Chapter 2 Above
Above
I lift my hands in the universal gesture for surrender, rising slowly to my feet. Rick reaches for his radio.
“Don’t you move,” the man barks. A fringe of salt--and--pepper hair sticks out from under a lumpy gray beanie. His pupils are flared, wary. Rick carefully holds his hands away from his sides, and I can see them shaking as we look at each other.
“I said, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” the man with the gun demands again. He’s a wiry man with a beard a few days past tame, cheeks spattered with what might be freckles or dirt. I try to focus on him and not the black barrel of the rifle currently trained on my chest.
“We’re with Search and Rescue,” I say calmly. “We’re looking for—-”
“This is private property, and you’re trespassing,” he says, cutting me off.
“I’m sorry. We must have missed the flag,” I say, struggling to keep my voice level. His finger is on the trigger, not alongside it, and the look in his eyes says he’s not opposed to the idea of pulling it.
“We’ll leave immediately,” Rick adds. His voice has a quaver to it. I’m distantly surprised to realize I’m not shaking at all. I can feel adrenaline like a chill through my body, but it’s only making everything sharper, slower.
“You’re not supposed to be here. I told them. I told them you weren’t allowed,” the man says, and comes forward a step. Rick stumbles back. The man tightens the butt of the rifle against his shoulder, bracing himself as if for a recoil. He’s going to shoot, I think, and still fear refuses to come.
“Leave them alone, Bill,” says a female voice, soft but authoritative. A woman is striding toward us, blond hair back in a no--nonsense ponytail, a sleeveless blouse showing off inked--up arms. There’s something vaguely familiar about her—-something around her eyes, or maybe her voice.
“They’re trespassing. And so are you,” the man says. “You don’t own this land yet.”
“We didn’t mean—-” I start, but she cuts me off.
“There’s a kid missing, Bill,” she says. “Four years old. Haven’t you heard?”
“I heard,” he says. “Doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Nobody’s saying you had anything to do with it, the kid just ran off,” she says. She squints, shades her eyes. My mouth is dry. I keep quiet. “How’s your brother doing, Bill?”
He shifts, wets his lips. “Well enough.”
“He’s lucky he’s got you looking out for his place,” she notes.
“But look. You and I both know he’s not going to be happy if a bunch of cops tramp all over his land, which is what’s going to happen if you pull that trigger.
Or you let these nice people walk fifty feet back that way, and we all forget this happened. ”
Bill’s jaw tenses. The rifle barrel lowers.
“You should get on home before you get yourself in trouble,” she tells him. “I’ll make sure they leave.” He glares at her. “Bill. This isn’t the kind of trouble Terry needs right now,” she says firmly. Finally he grunts, and without another word, he wheels around, striding off back toward the road.
I let out a trembling breath of relief.
“Thanks,” I say. Rick grabs his radio but doesn’t call in yet. The way he’s shaking, I’m not sure he could speak clearly just now.
“Not a problem,” she says, her arms still crossed loosely.
Without a gun in my face, I can get a better look at her.
She’s about my age, her skin lightly tanned, the suggestion of crow’s--feet at the corners of her eyes.
Spatters of color decorate the backs of her hands, her fingers, like she’s been painting—-a buttery yellow and a green the color of lichen. “I’m glad I saw him heading out here.”
“Sorry, you’re . . . ?” I say, feeling like I should know the answer, and then it clicks. “Emmie.”
“Emily,” she corrects. Emily Hill. The youngest of the Hill siblings. The last time I saw her, she was fourteen years old and wearing my sweater over her homecoming dress.
“This is Rick Lohman. And I’m Audrey. Audrey Dixon,” I say. “I don’t know if you remember me.”
“Audrey. Of course I remember you,” she says, some meaning snarled up between the syllables that I can’t read.
“There was a sound,” I say. “Out here. We need to—-”
But Rick cuts me off. “Audrey,” he says, and cranks up the volume on the radio, and a voice babbles, “Brown hair, blue dinosaur pajamas, him, he’s all right, he’s dirty, doesn’t seem to be hurt,” and it’s like a rush of wind, all the tension leaving me at once. They found him. He’s alive.
Rick laughs; Emily lets out a hissing breath between her teeth.
I close my eyes. I’ve never been one to pray, but it’s like prayer, this moment, feeling the world slide back toward the proper balance.
I tilt my face up, thinking I hear the rain, thinking how strange it is that I don’t feel it, and then I open my eyes and realize it’s not rain I’m hearing at all.
I stand beneath the wide boughs of an oak tree.
It surrounds me in soft shadow. The branch above me is thin, old, leafless.
From it are hung strings of white beads—-dozens and dozens of them, their cords gone gray and fraying with age.
The wind stirs the trees. The beads click against the branches softly.
Only then does it start to rain.
Back at CP, we debrief. Rick and I report in about our encounter, but we’re spared a chewing--out for now. It’s a temporary reprieve, I know, and I’m not looking forward to Tamara’s infamous tongue--lashing.
“The lucky charm strikes again!” Paul Matsuda declares as we mill about in the aftermath.
Matsuda’s five foot six and every bit of it muscle, the kind of guy who’s pushing seventy and still scaling cliffs that make me woozy just to look at.
He credits his health to a vegan lifestyle and freakishly cheerful attitude.
Shadow and Pebble, his dogs, sit next to him with their tongues lolling in happy exhaustion.
“I’m not a lucky charm,” I protest.
“Whatever. When you’re working, we get happy endings,” he says, jabbing a finger in my direction. “It’s scientific fact.”
“It’s confirmation bias. I want a statistical analysis,” I grump at him.
“Whatever you say, Lucky,” Matsuda declares. He slaps me on the shoulder. “Drinks tomorrow, okay?”
I dip my chin. “We’ll see.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s what you always say,” Matsuda tells me, and ambles off, dogs trotting at his heels. This is the deal: they invite me, I pretend I might show up, they pretend to be surprised when I don’t.
I leave the debrief feeling battered, trading nods and smiles with the others.
I should feel relieved, but that hum in my bones hasn’t faded.
The muscles between my shoulder blades remain tensed, my senses still straining.
There’s something out here. You haven’t found it yet, they tell me, but that’s impossible.
Bryson is on his way to the hospital, safe in the arms of his parents. It’s over.
I keep hearing the rattle of beads in the pattering of rain. I take the string of witch beads from my pack and run my fingers over it.
I need to see you, Janie said, the last time I heard her voice. I need to tell you something. She’d sounded strange. Out of breath and on the verge of laughter—-or tears. I’d wondered if she was on something. I told her not to call me again, and hung up the phone.
And when, later that night, she came to my window the way she always used to do and knocked and called my name, I pretended not to hear. I never even turned over to look.
I found the beads on the windowsill the next day. I never saw Janie again.
“Witch beads,” Emily Hill says. I startle; I didn’t hear her approach. She nods at the beads in my hand. “Gifts for Jenny Red--Hands, right?” A smile ghosts across her lips, lingering a moment at the corner of her mouth.
“You know the story?” I ask, and then I realize that of course she does—-Janie told it to her.
To her, and to me, and to Andrew Hill, on homecoming night all those years ago.
I’m struck again by the depth of her eyes, a gold veil over the green, and something in them that brings me right back to that night, the fire and the story and the small figure disappearing in the gloom as my bus pulled away.
She laughs. The sound is less amused than rueful, hemlock--bitter. “The witch in the woods who helps wronged women. I think there’s a new version every few years. Our town’s own Bloody Mary. I’ve always liked the idea.”
“What idea is that?”
“That there’s some kind of power out there that gives a shit what happens to girls,” she says. “So the kid’s really okay?”
“They told us he’s cold, hungry, and very unhappy, but nothing worse than scrapes and cuts,” I say. “It sounds like he got scared and went into an old root cellar to hide. It wasn’t marked on any maps.”
“There’s lots of stuff like that out there,” Emily says with a shrug. “We used to find them all the time.”
“Hopefully there’s not too much trouble with us being out of bounds,” I say probingly. “Bill seemed like the sort of guy to hold a grudge.”
“There won’t be,” Emily says, with more certainty than I’d expect. “Andrew and Melinda will make sure. Don’t worry. And speak of the devil . . .”
Andrew Hill is approaching, his hands swinging freely at his sides in a way that makes his gait more purposeful.
The years have hardened his already angular face.
You could call it handsome, but it’s always been an uncomfortable kind of beauty to me, with those blue eyes so pale they seem almost colorless.
“Emily,” he says as he joins us. He lifts a hand lightly to her elbow, a quick protective touch.
“I thought you were going to stay at the house.” He can’t quite keep the frown from his lips.
“Well. I didn’t,” she says. He regards her for a moment, and then seems to decide to let the matter go. His attention swings my way instead.
“Audrey, right?” he says. As if he doesn’t know. “Good to see you again.”
“Is it?” He stares at me; his sister snorts a laugh.
Andrew scowls. “I only meant it’s been a long time. Almost twenty years, isn’t it?”
Less than that, but clearly we’re pretending that particular interlude didn’t happen. “More or less,” I say.
“Audrey was a friend of Janie’s,” he says to Emily.
Part of me is surprised he said her name out loud.
They’d broken up long before that last night, the knocking on my window.
Their break had been cleaner than ours, but I knew Janie—-you couldn’t just walk away from her.
She always left herself scratched on your skin somehow.
“Yes. I remember,” Emily says with evident annoyance.
Andrew clears his throat. “Well. If you’ll excuse us. Melinda wants a word,” he says, directing the last to Emily.
“Am I in trouble?” she asks, a joke that isn’t quite a joke.
“Just some logistics to work out,” Andrew says. He puts a hand on her arm, less protective and more demanding this time. He nods to me. “Thank you for your service.” He moves off, guiding Emily along with him.
“Nice to see you, Audrey,” she says over her shoulder. I offer a nod in return, and watch a beat longer as she and Andrew recede.
Len ambles up to my shoulder, watching after them. “So,” he says pointedly. “We being nice to Hills now?”
“The nice ones,” I reply.
He gives me a look. “No such thing.” Len is the only person on the planet other than Andrew and me who knows what a colossal idiot I was one night in college.
I shrug and fold my arms, chewing my lip in thought. “Did you ever really meet Emily? She seems . . . fine.”
“I honestly don’t remember,” Len says. “She didn’t hang around much, did she?”
I rub the back of my neck. I try not to think about my teenage years. Janie haunts too many of those memories. “I never really saw her after sophomore year that I can remember.”
“Did she even go to FH?” Len says, frowning. “I think I remember something about her being homeschooled.”
“Maybe.” I clear my throat. “Hey, Len. Do you know anything about Meghan Vale? What’s going on with her case?”
He looks startled by the change of subject, but considers, scratching his chin. “There isn’t really one, as far as I know. She was fighting with her parents. Told people she was going to run away. Did. At least that’s what it looks like. Why?”
“Do you know if she had witch beads?” I ask.
“Those weird charm things you girls used to try to scare the menfolk with? No idea,” he says. “Is that still a thing?”
“Not as much as it used to be,” I say. “I found some in the woods. I wondered if they belonged to her.”
“Meghan Vale isn’t in the woods, Audrey,” Len says, with a hint of gentleness in his voice. “She’s in Seattle or LA or somewhere, or already on her way back home.”
I scrape my hair back, let out a breath. “Yeah. Probably.”
“You want to come over tonight? Kenny’s making lasagna.”
“I’m good.”
“You love lasagna,” Len says in a singsong voice. “Come on. Don’t spend the night alone in your apartment staring at pictures of dead people.”
“They’re not necessarily dead,” I say. “Besides, I’m not alone. Barry will be there.”
Len sighs, but he doesn’t argue. “I’ve got to go. Take care of yourself, okay?”
“Cross my heart,” I say. I trace an X over my chest, and I flee before he can call me on it. It used to be, Len and I took care of each other. These days, he’s got Kenny and a therapist. It leaves me feeling like I’m failing to keep up my end of the bargain.
I glance back toward the house. It’s a low, sprawling building, extensions tacked on at uncomfortable angles.
The trees cloistered around it leave little sunlight, but garden pots proliferate in the shade, hosting snaking vines and bursts of purple and scarlet flowers.
At the corner of the house, Emily Hill stands talking to her brother and sister.
Arguing with them, rather. Her arms are crossed, her head bowed, as Melinda speaks to her with short, animated gestures.
I can hear the blunt edge of her tone but not the words.
Emily’s pose speaks surrender, but even from this distance, I read rebellion in the set of her shoulders.
Then Andrew raises a hand, cutting Melinda off.
Whatever they’re arguing about, it’s none of my business. I get myself signed out properly and cleared to leave, and then I get in my car and maneuver my way around to point in the right direction, leaving the Hills and their land in my rearview.
I wait for the feeling of release and relief. Bryson Lee is alive, is safe. But that feeling doesn’t come.
Everything in me calls instead to turn back.
But it’s nonsense. I’m not a lucky charm, and I’m not some sage of the missing. Today was a good day. I should leave it at that.
I pull out onto the main road, and ignore the whispers urging me to stay.