The Hawley Book of the Dead (32 page)

Time seemed to go something like that after the girls disappeared. Sometimes it seemed to run me over with haste and fury; other times I felt suspended in it like a fly caught in a spider’s web. The clocks never told the time as I knew it. I woke the next day as if from the dead, my hair plastered to my face, my neck sweaty, clothing binding my limbs. I was wedged in a chair in the parlor, a blanket that someone must have draped over me covering my knees. Caleigh’s voice drifted in from the kitchen, along with the smell of bacon cooking, so I knew it must be morning. But without the clue of bacon, it might have been any time at all. Only my internal hall clock told me the right time, every ticking second an agony. It was forty-one hours my girls had been gone.

The morning brought no fresh news, no sign of the girls. Or Rigel Voss. In spite of hundreds of searchers still pushing through laurel and raspberry canes and hobblebush, four thousand acres of state land. The helicopter still whined at night above us with its infrared cameras, finding nothing, no spots of red that might be girls or horses.

After a long day being Skyped in to answer all the questions the talking heads asked, after the news cameras had been packed up, I checked in on Caleigh, playing Monopoly with my parents. Officer Bob lingered in the doorway. I went up to my office. Knowing we were so surrounded eased my worry for Caleigh, at least a little. Every chance I got I’d run up to look into
The Hawley Book of the Dead
, but since my visit with Jeremy on Kilcoole Beach, the Book had shown me only blank pages. That morning was no different. I rifled through every page, examining each for any stray blot of ink. There was nothing. I tried to write in the Book again, to see if that brought anything on, but some force wouldn’t allow my pen to touch the page. I slammed it closed, finally, threw it at the wall in frustration. “Stupid, stupid Book! Why won’t you show me where the girls are? You’re useless.” And I stalked out.

I found Falcon Eddy in the kitchen, waxing a bowstring.

“I’m going out,” I told him. “There’s no need to follow me. There are so many searchers in the forest, I’ll be fine.”

He didn’t look up from his work. “There were searchers in the forest yesterday, dearie. What would you have done had I not been there to shoot at daft bicycle bugger?”

“I was on Zar, I would have just galloped away. Look, I want you to stay
here
. You need to protect Caleigh, not me.”

He raised his bow, held it up to his keen eye, inspected it for warping. “We shall see what we shall see,” he told me. “You’ll find me where I’m most needed.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what I say.”

I gave up on Eddy’s cryptic talk, and stalked out to the barn. He made no move to follow me.

Clumps of searchers colonized the woods like mushrooms, poring over
every inch of ground. What could I hope to accomplish with only a mother’s intuition and faith? I didn’t know, but I needed to exhaust myself trying. Yellow leaves spangled the path and the air as I rode alone, near the turnoff for Hell’s Kitchen Road. A sudden flutter made me whip my head around. I saw two riders, their horses’ heads dipped to drink from the stream on the opposite bank, on the other side of the road. I could see their faces clear. Grace and Fai.

I flung myself off Zar’s back and ran into the stream to get to them. My tongue froze in my mouth when I tried to call their names. The instant my boots hit the slick stones of the stream I slipped, my right boot filled with water, and I scrabbled to save myself. In that split second everything changed. I could feel the air shifting. I looked again, and the twins were gone. My tongue unfroze and I called and called to them as I leapt the rest of the way across. When I got to the trees on the other side, I felt a blast of scorching air, as if something big had rushed by me. I crashed through it, through the brush, a branch whipping across my cheek, branding it. “Grace! Fai!” I saw nothing. Only trees and more trees and leaves swirling in golden gusts around me. I ran blindly, crashing loudly through the underbrush, scaring up birds. When a hand caught me, pulled me to a halt, I fell to my knees. I looked up and saw it was Jolon.

“Are you all right?” He searched my face, scanning my cuts and bruises. I nodded, unable to answer. He helped me up.

When I felt like I could talk again, I told him, “I’m all right, I’m all right, but I thought I saw … I thought I saw Grace and Fai on their horses. Did you see them?”

“I only saw you jump off your horse and run into the forest.”

“You didn’t see anyone on the other side of the stream?”

“No.” He hesitated, then said, “There was no one there.”

“You’re sure?”

He nodded, his eyes flooding with concern. His hands still held me, steadied me. I wanted to get up on my horse and ride, but I was shaking too much to even hold my reins. I wanted to bolt, to be in motion, but all I could do was try to breathe, stop my teeth from chattering with shock and cold.

“Let me go! I have to find them.”

“Reve, they weren’t
there
. I know you want to believe, but—”

“You can’t stop me!” I shrugged away from Jolon’s grip, began walking back to Zar, who was cropping grass. Jolon walked beside me, matching his strides to mine. It sent me back to the time before everything was lost.

Maybe he was trying to get back to that place, too, but the boy I knew was buried deep inside the man he was now. Then he surprised me. He said, “Do you remember when we used to ride here? Your hair then, it was the color of this stream. Chestnut. With golden lights. Just like the pony you used to ride. Her name was Maeve.” And I felt the irresistible pull of our childhood, as if we were both trying to get back there, to some magical place, where nothing bad could happen. “Maeve, the fairy queen. You remember?”

I did remember. I leaned against the nearest tree, spent. I had hoped so much to have found my girls. But Jolon hadn’t seen them. He of all people would have, with his keen senses. Had it been only a mirage, brought on by panic, loss of sleep, too much caffeine? Anguish spilled over me then, the old mixing with the new, loss upon loss. “I thought of you, you know,” I told Jolon. “For years I wondered where you were. I wished you’d kept writing to me.”

“This isn’t the time to talk of it. It was a long time ago.”

I stared into his silvery eyes. “Tell me while I catch my breath. Tell me what happened.”

Some old emotion tensed the muscles in his face. Something he thought he’d put away for good, maybe. Here I was, dredging it up again.

“It’s not a pretty story.”

“I don’t want a pretty story. Tell me. Jolon, just … help me think of something else.”

He leaned into my tree, shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “My mother, she was … not herself after my dad died. I think she was scared, on her own. I tried to help her, tried to be the man of the family, but what did I know? I was only a kid. Anyway, she just one day said to pack a bag. She’d sold the horses already. She hadn’t told me, but she sold the house, too.”

He’d come to find me that day. Rode his bike through the summer heat so hard the sweat soaked his shirt, and mine when he’d held me, kissed me for the last time, told me he’d write. That he’d never forget me.

“I didn’t even know where we were going. I didn’t mean to lose you. I wanted to come back, but she needed me. I thought she needed me. But then … that fall, she skipped out. She left while I was on a weekend camping trip with the Brothers.”

“What brothers? Where were you?”

“This one man my mother was seeing was a pipe fitter. We moved up to Maine with him for a job. Portland. Lived in one cold-water flat after another. I wrote you that once, then … well, you’d know and what could you do?”

I put a hand on his arm, surprising in its dense solidity, like a stone arm. He didn’t step away. I watched his eyes, shifting like the sky, darken to the color of a bruise.

“So,” he continued, “one weekend, the pipe fitter says, ‘Those good Jesuit Brothers are taking kids from the neighborhood on a camping trip. Why shouldn’t the boy go?’ I didn’t want to, I felt something was wrong with it, said I wouldn’t. The pipe fitter cuffed my ear and told me, ‘You’re going.’ So, I went. When the Brothers dropped me off at home, the latest cold-water flat was empty. Not a stick of furniture, no sign of my mother or the pipe fitter.”

I wanted to hold him then. I felt how it had been with us. I wanted to sink into the magic of that memory for comfort, mine or his or it didn’t matter which. Then I realized I’d bitten my lip so hard it bled. I tasted iron in my mouth, and knew how stupid I was being. Maybe I’d longed for Jolon once. But it was better if he didn’t think of that, if I didn’t.

“I was lucky, really.” He broke in on my tangle of thoughts. “It would have been a sadder story had I gone with them.”

“Didn’t you have anyone to take you in? My parents would have, if they’d known.”

“The Brothers kept me. Taught me this, taught me everything I know. I was raised by the Jesuit wolves of Maine.” His wintry smile flickered. “Ah, Reve, it’s been over and done a long time.”

But I had to know one thing more. “Why did you come back here? Why not stay in Maine?”

He turned his head, so I couldn’t see his eyes. “I guess because this was home to me. The only home I ever had. With a family. With a friend. You were home to me.”

For some reason I couldn’t name, I felt a rush of relief. We’d been friends first, for years, after all. Jolon was, could be, a friend. It didn’t have to be complicated.

“That’s good to know,” I told him.

I thought I’d better leave it at that. I lifted Zar’s reins from where they’d fallen in the grassy verge of the stream, put my foot in the stirrup, and jumped myself into the saddle. Because friend or no, old love or no, it didn’t matter. He hadn’t seen my girls, didn’t know where they were. My vision of them still seemed so real, but it had to be just in my head, my heart, my hoping. We had to keep on searching. Our side trip to the past was over.

“Thank you for telling me.” I scanned the road, the woods again. “Now I need to go.”

I rode out. After a few steps, something made me turn back. But Jolon had already melted into the forest. He didn’t reveal himself again.

I searched every little footpath and streambed at that end of Middle Road, where it dips neatly into Charlemont, hits Route 8. I saw nothing more remarkable than falling leaves and flecks of pink aster in the weeds by the roadside, and the usual scattered cadre of men and women in fatigues or blaze orange. Some nodded at me when I passed, stopped to talk for a moment, but not one told me they’d found anything, seen anything. Jolon, too, had seen nothing. My sighting of the girls was just a hallucination, then. Blame it on a fevered imagination.

It took me over an hour to trot home, and it was nearly dark when I returned. Dad had been looking out for me, came to me in the barn and untacked Zar when I fell off and sat on a hay bale, watching while he gave my horse a sponge bath, threw a sheet over him, fed him a good supper.

“Anything happen while I was gone?” I asked. I hadn’t told him about seeing the phantom girls, but Dad was pretending distraction, playing the absentminded professor. I’d learned to see through it. He had something he wanted to conceal as well.

“Went to Savoy.”

Savoy was only forest, dotted with a few Tyvek houses.

“Why?”

“We got a call this afternoon. Hunters found the carcass of a horse. On Savoy mountain. That’s why they wanted me there. To see if I could make anything of it, since they couldn’t reach you.”

“What color was the horse?” My heart raced then, as I hoped wildly for
bay
or
dun
. Not gray, not black. Oh, please.

“Black. What they can tell. The body’s been damaged by predators. Not much but bones and some skin left, really.”

“Could that have happened in two days?”

“They seem to think it’s possible. A pack of coyotes had been at it. Have to wait for the lab results.”

“The tattoo isn’t there? The microchip?” All our horses had identifying tattoos and had been chipped when I bought them.

“No tattoo left. And they couldn’t find a chip. But in the state of decomposition, they had to take it in to tell much.”

“Maybe I should see it …”

“There’s so little left. You don’t need that, Reve. They’ll try to match DNA samples from Brio’s hair.”

“They didn’t find anything else? Anything that could mean the girls had been there?”

“Not yet. They’re broadening the search, though, to Savoy and Plainfield.”

“Are they moving out of Hawley, then?”

“Tomorrow, Jolon says.”

Probably only the phone men in the van would remain. But even they had moved outside the gates, so we couldn’t see them. The next day, we’d be more exposed, more vulnerable. The internal clock chimed fifty-two hours.

That night there were no helicopters circling the forest. It was eerily quiet. My parents went home, to get some real rest. Two police cars remained at the gate, courtesy of Jolon.

Mrs. Pike left us beef stew, fresh baked bread, a green bean casserole. It was a heavy meal for the strange, almost sickly warm weather. But it was autumn and Mrs. Pike’s Yankee notions of meal planning didn’t bend to the weather, only the seasons. I sat down to dinner, for Caleigh’s sake if not my own. Mrs. Pike had cooked and cleaned as if nothing unusual was happening, shooing policemen and -women aside with her vacuum when need be. When I asked her to please not talk to the reporters hanging around the forest entrances, she’d just snorted and said, “I’d run ’em down before talking to that pack of jackals.”