With Ona driving her pickup truck and Alice in the passenger seat, they followed the Oriels’ burgundy Buick. The first surprise had been that the couple didn’t turn toward the town center. Instead, they headed deeper into the Blithedale Woods.
Ona held back as far as she could. She drifted onto the shoulder to let an impatient driver in a Toyota Camry pass, putting the car between the pickup and the Oriels’ Buick. After a while, the Camry revved its engine and, its tires screeching, shot into the oncoming lane to overtake the Oriels.
Tailing the Oriels was awkward. They drove at a snail’s pace, and it seemed to Alice that the whole world, let alone the Oriels, must see that Ona’s pickup was following them. Alice hugged herself. This detective stuff was nerve-racking.
For a while, the road rose and fell with the landscape, and then the Buick’s brake lights flashed up ahead and the right-hand turn signal flashed and they turned onto a dirt road.
Ona slowed down. The pickup rolled past the entrance to the dirt road. In the distance, Alice saw the red taillights.
“Where are they going?”
“No idea,” Ona said. “This is an old logging road. It’s public land now, which, deeper into the woods, abuts private property.”
She put the car in reverse, backed up, and then turned down the dirt road.
The pickup bounced on the potholed road. This would be rough terrain for the Oriels’ sedan.
After 10 minutes, Alice saw taillights ahead. Ona saw them too, and she switched off the headlights.
“Let’s see if we can sneak up,” she said.
The pickup rumbled and rocked along the forest road. The woods were dark. Alice’s eyes adjusted, but it was still a harrowing ride, the road growing dimmer and dimmer the deeper into the forest they went.
They turned a corner, and there it was, the Oriels’ Buick. In the dark, the burgundy looked almost black.
Ona slowed the pickup truck and rolled closer. The Oriels had parked their car at the edge of the road. The car was empty. Alice squinted, trying to see farther into the woods.
“It looks like they’ve abandoned the car and walked from here.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do, too,” Ona said.
She drove ahead. The road curved, and fifty yards further into the woods, she pulled the pickup truck up to the trees and put it in park.
Then Alice and Ona backtracked to where the Oriels had parked their car.
“Which side of the road did they enter by?” Alice asked.
“The side they parked on?” Ona said. “That’s what I would do.”
“Fifty-fifty chance of success.”
They stepped into the woods, and within moments, deep darkness shrouded them. Alice tested the ground ahead of her, placing her feet with care. Rocks and sudden dips made the terrain perfect for twisting an ankle. She could see nothing up ahead, no sign of the Oriels, only the black trunks of trees against the dark-gray gloom of night.
Either the Oriels hadn’t come this way or they were much further in. She dug out her phone to turn on her flashlight, and as her screen lit up—showing more missed calls and messages from Rich—she saw she had no reception. It made her stomach twist into a knot. How many movies had she seen where the hero lost cell phone reception right before encountering a crazed serial killer?
“No reception,” she whispered to Ona, showing her phone.
Ona checked her phone and shook her head. “Same here. A lot of places in the woods get spotty reception, because of the valleys and gorges between the hills and mountains. In fact, we may be close to Dead Man’s Gorge.”
“Dead Man’s Gorge? Really?”
Why couldn’t people gives places nice names like Nice Neighborly Gorge or Cozy Canyon? Alice let out a sigh and stuffed her phone back into her pocket, continuing her careful trek through the dark.
The minutes ticked by. She was getting used to walking in the dark, growing more and more confident that she wouldn’t twist her foot or fall. She was so intent on trying to see where she was stepping that she let out a little yelp when Ona grabbed her arm.
“Look,” she whispered.
Up ahead, lights glowed among the trees. Alice got excited. Finally, they were going to find something. She picked up the pace. Her eyes locked on the lights ahead as she clambered around the giant trunk of a tree. She stepped from one big rock to another, then scrambled up a low ridge.
At the top of the ridge, the lights grew clearer. Long, glowing rectangles. Light spilling onto straight-edged forms.
“A house,” she mumbled to herself.
She turned to Ona, who was trailing behind, and whispered, “There’s a house.”
It would take Ona some time to catch up. Alice couldn’t wait. She wanted to see what this house was, and whether the Oriels might be inside.
She hurried forward, her eyes still locked onto the house, and her feet swiftly navigating roots and stones and treacherous dips. The house was all straight lines. Modern. With a deck jutting out into dark nothingness.
What is this place? A modern home in the middle of the woods?
She put down her right foot and found only air. Her body pivoted forward. Pitch blackness lay below, not the dark contours of rocks and earth that her eyes had grown used to, and she realized she was about to fall, and fall far.
She drew in sharp breath, a preamble to a scream, when hands gripped her from behind and yanked her back.
She fell. But she fell backward, slamming her butt down on a tangle of roots, and her scream turned into an “oof!”
Familiar faces emerged from the darkness.
Mr. and Mrs. Oriel stood over her, Mr. Oriel shaking his head. “You must have a death wish, young lady.”