Catherine (30 page)

She described going to the mailbox and pulling out the postcard with a picture of
The Bat Cave and Hence’s familiar crooked handwriting on the back.
My heart started pounding, somehow knowing before my brain could that the card was
something momentous. I read the message over and over till I had memorized every word.
I thought I must be dreaming. I told myself I couldn’t go to Hence.
Think of Max,
I told myself.
Think of Chelsea.

Then came the hardest part, a passage about me—
my little girl, my only joy these last three years
—about how once she’d reunited with Hence, she hoped Max wouldn’t make it hard for
her to see me.
But even if he does
, she wrote,
I’ll come up with a plan for getting her back. I’ll hire a lawyer if I have to. I
won’t let anything keep me from her.

And though I hadn’t reached the journal’s end, I closed it, unable to go on.

“Chelsea?” Cooper stole a glance at me from the corner of his eye. “Are you okay?”

At the sound of his voice, I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. He pulled over
to the side of the road and shut off the ignition. Before I could gain control of
my voice, he leaned across to my side of the car and put his arms around me. “Say
something,” he urged.

“She was coming for me,” I said between sobs. “It says so. Why didn’t she come back?”

Cooper didn’t answer, but he kept holding on until I had cried it all out.

“I need a Kleenex,” I said finally. That was an understatement. My nose was running
something fierce.

“Use my shirt,” Cooper said. I laughed—an out-of-control half sob, half chortle—and
he released me to dig between the seats for a stray doughnut-shop napkin. Wiping my
nose and pulling myself together, I took my first look out the window in a while.
We were in the mountains. A tractor trailer rumbled by, shaking the car.

“Why are you so nice to me?” I asked when I could trust myself to speak. “Lying to
Hence, not getting mad when I ran out from the mixing room last night, even though
you told me to stay hidden, and I could have gotten you fired…”

“It wasn’t such a big deal.”

“It was,” I said. “It totally was.”

“I like you.” Cooper didn’t look at me when he said the words. “I thought it was brave,
what you did last night, telling Hence what he needed to know, even though he might
have blown up at
you. I like how you always say exactly what’s on your mind, no matter how…”

“Thoughtless?”

He held out another napkin, and I took it. “That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
He met my eyes with an expression on his face that stole my breath.

“What?” I asked. “What were you going to say?”

“I forget.” He leaned over again. This time I twisted in my seat to meet him halfway.
He brushed back the hair that had fallen into my eyes. Before I could think of what
to say or how to react, he was kissing me as though everything that had ever happened
in our lives had led us to this moment.

I tightened my arms around Coop and kissed him back, his lips on mine more thrilling
and gentle than I could have imagined. Who knows how long we stayed like that, his
hands in my hair, the air around us scented with powdered sugar. Cars and trucks blew
by, sending shudders through our car. A cascade of car honks from a passing van full
of college-age guys finally brought us to our senses.

“Wooo-hoooooooo!” one of them shouted, waving his arms out the window at us.

“Get a room!” another one yelled.

Cooper pulled away, frowning up the road after them. “Jerks,” he said.

“No kidding.” I grabbed his shoulders and tugged him close. “Never mind them. Kiss
me again.”

And he did, his sweet lips exploring mine for a few more minutes. But then he pulled
back. “I’ve been wanting to do that almost from the first moment I met you,” he murmured.

“Really?” Could I have inherited some of my mother’s magnetism after all?

“Really.” He touched my chin, tilting my face up toward him, but this time he kissed
the tip of my nose. “But we should get moving. We’ve got a mission to execute, remember?”

“I remember.” And the pleasant thrill that had run completely through me was replaced
by foreboding. I buckled my seat belt.

“Is there more?” Coop said as he turned the key in the ignition. “In the journal?
If you feel ready to read it…”

There was more. While my mom waited for Hence to arrive she’d had nothing much to
do but write about where Hence might be and what the two of them would do once he
finally arrived.
I can’t sit here waiting anymore
, she’d written.
I need to do something…. But what?
Being in her childhood home made her ache with longing for her mother, for her father,
even for Q.
I keep remembering the way he used to be, floppy blond bangs and freckles on his nose,
always wearing his favorite striped rugby shirt, black and yellow like a big bumblebee.
We used to be so close
, she wrote.
Maybe it’s not too late.

My throat dry from reading out loud, I took a swig from one of the water bottles I’d
tucked into my backpack and turned the page.
I can find him
, it said.
I know his new address must be somewhere in the office… maybe on the bill of sale
for the club. I’ll go downstairs and look. I’ve been so cut off from my past, but
now I can set everything straight, and by the time I return, Hence will be here waiting
for me. Maybe by tomorrow night we’ll be together, in this very bed where I’m lying
right now, under these rumpled sheets, warm and whole.

Little book, I’m putting you back in your hiding place for now. Wait there for me,
and I hope I’ll be filling you with happy news soon.

I turned the page and gasped.

“What’s wrong?” Coop asked. “There’s more, right?”

But the few remaining pages were blank. I had reached the end.

“This isn’t good,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’m scared.” I meant I was scared of what I hadn’t wanted to believe but had feared
all along—that my mother was dead. But Coop heard something else in my words.

“We can turn around,” he said.

I thought for a moment, running through everything I knew about my uncle Quentin.
He’d run off to live by himself in the woods, with an expensive gun collection and
a vendetta against Hence. My mother had gone to see him and had never been heard from
again. I
should
be scared—and not just for my mother.

But we weren’t even fifteen minutes from his house. We’d come all this way. And I
had to know the truth about my mom.

“Keep driving,” I told Coop.

For the rest of the ride, neither of us said a word. The robotic GPS voice directed
us off the highway and onto a twisting two-lane road. Before long the pavement ran
out and the Jaguar was climbing a steep dirt road, sending up a cloud of dust.

“You have reached your destination,” the robot voice said, and a second later the
dirt path stopped dead. There was nothing in sight—just trees and more trees.

“Over there.” Coop pointed to the left. I strained to see what
he was looking at and caught sight of a log cabin about a hundred yards off, almost
hidden by tall pines. I unclasped my seat belt.

“We don’t have to do this,” Coop said.

“I have to. You can wait in the car. You should. If I don’t come back in an hour or
so…”

Coop reached for his own seat belt. “No,” he said. “I’m going with you.”

“Wait.” I hugged him in the awkward space of the front seat, pressing my face hard
into the clean-smelling cotton of his T-shirt, as if I could draw courage from his
body into my own. But there wasn’t time to linger. We had to let go of each other
and knock on Uncle Quentin’s door before he noticed our car and came out to catch
us off guard. “Let me go first,” I told Coop.

He nodded and followed me up the steep path into a clearing. I’d been expecting a
broken-down shack, but my uncle’s log cabin was big and new-looking, not at all like
the hideout of a crazed survivalist mountain man. We paused on the porch for a moment.
I took a deep breath and pressed the doorbell. No answer. I tried again.

“He’d need a car way out here,” Coop observed. “But there isn’t one near where we
left ours, and there’s nowhere else to park.”

“That’s fantastic.” Relief washed over me. “This way we won’t have to deal with him
at all.” I gestured toward the windows on either side of the front door. “I bet at
least one of these is unlocked. Or even the door.” Not that I’d break and enter under
normal circumstances, but the chance to poke through my uncle’s house without having
to confront him was too good to resist.

“You’re kidding, right?” Cooper lowered his voice to a whisper. “There could be someone
in there. A wife or a girlfriend. Or a pit bull.”

I pressed my forehead to a nearby window, trying to see into the darkened room on
the other side—a living room, by the looks of it. “Nobody’s home.” I was so sure of
it I didn’t bother to whisper.

“How can you know that?” Coop sounded exasperated.

“I just do.” I turned the doorknob. Amazingly, the door was unlocked. I stepped inside.
“Are you in?”

Cooper sighed. “This is a really bad idea,” he said. But he followed me.

The living room was straight out of an L.L.Bean catalog, with a rough-hewn coffee
table strewn with that day’s
Wall Street Journal
. The air smelled faintly of woodsmoke. A stuffed deer head glared down at us from
the fireplace’s stone chimney. Apart from the newspaper, the only evidence of anyone
having recently been there was a blue stoneware mug on the coffee table. I picked
it up and swirled the bit of coffee left in the bottom. It still looked and smelled
fresh.

Beyond the living room stood the kitchen, its gleaming aluminum appliances and glass
cabinets like something from an architectural magazine. “Either he’s a neat freak
or he has a housekeeper.” I opened the fridge and stood there for a moment, analyzing
its contents: five bottles of beer, a large block of cheddar, a Tupperware container
full of what might have been chili, and many jars of mustard.

“What do you expect to find in there?” Cooper was starting to sound exasperated. “Shouldn’t
we be moving a little faster?”

I shut the fridge door. He was right, of course, but my nerves tingled with electricity,
as though some important discovery waited nearby. Off the kitchen, a hallway led to
a room with an enormous flat-screen TV, a pool table, and a bearskin rug, but not
much of anything else. A narrow door looked like it might lead outside. I pressed
my ear to it a moment, listening for a dog, and pushed it open. It creaked as I reached
inside to flick the light switch.

In contrast with what we’d seen of the rest of the house, this room was stacked floor
to ceiling with a maze of cardboard boxes that probably hadn’t been touched—much less
dusted—for years. One end of the room was a graveyard for old sports equipment—a mountain
bike, snowshoes, skis, and what appeared to be lacrosse gear.

“Look.” Coop pointed to a large photo on the wall, one of those formal family portraits
with everyone dressed in their matchy-matchy best. I recognized my mother right away,
looking amused, as though she were thinking about crossing her eyes and sticking out
her tongue. She must have been about twelve, though if she’d been in an awkward adolescent
phase, it sure wasn’t visible. Her glossy hair was pulled back in a French braid.
At her side posed a good-looking, slightly older boy in a button-down shirt, his blond
hair feathered back. Quentin. The wicked little smile on his face made it seem like
he’d cracked a joke the moment before the picture was taken. Behind the pair of them
stood a beaming man—the grandfather I’d never seen before. I wanted to study their
faces, but Coop had already moved on to a glass-fronted cabinet against a wall. I
took a step back from the portrait just as he
let out a low whistle. Seven guns—hunting rifles, I supposed—stood neatly inside the
cabinet.

“You still think it’s a good idea to be sneaking around your uncle’s house?”

“We knew about the guns.” Something else caught my eye: To my right, in the darkest
corner of the room, was a bookshelf built of planks and cinderblocks. These were the
first books I’d seen in the house, and the sight of them triggered an alarm in my
brain. They were old and dusty, probably remnants of Quentin’s boyhood—a collection
of Jack London stories, a cluster of Hardy Boys mysteries, and some Hemingway novels.
I scanned the titles, looking hard for I’m not sure what, until suddenly I knew. I
fell to my knees and started opening the volumes one by one, putting each one back
as soon as I’d made sure it was an ordinary book.

“Help me,” I told Cooper, and he dropped beside me and started searching the ones
I hadn’t reached yet.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

But there wasn’t time to answer. Right smack in the middle of the makeshift bookcase,
I found it—a thick textbook, the letters on the weathered spine all but worn away.
The minute I laid my hand on it, I knew it was different. Heart pounding in my ears,
I pulled it out and revealed its hollow core. “My mother,” I whispered, barely able
to get the words out. “She was here.”

Inside was a tightly folded sheet of paper, yellowed with age. A shopping list in
familiar handwriting: cherry tomatoes, romaine lettuce, bananas, oatmeal, pancake
mix. I turned the page over and found more of her handwriting, but smaller, as if
she was trying to cram a lot of information into a small space.