A Hawk in the Woods Page 5

  It only took a few steps to circle the corpse of the tree, but she walked it slowly, treading down the sedge with care, looking for any clue. There were a half-dozen places that seemed disturbed, the sedge not as thick, the earth looser, but those weren’t what she needed. She made a complete circle, counterclockwise, without seeing what she was looking for, but on the second transit a root caught her eye. It was humped up out of the ground like the root of a very old tree, a tree that has battled rocks and erosion for a century. But this tree died young.

  She squatted and pulled up a few tufts of sedge on either side of the root, ignoring the pain in her hands. Clumps of dark mud full of half-rotted leaves came up with each bunch, shiny beetles and centipedes fled the sudden light. The damned sedge was tickling the bare insides of her thighs now that she was so near the ground. She shifted carefully, only to be brushed by another stem, and then she shifted not carefully and got a welt she wouldn’t be able to scratch in public. Fuck it. She tore sedge out of the ground by the handful and began to gouge dirt from under the root with the ice scraper.

  It wasn’t long before she hit something that sounded too hollow for a rock; a little bit more digging and she saw it. The bone was dull and the seams were loose. It would take finesse to get it out. She breathed deep, let her burning hand clutch the scraper so tight it dug into her flesh, then slowly, consciously relaxed.

  The root had grown over the skull, but not into it. She supposed it hadn’t had enough time, though what did she know about how fast roots grow? No more than Mom, and Mom obviously didn’t know enough or she would have buried the old man deeper. Too deep for Abby to ever find.

  She worked the scraper down until it hit a pebble. Pried the pebble out and threw it aside. And again. And again. If the summer had been a little drier, if the ground right here wasn’t soft, it would have been impossible. As it was, there were an awful damn lot of pebbles for such swampy ground. Every one she hit with the scraper jarred her arm and slowed her down. Chunks of quartz, mostly, some granite, even a fossil clam. She stuck a few in her shirt pocket, just in case. She was so close—one side of the skull was completely free, and if she could just get it loose on the other side it was hers.

  She found a piece of slate, the kind laced with iron oxide, in her way. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck as she worked the blade of the scraper under it, pried hard—and then fell back, her hand stinging and the snapped-off handle slipping out of her grasp.

  “Damnit!” She would have sucked her finger—it was bleeding where the sharp edge of the plastic caught it—but that seemed like a good way to catch worms. The blade of the scraper stuck out of the mud, taunting her. She pulled it out and threw it as far as she could.

  Her nails wouldn’t have to be nice when this was over, but the habit of taking care of them was hard to break now. She shuddered as she pushed her fingers into the dirt, but she did it. Shuddered and scraped at the slate until she found the edge and pulled it loose. Shuddered and worked her way beneath the skull.

  Her efforts must have loosened it; it came up right away. She rocked back, but didn’t fall this time, and it was in her hands. The right incisor was missing, as it should be.

  It seemed like the thing to do would be to wipe it clean and see the bone glint white, but she didn’t have anything to do that with but the hem of her shirt and she’d made enough of a mess of herself. Grandfather had been muddy a long damn time, he could put up with it a bit longer.

  The marsh didn’t seem anywhere near as wide going back as it did coming across, although the grass still sliced her and the bugs still droned around her head. A wave of triumph washed her—the universe loved her, and she could do anything; she never needed to be afraid. Things always worked out right for her, didn’t they? The humidity, the little bit of breeze, made the air feel like a caress.

  The hawk screamed again, but when she glanced up, it was too high to see.

  Martha was still huddled in the passenger seat, but at some point she’d rolled the windows all the way up. Abby considered holding the skull up like a mask and rapping on the window to get her attention. That’s what she’d have done when they were both twelve. But they had a long drive ahead of them.

  Martha saw the skull when Abby climbed into the car anyway. But she just rolled her eyes and stared out the window in silence as Abby pulled the car back onto the road and accelerated away.

  She had to get Grandfather, he would know what to do, but she didn’t want to. Her pride pricked at running away and needing help, but even more than that, she didn’t want to look at him after seeing the thing in his form. But she couldn’t figure any way out of it. At least he’d know what it was, where it had come from, how to get rid of it.

  Inside the house she felt safer—things like that didn’t come inside the house, Grandfather wouldn’t let them. She needed to get composed before she went upstairs. She went to the bathroom first, splashed her face with cold water and slapped the dust off her T-shirt. She tried to feel for Mom’s footprints on the clean dark wood of the stairs, in case there was leftover strength in them, but she didn’t get much.

  At Grandfather’s bedroom door she hesitated one more time, trying to think of any solution that didn’t involve knocking. Then she knocked.

  There was no answer, and she hesitated again, since the right course of action now depended on whether Grandfather didn’t hear or was pretending not to hear. But she didn’t have much choice; she knocked again, longer and louder.

  There was still no answer, and when she tried the doorknob—something that only imagining how Grandfather would react if she didn’t tell him about the thing wearing his face could drive her to do—it turned. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  Grandfather wasn’t at his desk. He wasn’t sitting at the window where the light was closest to good. He wasn’t in bed, snoring quietly but never, never really asleep—or at least that was what he claimed.

  Abby stepped further inside. It was a trick of some kind, he was hiding, testing her.

  The other possibility was that they’d actually all left. That she was alone here with that thing.

  But she was safe inside the house. And safer than anywhere else in the house here in this room. All she had to do was wait it out. All she had to do was put up with feeling helpless and unable to do anything, anything useful, for who knew how long.

  She looked out the window, but all she could see were the branches of the old pines wobbling in the breeze, and a lone car—not Mom’s—coming up Route 20 in the distance.

  She wasn’t going to watch and wait all day like a dog on TV. It wasn’t fair—even thinking about the fact that they’d all left her made tears of anger start irritating her eyes. But if she cried, that was worse because when they got back they’d think she was sad.

  She unclenched her fists, looked around. At least the anger was driving the fear out. Her eyes went back to Grandfather’s desk, the books he’d left out after her last lesson.

  She was still too young to dream of challenging Grandfather head-on, but she no longer believed that looking at his books without him beside her would mean instant madness and death, any more than she believed in Santa or the ghouls. At worst she’d just find some words she couldn’t translate. There had never been a chance this wide-open to look at the books Grandfather said were not for little girls.

  But there were gaps in the shelf, and those gaps corresponded with nearly all of the books she wanted to read. The big flaking De Vermis, the one she thought Grandfather himself might never have read because it looked like it would crumble if it was handled. The three brown-edged volumes by Nicodemus of Antwerp. The slender blue-backed volumes of Bible-thin paper that Grandfather used for making notes.

  She was scared again, and this time was worse, because she didn’t know what she was scared of.

  It felt like hours before the slam of a car door told her she needed to come out and pretend she’d never been in Grandfather’s room to begin with. It co
uldn’t have been that long, though, because she’d only managed to read a dozen pages of the book she’d settled for… but then, she’d been distracted, and the book was mostly about astronomy. It was as bad as homework.

  Abby put everything just as it had been, to the inch, to the precise tilt of the gaps where the missing books were, and shut the door in silence even though they’d never hear her from outside. By the time she got to her own bedroom window, Mom and Martha were out of the car, focused on the barn. Mom was holding a shopping bag that looked big and heavy enough for the missing books, and she had the stiff gait that she adopted when she was angry and drawing herself up tall. But Grandfather wasn’t with them.

  Martha was inside the barn before Mom even got to the shadow of the building. She didn’t creep or dart, didn’t hesitate or glance back when she got to the door. If she heard the moaning she didn’t give any of the usual signs of fear that the Martha Abby knew showed almost all the time.

  Abby thought If I run down as fast as I can I can warn Mom, at least. But she didn’t move and the thought passed. Mom disappeared through the heavy-beamed doorway.

  They were inside long enough for her to take ten deep breaths, the kind that kept her from crying. And then they emerged. Mom first, no longer holding the bag, gripping Martha’s hand instead. Martha, looking pale now and dragging her feet as though she was exhausted. And Grandfather was with them. Grandfather looking more robust than he had in weeks, the opposite of the sick parody in the barn. Grandfather swinging the bag that Mom had held so heavily. Grandfather, his clothes smooth and his face smiling. Grandfather, with one stray piece of oat straw stuck unnoticed in the thinning crown of his white hair, where only someone looking down on him from above would be able to see.

  That afternoon Mom pulled her aside and said, “Abby, hon, have you noticed Martha acting weird lately?”

  It was only years later that it occurred to Abby to be grateful that her first instinct was always to lie to her mother, that she shook her head so sincerely before she even thought.

  Mom frowned, disappointed. “Well, could you try to keep an eye on her? She tried to run away this morning, that’s why we were gone when you woke up, I had to go get her.” Her hands were flexing as she talked, curling into fists and out again. “If she talks about leaving again, or actually leaves when she’s supposed to be with you, you need to come get me right away. Don’t chase after her yourself, and don’t go get your grandfather. Just come find me. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s important,” Mom continued as though Abby hadn’t just agreed with her. “She could get really hurt, if she goes off on her own. You stay with her, okay? Look out for her.”

  “I always do, Mom. I promise.”

  And she’d kept that promise, hadn’t she? She’d never put much stock in promises but she’d kept that one.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In Columbus Abby stopped in a gas station parking lot long enough to check the news—nothing miserable had happened to their hometown yet, more was the pity—and to update Facebook and Twitter with vague witticisms. It would have been better if she’d had a picture for Instagram, but she had nothing to pose with, unless she wanted to show the whole world Grandfather’s skull. No one wanted to see a goddamn Subway sandwich. There was nothing here. How did people even live? They’d passed twenty-seven red-tailed hawks since they entered Ohio, she’d been counting, so she tweeted about that. Immediately some little know-it-all with the handle @birdingdude responded that they were one of the most common raptors in North America. There wasn’t much energy in the response, because he was mostly thinking about himself and birds, not her, but it was something.

  She didn’t post about how each hawk had risen from its perch on their approach and flown above the car for a quarter-mile or so before falling back and disappearing. Hard to miss after the fifth or sixth bird did the exact same thing. She also didn’t post about how each time that happened, the radio would turn on and that weird song would come through as barely audible mumbling. She didn’t want to risk directing more attention to it. It—if it was who she thought it might be—shouldn’t be able to use it but there were a lot of things that a hawk shouldn’t be able to do that he was doing. She should have known this might happen.

  The main thing was to keep Martha from noticing, lest she get distracted and panicky. She’d fallen into a sulk after their unscheduled stop and then gone to sleep, snoring lightly in the passenger seat, and thankfully stayed that way through Ohio. Now she was awake and alert, though, especially since she’d devoured an entire footlong and was gurgling the last sips of a Coke through her straw. Abby put the phone back down and plugged in the charger, then started punching up her workout mix. Better not to even give Martha the chance to touch the radio. But as soon as she tried to turn up the volume she heard, not her bouncy Rihanna or a driving Adele track, but that god-damn folk song again. And there she had two pretty babes born. All alone and so lonely-o. The lyrics made Abby grit her teeth. He was threatening her. Threatening Martha, yes. But that was the same thing.

  She yanked out the cord but Martha had already caught it—she didn’t say anything but she frowned in a way that suggested she suspected more than an annoying electrical failure.

  Now it was doubly important that she not notice the birds.

  “Okay, hotshot, it’s time you learned to drive.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “It’s a better idea than me falling asleep at the wheel while you lay over there like a pretty princess.”

  “You didn’t say I shouldn’t sleep.”

  “It’s fine.” A slight pause, as though she was going to let it go. “But I need to sleep too.”

  “I know, I wasn’t trying to…”

  “And we can’t risk any more hotels for a little while, until we’re sure they’re off our trail.” She knew by now that whatever Martha did to time back there was going to stick, as impossible as it seemed, but she wasn’t going to let Martha know that. She didn’t want her getting a big head about it.

  “You could just pull over and sleep.”

  “Waste of time. And suppose someone tries to rob us, or rape us? It’s not like we can call 911.”

  “Sure we could. I told you I…”

  Abby cut her off. “You should be excited about this. Driving is fun.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s scary.”

  “You’ll get over it. Here, come around to the driver’s side.”

  Martha hesitated, but when Abby opened her door and got out of the car her sister followed suit. Abby glanced up. No hawks in sight, not here. Hardly even any trees.

  Martha got to the driver’s side eventually, and once there she slid back inside and set her hands on the wheel, her fingers curling in a tight clutch like a kid pantomiming control of a race car.

  “Not there,” Abby said, reaching over to move Martha’s hands to the ten and two positions. She tried to reach back to her own driver’s ed days. They weren’t that long ago really. “Like this. Go ahead and turn it on.”

  Martha stared at the steering column for a moment, then said, “You haven’t given me the key?”

  “You don’t need one any more. Keyless ignition. Step on the brake and press the start button, there.”

  “Okay. Which one is the brake?”

  “Seriously?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Muscle memory?”

  Martha winced. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  That was good to know, actually. “Okay, it’s the one on the left. And don’t put both feet on the pedals, just use one foot and switch back and forth.”

  “Why?”

  “Too easy to screw up and press down with the wrong foot.”

  “Isn’t it just as easy to press down with the right foot in the wrong place?”

  “No.”

  Martha turned the car on. Abby watched her press on the brake with exaggerated care, depressing it firmly before s
he even lifted her hand to hit the button. When the engine came to life Martha flinched a little, even though the cabin was quiet enough.

  “Okay. Now let your foot off the brake.”

  “Where should I steer?”

  “Nowhere. We’re still in park. And when you put it in gear it might start creeping forward a little but you’ll have plenty of time to figure your shit out.”

  “This isn’t my shit.”

  By mile three Abby was almost ready to say “fuck it” and take the driving back over herself, but if she did that, Martha would just give up in frustration and declare driving too hard forever. Which wouldn’t even matter except for these next couple of days, but now Abby’s stubbornness was engaged, and she wasn’t going to let her sister off the hook without a fight.

  Especially not when she’d just lost two hours.

  She stared at Martha, who was staring at the road, her eyes scanning the pattern Abby described without variation, like a robot. At least she was holding her lane.

  “Faster.”

  “I’m going the speed limit.”

  “You should be doing five over.”

  “But what if we get stopped?”

  “No one ever gets stopped for five over, unless you’re in a school zone or black or something. Going too slow looks suspicious. Like you have something to hide.”

  “I don’t want to get stopped.”

  “If we get pulled over, just start crying and I’ll do all the talking.” In truth, getting pulled over would be a huge pain, with Grandfather in the back and all. She could handle it, but she was already tired and fucked off. So it was crucial that Martha stop driving like a stoner.