Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

Whether he was or he wasn’t, she was out of alternative plans that didn’t involve a jail cell and eventual prison. At this point, it was find Brian in Maine or game over.

“Here we go,” she whispered. She got back in the car and drove away.

Above her, the sun was on the run.

She left 201 at a place called The Forks. Not The Fork, singular. The Forks. It was so named, she suspected, because if you wanted to enter the wilderness by trekking northeast from here, the roads, as faint on her map as veins in an X-ray, splintered off 201 and then off one another and then off one another’s progeny until it appeared the only way back would be scent trails or prayer. It was full dark now, the dark of Germanic fairy tales and solar eclipses.

She turned onto Granger Mills Passage and drove along it for several miles — or it could have been just a couple; it was slow going up here — before she realized she must have missed the turnoff for Old Mill Lane. She turned back and drove through the black until an anorexic sliver of road appeared on her left. There was no marker to tell her what the road was or where it went. She turned onto it, drove about four hundred yards, and it ended. She flashed her sole high beam and all she saw beyond her grille was an embankment about four feet tall and a field on the other side of it. The road had never been a road, just the idea of one, soon abandoned.

There was no place to turn around, so she put the battered, creaking SUV in reverse and tried to navigate her way back through the pitch with one shattered brake light. Twice she drove into the shoulder. When she reached Granger Mills Passage, she drove back the way she’d come for about three miles until she found a cutout alongside some farmland. She pulled in there and killed the engine.

She sat in the dark. There’d be no more driving tonight. She sat in the dark and prayed that movement would be just as impossible for him, at least until morning.

She sat in the dark and realized she hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours.

She climbed into the backseat, pulled her coat from her backpack and wrapped it around her, and used the backpack as a pillow.

Lying in the dark now, as opposed to sitting in it. Closing her eyes.

The sun woke her.

She looked at her watch. It was six-thirty in the morning. A low mist hung over the fields, beginning to smoke along the upper edges as the sun burned it away. A cow stood about ten feet away, on the other side of some loose barbwire fencing, staring through her with cow eyes, its tail swishing at a small squall of flies. She sat up and the first thing she wished was that she’d thought to pack a toothbrush. She drank one of the bottles of water, ate a power bar. She stepped out of the car and stretched and saw more cows in the field across the road, more smoking mist. It was cool, even with the sun, and she tightened the coat around her and breathed in the clean air. She peed by the side of the car under the steady, disinterested gaze of the cow, its tail still swishing like the needle of a metronome, and then she got back in the car, U-turned, and headed off.

It was only twenty-five miles to Baker Lake, but it took her three hours. Anything one would call a road gave way to what one could only charitably call trails, and she was forever grateful she’d stopped last night because she would have ended up in a ditch or driving into a pond. Soon she was so deep into the wilderness that the trails lost their names and some that appeared on the map had been reclaimed by the weeds and the brush. She relied on the SUV’s compass to continue heading due northeast. The rocky dirt paths crunched under her wheels and the chassis rocked from side to side like a child’s carnival ride, exactly the type of motion that often nauseated her, but she gripped the wheel and stared through the window for the next hard curve or sudden rock formation, and she felt fine.

The farmland had given way to tumultuous fields of overgrowth and those eventually gave way to the return of woodlands, the kind of woodlands Brian had always claimed to be part and parcel of his family history and subsequent career. She realized now that Brian had chosen a symbol to represent himself that was the exact opposite of who he actually was. Wood was dependable, sturdy, you could place your faith in it for generations.

Brian, on the other hand, was the biggest liar she’d ever known. And as a reporter, she’d known a lot.

Then how did he manage to deceive you?

Because I let him.

And why would you do that?

Because I wanted to feel safe.

Safety is an illusion we sell to children to help them sleep.

Then I wanted to be a child.

The path ended in a small clearing. There were no other paths beyond it. Just the small oval of weeds and sand and then the next forest. She checked her map, but it wasn’t detailed enough to include this. She checked her satellite photos and felt hopeful that she’d reached a pale spot on one of them that, if she were correct, would mean she was about three miles south of the hunting camp. She changed into her hiking boots and checked that the safety on the P380 was on before she slipped it into her waistband at the small of her back. She’d barely walked ten feet before the rise and fall of it back there grew uncomfortable and she moved it to the pocket of her coat.

The trees were gargantuan. Their canopies blotted out the sun. She presumed bears lived in these woods, and she had a moment of panic when she couldn’t recall how recent her last period had been. But then she remembered — it had been about ten days ago, so at least her blood wouldn’t attract a predator. By the looks of these woods, though, the scent of her flesh might be enough; nothing human had passed along her footpath in a long time. And whatever hunter may have done so in years past, she was fairly certain he’d been quieter than she. She pushed through like the awkward city girl she was, crunching leaves, snapping twigs, breathing audibly.

She heard the lake before she saw it. It wasn’t gurgling or lapping against the land. It presented itself as a pocket, a lack of density that removed pressure from her left ear, pressure she hadn’t even known was there until it wasn’t. Soon small patches of blue winked through the tree trunks. She turned toward them. In fifteen minutes she stood along the water’s edge. There was no shore, just the edge of the forest and a six-foot drop to the water. She made her way along it for another half an hour before the light changed ahead of her, the trunks of the trees brightening with it, and she picked up her pace and stepped through the last of them into a clearing.

The first cabin she encountered was missing all its windows and half its roof. One wall was caved in. The one next to it, however, was the one Gattis had described — faded green trim, faded red door, but clearly kept up, no sense of the land reclaiming it, no cracks in the foundation, the steps leading up to it swept clean, the windows dusty but intact.

The boards croaked when she climbed the four steps to the door. She removed the pistol from her jacket and tried the door. The knob turned in her hand. She pushed the door open. It smelled of must inside, but not mold or rot, and it smelled of the forest, of pine and moss and bark. The fireplace was swept clean. It didn’t smell as if it had been used in a while. In the tiny kitchen, the counters bore a thin film of dust. The fridge was stocked with waters, three tall cans of Guinness with the plastic ring still holding them together, and some condiments still shy of their use-by dates.

The den, also small — the entire cabin wasn’t more than five hundred square feet — sported a cracked brown leather couch and a small bookcase filled with adventure novels and positive-thinking manuals. This was Brian’s place, all right. In the bathroom, she found the toothpaste and shampoo brands he preferred. In the bedroom, she found a queen-size brass bed that squeaked when she sat on it. She walked around a bit more but found no evidence anyone had been there recently. She went outside and looked for footprints around the cabin but found none.