Big Woods

by May Cobb

  49

  Sylvia

  Dr. Marshall arrived twenty minutes later, red-faced and furious. “What’s going on?”

  “A word with you, please?” I asked, and we huddled together in the hall in a weak pool of light. “Who was Delia discharged to?”

  “The police from her hometown, Starrville.”

  I felt like he punched me in the gut. “How could you?” I asked, my voice climbing higher.

  “You have zero authority here, Nurse Parker,” he said. “I’m warning you, let it go,” he said, before twisting away from me and plodding down the hall.

  I punched out from my shift at 7:15 the next morning and walked out into the sunlight, pub blind from the dark basement. It had rained steadily through the night, and a warm spell had blown in with the storm, making the air hot and sticky.

  I fished out my keys from the bottom of my purse and my shoulder brushed the branch of a willow tree; drops of rainwater rolled down the leaves, showering me. Birds were trilling in the treetops, singing their morning song, and everything looked cleansed, immaculate, but I couldn’t luxuriate in the beauty. My mind was fixed on what I would tell the sheriff.

  Driving to the police station, I noticed that all the pear trees were already starting to bloom due to the warm snap, their china-white blossoms opening too early, and I had the bitter thought, You fools! We will still get another freeze!

  When I arrived at the station, the parking lot was empty, so I pulled into a spot just near the entrance. As I was walking up the flat concrete steps I stepped into a brown puddle of water that splattered dramatically across my white uniform hose.

  After the heavy damp from outside, the station lobby felt chilly, so as I sat on a bench waiting for the sheriff, I kept snapping my hose, trying to get them to dry faster.

  The sheriff didn’t keep me waiting long, and after he shook my hand I trailed behind him down the long, dark, wood-paneled corridor.

  He asked me to have a seat and as I was just beginning to explain why I was there, his phone line buzzed and he rolled his eyes in apology, punching the square blinking button and holding up his index finger, indicating that he’d be right with me.

  As he talked in a clipped tone to someone who I imagined was a deputy or a fellow officer, I looked around his tidy office. Everything was polished and orderly, and the room had the oaky furniture polish smell of a library. My eyes landed on his wall of diplomas, something I hadn’t expected. He had two bachelor’s degrees—one in Philosophy and one in History—from the University of Texas in Austin, and also a Criminal Justice degree from Sam Houston State. A thinking man, I thought, and for some reason, this gave me some relief. His voice was also thoughtful and distinguished, not like the rough slang of most of the men in this area. I guessed him to be in his early forties, but this morning, his strawberry-blond hair was freshly washed and combed over to one side so that he looked boyish, almost like a kid playing cop.

  He hung up the phone and apologized for keeping me waiting. I found myself spilling it all out to him: how Delia came to us, how she feared for her life, and finally, how she had been released back to the same people who were abusing her. I searched his face for signs of skepticism, but if he had any, I couldn’t read them. I felt like he was keenly listening to me, hanging on my every word and the whole time I talked he was jotting notes down in his green steno pad, his ballpoint pen gliding swiftly over the paper, nodding quickly and seemingly taking me serious.

  At one point I got choked up and cried as if Delia were my own daughter, and the sheriff—Tommy, as he asked me to call him—hopped up and grabbed a box of tissues off his sideboard, offering one to me.

  When I was finished talking, he snapped his notebook shut, clicked his pen, and fixed his sea-green eyes on me. “I’ll certainly look into this, Mrs. Parker. In the meantime, here’s my card if you need anything else at all,” he said, warmly.

  I gathered up my purse and thanked him, and stepped out into the sunlight feeling buoyed.

  That night during my shift, once a hush had fallen over the unit, I huddled in the corner with Hattie and told her about my visit to the sheriff.

  Her chestnut-brown eyes went wide. “Sylv, did you really? I’m proud of you, I’m glad you stepped forward. And I do hope we find out she’s with family.”

  The next morning, I clocked out a little bit early, eager to get back to the police station. It was still pleasant out, the morning felt like a warm yawn after the chill of winter. On the way over, I pulled into the donut shop and got a box of assorted pastries and a cup of coffee.

  The sheriff led me back to his office immediately. Right away, I could tell his mood was different, chillier. He did accept a donut from me, selecting one filled with strawberry jelly and eating it carefully, but I could tell straight away, it wasn’t good news.

  “The girl,” he said, between bite fulls of donut, “has a bunch of priors, according to Sheriff Meeks.”

  “But the sheriff is the one—”

  But I couldn’t finish before he put his hand up.

  “They say she’s a druggie, has mental problems, has been unstable for some time now.”

  I didn’t believe him, of course. And he didn’t come out and say it but I could see it on his face: he thought Delia was a throw-away, a floozy.

  “Sheriff Meeks is a fine man, Mrs. Parker,” he said, wiping jelly from the corner of his mouth. My own donut expanded in the back of my throat and I had to force myself to swallow it down.

  “They’ve assured me that she’s in the best hands possible now, with her family in Fayetteville, Arkansas.”

  “I’d like some kind of confirmation, some kind of address or something, so I can check in on her,” I pleaded.

  “I’m sorry, even if I had that information I couldn’t disclose it,” he said.

  “But these men, these men that raped and tortured her,” I said, my voice turning shrill. “They just get to carry on? What about their other victims?”

  The sheriff looked at me and tilted his head as if he were trying to assess whether or not I was crazy. There was a hint of condescending sympathy in his eyes, but then he turned stone-faced again. “I spoke at length to your boss, Dr. Marshall, yesterday. He assured me that his diagnosis stands—paranoid schizophrenia. I know you had a special relationship with the girl, and so I know this is hard to hear.” His mouth emphasized the word special. “I’m awfully sorry that she’s in such bad mental shape, but you have to believe me, there is no conspiracy here.”

  I closed the box of donuts and slid them to the side of the desk. I reached into my coat pocket and my fingers found the map. I was just about to show it to him, but something stopped me: the thought that he might be in on it, too. So I tucked it back into my pocket and pulled my purse into my lap and stood to leave, giving him a courteous nod and thanking him for his time as I backed calmly out of his office.

  50

  Leah

  Sunday, November 19th, 1989

  Lucy missing 7 weeks, 2 days

  Ever since the full moon party I keep having the same dream. I’m headed down a long, blacktopped road—it’s almost dusk and I’ve never been on this road before—and it feels like I’m floating above the road, hovering just beneath the tree line. I want to know what’s down the road, it’s like I’m being pulled, so I keep going. I pass a small white church, then a rickety farm house with a faded red barn that slants toward a rusty barbed wire fence. I pass an old one-room schoolhouse that’s been boarded up, and then the road slopes down to reveal a wide, open valley. My stomach drops as I coast down the hill until the road climbs up again, threading through a canopy of thick trees. It’s almost dark when I reach a long, red-dirt drive to the right. I stop and try and go down that road but I wake up each time before I can, and even though I don’t see Lucy in my dream, I know it’s her. She’s trying to show me something.

 
51

  Sylvia

  I left the police station shaking, my hands trembling with my keys, my breath jagged. I drove straight home and tried to clear my head. I walked through the door and chucked the rest of the donuts in the trash—my stomach was in knots and I knew I couldn’t finish them. I paced the house, trying to figure out what to do. I thought about calling the police in Fayetteville, to see if they by chance had any information, but I knew she wasn’t there. I thought about calling Hattie, but I knew she’d be sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her. I tried to lie down on the couch and fall asleep, but my mind wouldn’t stop racing, so after a few minutes I got up and tried to busy myself with tidying up.

  Finally, the house itself became unbearable to me. I changed into a pair of jeans and an old, faded button-down—my gardening clothes, really—and put on a head scarf and some oversized sunglasses and got back in the station wagon. Once inside, I unfolded the map and pressed it over my steering wheel, then started the engine and backed out of the drive.

  I drove to the south side of town and picked up the interstate and headed west toward Dallas. Once I crossed the river at the edge of town, I started counting the miles. Delia had told me it would be about fifteen until the exit. The interstate was quiet in the middle of the day, except for a few eighteen-wheelers zipping past. I got to the exit before long, the green sign that read Starrville/Omen Road. The road in the map hooked right just off the feeder road and I had to slam on my brakes to make the turn, the blacktop road appearing before I had anticipated it.

  I could picture Delia making it to the highway half naked and flagging down that trucker who drove her near the hospital before she jumped out of his truck at a red light.

  The night she had escaped, she told me that they had untied her from the stone first. She had performed sex acts with them as compliantly as she could, and after the sheriff was finished with her, she looked up at his sweaty face with sheepish eyes and asked if she could go into the woods to relieve herself. The second she got behind the first wide tree, she peered around to make sure no one was looking, then she ran and ran and ran and ran with no feeling at all in her bare feet, just a white hot desire to escape. She told me she kept picturing herself making it to the main road, and that’s what gave her the courage to keep running even though her legs were getting scratched up and her feet were bleeding. She kept running until her feet found the smooth tar of the black road.

  The road dipped down and to my left there was a thick line of pine trees, their fat waists cinched back by barbed wire. The road plunged down even farther, exposing a wide belly of pasture before being swallowed back up by more trees.

  About three miles in, I started scanning for the unmarked red dirt road. I slowed the car and turned right onto the road, which was just a rust-colored lane, really, with thick weeds growing between muddy tire tracks. The bottom of my station wagon chewed on the weeds but I kept idling forward, slowly. I wasn’t even sure I was on the right road—it looked like I was driving across somebody’s pasture—but then, after climbing a steep incline, I saw the stand of trees that gave way to the dense pack of woods that Delia had drawn on the map. When I got closer to the row of trees, I eased the car into the pasture and parked.

  I killed the engine and opened the door, which creaked loudly, but I stepped out and looked around. It seemed like there was nobody else out there.

  In the open field, the wind had picked up and the willowy tops of pine trees contracted like clouds. Wild wisteria vines hung from the trees, their lilac clumps swinging in the breeze like clusters of grapes. It was midday and the sun was radiant on my face, but as I walked deeper into the woods the sunlight became watered down, chilling the air and making everything look muted. I walked a little farther until I found the clearing for the little cemetery. Delia was right: you would never know this place existed if someone didn’t tell you.

  It was tiny—just a handful of graves, maybe thirty at the most—tucked inside a black iron gate with a sign that read, Forsythe Memorial. From the looks of it, it seemed to be an old family graveyard or a cemetery of a forgotten township, and in the green pasture adjacent to it, I saw the large circle of stones, just as Delia had described.

  Sunlight filtered through the trees, lighting up the faces of the stones and I thought I could see the rust splatter of dried blood on one of them. I kept listening for sounds to make sure I was still alone, but the wind kept gusting and shushing through the woods so that it made everything feel disorienting. I could smell the charred embers from the fire ring that was in the center of the stone circle, exactly like Delia had drawn on the map, and I stood out there in the howling wind and said just loud enough for the wind to hear: “So this is where these horrible things happened to you.”

  Just then, something scurried along in the woods behind me. I whipped around to look but saw that it was just a squirrel shimmying up the trunk of a tree. I turned back around and then heard a louder snap of a branch and what sounded like heavier footfalls. I looked over my shoulder and out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a dark figure pass behind a tree and stop.

  My heart chiseled in my chest and I found myself walking over to a gravesite and kneeling down and praying before it, as if I were visiting a lost loved one. I made a big show of crossing myself and prostrating in front of the grave, and even went as far to sweep pine straw off the headstone. My knees became saturated with the clean damp of wet grass, but I stayed planted there, not wanting to move.

  After a while, I stood up and turned in the direction of my car and walked slowly toward it, not looking back but having the strongest feeling I was being watched.

  52

  Leah

  Monday, November 20th, 1989

  Lucy missing 7 weeks, 3 days

  I’m upstairs in Lucy’s room, lying in her bed. Our old pecan tree has been picked clean of its leaves, and the branches scrape against the thick-paned window next to her bed. I’ve just gotten off the phone with the sheriff. It’s cold and black outside and freezing wind seeps through the windowsill, turning my nose red.

  By the time I got to school this morning, Ali’s story had already bounced around the halls like a boomerang. It was all anyone would talk about. Saturday night, she had gone to a party out at the lake with Brett. When he took her home at the end of the night, they turned down her street and at first, they both thought it had snowed in her front yard—everything was blinding white. But smiling, Ali said she realized her house had been rolled, and only the popular

  senior boys rolled houses of girls they thought were cute. Hundreds of rolls of toilet paper were draped from the willow trees in her front yard. Even the mailbox and the front hedges were all wrapped in white. But after Brett kissed her goodnight and she climbed out of his car and skipped up the sidewalk, she saw the message, spray-painted in white jagged letters across her bright green lawn:

  YOU’RE NEXT, BITCH.

  She thought it was because of her petition to ban MTV and was telling everyone at school she thought Rain and the Wavers were behind it. Buoyed by all the attention, she strode around the cafeteria during lunch today, valiantly wielding her clipboard, determined to get up to two thousand signatures.

  But just after lunch, when she went to get her books for fourth period out of her locker, thirteen shriveled black roses flew out at her like a flock of ravens. There was a note, too:

  Blond hair

  Eyes of blue

  Picked these roses

  Just for you

  Don’t sleep alone

  We’re watching your home

  And know which one’s your window, too.

  I heard her high-pitched scream from all the way down the hall—not her usual cheerleader squeal but a shriek of true terror—and saw her hands fly to her cheeks before she took off bounding down the stairs to the principal’s office. Soon she was flanked by both Brett and her parents, who had rushed to the school.
They demanded that the police be called.

  In fifth period, annual staff, I watched from the window as Rain was led out by two officers, his hands clasped behind his back in handcuffs, his streaked blond hair swinging behind him. The officers were wearing hats and even though I couldn’t see his face, I could tell by his walk that one of them was Sheriff Greene.

  When the last bell sounded and I walked outside, Mom was waiting in the parent pick up line. She was dressed in a long, black wool coat and was leaning up against our Honda. When I got closer, I saw that her eyes were swollen so much that they were just dark slits.

  “Come here, honey,” she said, pulling me into her. She leaned down and put her forehead to mine.

  “What is it, Mom?” I said, panic creeping into my voice.

  “Let’s get out of here so we can talk,” she said, opening the passenger side door for me.

  A lit cigarette smoldered in the ashtray, sending wispy curls of smoke up the dash. Mom’s unfinished coffee from this morning sloshed between us in a splattered Styrofoam cup as she drove us a few blocks to a nearby park, killing the engine and turning to face me.

  “The police found Lucy’s coin purse this morning,” she said, her eyes roving all over my face.

  “Where?” I shot back, frantically.

  Mom sucked in a quick breath before continuing, “They found it near a gas well out in Big Woods,” she said, her voice breaking before giving way to sobs. The whole car blurred and spun and I felt like I was going to throw up.

  After a few moments, Mom let out a long sigh and stared straight ahead as she told me the rest.

  An oil field worker had gotten a repair call for a gas well out in Big Woods this morning. When he climbed out of his truck and walked toward the well, something reflected off a nearby tree and caught his eye. He walked closer to the tree and at eye-level there was a giant plastic bag nailed to the bark. Inside the bag was a white cat, dead, with its throat slit and tail cut off. The man immediately radioed his boss who called the police.