After the Woods (11 page)

FIVE

356 Days After the Woods

It's nearly eleven a.m., and Mom is home sick, scraping candle wax off the counter with a butter knife. “Remind me never to order from the new Indian place again,” she groans, picking at the fossilized mass. “Clearly the tikka masala was bad.”

I murmur in agreement, reminding myself that I should be relieved. She wasn't supposed to be home on my day off, but her debilitated state will make ducking out easier. Still, seeing her vulnerable makes me feel worse about where I'm going.

The knife crashes to the floor as she cups her mouth with both hands.

“Do not puke!” I yell.

Her hands fall slowly. Her face is green. “I'll be okay,” she whispers faintly.

“I beg you to go back to the family room and lie down. I'll scrape the wax and put away the dishes. I can't clean around you. Puke, and there will be more to clean.”

Mom touches her fingertips together and bows to me, wincing from the pain of gravity. A
whoosh
as she collapses onto the couch. “Tell me again where you're going?” she calls weakly.

“Starbucks. With Petra. Nice girl, you don't know her,” I call back. I consider telling her that Alice might join us for extra insurance, but I can't afford tripping her antennae right now. “We're going over biology for the exam this week. It's on the nervous system of a hare.”

“Fun. Fix yourself lunch, please. I won't be eating.”

Neither will I
, I think, stomach tight. I throw myself into flaking wax off the granite counter. Next, I attack chunks of pumpkin innards, a nasty mess of threads and dangling seeds. I pry them from their sticking places and dump them into a large wooden bowl. I think of bits of melon rind I saw once, in the woods, in the pit, along with other things. I grab the edge of the counter, which is smooth and gloriously man-made, reminding myself I am not in the woods, and that pumpkin is not melon. I shake my head loosely and notice Mom's phone, lit with messages. Six from postdocs, none from Erik, which feels like a bad sign, as far as the evolution of their unrelationship goes. I wonder if he's still hungover too. In the distance, Mom snores. I snatch a pen to write a sticky note, then stop. Promising a return time will only complicate things. I crumple the first piece of paper, peel off a new one, and stick it on the fridge. I write “Feel better!” with a smiley face for good measure.

But for a shiny black SUV, my car is conspicuous among the beat-up numbers parked in the Parlee entrance lot. My brand-new Dodge Dart SXT is one of the many new things Mom threw at me for coming out of the Fells alive. If she couldn't protect me, paying for ten standard air bags, front crash prevention, and a body that weighs 2,750 pounds might. The car feels downright sparkly, and since break-ins along with roaming sociopaths are not uncommon in the Fells, I tuck my car next to a Parks Department truck.

Yellow caution tape flaps between saplings at the trailhead, sending a trill through my nerves. There's a fresh memorial pile on the bottom of the steps. Stuffed puppies and kittens. A light blue T-shirt that says Real Doctors Treat More Than One Species. A Brazilian flag. Flowers trapped in cellophane. It's a smaller pile, I imagine, than the one that's cropped up at the main entrance by now. But the main entrance is too main for my purposes.

My stomach hardens. Get down to business.

I slide my backpack off my shoulder and bend on one knee, checking my notebook against my watch. The sun sets at 4:25 p.m. The hike to the fire watchtower is 4.3 miles. Walking on a flat trail at an average pace, I can expect to walk three to four miles in an hour without stopping. Since the half mile before the tower is rocky and steep, I figure about a half to one hour just for that section. The entire trip should take no longer than two and a half hours. I could figure more, but this isn't intended to be a sightseeing stroll.

“Your answers aren't in there. Trust me. I've already been.”

Paula Papademetriou appears at the trailhead. I check past my shoulder like she's talking to someone else, but we are alone.

“Did you follow me here?” I ask, startled.

She steps over the yellow tape in hiking boots, jeans, and a short quilted jacket with buckles. Her ponytailed hair is damp at the temples. Her face is bare, with pointed cheekbones and a square jaw. It's a face to apply makeup to, slip glasses onto, try any hairstyle. Strong bones under her clothes too. If I put my thumb and index finger around her wrist, there would be a half finger's length between them before they met. It's a weird thing to think of, Paula Papademetriou's thick bones.

Even her bright teeth look powerful. “I came out of the woods, remember?” she says, looking at me sideways, teasing. “I was here first?”

“Right.” I shrug awkwardly. “Obviously.”

“That doesn't mean I didn't have a feeling you'd be here.” She holds out her hand, tanned, with squared, French-tipped nails. A thin diamond bracelet flashes on her wrist. “It's really nice to meet you in person. I'm Paula.”

Her voice isn't the high one I heard gossiping in the tavern. It's low and throaty, the kind of voice owned by a dame in a dime-store detective novel. Closer to her TV voice, but not that, either. I wonder how many voices she has.

I tug off my thin glove to shake her hand. “I'm Julia.”

She laughs, and it's kind of musical. “I know who you are.” She brushes her hand against her thigh. “Sorry I'm a little sweaty. The hike was longer than I estimated.”

“It's 4.3 miles to the fire watchtower. If that's where you were going.”

Paula's eyes narrow slightly. “You have my number,” she says, then seizes the opportunity to get literal. “And now I have yours. You sent me a text last night. You're a woman of few words.”

I blush. My “hi” text was the equivalent of a giddy prank. “I wasn't sure if I had the right number.”

“Well,” she says, digging through a slouchy bag slung over her shoulder, “now you do.” She hands me a business card with raised lettering and her phone number. “My business card, with my private cell. It's old-fashioned, I know.”

It says:

PAULA PAPADEMETRIOU

News Anchor and Investigative Journalist, 3 News Boston WFYT-TV

If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

781-555-9698

“That saying is pretty funny.”

“Words to live by. It's an old journalism maxim my first producer used to say. It means familiarity and history do not excuse you from checking and double-checking your sources. Never be content with what you're told. Always dig.”

I tilt the card in my hand. When she leaves, I will tape it to a page inside my notebook. “Even when everyone's telling you to be content?” I ask.

“Especially when everyone's telling you to be content.”

I look toward the sun. “I should really hit the trail. I want to get in and out before dark.”

“I imagine you would. Pardon me for saying this, and I'm sure you've heard it ad nauseam, but you are a remarkably brave person. Most people in your circumstances would never want to see the woods again, never mind a crime scene that could have been their own.”

Person
instead of GIRL. And she called me a
woman
, too, before. It's like she knows I'm not a GIRL anymore.

Paula's face softens. “I've angered you. Forgive me for being so direct. It's an occupational hazard,” she says.

“I was just thinking. I space out like that sometimes. Actually, I'm okay with directness.” I get quiet again, not sure what else to say. Paula looks at me searchingly for so long, I feel compelled to fill the silence.

“What I mean is, it's a nice change. Pretty much everyone treats me like I'm a porcelain doll,” I explain.

“That must be unbearable,” Paula says, sympathetic but not patronizing. Which is nice.

I shrug. “I can't blame them. What happened to me was scary. And it scares them. So they act weird.”

“You deserve to be treated like a normal person.”

I gaze at the trail, thinking about that. Mom would have me banished to the countryside. Ricker wants to shape me to fit the textbook trauma victim. But Paula thinks I should be treated like a normal person.

Wind stirs the few stubborn beech leaves clinging to branches.

“Part of it, I think, is that they're afraid I'm going to spill lurid details of what happened to me. When mostly, I just ran and hid and ran,” I say.

Paula eases backward to sit on the entrance step, resting her forearm on one folded leg, the other extended luxuriously. Like me, she takes up a lot of space. “You must get angry,” she says.

“Technically, I no longer have an object to be mad at. Donald Jessup is dead. His mother is an old hoarder who lives in a house with petrified dog poop covering the front lawn. I can't exactly take out my anger on her, even if she did spawn Satan. There's really no one else.”

“No?”

I work my mouth into a corkscrew.

“Sit,” she says as she pats the stone stair next to her. “You were saying?”

I sit. “The only other person is Liv. And I can't blame her. She's the other girl who was with me, in the woods,” I tell her.

Paula smiles. “I know who Liv is.”

I laugh a little. “Yeah, you do. You probably know more about her than I do.”

“The girl who got away,” she says slowly, resonant.

“She
ran
away. Anyone would have.”

“And you're the girl who got caught.”

I smile ruefully. “For a while.”

We stay this way for seconds, then minutes. The distant roar of Route 93 is cotton to my nerves. Paula smells like vanilla and lemon. It doesn't feel like I'm sitting next to someone you can see on TV any given night. It feels like I'm sitting next to an aunt, if I had one. Or a girlfriend of my mother's, if she had one.

“Can I be honest?” she finally says.

My heart trips a little.

“If I were Liv, I would have run too. I could never do what you did.”

“But you get why I did it?” I ask.

“I totally get it. I might seem old to you, but I remember what it was like, being young and having a best friend.” She moves a bit of hair behind my ear. It's a little weird, and a lot like what Kellan did last night. Again, I don't dislike it. “You're probably closer than sisters. I imagine an experience like this, horrific as it was, bonds you for life.”

I stand and throw my pack over my shoulder. “I don't mean to be rude. But I really need to get going.”

“I'll walk with you. You shouldn't be alone anyway.” Paula scrambles up, limber and quick. “Do you mind if I walk with you?” she asks.

“Guess not,” I mumble. We ignore the caution tape and take the trail fast, walking wide over roots and loose rock. This section of the Fells is intentionally less groomed than the main loop, to keep partiers away from the watchtower, and is illegal to enter after four p.m. for the same reason. Glass bottles and cans litter the brush, along with plastic dog-waste bags and cigarette butts. It's the way I came out on my stretcher, holding the hand of the biker who rescued me after I almost killed him when my screams made him crash. He had the gaunt cheeks and prominent eyes of an adrenaline junkie; he was, I believe, more frightened than I was. We must have talked, or we didn't. He stayed with me until the paramedics and the police came, and they say I wouldn't release his hand, even in the ambulance, but I don't remember that. I do remember being flat on my stretcher, the sun glittering painfully through the lacy treetops, hurting my eyes, but I kept them open. I would keep my eyes open when they set my ankle. I would keep my eyes open when the sad-mouthed nurse swabbed me for evidence of Donald Jessup.

“I understand why you want to come out here,” Paula says suddenly.

“You do?”

“You believe your cases are linked. You need to see what happened to Ana Alvarez to understand the fate you escaped.”

“Some people call that macabre.”

“I call it necessary. Otherwise the entire episode has a randomness that doesn't sit with you. If Ana Alvarez was your corollary, Donald Jessup had a plan. And if Ana Alvarez was his trial run, at least knowing that would put order to chaos.”

I scowl at the ground, my quads itching to run.

“You think if you go to the spot where they found her, you'll know. You'll know if he did it, because you'll know what his plan was.”

I pump my arms hard. I can't decide if I'm mad that Paula's making me sound like an awful person, or that she's cutting too close to the truth. Either way, the black in my belly is on high alert. “You think I want Ana Alvarez dead?” I ask. “You think her murder is useful to my recovery? What kind of a person do you think I am?”

“I think you're the kind of person who's never content with what they're told,” she says.

“Who checks out their own mother. That's pretty sad.”

“If it makes you feel better, it's not sad.”

“You know what would make me feel better?” I huff. “If reporters didn't pop out of the bushes or the trailhead or vans at Shiverton High School, and I could get on with my life.” I pick up my pace to a jog.

“There's a place to put your anger, you know,” Paula says, struggling for breath.

“Besides on you and your compadres? Because that feels right, right about now.”

“When the police caught Donald Jessup he was wearing an ankle monitor.” She pants mightily. “Do you know what that is? It's an electronic device that recorded his location. Donald Jessup was required to wear it—it looks like a thick, black, rubber bracelet around his ankle—as a condition of his parole. The monitor sends a radio frequency signal, a ping containing the offender's location to a receiver. If the offender moves outside of the allowed range, the police are notified. The allowed range did not include any area within twenty feet of a place that children congregate.”