouth like she might puke. “You can’t be sick, Lily,” I say, offering her water, because vomit contains DNA. The last thing we want to do is leave any more evidence that she was here.

She takes a tentative sip of the water, her hand shaking on the bottle. I help guide it.

“Are you okay?” I ask, watching as she struggles to swallow.

She nods. “It was here,” she says, as if that much isn’t obvious. She takes another sip of water and this one goes down easier. She can’t bring her eyes back to look at the blood. “I remember. I remember this clearing. This is it.” The clearing is still thick with trees, but there’s a small break in them. Still, the trees stop the sun from getting in. The sunlight on the ground is mottled at best, patchy through the treetops. The land here is more woodchips and dirt than the soft bed of grass I’d imagined when Lily described how Jake pushed her to the ground and how she fell on her hands and knees. No wonder her knees were so torn up.

“The deer, he said, were in there,” Lily says, crouching down and pointing to a place where the trees stand a little further apart and you can see inside, into the forest, like through a peephole. I come to stand beside her. I crouch down like her, following the direction of her finger.