These Silent Woods: A Novel(31)

I shake my head. “I don’t know, Finch. I’ve got no idea why she was there.”

“That thing she had, the black thing she was looking through—that was a camera, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” The kettle begins to hum.

“I wish I had one.” She takes a bite of stew. “Think of the pictures I could take. How close I can get to animals. She was so pretty, wasn’t she?”

I pluck a mug from the cabinet and don’t answer her.

“Her hair, the way the wind blew it.” She winds her hair around her pointer finger. “Do you think I’ll be like that, someday? I mean that pretty.”

I scoop half the suggested amount of powder in the mug and pour the hot water over it. “You’re the prettiest girl I ever knew, Finch. I’m not just saying that.” I set the mug in front of her and squeeze her shoulder. “Even prettier than your mother, if you want to know the truth.”

She grins and leans forward, blowing on her hot chocolate.

I walk the bowls to the counter and submerge them in the washbasin. Look out the window, scan the yard. My mind is twisting and weaving through all the things to consider about our run-in with that girl, but I don’t want to think about them until Finch is tucked in for the night.

Once I finish my two squares of the quilt for the evening, we head to the bowl in the kitchen and brush our teeth.

“Open,” I tell her, and she obeys, mouth stretched wide. I brush each quadrant, counting to myself. No dentist out here, so I make sure I take good care of Finch’s teeth.

“Okay, spit,” I tell her, and she leans over the stainless-steel bowl and splatters it with foamy toothpaste. I take the towel from the kitchen and wipe the sides of her mouth.

“Don’t brush so hard, Coop. You know I have a loose tooth.”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

She opens her mouth and points to one of the top center teeth, wiggling it back and forth. “See?”

Once Finch is tucked in, I go back to the main room and pull the lens cap from the shelf, because as my head is clearing from the panic attack a troubling thought has come to me. I walk the cap over to the candle. Lean in close, have a good look at it. Maybe it wasn’t from Scotland’s spotting scope, after all. Maybe those weren’t his footprints in our hunting blind. Which means that girl could’ve been around for who knows how long, snooping, and what if she knows about the treestand, the cabin, the chickens, us?

I pull a long tube from the coffee-table trunk and take out the big rolled-up piece of paper inside, a hand-drawn sketch of the property that Jake’s father made at some point. It details everything, not just the cabin and the small clearing where it sits, but other things as well. It’s only because of this map that I know that there used to be two sweet cherry trees in the yard next to the apples. I’m assuming they didn’t last long, because they weren’t here when we arrived, not even a trace of them. But the map shows the wild raspberries and blackberries at the yard’s perimeter, the outhouse, the pump for the well, a compost pile out back, close to where we buried Susanna. All of this is in great detail, and from what I can tell, to scale.

But the map shows the rest of the property, too. The steep hollow we cross. The swath of sugar maples we tap for syrup. The river that coils through the valley, the swamp that is only a swamp certain times of year, but which, in a tiny patch in the southwest corner, has quicksand, and that, too, is noted, in small print. The patch of huge, lichen-covered rocks, where there is a cave that I eventually searched for and found, and also a stretch of rock on the ground that’s so flat it feels like a road but it’s not. Even the square of huckleberries that flushes red with fall is noted. You see, this was drawn by a man who loved his land, who wanted to know it the way a good father wants to know his child. In the dim light of the kerosene lamp, I lean in close and study the sketches and notes.



* * *



There is a thing I’ve always been good at, one of the few worthwhile abilities I never had to work for: a preternatural sense of direction. As a kid I used to wander the state forest behind Aunt Lincoln’s land, hours sometimes, just walking and tracking and following sign. Footprints, scat, the pressed grass of animal beds. I was a boy without commitments or rules, mostly, so on days when Lincoln was working long hours, or wherever it was she would disappear to, I went to the woods.

Never once did I get lost. Never once did the possibility cross my mind. I don’t know how else to put this, but I just always knew where I was, and I always knew how to get back, even if it involved going a way I’d never gone before. And because this wasn’t something I’d learned to do or learned to fear, I never gave it any thought.

Then one day Lincoln took me hunting. We trekked way up into state land, and Lincoln shot a deer. It was wounded bad but didn’t fall. Deer, sometimes they can take such a hit, and bleed and bleed and you wonder how on earth they can still be alive, but they are. They keep on moving, resilient creatures, with an irrepressible drive to live. Well, dark folded in quick and Lincoln slumped down against a tree and said, “Heck, Kenny. Did you bring yourself a snack? I think we might be lost.”

I was eleven then, and hungry all the time, but more often than not, there wasn’t much to scrounge from Lincoln’s cabinets, so I told her no, I didn’t have a snack. But the good news was, we weren’t lost. I knew exactly where we were, and in thirty minutes we were home, back at Lincoln’s kitchen table, eating Chef Boyardee from the can.