Chapter 20
IT WAS NOT yet ten, but the night was already pitch-black, the moon snuffed by clouds, and Piney Road was a ribbon of lesser black winding through the trees. Pax hoped the Guard didn’t have curfew patrols out on the smaller, interior roads. Or if they did, that they were already busy chasing Tommy.
Pax turned south onto Sparks Hollow Road. A hundred yards before the T intersection with Creek Road he stopped and cut his headlights. He reached for the flashlight and turned it on.
He eased the car forward, driving with his head out the window, playing the feeble light of the flashlight across the road ahead of him. A few feet from the intersection he turned off the flashlight and nosed ahead. To his right was a dim glow that had to be the guard shack or the interior lights of some vehicle. Did Humvees have dome lights?
The western checkpoint was only a quarter mile down Creek Road to his right, a straight shot. The guards would see headlights as soon as he pulled out, and then as he drove away his taillights would be glowing like fox eyes.
But he had to go east only five hundred, six hundred yards before the road bent again and he’d be out of their sight. He could drive blind for a couple football fields, right? And if he drove into a ditch, so be it. It was only a fucking Ford Tempo.
He turned the wheel left and gently tapped the gas. He could see nothing; the windshield was a black canvas. At any moment he expected to bang into a tree or tilt off the road into the ditch. He leaned over the wheel, ears straining, eyes wide.
Thirty seconds passed and he couldn’t stand it any longer. He touched the brake—and the red glow lit up behind him. Shit! He’d forgotten about the brake lights!
Fuck it, he thought. He switched on the parking lights and accelerated. The faint yellow glow barely illuminated the pavement in front of him, but he thought he could make out theedges of the road.
Thirty seconds later he almost drove into the side of the mountain as the road hooked a hard right. He cranked the wheel, then flicked on the headlights to full and gunned it. He rifled through the single-lane bridge at fifty miles per hour and swung through the next big curve with wheels squealing.
No headlights appeared in his rearview mirror, no small-arms fire shattered his back window.
Jo’s mailbox appeared faster than he expected. He braked hard, swung onto the driveway, and snaked up the drive. The little house was dark, the patch of gravel out front empty of cars.
He shut off the Ford and got out, his heart still beating fast. He walked quickly to the edge of the slope, where he could look down on the stretch of shadow where the road lay. No headlights, no sirens. The only sound was the rattle of leaves in the chill breeze. His right hand shook along with the invisible leaves.
He patted the vial of vintage in his pocket but didn’t take it out.
All right, then.
He walked back to the house, calling, “Sandra! Rainy!”
He went from room to room through the dark, using only the flashlight because the house lights might attract Tommy or the Guardsmen. The girls weren’t inside, but he’d guessed that—known it—as soon as he’d entered.
He went out to the back door and flicked the light across the backyard. The tree seemed to jump out at him, gray bark materializing out of the night. He raised the beam of light until he saw the bit of frayed rope still dangling from the tree limb. It would take a strong man to hoist someone up into the tree. An iron grip to hold on while he slipped the rope around her neck.
Paxton walked to the edge of the lawn where the forest began. “Rainy! Sandra! It’s me, Paxton.” He walked into the trees. “Girls? You can come out now.” He stumbled against a root, stumbled again, and aimed the light up into the canopy. “Tommy’s gone—he’s already checked the house. Come inside. I’ll make you some soup.
“I have Sal-tee-eens,” he sang out.
He swung the light across the ground. A dirt path ran up into the trees, climbing the side of Mount Clyburn. He followed it with the light—and froze.
A small black figure hung from a tree branch, legs slowly twisting.
He shouted wordlessly, and the next moment the silhouette became a girl hanging by her arm. She let go and dropped to the ground, landing easily. She straightened and smiled into the glare of his light: a bald, dark-skinned girl dressed in jeans with a torn knee.
She ran down the path to him, her huge backpack bouncing, and threw her arms around him. “Paxton! We missed you!” Her hug nearly drove the breath from his lungs.
“You scared the hell out of me!” he said.
She laughed—he’d forgotten how she could laugh.
“Where’s Sandra?” he asked.
“She’s coming.”
They walked up to meet her halfway. She looked like an old woman: she wore a blanket draped over her shoulders, and below that was a long dress and furry boots. The path was steep so that when they reached each other her head was above his. She leaned down to him from her hips, embracing him at the shoulders like a grown-up. She seemed years older.
“You look cold, Sandra. Come on, let’s get you in the house. I brought food.” Then quickly: “Don’t worry, Tommy’s not there. He’s already checked the house and left.”
The girls didn’t answer. He’d have to decide how much to tell them, and how quickly. First, he thought, food.
They searched for another flashlight, and when they couldn’t find one they decided that it would be safe enough if they pulled all the drapes and set one or two lamps on the floor—no overhead lights. He warmed up the cans of soup on the stove—Rainy said, “Of course it’s soup, it’s the only thing you know how to cook”—while Sandra, wearing the blanket like a poncho, sat at the table making hors d’oeuvres of Saltines and peanut butter. “I should have brought popcorn,” Pax said. “This is like a sleepover.”
“We’ve never had a sleepover,” Sandra said.
“What, never?”
“When we lived here, nobody was allowed to come over,” Rainy said. “And when we lived at the Co-op, everyone was already there.”
Sandra kept apologizing for not bringing the laptop and for not coming to see him, even though it wasn’t her fault or Rainy’s: Tommy had grounded both of them the night of the town meeting. “We were watched all the time,” Sandra said. “Either Tommy or the white-scarf girls.”
“What’s with those scarves?” Pax asked. “Do you get them when you reach thirteen or something?”
Sandra laughed. Rainy looked at him with those flat eyes. “No.”
“How am I supposed to know?” he asked.
“That isn’t a Co-op thing—not the Co-op Mom started,” Rainy said. “Some girls just started wearing them.”
“To show they’re pure,” Sandra said. She leaned across the table, gave Rainy a peanut butter–smeared cracker, and Rainy placed it in Paxton’s mouth.
“You need to eat more than us,” Rainy said. Then: “They’re not beta enough. Older women, like Mom and the reverend, they’re tainted.”
He made a questioning noise and tried to swallow the cracker.
“You know …” Sandra said.
“You mean sex?” Pax asked.
“Sex with men,” Sandra said.
Rainy shook her head. “The white-scarf girls think it’s something special that they went through the Changes before they went through puberty,” she said. “Like a hat’ll make them closer to natural-born.”
“Like us,” Sandra said.
“Right,” Pax said. “You don’t need no stinkin’ hat.”
“We’re the first natural-borns,” Sandra said. “The white-scarf girls practically worship us.”
“And hate us even more,” Rainy said.
He found bowls in the cupboards and rinsed them out. At least the water was on. And the electricity. “Hey,” he said. “Did your mom own this place or rent it?” Somebody had to be paying the utilities. The twins looked more blank than usual. “Never mind.” He doled out the soup, and the girls made him clean and fill a bowl for himself.
After awhile he said, “So these scarf girls, why don’t they like you?”
“I said hate,” Rainy said. Then she shrugged. “They hated Mom, and we sort of inherited it.”
“But why? What did she do to them?”
Sandra looked at Rainy. Rainy said nothing.
“Girls, come on,” Pax said. “I know she left the Co-op for some reason. You told me that she argued with lots of people.”
“Mom had an abortion,” Rainy said.
“Rainy!” Sandra shouted.
“He should’ve already known that,” Rainy said to her.
Pax looked at the table for a time. “You’re right,” he said. “I should have known that.” Jesus, why hadn’t he come back sooner? Why hadn’t he reached out to Jo? He’d left her to raise the girls alone, but he’d told himself she was better off without him. She was the self-assured one, and she had Deke. Hell, she had an entire clade to help her raise the girls and look out for her. He hadn’t suspected for a moment that pregnancies would keep coming, or that her people would turn on her.
“So,” Pax said. “They exiled her.”
“You don’t know how our clade feels about … that,” Rainy said. “The white-scarf girls were outraged. They threatened her. And the doctor too. They burned things on Dr. Fraelich’s lawn. We had to leave.”
“Without Tommy,” Pax pointed out. Did he threaten her too?”
Generations of grandchildren stretching out in an unbroken line, Tommy had said. More real than you are.
“He would never hurt Mom,” Sandra said.
Pax said, “You told me they argued all the time. He must have been furious that she’d had an abortion.”
“Stop saying that word!” Sandra said. “Stop talking about it!” She pushed away from the table and stumbled as she got up. Rainy leaped up to catch her and Sandra shoved her away and ran from the room, blanket trailing like a cape.
Rainy looked at him, her face unreadable, then walked after her sister, calling softly, “Sandra, Sandra, come on now, sweetie …”
A half hour later he knocked softly and went inside the girls’ bedroom. The room was dark, but he made out Sandra’s nightgown-clad shape on the lower bunk, and Rainy sitting on the floor beside her, one hand on her sister’s back.
Pax crouched down. “Already asleep?” he whispered.
“She’s been tired lately,” Rainy said. “It’s the stress.” She sounded so adult.
He nodded. “Say, how would you like to help me with something?”
She followed him out of the room and closed the door carefully behind her. In the kitchen she saw the laptop open on the table, the bumper sticker on the lid upside down now. Christian Fish looked the same flipped or not, but poor Darwin Fish seemed to be on its back with its legs in the air.
“You looked in our backpacks,” Rainy said angrily.
“I picked it up and it was heavy—”
“You looked in our backpacks!”
He opened his mouth, shut it. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Rainy blinked at him. “Well, we did bring it for you.”
“And you haven’t gotten past the password yet,” Pax said.
“No, but the hacker guy already left town, didn’t he?”
“He left me instructions. And tools.” He showed the things that Weygand had left for him: two cans of compressed air, a Phillips screwdriver, a four-gigabyte thumb drive, and a sheet of notebook paper with six numbered steps—and several asterisks.
Rainy looked at the laptop. “Show me.”
Weygand had explained the procedure several times, and Pax was reasonably sure about the details. He handed Rainy the Phillips screwdriver, and she set about opening the bottom panel of the laptop that allowed access to the RAM cards.
Pax read over the instructions again. “Okay, stand by with the compressed air.”
He took out the laptop’s battery, plugged in the power cord, and turned on the laptop. At the log-in screen he typed a series of random characters—anything would do, Weygand had said, because regardless of what was typed the operating system would retrieve the encrypted password off the hard drive, unencrypt it, and hold it in memory so that it could be compared to the typed characters. The clear text password only existed in RAM, never on the hard drive where hacking software could get at it. If the log-in succeeded, or if the computer was turned off, the clear text would be instantly erased.
The key to the whole process, Weygand said, was redefining instantly.
The screen came back with an incorrect password warning. “Ready?” Pax asked. He tilted up the laptop to expose the open compartment on the bottom. “Go.”
Rainy blasted the opening with the compressed air. After ten seconds she switched hands. “It’s cold,” she said.
“That’s the point. Keep going.” Weygand had said that information in RAM didn’t disappear for twenty or thirty milliseconds—and if the RAM card was immediately chilled, the information could persist for up to a minute.
When the can started to sputter he yanked out the power cord and the screen went black. “Here we go,” Pax said. He grabbed the thumb drive, fumbled it into one of the laptop’s USB ports, and plugged in the machine.
The screen remained black.
“What’s supposed to happen?” Rainy asked.
Pax picked up the instruction sheet. “It’s supposed to boot from the USB drive. There’s some kind of hacker operating system that’s supposed to load and go looking through RAM for the password.”
“It’s not even blinking,” Rainy said.
“I can see that.”
How much time had passed, thirty seconds? Maybe the USB port was dead. He looked at the side of the laptop and saw there was another port next to the first.
Another ten seconds passed. Fifteen. He yanked out the thumb drive and unplugged the laptop. Then he put the drive into the second port and plugged it in again.
“Should you have done that?” Rainy said.
“I have no idea.”
The screen flashed, and the Macintosh loading screen appeared. In a few seconds the log-in dialog box appeared.
“Shit.”
“It’s okay, Paxton,” Rainy said, and patted his hand. Her fingers were cold.
“It was probably working in the first port! I should have tested this first. All right, we’re going to try this again.” He picked up the instruction sheet and started reading through the steps yet again.
“Tommy says you’re a junkie,” Rainy said.
He jerked his head up. “What?” He could feel the heat in his cheeks. “That’s crazy, hon. Do you even know what a junkie is?”
“We know about the vintage. We’ve taken care of you while you were on it.”
“I don’t think you understand—”
“We’re worried about you, Paxton. Both of us are. We want you to stop hurting yourself.”
He put down the paper. “I’m working on it,” he said. He smiled. “The problem is, I’m a better person when I take vintage than when I don’t.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true, hon. I just, uh, feel more.” He picked up the screwdriver, ran his thumb along the metal. “It’s hard to explain, but I get this feeling of, I guess, connection.” He laughed. “Honestly, sometimes I lose track of where I stop and other people begin. Even people I have trouble relating to, on the vintage I can talk to them.” Even dead people, he thought. His conversation with his mother had been better than any he’d had with her while she was living. “I can just … love them.”
Rainy took the screwdriver out of his hand and put it on the table. “Maybe you should try doing it without the vintage.”
She regarded him with that preternatural blank calm. After a moment he said, “You know, you’re pretty clever for a twelve-year-old.”
“You don’t know many twelve-year-olds.”
“Seriously, you’re the smartest kid I’ve ever met. You remind me so much of your mom.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Tommy says that all the time.”
“Okay …” he said. Who wouldn’t want to be Jo Lynn Whitehall? Pax certainly did. Maybe they didn’t like it because of the way Tommy said it. “You know,” Pax said, “You haven’t told me yet why you and Sandra ran away from him.”
She wouldn’t look at him. She went to the sink, picked up a cloth towel.
“Rainy, did he hurt you? Or Sandra?”
“Tommy wouldn’t hurt us,” she said. “Not like that.” She rubbed the cloth along the edge of the counter. “He wants to take us away. Out of Switchcreek.”
“Ah,” Pax said.
She turned to face him. “You knew?”
“Tommy came looking for you tonight,” Pax said. “He said some things.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“It’s an empty threat, Rainy. Tommy can’t leave Switchcreek—soldiers are guarding all the roads.”
“No, there’s a plan,” she said. “A plan to sneak us out. A couple of the white-scarf girls told us. People in the Co-op are working on it.”
“What? Why? Why would they let him take you?”
Rainy looked away. “We told you—we’re special.”
“Yeah, the natural-born thing. But there are other natural-borns, aren’t there? Why you two?”
She shrugged. “Because we’re the first, I guess.”
“Rainy, this doesn’t make any sense. If you’re that special, they wouldn’t just let Tommy run off with you, they’d protect you.”
“They think that’s what they’re doing.”
“This is bullshit,” Pax said. He got up from the table. “When was this supposed to happen?”
“In the morning.”
“What?”
“That’s why we left tonight. We can’t trust Tommy, or the reverend.”
“Wait a minute. How are they going to get you out? There are checkpoints, helicopters—”
“I don’t know, they didn’t tell us that!”
Jesus, he thought. Tommy was going to get them killed like Deke and Donna.
“All right, listen,” Pax said. “I’ll go to the Co-op, I’ll talk to the reverend—”
“No! You can’t talk to her!”
“I’ll tell her that if Tommy tries to kidnap you that I’ll tell the Guard.”
“But she’s a part of this! You can’t trust her, Paxton.”
“I’m not talking about trusting her—I’ll be informing her. She won’t be able to do anything to you, and Tommy won’t be able to do anything to you. I promise.”
She regarded him warily—or what he took for wariness.
“I promise,” he said again.
“Look, there’s nothing we can do till morning. We’ll worry about all that stuff tomorrow. Meanwhile …” He picked up the remaining can of compressed air and put it in front of her. “Why don’t we take another crack at this?”
Rainy fell asleep at the table with her head resting on her forearm. They’d made no progress on getting past the log-in screen. Weygand’s hacker scheme had given them nothing but cold hands. They’d spent an hour trying every password they could think of—“sandra,” “rainy,” “lorraine,” “switchcreek,” “bowie,” “changes,” then birthdays and favorite places—and then when Rainy put her head down he went on trying the names of flowers and the names of authors on her bookshelf. Uppercase, lowercase, title case. Nothing worked, but at least the laptop refrained from locking him out.
The tube of vintage, melted now, seemed to burn in his pocket.
“Let’s go, Rainy.” She startled when he touched her arm. He helped her to her feet, then ushered her through the dark to her bedroom. He circled his arms around her thighs and hoisted her to the top bunk.
“Paxton,” she said from the dark.
“Yeah, hon?”
She was silent for a long time.
“Are you crying, Rainy?”
She sighed. “No. I have trouble crying.”
“Me too.”
“I sure want to, though.”
Another long moment passed, and then she said, “My mom did some bad things.”
Rainy couldn’t use the A-word more than once, it seemed.
“I know it’s hard to understand,” Pax said. “Some things aren’t black and white. Your mom wasn’t against children—she wasn’t against you. She just believed that a woman has a right to choose when—”
“She killed her baby, Paxton. My little sister.”
“Oh, hon,” he said sadly. Rainy was the stronger of the two sisters, but this had obviously been eating at her, too. “Your mom wasn’t a bad person. It’s just that some people believe that a fetus isn’t …” Isn’t what? He wasn’t prepared to have this conversation. “Maybe when you’re older you’ll understand.”
“She talked about giving all the girls pills. She said they ought to put it in the water.”
“She didn’t mean that.”
“Mom didn’t say anything she didn’t mean. Everyone knew that.”
“Okay, you may be right on that one.” He put a hand through the rails and squeezed her calf. “But those girls at the Co-op, they’re getting pregnant without having a choice. Your mom wanted to protect them.”
“No, she wanted her choice. The white-scarf girls want their babies, Paxton.”
“But they’re just girls. They’re not old enough to make that decision. And when they do get pregnant, of course they want to keep the babies. It’s hormones, it’s—”
“It’s not just hormones!”
“Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. But someday you’ll understand that even good people can do things that seem wrong. Bad things. Sometimes they have to.”
“She was going to keep doing them, Paxton. She was going to keep killing the children. Mom and the reverend.”
“Rainy, no. I don’t know what you heard, or thought you heard—”
“I can prove it.” She started to climb out of the bed. “It’s in my backpack.”
“Hold on, what’s in your backpack?”
“Just get it.”
He went out of the room, found the big nylon bag in the kitchen, and brought it back to the room.
Rainy searched through it for a few moments, unzipping pockets, then said, “Here.” She pressed something into his hand. “Reverend Hooke gave these to my mom.”
It was a pill bottle. It was too dark to make out the label. “What is this, Rainy?”
“Mifeprex is what it says on the label,” the girl said. “Mom called it something with a number. It’s an abortion pill.”
He blinked. “RU-486?”
“That’s it.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. After a moment Rainy said, “I heard Mom talking to Hooke on the phone about it. She asked the reverend for them.”
“Maybe you misunderstood what—”
“I’m not stupid, Paxton.”
“But who were they for?” He still didn’t believe that she’d heard correctly. “One of the white-scarf girls?” Or Jo, he thought, though he didn’t say that aloud.
After a moment of silence Rainy said, “I didn’t hear who it was for.”
“Okay, when was this? How long ago?”
“Paxton, it was the night she died.”
“What?”
“She called the reverend after we went to bed that night.”
Pax pressed his forehead against the wooden frame. “Did you tell anyone this?” he asked. “The police, or Deke?”
“We were too scared. If Mom and the reverend were doing this, then who knows—”
“Jesus, Rainy!” He kept his volume down for Sandra’s sake, but his anger was clear. “You should have told someone.”
He immediately regretted yelling at her. Of course they’d been afraid. What trusted authority figure would turn out to be the next monster? Baby-killer. The most depraved criminal a beta girl could imagine. No wonder the only people the twins trusted were each other. And maybe—now—Pax.
“Don’t worry,” Pax said. “I promise to take care of everything. In the morning I’ll … well, we’ll think of something.” He found her face in the dark and kissed her on the smooth top of her head. “The point is, you’re not alone in this anymore. We’re a team, right? A club.”
Pax had belonged to only one club in his life. As the only remaining member, he granted himself the power to silently induct them on the spot—they’d already met the organization’s membership requirements.
He closed the bedroom door, thinking, Welcome to the Switchcreek Orphan Society, girls.
He sat in the book-lined living room with the computer open on his lap, its screen washing his face with cold light. He thought of unwanted pregnancies and chemical abortions, secret passwords and suicide notes, corruption and embezzlement and blackmail. Deke had said Jo had figured out what Rhonda was doing. The proof might be right under his fingertips. He pecked at the keyboard, typing random words into the password box, watching the machine instantly reject each one.
The vintage sat heavy in his pocket like a tiny bomb.
Instead he picked up the bottle Rainy had given him. The label was muddy and the ink smudged, but he’d been able to decipher the important details: the patient was Elsa Hooke; the prescribing doctor was Dr. Fraelich, Marla; and the three tablets were for something called “Mifeprex (Mifepristone)”—neither of which he’d ever heard of. The tablets came in large 200-milligram doses, and all three were still in the bottle. The prescription had expired more than six months ago.
Jo had known that the reverend had the pills and hadn’t used them. He thought of Jo sitting in this room when she realized that her body had betrayed her again, that it had once again manufactured a fertilized egg like a tumor—unwanted, unearned, and unasked-for. The idea of three such invasions in a dozen years horrified him.
He put the medicine bottle into his pocket—and look, here was the vial of vintage.
He held the tube in his hand, turning it. He decided to empty the vial into the toilet. Later he resolved to take one sip and then throw the rest away. Sometime after that he committed to a new life: In the morning he’d return to his house, empty the freezer, and call his father to tell him he’d never be able to visit in person again.
Then, as morning approached, he thought, One last drink. A toast to my new life.
He removed the cap and kissed the lip of the vial, small mouth to his larger one. He tipped the tube higher and held it until he could no longer feel the thick drops on his tongue.
Even after it was empty he couldn’t let it go. He sat on the couch for a long time, turning the empty thing in one hand while he typed nonsense words and strings of numbers and every Bowie lyric he could think of.
The wind picked up, setting the back door to knock against the frame like a cranky child. Finally he set aside the laptop and walked to the kitchen. He started to close the door but instead opened it wider. The cold breeze felt good against his face. It was 6:00 a.m., still an hour before dawn, but the blanket of clouds had begun to thin. The huge tree, still bulky with leaves, held back a charcoal gray sky.
He sensed someone behind him and turned. She leaned in the kitchen doorway, her arms folded across her chest. She was dressed for warmer weather: a white wife-beater T-shirt, khaki shorts, bare feet. Her skin shone, a glaze of dark raspberry.
“Hey, Jo,” he said.
She smiled, turned, and walked into the living room. She looked at the laptop.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been trying to violate your privacy. Haven’t had much luck, though.”
She tilted her head and smiled.
He said, “So what’s the password, Jo?”
And then he knew. As surely as if she’d spoken it aloud.
He sat down and put the computer on his knees. He was such an idiot. There was only one possible password. And if it didn’t open the laptop he’d chuck the thing out the window.
He typed three letters—SOS—and tapped return.
The password dialog box blinked away, and a screen full of icons replaced it.
“Switchcreek Orphan Society,” he said. Jo pursed her lips, silently laughing.
He opened a folder on the hard drive just to see if he could. “You care to tell me where you left your suicide note?”
She shook her head. He didn’t know whether that meant she hadn’t left one or didn’t want him to read it.
“I can look at this later,” he said. “Right now I want to—”
He noticed a folder on the desktop named “RM” and forgot what he was going to say. He clicked on it and saw a long list of word processor documents, spreadsheets, scanned images, as well as a dozen subfolders. The names “Rhonda” and “Mapes” and “RM” were on most of them. He clicked on a folder at random—Tema2007—then opened an image named MedFund2007Page01.tiff. It was a scan of a complicated form from the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency—some kind of payment for medical services. Dr. Fraelich’s name was near the top, and he wasn’t surprised to see Rhonda’s name right after it. The dollar amount was for over a million dollars—$1,100,022.00 to be exact. And there were a dozen more forms just in this one folder.
If he was going to understand what the form meant he’d have to go through all these documents, look for any notes from Jo herself. But he was pretty sure it wouldn’t paint Rhonda in a positive light.
He shook his head, amazed. “How much did you have on her, Jo?” He looked up and she was walking away from him, toward the back door. He set aside the laptop and hurried after her.
She walked out into the backyard. Her hand trailed across the trunk of the huge oak, but she didn’t glance up. He almost caught up to her as she entered the trees at the edge of the yard.
The faint light from the sky vanished. She was only a few feet ahead of him, but he could barely see her pale T-shirt against her dark shoulders. They went uphill, Jo moving quickly and noiselessly, Pax stumbling over roots and rocks, cursing, jogging to catch up with his hands held out in front of him to warn him of tree trunks.
After ten, fifteen minutes they stepped out into a clearing like a basin of moonlight.
Jo turned to look at him. Her eyes gleamed. Her shirt seemed to glow.
He looked around. The path continued on the other side of the clearing, heading back down into the valley, toward the Whitmer farm and the Co-op.
At the high edge of the clearing was a makeshift bench made from three logs. Jo sat down and held out a hand. He sat next to her and she warmed his hand in hers. They stared out at the silvery grass, the dark woods. He knew she was a figment of his imagination, a chemical dream like all the other vintage-prompted hallucinations. He didn’t care.
“I’m sorry, Jo,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
She said nothing. That was all right. The heat of her skin against his was enough.
Above them the gray sky took on indigo hues. Color seeped into the air, painted the grass with faint greens and yellows, rusted the leaves at the edge of the clearing.
Jo looked at him, then looked back at the bushes behind her. He followed her gaze but didn’t see anything. He stood, stared up the slope into the trees. They were still a half hour’s hike from the top of Mount Clyburn.
“I don’t know what you want me to see,” he said to her. He moved behind the bench, still peering into the woods, and his foot came down on something round and hard.
He reached down into the long grass and picked up a metal flashlight streaked with mud. Jo’s flashlight, he decided. He clicked the button, and the light snapped on. After months in the woods, the batteries were still good.
She looked up at him over her shoulder, her gaze steady. She’d come here that night, he realized. She’d left the house after the girls were in bed, then made her way up to this place, following the flashlight. She’d sat on this bench, waiting.
And this is where she died.
He clicked off the light and came around to the front of the bench and kneeled in front of her, instantly wetting his knees.
“Who was here, Jo? Who did you meet? Was it the reverend?”
She gazed down at him with oil-black eyes. Then she smiled—a very un-beta smile that summoned the girl she’d been—and then rapped her knuckles against his forehead: tock, tock. Figure it out, knucklehead.
He stood up, looked back the way they’d come, then at the path that led down to the farm, the Co-op. This clearing was the halfway point. He started down the slope, then realized that Jo wasn’t following.
He looked back. She sat on the bench, her eyes on him. She was going no farther.
He lifted a hand. He knew that she wasn’t really there, but he was nevertheless reluctant to leave her behind. Yet again.
She nodded toward the woods behind him. Finally he turned and started down.