Courage Tree (26 page)

“Thank you,” she said.

He lifted his head to look at her. “For making love?” he asked.

“No, for the Christmas present. For giving me back my life, and Sophie’s. For reminding me what’s important.”

Lucas’s simple counsel had changed the way Janine had lived her life these past few months. She’d found time every day to do something fun with her daughter. She’d rejected any treatment that might give Sophie a few more months of life,
only to make those months miserable. And she began arguing with Joe over the best medical care for Sophie. He did not share her newfound appreciation of taking joy in the moment, and he’d looked at her blankly when she tried to explain it to him.

As she spotted Lucas’s car turning into the parking lot of the small airport, though, Janine wondered how it could be possible to find any joy in a day like today, when Sophie was lost in the woods, probably sick and undoubtedly terrified.

She walked across the tarmac to meet Lucas. Once out of his car, he hugged her hard. “Still no news?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Forgive me for last night,” he said, holding her, pressing his lips to her temple. “For not being with you. I know it must seem as though I’ve got my priorities screwed up, but—”

“It’s all right,” she interrupted. “I know you would have been with me if you could have.”

“You are a very understanding woman.”

“Forget it,” she said, shrugging off the compliment. “Let’s just get up in the air.”

“Were the dogs able to pick up Sophie’s scent again?” he asked, when they were hovering over the site of the accident. It looked so different now than it had only a few days earlier. The car was gone, of course, and the rain had brought new growth with it, the fresh green color masking much of the charred earth.

Janine shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “They figure the rain must have washed away her scent. But I checked at the trailer before going to the airport this morning, and Valerie said they were still trying. They haven’t given up.”

“Lucky for them,” Lucas said. He leaned over to kiss her cheek. “They’d have to face Janine Donohue’s wrath if they did.”

Flying directly west of the accident site, they were able to locate the creek where Sophie’s scent had been found—and
lost. Janine flew out from that epicenter in a spiral, much as she and Lucas had done from the Girl Scout camp on Tuesday. It was, as Valerie had predicted, nearly impossible to see beneath the thick cover of trees, but they flew as low as they could, searching beneath the canopy for any movement or swatch of color.

“There’s a shack down there,” Lucas said after they’d been flying for close to an hour.

The spiral had grown so wide that Janine was about to suggest they give up and go back to the airport. But now she maneuvered the helicopter so that she could look directly down at the dilapidated log cabin. A small fire ring sat in the clearing in front of the shack, but there was no sign of smoke or embers, and the structure looked as though it hadn’t been lived in for decades. The fire ring was surrounded by large, flat rocks, and the area around a small, dark crevice on one of the rocks glittered, sending a shard of light into Janine’s eyes.
Mica
, she thought.
Or quartz
.

She sighed. “I guess we should turn around,” she said, frustrated. “We’re way too far from the creek. A good five miles. She couldn’t possibly have walked all the way out here.”

“Not with a bare foot,” Lucas agreed.

Janine turned the helicopter around, and although she continued to scan the terrain below them, she kept picturing the old cabin. The flat rocks. The glittery shard of light. Why was that stuck in her mind? Maybe because she knew that, if Sophie had seen a shack like that one, surely she would have gone inside it for shelter. But that particular cabin was too far from the road, and she and Lucas spotted no other buildings on their flight.

Still, even as she landed the helicopter back at the airport, the image of that log cabin remained firmly planted in her mind.

F
rom her seat on the sofa, Zoe heard the sound. At first she thought it was thunder in the distance, a storm moving in, and she stopped eating her granola to listen. Sophie sat at the other end of the sofa, her own bowl of cereal cradled in her lap, her swollen foot elevated on a crate, and she heard it, too. Her head jerked to attention, and she turned her face to the window. Only Marti, who stood leaning against the door jamb between the shanty’s two rooms, did not seem to notice the sound. She was engrossed in eating cut peaches from the can, having refused Zoe’s offer of the granola because the only milk available was powdered.

It wasn’t thunder, but some sort of aircraft. Zoe had heard a few planes fly overhead while she’d been living in the shanty, but this was different. This plane was close and getting closer. She looked at Marti again, who had stopped a spoonful of peaches halfway to her mouth, her eyes wide now with fear.

“That’s a helicopter!” Sophie practically tossed her cereal bowl on the floor as she jumped to her feet and hobbled toward the door of the shanty.

Instantly, Marti leapt toward her, the can of peaches falling, splattering syrup across the splintery wooden floor. “You can’t go out there!” she said, grabbing Sophie’s arm.

“Ouch!” Sophie yelped.

“That’s her burned arm,” Zoe said, and Marti let go of Sophie’s left arm but quickly grabbed her right instead.

Sophie tried to wriggle free. “My mom knows how to fly a helicopter,” she said. “Maybe that’s her!”

The sound of the helicopter was now loud enough to send a chill up Zoe’s spine. Through the glassless window, she could see the leaves of the trees flapping madly in the helicopter’s wake. Had they left anything outside that would give them away? she wondered. Marti had been right about not having a fire, she thought, and thank God she’d taken the blue tarp off the roof.

“You can’t go out there,” Marti repeated to Sophie, gripping her arm. “Don’t you get it?”

Sophie kicked her hard in the shin with her good right foot.

“Shit!” Marti backed away from the girl, but only momentarily, because Sophie headed for the door once again.

Zoe stood up, ready to stop Sophie herself, but Marti grabbed the girl’s shoulders and spun her around to face her. “You little bitch,” she said. “This is my
life
you’re screwing around with!”

Sophie barely seemed to hear her. She looked toward the window. “It’s going away!” she said, struggling to free herself. “Let me go.
Mom
!”

She pulled free of Marti’s grasp and ran out the door before either of them could stop her, but she was too late. The sound of the helicopter was growing faint in the distance, and soon all Zoe could hear was Sophie’s cries for her mother, and even they were weak and fading and heartbreaking. She knew the little girl was in tears, and she stood up and walked to the door.

“Don’t go to her, Mother,” Marti said. “Don’t reward her for practically sending both of us to jail for the rest of our lives.”

Zoe turned to her daughter. “You’re a very hard woman, Marti,” she said. “I never realized that.”

“I had to be,” Marti said. “I grew up without any parents to protect me.”

Zoe winced at her words, but before she had a chance to respond, Sophie limped back in the shanty, the bandage on her foot spotted with red.

“Your foot’s bleeding again, honey,” Zoe said. “Sit down and let me take care of it.”

Sophie dropped wordlessly to the sofa, raising her foot to the crate again. Her cheeks and nose were red from crying, and she turned her face away from the two of them.

Zoe got to her knees in front of the crate and began unwrapping the bandage. She winced against the pain in her back. How many more nights could she sleep on her lumpy, homemade mattress?

“Get me the peroxide, will you, Mart?” she asked her daughter. “It’s in the bedroom in the box by my bed.” Sophie’s foot looked worse than it had the day before. She wished the antibiotics would start to work.

Marti returned with the bottle of peroxide and a handful of cotton balls. She stood above Zoe, staring down at Sophie’s foot.

“You really screwed up your foot, kiddo, running out there like that,” she said to Sophie.

Sophie turned her head to look at her. “You are so mean,” she said.

“She’s not really mean, honey.” Zoe dabbed peroxide onto Sophie’s foot with the cotton balls. “She’s just scared.”

“You killed that poor turtle and then didn’t even eat it,” Sophie said.

They had left the turtle in the clearing the night before. This morning, it was gone, and Zoe figured the dogs had gotten to it.

Marti sat down on the other end of the sofa and lit her
lighter. She had no cigarettes left, and playing with the purple lighter had quickly become her new addiction. “Look, Sophie,” she said. “Do you understand what’s going on here?”

Sophie looked at her suspiciously. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, if they find
you
, they’ll find
me
, and then I’ll have to go back to jail. Someday, we’ll all be able to leave here, and then maybe you’ll be free to go, but that’s a long way in the future.”

Sophie stared at her foot as Zoe wrapped it with fresh gauze. “Why were you in jail?” she asked.

Zoe tore off a piece of surgical tape and glanced at her daughter, wondering how she would answer.

“They think I killed someone,” Marti said.

“Did you?” Sophie looked up at her now.

“No. But the evidence made it look like I did. So I’m supposed to be in jail for the rest of my life.” She sighed. “Do you know what it’s like in jail?”

“Not really.”

“Well,” Marti said, “imagine being trapped someplace you can never, ever get out of. And people there hurt you. The wardens, who are there to make sure you don’t get out, hurt you all the time. And the other prisoners hurt you. Everyone hates everyone else. You have no choice what you eat, and it’s all garbage, anyway.” She flicked her lighter again and stared at the flame. “You have no freedom to go any place,” she said. “You have to do whatever they tell you to do, or you’ll end up in solitary, locked up all by yourself, day and night, with no lights and…man, you just go crazy.”

Sophie cast a sideways glance at Marti, then studied her foot again. “I think I know a little bit what jail must be like,” she said. “Some kids I know say that dialysis is like being in jail.” She shrugged. “I guess it is, in a way. Every single night, before I got Herbalina, my mom hooked me up to a machine by my bed. She used the tube in my stomach, and I’d be
attached to the machine all night long. It was hard to roll over, and hard to get up to go to the bathroom. In the morning, she had to leave some extra water in my stomach, and I always looked fat. All day long, I had to measure everything I drank, even things like ice cream and Jell-O, ’cause they’re really liquids, and if I had too much liquid, I’d get really sick. I couldn’t eat stuff that my friends ate, like bananas or French fries.” She looked again at Marti. “
You
got put in jail when you didn’t do anything wrong, and
I
had to get dialysis when I didn’t do anything wrong, either. Sometimes bad things just happen to people.”

“Shit happens, huh?” Marti said. She stood up and stretched. “I am so bored! I’m going to read for a while in the bedroom.”

She doesn’t get it,
Zoe thought as Marti left the room.
Or maybe she gets it and she just doesn’t care.
She was finished with her bandaging job. She stood up and, on a whim, leaned over to kiss the top of Sophie’s head. This child was so brave.

As she put away the peroxide and threw out the bloodstained bandage, tears burned her eyes. Sophie was in jail once again, she thought. Only this time, she and Marti were the jailers who were keeping her there.

“I
feel terrible saying this,” Joe said, as he turned onto Route 66. “But I’m beginning to wish that Sophie had been killed in the car accident, too.”

There. He’d finally said those words out loud. The thought had been eating away at him for a couple of days, but he’d been holding it inside, still trying to pretend to the rest of the world that he thought Sophie could be found alive. He couldn’t imagine saying those words to anyone other than Paula.

From the passenger seat of his car, Paula reached over to rub his shoulder.

“I know, hon,” she said. “But I’m still hoping that somehow…by some miracle…” She shook her head, and he knew she was as frustrated as he was.

It had been another long, disheartening day of sitting helplessly by the trailer, staring into the woods that had taken his daughter from him. It seemed to him that every dog from the search-and-rescue teams had been called to the creek to try to pick up Sophie’s scent. Valerie told him that some of the dogs seemed to find the scent for a moment or two, only to
lose it again. Even the cadaver-seeking dogs were brought into the area, but no one was upset when they, too, seemed unable to pick up a scent.

Now he and Paula were headed back to Vienna. All of them—Janine and Lucas, Donna and Frank—were on their way home, because tomorrow was Holly Kraft’s funeral. And although Joe fought the feeling as hard as he could, he could not help but think that perhaps Holly’s parents had been the lucky ones. They knew where Holly was. They knew that the end for her had been swift. They knew she was no longer suffering.

“I can’t believe it’s been five days already,” he said.

“It seems like five weeks to me,” Paula said.

“Did you hear them say something about ending the search on Sunday?” Joe thought he had overheard Valerie mention something to that effect, but he had not wanted it to be the truth and so had not pressed her.

“I think that’s what Valerie said,” Paula said.

“And then we’ll never know what really happened.”

“They’ll still be looking tomorrow, hon,” she said.

“She could be anywhere,” Joe said. “And when I look at that topographical map in the trailer…I’m overwhelmed by how much land is out there. How much territory there is to cover.”

Joe’s cell phone rang, and he grabbed it from the console. He doubted he would ever be able to answer a phone dispassionately again.

“Hello?” he said, as he opened the mouthpiece.

“Is this Joe Donohue?” It was a woman’s voice, and he thought immediately of Valerie Boykin. He steeled himself for what she might tell him.

“Yes,” he answered. He was aware of Paula leaning closer to him, as if trying to hear what the caller had to say.

“This is Catherine Maitland, from Monticello,” the woman said. “I understand you needed some information on one of our former employees.”

“Oh, yes.” Joe had nearly forgotten about the call he’d made to Monticello that morning. It seemed so long ago.

“The name they gave me was Lucas Trowell,” she said. “T-r-o-w-e-ll. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I think there’s been a mistake,” she said. “We have no record of anyone by that name working here.”

“He wouldn’t be working there now,” Joe said. “He’s a former employee.”

“We have no record of him
ever
working here,” she said.

This was not what Joe had expected. He thought he might hear that Lucas had been an irresponsible worker at Monticello, as he was at Ayr Creek. He even thought he might hear something regarding Lucas’s abnormal interest in young girls. But he had certainly not expected to hear that Lucas had never worked there.

“Uh, he would have worked there in the late nineties,” Joe said. “He was a gardener. A horticulturist.”

“I’ve been the human resources director here for fifteen years,” the woman told him. “I could tell you the names of all of the gardeners, landscape architects, et cetera, who worked here during that time. Lucas Trowell is not one of them.”

“But someone there gave him a glowing reference when he was applying for his job at the Ayr Creek estate in northern Virginia,” Joe said.

The woman was quiet for a moment. “Are you sure he didn’t work at Mount Vernon or one of the other historical properties?” she asked.

“I’m sure.” Joe felt his jaw tighten, and his head was beginning to ache. He let go of the steering wheel for a moment to rub his temple. “Listen,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”

“I don’t think I was really much help,” the woman said.

“Yes, actually, you were.”

He closed the phone and laid it back on the console, then glanced at Paula. She was studying him intently.

“Well?” she asked. “What was that all about?”

Joe tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “Something’s rotten in the tree house,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, it appears that Lucas never worked at Monticello.”

“What made you think he had?” Paula asked.

“He told the Ayr Creek Foundation that he’d worked there. Frank told me that they gave him a very high recommendation.”

“I don’t understand. Who were you just talking to?”

“The woman who’s the head of the human resources office at Monticello. She said no one by that name has ever worked there.”

“Why would she call you about it?”

“Because I called her. I wanted to find out the real scoop on what sort of employee he’d been. There’s something not right about that guy.” He looked at her again. “I spied on him a bit last night.” This seemed to be his evening for confessions.

“You
what
?”

“I wanted to know why, if he cares about Janine so damn much, he refused to go back to West Virginia with her last night. So, I went to his house. I expected to find him with another woman.”

“And?”

“I could see him inside the tree house, working at the computer.”

“Ooh.” Paula’s voice was teasing. “How very incriminating.”

“Right. And who knows, maybe I was too early—or too late—to catch him with another woman. But then I looked through his recycling at the curb and I—”

“Joe!”

“Don’t give me a hard time, okay?” He was in no mood for Paula’s moralizing.

Paula sighed. “So, what did you find in his recycling?” she asked.

“Kiddy porn.”

“Oh, God. Ugh!” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Are you kidding?”

“I wish I were,” he said, although the truth was, he was beginning to take a sadistic delight in getting the goods on Lucas Trowell.

“You mean, you found magazines or what?”

“I only saw one. It fell open to a picture of a nude child. A girl. That’s all I needed to see. I called Monticello, because I wanted to know if he’d left there of his own accord, or if maybe he was actually fired. I never expected to find out that he hadn’t worked there at all. I have to tell Janine.” He would call her the second he got home.

Paula was quiet a moment. “I don’t think you should tell her,” she said.

He looked at her in surprise. “Don’t you think she has a right to know?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you want to know that the guy you’re sleeping with is a liar at best, and a pedophile at worst?”

“Right now, though, Lucas isn’t hurting anyone,” Paula said. As always, she was the voice of reason. “And Janine gets a lot of comfort from him. Even if he
is
everything you say, now is not the time to dump all of that on her. You’d be ripping her support system right out from under her.”

Joe scowled. “I don’t want her with him any longer. Sleeping with him any longer.” He shuddered. “It makes me sick to think about her being with someone like him.”

“Joe…” Paula adjusted her seat belt to turn toward him. “You know I love you, hon, right?”

He nodded.

“Sometimes you can be pretty selfish.”

It wasn’t the first time someone had told him that, but he didn’t like to hear those words from Paula. He could always count on her to tell him the truth, and this was one truth he didn’t feel like hearing.

“So, if I tell Janine that her boyfriend might be a criminal, I’m being selfish?”

“If you told her right now, then, yes. I’d say you were.”

He didn’t get it. Her rationale made no sense to him. But he trusted her in a way he trusted no one else.

“All right,” he agreed. “I’ll hold off until this whole mess blows over.”

Paula smiled as she leaned over to kiss his cheek. “That’s my boy,” she said. “You’re not so bad, after all.”