Two Girls Down(75)

They followed a series of splintered roads according to Mrs. Macht’s directions until they were officially lost. There was a house every quarter mile or so, each one more rustic than the last, smaller and smaller windows and doors, lawns shrinking and turning into woods, until they didn’t see any houses or cars for ten minutes. The landscape reminded Vega of a program she’d seen on TV once, something like “When the Humans Die”—vegetation growing wild, vines covering houses and cars, doing the quiet work of decomposition.

She watched her phone, which still retained a flicker of reception, but the message kept coming back that the Internet could not find her location. The tics of the circle in the upper left corner spun. Searching, searching.

Cap decided they better turn around, but then Vega saw something up ahead, a flash of white, headlights and tires jutting out from the trees. A truck.

Cap rolled into the gutter of the road and turned off the car. Vega got out, smelled the salty smoke of a fire somewhere close. She heard a dissonant birdsong, three mismatched notes on a loop. She examined the pickup, the paint faded to beige, dirt coating the tires and fender. Her eyes followed the scrap of a driveway back to a cabin the size of a gas station bathroom, surrounded by trees, and on the porch, a man kneeling, working at something.

Cap went first, stepping quietly around the truck.

“Excuse me,” he called, his voice amplified.

Vega nodded, approving his volume. Best not to surprise anyone out here.

Closer to the house now, she saw the man crouching, cleaning a stool with a spray bottle and a rag. There was also a folding chair and an old tube television.



The man glanced up as they came to the clearing, and said, “Folks lost?”

He was in his seventies, with hair that looked recently shaved, just sprouting white spikes in a semicircle on his head and also his face.

Cap came forward and said yes, introduced himself and Vega. The man didn’t offer his name.

“We’re looking for a woman named Dena Macht. Do you know that name?” said Cap.

“Macht, sure,” said the man. “You’re all turned around, realize?”

He stood now, wiping his hands with the rag.

“Yeah, we thought as much,” said Cap.

The man gave them some directions. Turn around, a left where they had taken a right, follow the unmarked road with the broken roadblock sign to the Macht cabin.

“I’ve seen the girl and her boyfriend in town,” said the man with the air of a conspirator. “They got problems.”

“What makes you say that?”

“That girl, Dena?” said the man. “I used to see her with her granddad when he built the place. She used to be cute; now she’s got holes in her face from the drugs.”

He seemed genuinely saddened by it.

“Have you seen them lately? In the last few days?”

“Nah, I ain’t seen them,” he said. “Couple weeks probably. You friends of theirs?”

“We know Dena’s parents,” said Cap.

The man nodded. That was enough for him.

“Well, she owes money to everyone in town. Surprised they haven’t torched the place yet,” he said. Then, as an afterthought: “I don’t trust people from New York, personally. Think they got an attitude.”

At first Vega thought somehow he’d picked up Cap’s trace Brooklyn accent, even though Vega heard it only in a few of his words, when he said “coll” for “call.” Cap met her eyes, registering the anomaly.

“Who’s from New York, now?” said Cap.

The man dropped the rag on the folding chair and pulled a tissue from his pocket, rubbed it on the back of his neck.

“Her boyfriend, right? The tall guy. He’s got a damn Giants sticker on his car,” he said, impatient suddenly, like Cap and Vega were dense not to get it before.



Vega’s head burned in the middle, the realization blistering outward, fire eating up the fuses. She turned around and left first, heard Cap thank the man and not wait for him to say anything back before Cap followed her, both of them walking, then running through the white trees which were peeling, flaps of bark hanging off with the red wood underneath. Vega knew it was probably natural for whatever kind of tree it was, but it still looked like a disease, a hemorrhage, something to be cured or killed.

—

They found the roadblock, faded orange stripes on two planks with a handwritten detour sign. Vega got out and moved the sign to the side of the road while Cap tried dialing Traynor, then Junior, then Em, but there was no answer, no click and no ring—just the low hum of not connecting.

Cap leaned his head out the window and said, “I have no bars. No dots. Do you have service?”

Vega got back in and ran her thumb over the face of her phone.

“No,” she said.

Cap pulled ahead slowly, hearing the wheels crush gravel, the car rocking unevenly over the dips. He kept one hand on the wheel and the other on the phone, hitting Traynor again. Traynor…calling work. Nothing.

“Caplan, brake,” said Vega.

Cap glanced up a little too late, and the car slid into a ditch. He yanked the wheel right and pulled out, the fender cracking the edge.

“Shit.”

“Caplan,” said Vega. “Maybe we should walk awhile.”

“Yeah,” he said, pulling over.