When I reach the turnoff for the forest, I push the button on my car’s odometer. Of course, it’s not precise, and it was never meant to be, but several old news stories mentioned that my mom’s body was found two miles from here.
And that’s where I’m going. To the part of the woods where my parents took their final breaths. The place where we were last together as a family.
I know it won’t look the same. For one thing, it’s summer, not winter. But with all the dreams I’ve been having, maybe things are coming back, the way Quinn said they would. Being in the woods might spark more memories, or at least more dreams.
Last night, Duncan offered to walk me home from his parents’ party, but I said no. I didn’t need any distractions, like both of us thinking about that kiss. Before I left, I told Duncan what Jason had said, his paranoid accusations. Did Jason know about my dad’s money because he took it? Was his face the last one my parents saw?
Of course, it’s still possible Benjy did it. Nora loves him, but I have a feeling Nora loves everyone.
When the odometer clicks to 2.0, I find a wide spot in the road, pull over, and park. My bare thighs stick to the vinyl seat as I slide out. Since I don’t own hiking boots, I’m wearing tennis shoes. From the backseat, I grab my pack. Inside are an apple, a bottle of water filled from the tap, printouts of news stories, and some screenshots from both America’s Most Wanted and the recent stories about my dad’s jawbone being found. Anything that shows a photo of the woods.
As I pick my way through the blackberries bordering the road, I pop a berry into my mouth. It’s sweet and so ripe it nearly melts on my tongue, leaving behind dozens of seeds. The next is mouth-puckeringly sour.
Under the canopy of the evergreens, it’s at least ten degrees cooler, which is a relief. The ground is carpeted with pine needles dried to copper. I’m a city girl. I can recognize a discarded candy wrapper at twenty paces, but I can name only a few of the plants and trees I see around me. From my grandmother, I know the names of some wildflowers, but here it’s just a million shades of green, from the bright chartreuse of the ferns to the gray-green needles hanging far overhead. Unseen birds twitter and cheep. In the distance, I hear the babble of water.
Taking a deep breath, I look around. Only a few trees are small enough to be Christmas trees. On the rest, the branches don’t begin until far overhead. Most of these trees must have been here long before I was born, or my parents, or even Grandma. They started out as seedlings and then stretched themselves toward the sun, stacked branch on branch into the sky.
About the only time I’ve spent in the wilderness is the four days in fifth grade when we went to Outdoor School. We looked at bugs and leaves, and at night we slept in cabins crowded with bunk beds. My foster family didn’t have a sleeping bag, at least not one they would let me take, so my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Winters, lent me one.
I thought I would be more freaked out being here, but I’m not. It’s just me and the peaceful woods. So far, no ghosts.
And even though it would be nice to just stay here admiring the beauty, I need to make the ghosts come out. I look at photographs, trying to memorize the patterns of branches. The way the limbs cut the sky into triangles, how two trees share the air. Then I look back up at the real trees as I slowly walk forward. I look up and down and back and forth so much I start to feel dizzy. There are hundreds of trees here, tree after tree after tree, stretching back forever.
Every step changes what I see. It’s possible I could be standing right in front of one of the trees in the photos, but the angles wouldn’t match unless I was on a different side. In fact, I realize that the older photos I so carefully compiled are completely useless. Things would have grown in fourteen years. Not only grown, but branches could have been broken off, or a tree could have been hit by lightning. Nothing stays the same.
And America’s Most Wanted—were the shows even filmed in the real locations? Or did they go to some back lot, where the same few trees stood in for every forest on every TV program, where cars crashed off the same cliff, show after show? It would certainly be cheaper, and from what I’ve seen on YouTube, that show never did look very slick.
This whole idea was stupid. My chest aches as if there’s a stone inside, a stone so heavy it might pull me over.
No! I promised my parents’ memory I would find who murdered them. I can’t give up now. I close my eyes and try to remember. Try to pretend that I’m little, bundled up against the cold. Did we stop and have hot chocolate? I’m almost sure of it, can almost taste the creamy sweetness on my tongue.
And I’m rewarded, not with a memory but with a logical deduction. None of the articles said anything about snowshoes or skis, so my family must have gone only as far as I could walk on my short legs. Unless maybe one of my parents carried me. But a kid that age would weigh—what? Thirty pounds? My parents wouldn’t have wanted to carry me too far, even if they took turns. And once they cut down a tree, one of them would have had to drag it, green branches sweeping the snow. So they probably stayed close to the road.
The more recent news stories might still hold a clue as to where it happened. I shuffle pages until I come to the ones about my dad’s jawbone turning up in a dog’s mouth. A screenshot I made from a TV news program shows a tree with a branch cut off at about head height, leaving behind a big, healed-over scar roughly two feet in diameter. The picture is too tightly focused to know what is behind it, whether it’s more woods or the road or what.
I move forward, slowly scanning the trees for that scarred place. It’s not possible to walk in a straight line. I have to detour around stony outcroppings and clumps of blackberries. Confront fallen branches, some that have come to rest a few feet off the ground. Each presents a puzzle. Over or under?
I imagine this landscape covered with a white blanket of snow. Part of it stained by the blood I remembered seeing at the hypnotist’s. Are my parents still part of this place? If you die, do you leave some fragment, like a ghost or a memory, behind? Or, just thinking of it in purely physical terms, are atoms from their flesh and blood and bones in the air I breathe, in the dust my tennis shoes kick up?
Something snags my attention. I turn my head to look again. It’s a tree with a cut-off branch. At about head height. The healed cut is almost two feet across. I look back down at the screenshot from the recent news story, and then back up at the tree.
And that’s when I find myself falling.