It was near impossible to walk a straight line in the forest but Jed Braimen did the best he could. He inched around trees, ducked under branches, and used a stick to perforate the low brush. His brother Karl liked to weave wide and it bothered Jed to no end because that’s not what they were supposed to do.
“If you do that you might miss something. Nathan specifically said to stay shoulder to shoulder and walk straight,” Jed called out, berating his brother.
“That only works when there’s a whole lot of us and we’re in an open field or on a beach or someplace flat. It doesn’t work up here,” Karl shot back.
“Still, we could miss something really important,” Jed groused. Frustrated, he stopped and took his hat off to wipe at his brow.
Concentrating like this, knowing he was probably looking for a body, made him sweat through the cold. And he was hungry. And he didn’t want to find a dead person. And it wasn’t like they were looking for one of their own but he would keep that thought to himself. Cherie Connelly gave him an earful when he said it out loud and he wasn’t about to say it again, even to Karl.
Jed put his hat back on and considered there were only two good things about today: he didn’t have to work and he got to Fritz’s store long after the body had been carted away. It was awful enough seeing all that blood. If he’d seen Fritz’s dead body Jed would have had nightmares for a year.
“Think we’re wasting our time?” Karl asked as he shuffled through the pine needles and the muck left wet from the night before. Half-heartedly he hit the heavy brush with his stick. Even Karl, always the optimist, was starting to think this was a wild goose chase.
“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know how a kidnapper thinks?” Jed asked. “Or a killer for that matter.”
Karl shrugged and took out a smoke. He leaned back against a tree, lit his cigarette, took a good drag then put his head back to rest a minute. The mists and the fogs hadn’t exactly cleared; they had just slipped away down a gulley or wound themselves up high in the trees. It kind of felt like when him and Jed were kids and their mom threw a blanket over some chairs and called it a tent. It was that kind of quiet and that kind of weird cold/warm. Karl thought this was the most beautiful sort of day in the mountains. If that woman was still alive she’d have the day; if she was dead, there wasn’t a better place to lie. Karl also knew, alive or dead, the forest made it near impossible to find someone who wasn’t supposed to be found.
Fritz’s murder was one thing. You could see what was left after the deed was done, but the woods were a sponge. Whatever happened here – good or bad – it would all be soaked up and held tight. It would take a helluva powerful person to squeeze the secrets out.
“I think we’re wasting our time, Jed,” Karl mused. He wasn’t really making a decision; he was just throwing the idea out there. “I think we should go back and tell Nathan there’s nothing here.”
Jed hunkered down, still poking at the ground. Karl watched him with a lazy eye and smoked in his lazy way.
“I mean, I’m no expert or anything,” Karl went on with great practicality, “but it seems to me that if whoever killed Fritz took this woman, they would have pretty much killed her right off. And, if they did that, and they were running hard, they would just dump her soon as they could. Maybe they’d put her a little ways in to give ’em some time to get away – I could see that – but I don’t think you’d drag her all the way up here. I don’t think they’d keep her tied up or anything. I mean, we’ve gone about as far as a mile.”
Jed attended to his brother as Karl blew smoke through his nostrils, his eyes almost crossing as he checked out the trick. Karl was a nice looking man. Divorced twice, no kids, he had a passel of bad habits and a good head on his shoulders. Jed was a little more fanciful. Maybe it was because he was younger or maybe because he was never really happy in all this quiet. He wanted a little more excitement than his days afforded so he let his mouth run on to what he was imagining in his head.
“Unless whoever took her is a freak, Karl. I mean there was just a story about that guy in Austria who kidnapped that girl and kept her as a sex slave for like seventeen years. There’s been a bunch of guys like that. Maybe whoever took her has a slave house out here. You know, a sex slave place. Hooee, what if we could find that?”
Jed twisted his head this way and that as if he expected one to materialize. Karl snorted the notion away and Jed smiled. He knew Karl would be just as excited if they found something like that. They’d be heroes. They would be on TV.
“There’s been two or three we’ve heard of and they’re always in really strange places like Austria or down in Georgia,” Karl snorted.
“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen up here,” Jed insisted, not ready for his brother to take the fun out of this adventure. “I mean, there are plenty of places to hide, lots of old shacks all up and down the mountain. What about the abandoned mines? We wouldn’t even know anyone was up there if they were hiding in those places. That woman might be chained up right now, as we speak. Hey. Hey. Maybe she could be in some sort of coffin. I heard about that, too.”
Jed shivered, so taken was he with the story he was spinning. Karl ground out his cigarette on the trunk of the tree. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue so that he sounded like he had a lisp when he talked.
“Yeah, I suppose. Still, I think it’s a little far fetched. I could see it if she was some young thing, but she’s older, you know.”
“Yeah, but she’s really pretty. I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers,” Jed chuckled.
“You wouldn’t kick any woman out of bed, crackers or not,” Karl pointed out.
Jed chuckled then he and Karl laughed together because it was the truth.
“I think somebody came through here, took out Fritz just ’cause they didn’t like the look of him and grabbed that woman ’cause they did like the look of her. Simple as that,” Karl said this like God’s own truth. “That’s what I’d do if I was a murderer.”
“Yeah, well you’re not.” Jed stood up, put his hands on his back and stretched. “I still say there’s something bigger than us that’s happened. We just get too settled up here, Karl. The rest of the world is pretty complicated. People do stuff we’d never even think of doing. Even for all my talk about going somewhere else, I really like it up here. It’s nice except when something like this happens. I’m just happy it doesn’t happen very often.”
Jed picked up a stone and threw it over the tangle of undergrowth. He knew he cleared it because he heard it bounce off a rock on the other side then tic-tac-toe down an incline. He perked up. He picked up another stone and got ready to throw it.
“Hey, did you hear that?” Jed cocked his head. He held up a hand. “I didn’t know there was a creek down . . .”
“Shhh.” Karl waved Jed quiet. His head was cocked, his eyes were narrowed. “Listen.”
“I heard it. That rock hit water down there.” Jed whispered back as he wiped his hands on his pants. “I’m not going to fall for any of your jokes. . .”
“No. No. I mean it.” Karl waved again, annoyed. “I heard something. Listen.”
Jed searched the woods like he could see what Karl was talking about. He listened hard.
“There,” Karl whispered. “There.”
“Oh, my God,” Jed whispered back. “I hear it. Damn straight, I hear it. That’s the dog going off.”
“Then let’s get our rears in gear, brother. We got us something going on,” Karl whooped.
“I hope it’s that woman he found,” Jed hollered, chasing back the way they came.
“I hope she’s alive,” Karl called over his shoulder as he led the way.
After I came back from Italy, I offered my mama a fortune to let Charlotte go but by that time Charlotte was mama’s gravy train.
Mama threatened to tell a court of law and the newspapers that I was an unfit mother. There were records: the motel, the ambulance, the hospital. I didn’t want anyone to know why I had been in the hospital – especially Charlotte – so I went away with my tail between my legs. I went away without my baby and it seemed there wasn’t much sense to my life after that. I was in so much pain that I finally understood Sharon. Drugs and drink never quite cured my pain but it dulled it enough to live with it.
After I married, though, Jake managed what I couldn’t. He never told me how much he paid my mama or what he threatened; he just brought my baby home. He presented Charlotte like a jewel. I reacted like I didn’t care for the setting.
What did he expect? Charlotte was confused. I was ashamed about what had happened to me and about leaving her in the first place. I shouldn’t have been, but who’s to say I was wrong? I missed a lifetime of important things while I brooded about the past. Now I almost miss something important because of my self pity. That is the most useless emotion of all, self pity. I must leave the past behind and tend to the moment because salvation is close. There are men somewhere. I can hear them. I almost missed them because I was wrapped up in my sorrow.
Their voices are distant but distinct and it takes no more time than a mule kick for me to get myself up out of the dirt. I fall hard on my knee and howl in frustration and pain only to quiet real quick. I wait, barely breathing, hoping they heard that.
They call my name!
They must have heard me!
I move fast. My knapsack flaps against me as I hurry along. I make my way, hand-over-hand on the smooth rock wall of the tunnel. I try to run, dragging one foot behind me, as I go toward the fading light ahead.
“Hold on. Don’t go.”
I call out to the light and holler to those men as I shoot out of that tunnel. The smile on my face fades fast because I have taken a wrong turn and come out in a different part of the forest. Taller trees. Higher branches. There are boulders, not stones, in my way. I am on an incline like the one I fell down but brambles cover the rise like an unkempt beard. The sound of the men’s voices is muffled. They seem to be farther away. The beat of my heart spikes.
“I’m here!”
I throw myself at the slope. The pain is excruciating as I climb. I slip. I scramble over the rocks and clutch at the boulders. I hear them again.
“Here! Help. . .”
I am caught midway between the rise and the bottom. With my left hand I hold onto a bush with thistles. The key is still in my right and I’m afraid to open it for fear it will be lost. I’m scared to go up and terrified of falling down.
“Here. Please.”
I say this so small it will take God’s ears to hear it. A dog yaps and barks the way the ones in my town did when they lived their life chained to a stake in a dirty yard. Those desperate dogs would snap their necks for one last chance to be free. I am that desperate. Tears stream down my face; so many tears that my hair is wet. I cry buckets.
I pull myself up a few inches. My arm is stretched almost out of the socket. My dirty hand looks awful. They are right. I am old. It is the cold. I can’t see the blue of the blood in the veins running beneath the surface of my skin. I have hold of a sapling. My shoulder is blazing. My face scrapes along the dirt as I pull and pull until I am lying over the tip of the ridge. I raise my head and see that there are two of them going one way and a third further on. They are running and calling out. I am silent, so tired I don’t even hear my own breath. I should. I must be gasping for it this climb has been so hard. That’s okay, though. I have faith they will feel my presence because it’s always been that way. But I am not the Tessa of old. The magic is lost on these men who weave in and out of the trees as they run away from me.
I cannot speak and I cannot hold on.
I am sliding, sliding, sliding down again.
I was so close to salvation. So very close.