These Silent Woods: A Novel(32)

Lincoln sat across from me and shook her head. “How’d you do that, Kenny? How’d you get us home?” Her face was red, the way it would always get when she’d been outside for long, and her eyes were moist. The one always teared up and spilled over when it was cold.

I shrugged.

“You been out there before, to that spot where we were?”

“Nope.” I shoved a ravioli in my mouth.

“Never?”

“Never.”

She pointed her fork at me. “That’s from your mother.”

I stared at her. Lincoln never spoke about her—my mother, her sister.

“She could know how to get somewhere, even when she’d never been there before. We were in a city once, somewhere neither one of us had been. I’m telling you, I was all turned around, felt like I was spinning. But she knew her way around, like she lived there. Crazy thing, that a person could know a place they’ve never been.”

In the military, I learned, and so did my superiors, that my ability to know my way around unfamiliar territory was a useful skill indeed. And let me tell you: they did not let that skill go to waste. “What street was that where you saw the woman with the radio, Private?” I didn’t know the name—couldn’t say it—but I’d point on a map. “Can you get us to the spot where you and Williams found that cache of weapons? In the dark?” And I could get them there. A roundabout way, a different way than I’d gone before. I could find it. I always did.



* * *



Anyhow. I guess when I take out the map to double-check, I’m not really double-checking. I know where the property line is that separates this land from the national forest. I know that, sitting against the King of Trees, we were a quarter mile from that line because I paced it off, a long time ago. I know that girl headed back through the national forest by walking an old logging trail that winds a mile and a quarter through a swath of towering white pines and all the way back to a small parking lot. In fact, come to think of it, I believe it’s called Old Logging Trail: a flat, comfortable walk that, on some pamphlet, experts have designated as “easy.” I know, too, that she would’ve passed the NO TRESPASSING signs I posted years ago and that she must’ve paid them no mind.

What I don’t know is whether she’s been here before. Whether maybe she’s to blame for those footprints we found at the King of Trees. The blind, too. How close she has come to the cabin, whether she’ll be back. And, most troubling of all, whether she saw us. Whether she took our picture. Because if she has been snooping around and it’s a habit of hers, if she’s out there roaming around with a camera, of all things, it changes everything for me and Finch. Everything. Our whole world now in a more tenuous state than it already was.

And the question is, what am I gonna do about it.

Because somehow I can’t shake the feeling that us crossing paths with that girl—it’s trouble.





SIXTEEN




The day after Finch and me see the girl in the woods, we make another attempt at a deer and head out in the opposite direction of the valley, west. The snow will be coming soon, and I want meat hanging before it does. We’re lucky, that morning: the two of us creeping up over a ridge, coming upon a six-point bedded down in some broom sedge. Almost didn’t see him but then the white of his antlers jumped out to me, forty yards ahead. Easy shot.

We sit down, our backs against a thick black oak. Give the buck time to run and wear himself out and die.

Finch pulls an apple from my backpack. “Can I track him myself?” she asks.

“You can try.”

She smiles, sinks her teeth into the apple, winces. “My tooth.”

I lean close and take a look: the baby tooth, twisted to the side and hanging. “Want me to give it a yank?”

She makes her bear face. “No.”

After twenty minutes, we stand and head to the spot where the buck had been lying, the grass matted down. A smattering of blood.

“Here,” Finch says, pointing to a patch of blood smeared on some cheatgrass. She steps forward, her eyes searching the forest floor. “And here.” More blood, drops on a lichen-covered rock. Such focus. She bends, squinting. Circles back. Sometimes the blood trail stops. She stands up straight, looks around, momentarily stumped. “I don’t need your help,” she says, waving me off.

I linger behind.

She catches sight of something and dashes forward ten yards. “Found it.” A large swipe of blood on some grass. Tuft of brown hair. She reaches out, presses her finger to the blood. Looks some more.

“There!” Triumphant, she points: twenty yards ahead, the deer. She darts off.

“Don’t get too close.” It could still be alive, and if so, frantic. Any creature on its deathbed will fight for those final moments. I’ve learned that the hard way.

“It’s dead,” Finch says. “I see its tongue hanging out.”

I nudge it gently with my boot, just to be sure.

Finch and me gut the deer in the woods. She kneels down, leans in. “Can I do it?”

I hand her the knife, point. “Slide along here. Good.”

“How old do you think she was?”

“What? Who?”

She stops cutting, looks at me and rolls her eyes. “The girl we saw yesterday. Who else?”