Callie
Jane stares at her for a long time. “Maybe that’s why I liked Damien. He reminded me of you.”
“Joking. You’re nothing like any of them.” Her smile drops. “Thank god.”
Jane turns and looks toward the river, which sparkles in the winter light. “So where did your last name come from? It’s not Jenna’s last name. She said she gave you your dad’s name, right? But obviously that’s not true.”
“I don’t know. She was so young. It could have been anything. Someone in a band she liked. Plucked out of a hat.”
“I’m going to google it,” Jane proclaims. “Google knows everything.”
“Hauser Pine Barrens,” Jane says as she types, and Callie rolls her eyes. Jane scrolls and scrolls, her brow furrowed. She looks at Callie, her cheeks sucked in.
“What? Are there other criminals I’m related to? Please don’t tell me.”
Jane hands Callie her phone without a word. Her browser is open to a blog post from a hiker about a route through a place called Hauser Hollow.
Rumor has it Hauser Hollow was once home to Quakers who fled the strict rules of their communities and came out to the Pines to live their own way.
There used to be settlements here, but they’re gone now.
What stands in its place is an old hunting cabin, restored and kept up.
There’s a sign claiming it is private property but I’ve never seen anyone here, though a buddy of mine said he has seen buck skins stretched for scraping outside.
She sits up. “It’s real?” Callie asks.
“What do you mean?”
“My mom used to talk about this hunting cabin she’d spend time in when she was a kid. Her family used to keep a watch out for the Jersey Devil a hundred years ago. I always figured it was BS.”
Callie stands up.
“Cal. What are you doing? I know that look. I don’t like this look on your face. I’m supposed to be taking care of you.”
“I’m going. I’ll be back.”
She leans over and kisses Jane on top of her head and takes the front steps in a leap.
The hiker’s blog post gives instructions on where to park, warns about the difficulty of finding the hollow and how easy it is to lose the trail. Don’t mess with the woods out there. You’ll never find your way out if you wander off.
She takes a long breath in when she pulls into the little clearing alongside the road where the trail starts.
Callie’s brought her water bottle and a granola bar that had been in her glove compartment, takes screenshots of the hiker’s instructions for finding Hauser Hollow in case she loses service.
The sugar sand trail had once been a carriage route through the pines, but now it’s choked with understory, dense and inhospitable. It’s only five miles to the cabin from where she parked her Jeep, but progress is slow, despite feeling like a furnace is blazing in her chest.
She stops to look for her first landmark, the hull of a wooden boat that had been hauled out of the river, dragged here for who knows what reason.
It feels like it’s taking too long, that she should have passed it by now.
She starts to feel dizzy, panicked. Would she know the way back if she wanted to?
She spins in a circle and can’t remember if the fallen tree had been on her left or her right when she came out.
She turns back slowly, squinting until—there!
—she finds the blurred shape that she hopes is the hull.
Her feet are aching and blistered, her mouth feels dry despite the water she drank, and yet she plunges forward, because that’s all there’s left to do.
She needs to keep moving or else the sweat against her skin will start to go cold.
She marches most of the way with her head down, looking for roots or rocks that could trip her, but when she lifts her face to the sky now she sees a slight widening of the trees. Open space ahead. And then she smells it: chimney smoke, cutting through the scent of wind-chilled pine.
One of the reasons Callie never believed the stories about this place was that it seemed too lovely to be true. Too much like a fairytale. A secret house tucked deep into the woods.
The hunting cabin looks more weathered in person than it did in the photos, the logs battered and bleached, but the door is painted a bright, glossy red that looks fresh—the same color as the front door to Jenna’s house.
She stands on the porch and inhales. Knocks once, softly, worried all of the sudden that she is wrong.
That someone is here but it isn’t her mother.
But then the door swings open and Jenna stands in front of her, wearing an old wool sweater. Her eyes are clear and bright and alert, her pupils normal. Not the dark holes of someone lost to drugs. Not the bleary look of someone on a bender.
“You don’t have to knock. This is yours, too.” Jenna’s voice is wry but Callie sees something tender, gentle, in her face. “Come on. If you’ve found me here it probably means we’ve got a lot of shit to work through.”
The door swings open wide and Callie follows her mother in.
Inside the cabin is tidy and spare, with a single stone fireplace and worn but comfortable-looking armchairs, a sofa, a sliver of a kitchenette.
“I started coming out here when I first got sober. Walk like that makes it pretty hard to get booze out here.”
“Does Steve know that?” Seems like he would have mentioned it to Callie if he did.
“You talked to Steve? I owe him a call. Poor guy probably thinks I fell off the wagon.”
“Well…”
Jenna waves her hand. “I haven’t touched anything since that night, I want you to know.”
“What is this place?”
“It’s been in our family a long time. My mother used to take me out here, before she got sick. Almost every weekend. This land has been ours for hundreds of years, on her side.”
“I know. But I didn’t believe you until today.”
“Looks like you figured it out okay.”
“I figured out a few things. A little late.”
Jenna watches her, and when Callie realizes she’s not going to say anything she continues.
“Your bag was found on the Batona Trail. That’s twenty miles from here.”
“Well I probably walked twenty miles here, but not from there. Damien knocking on my door, saying he wanted to talk to me about something. I know what that means in that family. Nothing good ever came from a Caputo telling you they wanted a talk.”
“How did you get away from him?” Callie can’t picture it. Jenna fresh off a bender outpacing Damien the woodsman? Doesn’t make sense.
“That boy thinks he knows the woods. Maybe he does. But not like me. I knew as long as I was here I was safe from them.”
“So the drugs in your bag…”
“Drugs?” Jenna snorts. “That’s a nice touch. No, you know me. Only ever had one true love.”
So that had been Damien too. Planted the drugs, placed the call to Fauver, knowing the assumptions Callie would make.
“I found your chip. From AA. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, about being sober.”
“Well, hard to believe a drunk person about that.”
“What made you relapse? Did something happen?”
Jenna sighs. “I ran into Lorraine at the store. Clickety clacking her big bracelet, hair perfectly done. She told me you were having dinner with them. Made a big show of pointing out the mascarpone for the tiramisu she was making. Said she knew how much you liked it. And I realized … I didn’t know that about you.
That there was just a lot I didn’t know. ”
It’s the shame of my life that you’ve become one of them. It was the last thing Jenna said to Callie, and it hits differently now that she knows the facts. Jenna had been ashamed that the Caputos claimed Callie, that it looked like she was more theirs than Jenna’s.
“Does Lorraine know? About you and Luke? About … me?”
“Ah. She knows. In her way. I don’t think any of them ever really tell her a goddamned thing. But she’s not stupid.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jenna looks around the room for a minute, long enough that Callie thinks she might not answer her.
“I didn’t want to tell you at first, because it was painful.
And then when you got older, I didn’t want to tell you, because I knew you’d choose them.
Stable jobs, pillars of the community. I mean, look at you.
Chief of fucking Police. I guess you chose them anyway. ”
“And … Baby Doe. There was a test done, Mom, and they found out that…”
“Luke’s too. With Annabelle.”
“You knew that too?”
Jenna clears her throat, looks up into the corner of the room for a moment.
“He used to come pick me up, when my mom first got sick and my dad was driving her to treatments and I was alone a lot. Those were his cop days. He’d put on the siren in his patrol car, say stupid shit through the PA system to make me laugh.
” Jenna shakes her head, lets out a sigh.
“I was young. I thought, hey, this guy is giving me attention, I thought it would give me something to write songs about. How stupid is that? But that’s what you’re taught, when you’re that age, especially back then.
The thing you write about is love, a guy.
And none of that had happened to me yet. ”
It breaks Callie’s heart. Because it was so true. Somewhere along the line that was what girls learned. Experience meant men. They had the keys to the rest of your life.
“When did you know about Annabelle?”
“That she was pregnant? I heard Miss Hamilton, the history teacher, talking to the guidance counselor. I was there, waiting around in the hall outside the office, I was in trouble for cutting class. Anyway, she was saying something like, maybe she had it all wrong, but that she wondered…”
So Hamilton had her suspicions. No wonder she didn’t want to mention it to Callie when she visited her that day at the school. Not when she knew how the story turned out. Hamilton was trying to protect Annabelle after the fact, because she failed her when it counted.
“What did the guidance counselor say?”