These Silent Woods: A Novel(69)

I dash to the Bronco, climb in. Drive off and once I’m a hundred yards down the road, just about to curve out of sight, I look in the rearview mirror once more. Finch has fought free and is chasing me, and Marie is running after her and even above the roar of the engine I can hear Finch screaming, Cooper, don’t leave me! Cooper, don’t! and that’s the last memory I’ll have of my daughter out here: begging me to stay and me driving off and I think maybe I have never hated myself more.





THIRTY-FOUR




The night Jake and me were pinned down and he was dying and I killed the two people, darkness rolled in. After it was quiet for a bit, I slung Jake over my shoulder and started walking, tucked in close among the shadows of buildings and thinking we’d never make it but since we were out of water and had no means of contacting anyone, we had no choice but to try. That night, I was sure we would die, sure of it. Though I wasn’t the religious type, I’d always believed there was an after. Answers you had to give, maybe. Explanations. I’m not saying heaven or hell per se, but a time of reckoning. My ugly soul would face what it had coming and there was no way to explain my way out of what I’d done, but even then I suspected there was a worse alternative, too: that living with the weight of my own actions would be its own sort of hell. Which it was. Is. We survived and I have relived what I did that day ten thousand times over, and I assure you, it has worsened now that I’m a father myself because becoming a parent—it makes something inside of you bloom and deepen. You love as you haven’t loved before.

Once, months later when Jake was recovering and I was on leave, he said to me that he had a dream sometimes, that he was on that table dying, and two people brought him a cake with dates and nuts and it was so good that he thought he was at the entrance to heaven. “Probably all this morphine,” he said as he lay on the hospital bed, hooked up to various machines. I didn’t tell him that it wasn’t a dream, not quite. I didn’t tell him that there were terrible things from that day that he was lucky not to know about. That part of my saving his life was a deed that would haunt me the rest of my own miserable days. He was worth it: that’s what I’ve told myself, all these years since. Better than me from the start and full of goodness and worth it.



* * *



I think about all of this as I head toward town. Twelve miles of woods, the gas station, a handful of country houses, more miles. Then town. Which, “town” seems too big a word for the place, tiny as it is. The card the sheriff gave Marie had a phone number and an address, 401 Main Street.

I pull into the only empty spot on Main Street, park the Bronco, and look for numbers on the buildings so I know which way to head. Nice little place, really. No stoplights. And every hundred yards or so, a metal bench beneath two Japanese maples. I walk past a brick building with wide steps and fancy columns: the library.

Just up the street, there’s a commotion. Lots of people on the sidewalk, plus a van from a television station parked out front. A man leans against a building, smoking a cigarette.

“What’s going on?” I ask him, motioning with my head.

“That girl who went missing before Christmas. They may have found her.” He takes a drag from his cigarette.

“Yeah?” I try to sound nonchalant. I think back to the newspaper articles.

The man shakes his head. “Strangest thing. Early this morning, a guy shows up at the police station and says the girl’s dead and he knows where the body is. Says he didn’t do it but he’ll take them right to her.” Cigarette smoke shoots from his lips. Haven’t smelled that for years and though I’ve never been a smoker, something about it feels good, then. “They’re out there now,” he says. “Sheriff and the deputy and a few other folks.” He points toward the people up the street. “Everyone is waiting for them to come back.”

“What?”

He gestures toward the building. “Guy has them out there now. In the woods.”

How to process this. How to make sense. And is this man telling the truth. And who has reported the body and how did they find it. And are all those people out in our woods, stomping around and closing in on Finch and Marie. “Did the guy say where the body was?”

The man with the cigarette shrugs. “Close to national forest land, I think.” He slides his sunglasses off and squints at me with his light blue eyes. “That’s not all of it, though. Those people from the missing girl’s camera. The man and little girl. Do you know what I’m talking about? It was in the paper. A photograph, bunch of fuss over who they were.”

I adjust my sunglasses, grateful he doesn’t recognize me.

He takes one last drag from his cigarette and then drops it to the sidewalk and twists his foot over it. “The guy says they were squatting on his land so he killed them. He brought evidence. Dog tags from the man. A tooth, from the little girl.” He spits to the side. “Says he saved them as a memento. Makes me sick to even say that out loud. Local guy. Psychopath, right here in our midst. Of all the places.”

I can feel it coming, barreling hard: a panic attack. The sun is too bright, the sidewalk, too. The buildings and cars begin to sway back and forth; they blur and shift. I lean against the building and grip the bricks. “You got another smoke, man?”

He looks at me, seems to think about it, then reaches into the pocket of his shirt and pulls out a cigarette and a lighter. “You all right?” he asks, handing them to me.