“IS SOMEONE PUNISHING ME?” she roared into the phone the moment Maisie answered. “For leaving him there? For walking away?”
She sat parked in front of Pa’s house, her free hand clenching the steering wheel so hard, her knuckles hurt. The For Sale sign on the lawn glared at her through the passenger window.
“Emmie?”
She’d driven halfway to Maisie’s house, then changed her mind and turned down the dirt road to Pa’s, afraid she’d do something rash. Like break all of Maisie’s china before letting her explain.
“Where are you, sweetheart?”
“I’m at the house,” Emeline said through gritted teeth, fury searing her. “I found…” She glared down at the pearly orb sitting in the cupholder, gleaming white against the black plastic. The sight made her feel a little sick. “I found a tithe marker. On his pillow. Is this some kind of prank?”
Maisie stayed silent so long, Emeline wondered if the line had gone dead.
“I’m driving Eshe to an appointment right now,” Maisie said at last. “We’ll come straight over when it’s done.”
“Fine.”
After ending the call, she picked up the tithe marker. An unsettling feeling was taking root in her. Clenching the marker in her fist, she got out of the car. The sweet-sour smell of the grapes, heavy on the vine, greeted her. As her feet touched the earth, the wind picked up, nipping at her bare ankles.
She shivered, then glanced beyond the house. To the dark and looming wood.
Emeline, the forest whispered, just as it had done all her life. Come and play.
She thought of her gig. Of the moss and the beetles. The woods had never quite let her escape. Not completely.
Emeline shook off the ridiculous thought. Don’t be crazy. But maybe it was too late for that.
As she headed for the stone house, she avoided the For Sale sign. Half a dozen people had offered on the house since she put it on the market this summer with help from Corny Henrik, Pa’s best friend. Mostly foreign investors. People who weren’t planning to move in, only looking for a place to stash their cash.
Emeline turned them all down.
But she couldn’t keep turning them down. Pa had almost nothing in the way of savings, and the little he did have was paying for his care at Heath Manor. The only way to keep him there was to sell the house and farm.
One of these days, she was going to have to accept an offer.
Arriving at the door, she punched the passcode into the lockbox where the real estate agent kept the keys, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. Once, dirt-encrusted shoes lay piled to the right. In their place now was an empty rubber mat. Emeline toed off her boots. The tiled floor chilled her feet as she walked from the mudroom to the living room.
No fire burned in the stove. No woodsmoke smell hung in the air. No delicious aroma wafted from the kitchen. The only sound was the ticking of the grandfather clock.
This house—the one harboring her most cherished memories, the one she’d spent nearly all her life in—felt utterly lifeless and cold. Like its soul had fled and only a shell remained.
Emeline called for Pa, checking each and every room. It was pointless, though. Pa didn’t know how to use the lockbox. If he’d managed to walk the eight miles here from Heath Manor, he wouldn’t be able to get in.
The familiar smells of the house drew a swarm of memories, making her dizzy. Emeline grabbed hold of the kitchen table to steady herself, then sank slowly down into a chair, remembering her last visit home.
They had been sitting at this very table as Emeline explained where he was going: to Heath Manor, to get the care he needed. Pa’s leg bounced nervously the entire time she spoke.
He’s scared, she realized at the time. So, she’d taken his hands in hers, wanting to soothe him.
Pa pulled instantly away. Like Emeline was a stranger and why was she touching him? He tucked his hands under the table, where she couldn’t reach.
Don’t be familiar, the doctor had told her. It will only confuse him.
But Emeline didn’t know how to not be familiar. How was she supposed to pretend Pa wasn’t who he’d always been? Grandfather, caregiver, best friend.
Who are you? he’d asked her that day.
The words were like a swift, stinging slap. Throwing her completely off-balance.
At a loss, Emeline had blinked, staring at the man who raised her. Watching him try to recognize her. Watching him reach for memories the way one reached into a river to drink, only to find the bed dry and the reaching hand empty.
He’s not the man he used to be, Joel told her at the time. Don’t set aside your dreams for someone who can’t remember who you are.
She shook off the memory.
Is this my punishment? she wondered. For abandoning him?
Pa had raised Emeline ever since her mother left shortly after she was born. For all her life, he wholeheartedly supported her dreams. And what had Emeline done to repay him? The moment he needed her help, she’d handed him over to strangers, then put his farm up for sale.
A wave of self-loathing swept through her.
Rising from the table, she pulled her oversized cardigan—one she’d borrowed from Pa and never returned—closer around herself. Her grandfather might not be in his house, but he was somewhere close. He had to be. Old men with bad hips didn’t just disappear.
Where else would he go?
She forced herself to look out the kitchen window. Towards the woods. The trees there rose to twice the height of the house, standing like sentries.
Emeline’s gaze snagged on the only opening for miles: a space in the hedge. It yawned like a wolf’s mouth, marking the entrance to that dark, other place.
Once, a tree stood in the gap. Pa planted it on the day Emeline was born and it had watched over her ever since—or so she used to imagine.
Pa cut it down after she left Edgewood, like a portent of what was to come.
A breeze blew in through the screen, rustling Emeline’s hair. A smell slipped in with it: rotting wood and old bones.
She shuddered, thinking of rattling doors and rotating knobs.
Emeline, whispered the woods. Come.
The back of her neck prickled, as if she was being watched, and her pulse sped up. She stepped towards the window, scanning the tree line. But there was nothing there. Just the trees hushing and swaying. Whispering her name.
Emeline breathed in deep.
Get control of yourself.
Behind her, someone cleared their throat.
She jumped, heart banging in her chest, and spun to find a middle-aged man standing in the kitchen.
He wore a faded jean jacket, and the head of a wooden tobacco pipe peeked out of his breast pocket. He was tall and sun-kissed and several years younger than Pa. Old enough to be Emeline’s father. His dark brown hair was shorter and grayer than she remembered, but the rest of him was familiar.
“Tom.” Emeline flung herself at him. Wrapping her arms tightly around his neck, she pressed her face to his jean jacket and breathed in his pipe tobacco smell.
This was Poor Mad Tom, otherwise known as Tomás Pérez. Once a photographer for National Geographic, now Pa’s retired soft-spoken neighbor. “Poor” because he’d been madly in love with Emeline’s mother, Rose Lark, who broke his heart when she went and got pregnant by another man. “Mad” because he truly, deeply believed he was once part of the Wood King’s court.
He loved to tell Emeline about his wild adventures when she wandered up to his door as a small, bored child, looking to be entertained.
Tom patted her back gently. “I thought you were your mother.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “You could never disappoint me, kiddo. How’s the music thing going?”
She let go to find him smiling down on her.
“Good.” She thought of her upcoming tour. Of the Daybreak reps and their potential offer. “Really good.”
“No surprise there.” He beamed like a proud father. “Maiz always says our Emmie has a magic voice. What about that boyfriend of yours?”
“Joel?”
He shrugged. “Whichever one you’re on now.”
Ouch.
Not that it wasn’t true. Emeline went through boyfriends as quickly as she went through guitar strings. Joel once liked to tease her about her cold, ruthless heart.
That was before they started hooking up.
“Joel’s … good. But he’s not my boyfriend.” Not technically.
Tom studied her for a long moment, then said, more somberly, “I take it you heard the news?”
Emeline nodded, then dug the tithe marker out from her pocket and held it up to him. It gleamed, frost cold, between her fingers. “Who did this? Do you know? Someone left it on Pa’s pillow.”
Tom pressed his lips together, looking from her face to the marker and back again. “You know what that is, sweetheart.”
“I know what it is,” she said. “What I don’t—”
“Then you know who left it there.”
The silence grew thick and stagnant between them. He watched her, brown eyes quiet, while Emeline seethed beneath the weight of years and years of Edgewood baggage.
“The Wood King has him,” said Tom, simply.
Emeline fisted the orb in her hand. The Wood King and his woodland monsters—things like shadow skins and ember mares and shiftlings—were fairy tales she’d left behind when she drove away two summers ago.
“There is no Wood King,” she said, even as she remembered the dark and looming woods stalking her at last night’s performance.
Except if the woods really were inside La Rêverie, she told herself, someone other than me would have noticed.
But no one ever noticed. Which proved it was a delusion.
And yet, that unsettling feeling was growing like a thundercloud inside her.
Tom looked away, drawing his bottom lip between his teeth. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he stared out at the woods. “If you say so.”
She felt irrationally guilty then. But Tom was a grown man, and she wasn’t a little kid anymore.
More important: it was going on seventy-two hours now. Pa had been gone for three days. Even Emeline knew that when it came to missing, vulnerable people, three days was too long.
She still had a few hours of sunlight left, though. Stepping around Tom, she started for the mudroom. “I’m going to drive around and see if I can find him.”
“Emmie.”
Emeline ignored him, feeling herself starting to unravel.
In the mudroom, she grabbed her Blundstones and pulled them on. “What if he’s hurt and lying in a ditch somewhere?” The horror of it was sinking in. “What if he doesn’t have his hearing aids in and can’t hear me calling?”
What if he’s dead?
“He’s not in a ditch, love.”
Tom, who’d followed her through the house at a more leisurely pace, gently touched her arm. Emeline reluctantly turned to face him.
“Maisie and me, Corny and Anya, Eshe and Abel, not to mention the police … we’ve spent the past three days searching. Driving down back roads. Walking through fields.” Tom shook his head. “If Ewan tried to leave Heath Manor, the locked doors would have stopped him. If he managed to get through the doors, there’d be footage on the cameras. If he really was wandering around out here, no tithe marker would’ve been left in his room.”
His gaze turned fierce, his voice stern.
“There’s only one place he can be, kiddo.” Tom glanced towards the distant wood. Almost wistful. “The proof is right there in your pocket.”
Emeline followed Tom’s gaze towards the windows. What if Pa was in the forest? Not because he’d been kidnapped by some fairy king, but because he might have walked all the way home only to find the doors of his house locked and then turned to the trees in his confused state.
“Has anyone checked the woods?” she asked.
Silence rang out as Tom glanced down to his loafers.
No. They hadn’t. It was written plain across his face.
“Why don’t you get some sleep tonight?” said Tom, evading her question. “And first thing tomorrow, you and I will go out looking again.”
Emeline heard the falseness in his tone. He was placating her. Humoring her like a small child.
An ember-red rage flared inside her.
Emeline didn’t doubt that Pa’s neighbors had searched for him. But what good were their searches when deep down, they all believed he was kidnapped by some wicked forest king? How hard would they look, really, if they thought it a fool’s errand?
No one in Edgewood ever entered the woods—not if they could help it. In their minds, nothing but monsters waited beneath those dark boughs. It was the Wood King’s domain.
Trespass and suffer the consequences. The warnings of her childhood clanged through her mind. Set foot there at your own peril.
Pa’s neighbors may have searched everywhere else, but they hadn’t searched those trees. Their superstitions prevented them.
It was too much for Emeline. She was so tired of this nonsense. She wanted to yell at Tom. Wanted to curse them all out for letting their ridiculous fears get in the way of finding their friend—a man who was lost and likely terrified.
But she didn’t. Instead, summoning the lessons she’d learned as a girl in a cutthroat music industry, Emeline kept her voice sweet and calm despite her building anger. “You’re right.” She plastered on her best performer’s smile—her most winning accessory. “I’ll go to bed early, then come get you in the morning.”
She didn’t need to force a yawn—it came naturally. She hadn’t slept since the previous night, back in Montreal.
The tension bled out of the room as Tom relaxed.
He nodded his approval. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Not trusting herself to speak, Emeline watched him leave in silence.
Her anger lingered long after Tom’s truck disappeared down the lane and the dust from the dirt road settled. Alone now, Emeline slid her phone into the pocket of her jeans and headed for the back door. When she flung it open, a cold wind smacked her skin. It was late September, and the heat of summer had fled.
The moment she stepped onto the bottle-green grass, Emeline heard them: the voices of the trees, whispering in unison.
Emeline …
She pulled Pa’s blue cardigan closer around her, jamming her hands in its pockets. The sun hadn’t gone down yet, but the air glowed gold as dusk approached, catching in the leaves of the giant trees up ahead.
The sight of the woods, watching and whispering, made Emeline prickle with wariness. She thought of her gig last night: the beetles swarming the table, the moss crawling towards her while she sang.
“Is this what you wanted—to drag me back? To trap me here this time?”
Look at yourself. Talking to trees.
But the truth was, just for a moment, she wanted to believe the forest was a dark and deadly thing that could steal from her. It would make things so much easier. It would give her something other than herself to hate.
She descended on the woods, letting her feet take her to the tree line.
“I’m going to find him,” she growled. “I’m going to bring him home.” Her hands tightened into fists. “And then I’m never coming back here again.”
She approached the hole in the hedge, where her tree used to stand. The grass was thick and long, as if no tree ever stood there at all. She tried to remember: what it looked like, what it smelled like.
But she couldn’t.
The wind rose up, snatching at her hair and stinging her cheeks. The leaves began to flicker.
Beware of the Wood King, Emeline.
“There is no Wood King,” she said bitterly.
And she walked into the forest.