True Places(86)

Numbers. Dates.

APRIL 1, 2002–JULY 27, 2011

Iris placed her hands on the ground to steady herself. Her heart beat loudly in her ears. Her lungs squeezed and she winced in pain.

July 2011? Six years ago. When Daddy left.

She pictured him, his face hard and broken, going out the door, stepping off the porch with long strides. Sweat stains down the back of his shirt. Thin, bare legs dangling from his right side. Ash.

Iris ran after them, shouting, crying.

Mama caught her, scooped her up, and held her, the way Daddy was holding Ash. Wouldn’t let her go no matter how she tried to wrestle her way out of Mama’s grip.

Daddy passing the wood pile, the sang patch, disappearing down the hill. Gone.

April fools, Ash. April fools.

A hand on her shoulder.

Suzanne talking. Questions.

Iris closed her eyes and opened them again.

Ash.

She jumped up, threw off Suzanne.

Ran straight through those white flowers and into the woods.





CHAPTER 38

In the grove of trillium, Suzanne stood facing the woods into which Iris had disappeared. The sound of the girl’s steps receded, fading into silence. Suzanne crossed to the edge of the grove, as if to follow Iris, but hesitated, peering between the trees, over the shrubs, to where the growth became a seemingly impenetrable mass. It was, she knew, no different from what she had been hiking through all morning, and yet now that Iris had gone, the woods had taken on a different aspect, as if they were not three-dimensional but a solid green curtain. Iris had found the parting and slipped through.

Suzanne was alone.

Her shirt was soaked under her backpack. All at once her skin chilled. She stared again into the woods, wishing she had pursued Iris right away when she had a chance of keeping up. The girl could be anywhere now.

Suzanne spun in the direction from which they had come, looking past the boulder to discern the path, such as it was. She started in that direction, imagining the Navigator waiting patiently by the road. She imagined sitting behind the wheel. She took a deep breath in and it caught in her chest. Her heart was beating too quickly. She closed her eyes and took several more deep breaths, willing her lungs and her heart to obey her, willing the signals of panic cascading from somewhere in her brain to stop. Her faithless nervous system was a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. She opened her eyes and took inventory of what she might do to forestall an attack.

Look, she said to herself. I am surrounded by flowers.

She knelt and focused her attention on a trillium, the dark green of the leaves, the blush of pink on its petals. Three petals, three sepals, three leaves. The petals wavy at the edges. The leaves slightly veined and without stalks. She examined one, then another and another. Her heart slowed.

Not daring yet to stand, she moved in a crouch to the carved wooden sign, the marker. She examined the grain of the boards, the intricate notches, the stakes nailed to the back and driven into the ground. She ran her fingers over the lettering, marshaling her senses to hold tight the reins of her emotions.

ASH.

A boy or a girl? The child had died at nine during the same year that, according to Iris, her father had left the cabin and never returned. But that was nearly six years ago. The sign could not be that old. Who had been here? And how much of what Iris had told them had been true?

Suzanne’s mouth was parched. Slowly she came to her feet, lowered the backpack to the ground, and removed the water bottle from the side pocket. She drank, keeping her eyes on the marker, on the flowers, on her steady, even breathing. She put the water away and turned in a slow circle.

She was alone.

A finger of dread crept up her spine. Suzanne reached into her pocket for the drawing Iris had made. The cabin had to be nearby. They had been heading in the same direction for at least two hours, so it was reasonable to stay on that course. If the map was right, Suzanne would encounter the first stream pictured on the map and, shortly after that, the cabin. She could attempt to go after Iris, but it would be a false move. Iris didn’t need her, not out here. The girl’s backpack contained food, water, and extra clothing; she had survived for years on much less. And Suzanne had no doubt Iris could find the cabin on her own, if she chose.

Suzanne retrieved her phone from the pack and checked the screen. No service. She stowed it, hoisted the pack onto her shoulders, clipped the hip belt, and crossed to where they had emerged from the woods. It was mostly downhill to the car. She was confident she could find the way and be safe in her car in less than three hours. From there she could return to Buchanan and call Whit. Or the police. But what would she say? That she had almost found the cabin? Did she really want them to know? And what would she say about Ash’s marker?

In truth, she didn’t want to talk to anyone, not about what she’d found, not about Iris and her cabin and her family, and not, most of all, about why she had left. She wouldn’t know the answer to that until she stopped looking over her shoulder at her past and understood what was in front of her.

Suzanne stepped from the grove of flowers into the woods. As she walked, she absorbed everything around her with the same intensity she had applied to examining the trillium, inviting this spectacle of life surrounding her to guide her onto Iris’s map, both the one in Suzanne’s pocket and the one in Iris’s heart.



The stream appeared sooner than she had expected, its gentle gurgling a welcome sound. She followed it upstream for a few hundred yards until she found a ginseng patch, probably the one Iris had included in the drawing. Suzanne was sure she was close now, and her excitement grew larger than her lingering anxiety about being on her own. Her stomach growled—she hadn’t eaten since breakfast—but she didn’t want to stop to eat. She noticed an overgrown trail at the end of the ginseng patch, pushed the arching branches of brambles aside, and pressed on. After a short while, she descended to a smaller stream, not more than a rivulet, and followed it upstream, as the drawing indicated. The hillside she had been skirting on her right flattened, and the terrain opened, revealing a clearing. Across from where she stood was a cabin of weathered wood, darkened by weather, smoke, and time. The porch was narrow, and a stovepipe poked through the debris-covered roof. She could hear water running beyond the cabin. Other than an outbuilding tucked off to one side, there was little to suggest a family had lived here. She had expected buckets, stools, rusted implements, crude toys, a laundry line, perhaps. Suzanne approached with caution, and, as she neared, it seemed the cabin had not so much been placed on the land as grown up from it, as if the lumber from which it had been constructed had reverted, in its nature, to tree.