These Silent Woods: A Novel(37)

“Hello?” she calls, climbing the porch steps.

The door is unlocked, of course. She knocks, takes a few steps, I’m presuming to peer in the window, but I can’t see her. “Hello?” she calls again.

What to do. Behind me, rustling. I turn and see a small figure, skirting the edge of the woods. Finch. I whip-poor-will. She stops in her tracks, startled. In the dark, she can’t see me. I make the noise again, and this time she places me and stumbles toward me. I pull her close, press my chin to her head. Despite the cold, she’s sticky with sweat.

“You all right? Why are you out of breath?”

“I saw the car coming,” she whispers. “The headlights. I tried to hurry.”

“Is someone there?” The woman on the front porch peers around the side of the house, her voice coming closer. “Bloody hell,” she mutters into the dark. “Bloody hell!” She steps off the porch and I can barely discern her outline in the dark. “Now what?” the woman says, looking at the sky. Followed by more muttering that I can’t quite hear.

Finch turns to look at me. I can feel her head moving against me, her heart beating against my palm. I press my finger gently over her mouth.

The woman shoves her hands in her pockets and begins pacing back and forth between the blueberry bushes and the cabin. Spins on the ball of her foot and we can hear her skirt swishing. With what appears to be a sudden sense of purpose, she marches to the car.

Leaving, thank God.

No— She leans in, rustles around in there, and fishes out a headlamp, strapping it to her head, the light flickering through the trees. She tramps over to the outhouse and disappears inside. Almost like she knew right where to go.

“Who is she?” Finch whispers. “Why is she here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m cold.”

I unzip my coat, slide out of it, and wrap it around her shoulders. Walt Whitman prances up and glides against my knees.

Around us, the dark thickens. Finch shivers. “We can’t stay out here all night, you know,” she says. “We’ll get hypothermia. We’ll die. I can hardly feel my toes. If they fall off, I won’t be able to walk. You need your toes to walk.”

“Stay put,” I tell her, then I stand up, knees and back stiff from squatting. She’s right: we can’t just hide behind the cabin all night. I walk around to the front of the house just as the woman is exiting the outhouse.

She starts when she sees me, gasps, steps back, nearly falls: she’s surprised and clumsy and she shines the headlamp right in my face.

I shield my eyes. “Can I help you?” I say. I’d planned on opening with “This is private property,” but up close I can see how scrawny she is, how pathetic and scared.

She looks at the Ruger. “I’m.” Her voice shakes; the headlamp shudders as she adjusts its angle. “I’m looking for a family. A man and a little girl.” She looks toward the car, sizing up the distance.

I take a step closer, and fear flickers across her face, her features accentuated and strange with the angle of the headlamp. “Who are you?” I hiss. The possibility that Judge and Mrs. Judge have found us and coordinated some sort of plan to take me down flickers through my mind. Because if they were gonna do it, they would do it with stealth and flare, same way they did before. Get my guard down, then make their move.

“I’m very sorry to have disturbed you,” the woman says in her shaky voice. She has the slightest hint of an accent. “It’s clear I’ve come to the wrong place. I must’ve gotten turned around on the back roads. It was getting dark. I apologize.” She steps sideways toward her car. “I’ll be on my way now.”

“Not before you tell me who you are, you won’t.”

She swallows hard. I see the movement of her throat, gray in the shadow of her jaw. “I’m just making a delivery, that’s all. My family owns a cabin out here, and supposedly my brother’s friend is staying in it for a while. He gave me a list and asked me to bring supplies. That’s all I know. I’m late, but again, I’m just making a delivery. Please—”

I’m still suspicious. Which, if you knew Judge and Mrs. Judge, you’d understand. “How late?”

Her brow furrows, the headlamp flickering its light. “A week. I was supposed to come on the fourteenth. But I had to work and then my car was in the shop and I couldn’t.”

“You got the list?”

She nods, begins searching her pockets. “Here,” she says finally, handing me a piece of paper. “I have food in my car. Food and batteries, all sorts of stuff. Everything on the list, actually. You can have all of it if that’s what you’re after. Take it, please. I just need to be on my way.” She takes another step toward the car.

I hold the note in the light of her headlamp: it’s my handwriting. Things begin to make sense.

It has been ten years since we saw each other. “Marie?” Jake’s baby sister.

She tilts her head. “Do we know each other?”

“We met once, years ago. You and Jake met me here.”

“Kenny?” She squints, studying my face. “I didn’t recognize you.”

Strange, hearing that name, after all these years. “Yes.”

She seems unsure.