Into the Woods (62 page)

Kevin’s dad would know. He’d been her mother’s best friend.

TWO

T
hough the rising sun was bright in the girls’ room, little Em was still asleep, and Lilly eased the door shut, smiling at the pout the four-year-old was wearing. Her smile faded quickly as she went downstairs, the air becoming cooler, but no less humid. It was going to be a scorcher of a day, and she was glad the hay had come in already, filling the barn where her art studio was with the scent of summer.

The chance to lose herself in her work pulled at her, her restless sleep filled with images of honey-eyed wolves. She blamed her mother, and she slipped into the kitchen, seeing the basket of newly washed eggs next to the sink.

It was quiet, even for a lonely farmhouse at the edge of nothing. The come-and-go squeak of the porch swing mixed with the ever-present crickets and bubbling creek, and she leaned on tiptoe over the sink to look out onto the porch. Meg was in the long swing, a half-melted Popsicle in her grip, Pepper sprawled out beneath her. The sun bathed her in its glow, and the nine-year-old girl in her shorts and straight brown hair looked wisely innocent—a small spot of quiet intelligence calmly swinging as if waiting for something to come up the road, something she wouldn’t share with her mother.

“Good morning, Meg,” she said softly out the open window, holding the faded curtain aside so she could see her daughter’s blue-stained smile. “You’re up early. Where’s Gram? Still in the barn?”

The creak of the long swing slowed, but didn’t stop. “She went for a walk in the woods.” Meg pulled her attention from the car bridge, twisting to pull her legs up under her as blue dripped from a bent knuckle.

Meg’s words tightened through Lilly. She drew back in, her hand looking like her mother’s for the first time as it let go of the curtain. Her mother had said she was going to go into the woods to see if her dryad’s tree had decayed. This fantasy had gone on long enough.

Brow furrowed, Lilly headed for the porch, her sneakers silent on the faded linoleum. The squeak and slam of the screen door shocked through her, and she forced a smile so as not to worry Meg. “She went into the woods?” she asked, coming to sit beside Meg and keep the swing moving. “What for?”

Meg tilted her head, tongue reaching to get the threatening drop of blue. “She made me promise not to tell, but it’s okay. She knows Penny is a liar.”

Damn it. Damn it all to hell
. Lilly took a slow breath, feeling the heavy air settle deep into her lungs, making her thoughts scattered and her muscles unwilling to react. “How long ago was that, sweetheart?” she asked, trying to hide her anger.

Meg shrugged, tilting her head to bite off one side of the last inch of blue ice.

“Meghan Ann!” she snapped, and the little girl blinked, her cheeks bunched out against the spot of cold in her mouth. “How long!”

Eyes wide, she crunched through the Popsicle. “The sun wasn’t over the trees yet,” she volunteered, her gaze never leaving her mom’s face as she ate the last chunk of sweet ice.

Agitation drew her to her feet, the swing bumping the back of her legs and settling as she looked at the woods. “Less than half an hour,” she muttered, headed for the kitchen. Enough was enough. She was going to go find her, and then they were going to have a talk about fantasy and reality. Her mother was not crazy, and she was not losing touch with reality. But if she couldn’t be trusted to not run off to the woods chasing a fairy tale, then maybe things were worse than Lilly wanted to admit.

A new fear joined her old ones as she grabbed her cell phone from her purse by the front door. She snatched her work boots from beside the back door, and her sun hat from the pegs. Em’s and Meg’s hats were hanging there beside hers, but her mother’s was gone.

“Meg, watch Em for me, okay?” she said as she came out and sat on the rocker to kick her sneakers off. “I have to find Gram.”

Her Popsicle gone, Meg slipped off the swing, the stick between her teeth. “Gram told me you were going to go after her. Can I watch TV?”

Head down, Lilly shoved her feet into her boots. “Yes, but let Em pick the channel when she wakes up.”

“She always picks baby shows,” Meg complained, leaning heavily on the armrest of the rocking chair as she bent in far enough to lift her toes from the old wood floor.

“Make her a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, okay?” Lilly said, fighting to keep her impatience in check. “And don’t leave the house. Lock the door when I leave, and don’t open it except for Mrs. Elliot. She’ll be here in an hour to pick up the bread for the church social. I should be back before then.”

“Okay. She smells funny, though.”

She smells like stale whisky
, Lilly thought, then froze in the idea that she was making a mistake, like the mother in the fairy tales who leaves her children to go to town, telling them not to let the wolf in only to return to find them gone.
Oh, for God’s sake, Lilly, it’s the twenty-first century
. “Pick up the phone if it’s me.” She looked up from tying her boots, seeing Meg not listening to her. “Meg?”

“Okay.” With a worrisome confidence, the girl leaned back to set her feet on the porch.

Lilly stood, motions slowing as she put on her hat. A glance back at the kitchen tightened her anger. She was
not
going to take a jar of honey with her. She gave Meg a quick hug, then stomped determinedly down the four stairs, angry with her mom for making her do this.

Heat rose like a wave from the dormant, burnt grass, her steps all but silent on the puffs of fine dirt as she took the path to the barn. Ticked, she powered up her cell phone, scrolling until she found Kevin’s number.

But then she hesitated, pace slowing as the shade of the barn took her. The snap of her phone closing was loud, and she looked up as she tucked it away, the call unplaced as she remembered their last conversation. There was no need to get him involved. She knew where her mother was.

Squinting, Lilly slowed to a stop at the edge of the woods, her shadow running long behind her. The sharp dividing line between farm and woods was kept true by the yearly mowers, and seeing the understory laid bare and clean in the morning sun was eerie. The cooler air wafted out, shifting her hair like a lover, and she tucked a stray strand under her hat.

The image of a beautiful, devious boy she’d never actually seen rose up unbidden. It was followed by the memory of countless hot summer nights when she would kneel at her bedroom window, arms on the sill as she gazed into the black woods, heart hammering as she imagined the fireflies were winking for her, telling her to come dance with them in a magical glen.

Staring at the woods, Lilly’s breath came and went in a slow sound. She turned back once to reassure herself that Meg had gone inside with Pepper. The porch was empty. Woods lay on one side, the grassland and cultivated field on the other, the house that three generations of women shared in between—and the sun rose over it all like an angry god bent on restitution. “It’s just a story,” she whispered, but a niggling doubt tingled down to her clenched hands as she strode forward into the coolness.

A single strand of spider silk brushed her, and she waved her hand, having forgotten that particular hazard of walking in the woods. There was no path, but she knew where she was going. It would be a simple task to walk a straight line until she found the creek and then following it upstream to the thicket-enclosed glen where her mother had told her never to go but of course she had.

Almost without realizing it, she fell into a familiar rocking pace that both made good time and allowed for unexpected shifts of balance. The poem ran in her mind, her steps beating it deeper into her thoughts.

Sunder wraith from flesh ill-taken; And bind fey spirit to wood awakened
, over and over it came, again and again. She’d loved the magic of it when she was a child, but now it only made her mother sound crazy, that much closer to an unwilling move to a sterile, cold home with her most precious things arranged on a stark white counter, mementoes whose only purpose was to give well-meaning visitors something to coo and reminisce over.

Sunder wraith from flesh ill-taken. What the hell did that mean?
But there was no meaning to be found, and Lilly forced herself out of step, trying to get rid of it.

But slowly her pace slipped back as the peace of the woods crept into her bones. The memory of being here as a child suffocated her anger: looking for mushrooms with her mother, the excitement of finding the forest lilies that she was named for, the dark depths of moss-rimmed pools of water that might vanish unexpectedly when a hole opened up and drained the water away through the caverns that riddled the hills. The woods had been a playground, potentially threatening, but feeling safe.

From almost under her feet, a grouse exploded into flight, shrieking its fear and making Lilly stop short with a gasp. Barely she caught her cry. She wanted to laugh, but the sound never came. The sound of water running came from up ahead. And chanting.

Lilly frowned as she recognized her mother’s voice. She walked faster, anger making her misstep and almost twist her ankle when her foot rolled on a log. The creek gave her no cheerful chatter to warn her, and she found it with a shocking abruptness, almost walking right off the edge. Pulling up short, she blinked. If the creek looked drained at the house, it looked positively minuscule here, the once full-force flow now reduced until the tops of rocks that might never touch the bottom of a boat showed dry. The tall edges of the watercourse looked like raw wounds, and the once-loud chatter of the water was a bare hint. Fish as long as her arm lay in deeper puddles, their gills pumping as they struggled to survive another day in the hopes of rain.

A huge, glacier-dropped rock sat in the middle of the stream. The water had gouged a deeper hole before it, but rocks with dry tops showed to either side of the huge monolith her mother used to jump from, skinny-dipping before her fourteenth birthday when everything had changed. A tree grew at the center of the rock, finding enough soil over the ages to somehow survive.

“I know you can hear me, Penn. I’ve given you enough blood for a week. Show yourself!” her mother’s voice rang out, and Lilly’s attention jerked to the right.

Frowning, she ran from the stream, dodging around trees that bent over the creek as if to hide it from the sun. The ground slowly began to rise, the soil became dryer, and the trees were spaced farther apart, looking almost twisted. Who was her mother talking to? The squirrels? Almost she hoped so, for if she was shouting at a tree, Lilly was going to check her into the retirement home just outside of town.

“Mom,” she whispered as she hauled herself up a rill and looked down into a shallow glen. The soil here was broken rock, not giving enough purchase for anything but grass and brambles apart from the very center where a pine tree eked out a living, its branches dead or dying as it stretched out its limbs as if desperately trying to touch its neighbors for help. Thorny berry bushes made an almost impenetrable fence, but her mother had gotten through somehow, and the old woman knelt at the base of the pine tree, her sun hat askew on the ground and her hair undone.

Lilly’s brow furrowed. Pissed, she pushed forward to find a way through the bushes. She took a breath to shout at her mom, wincing and drawing back when she walked through an entire spiderweb, backpedaling and brushing at her face.

Shuddering, she stopped, her lips parting when she looked up and she saw her mother wasn’t alone. The muscles in her face went slack, and she squinted, taking a step forward and snapping another web. The bright sun made it hard to see, but there was a long-limbed boy standing over her mother, his hands on his hips and the sun turning his shoulder-length, tousled hair to a flaming copper.

A thousand stories over a thousand summer nights passed through her mind. Her heart pounded, and she took another step, anger filling her as her mother began to cry, kneeling at his feet. “You!” she shouted, unwilling to believe. “Get the hell away from my mother!”

The boy looked up, his astonishment becoming a devilish smile. “Your daughter can see me, Em. How delightful,” he said, and the sound of his whispery voice shocked Lilly to a halt. Something in her fluttered. Something older screamed out a warning. He was perfect, but only death was that beautiful. “I don’t love you anymore,” he said, bending close over her mother. “But you knew that. Perhaps your daughter? Your . . . granddaughters?”

Lilly jerked from her stupor as her mother surged to her feet, rocking like a drunken ship. “You stay away from my girls!” she shouted. “I swear I will scorch every tree on the hill to ash if you so much as whisper in Meg’s ear again! Stay out of her mind, you hear me!”

Frantic, Lilly paced the edge, looking for the way in.

“No. I don’t.” The beautiful boy touched her mother’s face, and Lilly burned at the sound of heartache her mother made. “You were so beautiful, Em. Now you’re dried up and withered. Beauty gone. You’re not good for anything now.”

“Mom!” Lilly cried as her mother tried to slap him and the boy darted back, laughing.

“Wraith by moonlight, hunter by day; Bond is sundered by sun’s first ray!” her mother shouted, and the boy lightly danced forward, gleefully kissing her on her withered cheek.

“Blood is binding, blood is lure; Flesh is fragile, to blade’s sweet cure!”

“The tree no longer holds me, Em,” he said, reaching up to pull himself into the broken, needleless branches. “The wood is dead, and you can’t bind me to it. I am free. And I will have the blood of your blood as my own for your penance.”

“Sunder wraith from flesh ill-taken; And bind fey spirit to wood awakened!” Lilly’s mother cried out, and the boy dropped to the rocky earth. Lilly watched, the thorns pressing into her as he looked at her mother in disdain and then reached out and slapped her.

Lilly sucked in her breath as the sound of his hand meeting her cheek cracked through her. “Get away from my mother, you son of a bitch!”

“Oh, if only,” the boy said. Without thought, Lilly pushed into the brambles, tiny thorns biting her as the canes locked as if to bar her. Fire pricked from a hundred wounds, and she cried out in impatience as she stomped forward, trying to crush the thorns under her feet and make a way.