What Lies in the Woods(26)

When we were kids, Cass called it supercharging, when Liv’s obsessions reached a fevered high. All her little tics and quirks went into overdrive, and she couldn’t stop talking about whatever she was fixated on. She’d start out excited about bees and then she would become apocalyptically concerned with bee parasites reducing populations. She would count every bee she saw, writing the numbers down in a journal, convinced that if she could count every single one it would mean that the bees weren’t going to die and the world wasn’t going to starve. She got obsessed with the numbers four and seven. Four was a good omen—much to the chagrin of Kimiko—and seven was a bad one.

Later we’d realize these were the first signs of her illness, which would manifest fully later in life. The meds helped, once they found the right ones. With the meds, she didn’t usually get to the last stage, the pernicious magic of ritual and numbers. She’d spin herself up on an idea and spin herself back down again.

“Can I see Liv’s room?” I asked. Kimiko’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “I’m probably worried over nothing, but I got a weird call from her, and if I can figure out where she is, I’d feel a lot better.”

She gestured toward the hall. “Go ahead, then.”

I made my way down the hall, past photographs showing Liv at all ages, a jumbled time line. There was no clear demarcation between Before and After. Maybe I detected a hint of hollowness in her eyes, a fear that hadn’t been there Before, but it was probably my imagination. The only gap came during the college days, after Liv’s big crisis that ended with her back home—for good, as far as anyone could tell.

The lock on Liv’s room had been drilled out. I touched the gap in the metal of the knob, remembering that phone call, the worst I’d ever gotten. My turn to sit by a hospital bed, waiting for my friend to wake up—or not.

I’ll be here tomorrow. I had to believe she wouldn’t break that promise.

Her room was meticulously organized. Liv was a collector. Things became sacred to her easily, taking on an almost mystical significance. She displayed her objects carefully, according to her mood and their meanings. A conch shell on her bookshelf, the four arrowheads laid out in a line next to it. Elsewhere was a nautilus fossil, a cross necklace her grandmother had given to her, the plane ticket she’d never used when she was supposed to fly to Japan right before the tsunami but got stomach flu. There was a lot in the room, but everything was cared for and everything had a specific meaning.

Maybe if I had understood them, I could have read the collection of objects like a diary, and they could tell me what I needed to know.

Her laptop was out on her desk. Next to it was a stack of articles and environmental reports. Probably something to do with the work she did for her parents’ environmental compliance consulting firm. There was a sticky note on top of the stack with a bunch of numbers and letters jotted down on it—2248DFID, 3376DFWA, 1898DFWA—and a to-do list on a notepad that included “check map ID references” and “pharmacy pickup.”

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Some hint about where she would have gone, or why she would have called suddenly in the middle of the night. What had changed between yesterday morning and last night?

I tapped the touchpad, and a password login popped up. No dice. I tried the drawer. There were pencils, a sketchbook, rubber bands, paper clips, hair ties, three pill organizers—which seemed to indicate that she’d taken all of her pills including last night’s, though not this morning’s—and loose photographs, snapshots that had been printed at a drugstore.

Most of the photos were of her parents and the cats. Apparently there was a big fluffy gray one in addition to the marmalade gentleman I’d seen on the couch. But there were about a dozen random, poorly framed and badly lit photos of the woods, too.

The sketchbook was full of detailed studies of plants, insects, and birds. She was her parents’ daughter, that was for sure. She’d always had her father’s love of art, her mother’s attention to detail. For a while, she’d had to stop drawing—the antipsychotics she was on made her hands shake too much. That was when we’d almost lost her.

But now she had different meds, a lower dose, and beauty spilled from her again.

I turned the page and froze. This sketch was different. Looser, for one thing, drawn from memory rather than life—at least, I hoped so. It showed the top third or so of a human skeleton. Flowers had been placed in the eye sockets, and around it were arrayed seashells and stones and stranger objects—a set of four jacks, a playing card, a collection of coins.

“Persephone,” she had written at the bottom corner of the image, in her tiny, precise writing.

I turned the page. Another grinning skull greeted me. And another, and another, and another—page after page, growing less detailed, more gestural, with each one. Darkness seemed to radiate from the bones until on the last page they were roughly hewn patches of negative space in a field of scribbled pencil lines.

I thought the drawings must have gone back months, but the sketch before the first portrait of Persephone was dated only three days ago. Liv had done all of these since Stahl died. Since she decided to tell us what she’d found.

There was one more thing in the drawer. A small velvet jewelry box. I eased the lid open, praying to find a set of pearl earrings.

It was a bone. The tip of a finger. It might have belonged to any finger, might not have been human at all, except that I knew it was. It was from the right ring finger.