The deluge must have caught the hikers by surprise as well. The man squinted and, even though the trail was maybe six feet away from him, he couldn’t make anything out except for the twisted forms of trees and bushes. The rain was a shroud between them and the whole world was a gray haze. The man turned back and shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand.
The kid was gone.
Alice ran flat out. It hadn’t even been a decision: it was as if the thunder had been a starter gun and she was off. She was half-blind from the rain and half-deaf from the roaring of the downpour. But so was the man, she told herself, so was the man.
She had seen the trail that led south, and that’s where she was aiming. Would he guess that she would go that way? She could not stop and ponder the issue; she had hardly any advantage at all, and while the mountain wouldn’t kill her it certainly expected her to be smart.
Be smart or be dead.
Alice ran—once or twice bouncing off tree trunks onto the slippery ground and straight back on her feet. She slipped and fell and kept running—and all the time the rain was a veil around the little girl, keeping her hidden, keeping her safe.
If he had called out after her she would not have heard him, and she was glad. She did not want to hear him shout after her in anger, she didn’t ever want to hear his voice again.
Somehow, the relatively unobstructed progress meant that she had stumbled onto the trail. Alice followed it down the mountain, flying over the slick, stony path. With surprising clarity she managed to grasp that if she could run more easily on the path then so could he. She imagined him after her: his steps more confident than hers, and his eyes sharper—as sharp as the long hunting knife.
Alice didn’t know how long she had been scampering down the mountain, and she could only hope that she was still on the trail. She had been careful, but careful doesn’t count for much when you’re running for your life.
She felt grass underfoot—soft, springy grass—she corrected her direction and felt again the slimy, reassuring feel of the path under her sneakers. The mountain was helping her, just as the rain was helping her. This simple belief brightened her little girl’s heart and she pushed even harder. She let herself go with neither thought nor control: she would go wherever the mountain would take her.
When, minutes or hours later, the rain stopped—almost as suddenly as it had come—Alice found herself at the mouth of a valley so green it made her eyes hurt, and the trail—the blessed, hallowed trail—was straight ahead of her. Alice dared to look behind her for the first time. Her eyes scanned the landscape and could detect no movement aside from the tops of the trees bowing a little in the wind.
She allowed herself a single moment to catch her breath and then darted under the edge of a rocky crop from where she could follow the path without being too easily spotted from above. She couldn’t run anymore but she could jog a little, walk for a minute or two, then jog again until the stitch in her side became too much.
Keep it together, keep it together just a little longer. She could hear herself huffing and puffing like some old person, but she couldn’t help it. There will be people. There will be regular people.
The ground was sodden under her feet, and her sneakers flapped in the mud. Alice was soaked and exhausted and would have given anything and everything for a family in a station wagon parked by the side of a road, or maybe a ranger in one of those official vehicles. She was looking ahead so intently that she didn’t hear the footsteps behind her until a hand grabbed the back of her pack and whirled her around with a yelp.
The man stood there, just as drenched as she was, the rifle hanging on his shoulder by the worn strap. His face was a blank mask and his eyes were glittering buttons of nothing.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.
Alice did not reply.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Alice backed away from him, slowly, bumped against a tree and worked her way around it until it stood between her and the man. She had no strength to speak and no words to say what she wanted to say.
“Come here,” the man said.
Alice shook her head.
“We’re not done, boy. Not by any means.”
Alice reached the side of her pack with shaking hands, yanked off her baseball bat and lifted it between them. It felt clumsy and ridiculous in her hands, and it trembled with each heartbeat.
“What’s on your mind, son?” the man said, and he took a step forward around the edge of the path.
The rain had washed away much of the earth around the roots and what was left was slippery and wet through. The hole opened suddenly under his feet and at any other time he would have been fine, he could easily have righted himself and grabbed at the tree for support, but the heavy green backpack pulled him backward, the man lost his balance and fell into five feet of ditch full of bare roots and rotten leaves. And he fell badly.
He swore—a litany of words that Alice had never heard before. The man unshouldered his pack and with a groan threw it high above him and out of the hole. He swore again, and Alice realized that he had hurt his leg. On the edge of the hole, his rifle lay on the wet grass.
They both noticed it at the same time but the girl was closer; she dropped the bat and reached for it, pulling it out of the man’s grasping hand.
Alice held it in her arms; it was an awkward, ugly thing. She brought the stock up to her shoulder as she had seen in movies and met his eyes. It was heavy and her arms were going to tire quickly. She aimed at the man’s head because, at that distance, she was going to hit him no matter what.
“What’s your name?” she said.
The man considered the question with his head to one side and his eyes narrowed.
“What’s your name?” Alice repeated, and she could feel her arms would soon begin to shake in their effort to hold up the weapon.
“A name is a powerful thing. Why should I tell you?”
“I told you mine.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have.”
“What’s your name?”
“You take a shot at me and the stock is going to take your shoulder right off, boy. Put it down before you hurt yourself.”
“What was lesson number two?” Alice’s voice cracked as she felt her emotions rise and her throat tighten.
“Lesson number two is to shoot your target right in the eye.”
The girl’s arm began to quiver. “Is that what you wanted me to do?”
“What do you think?”
“Tell me your name, you sonofabitch.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because you’re not going to get away with this.”
“This . . . what? I fed you and kept you safe for three days and I was walking you back to your family.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, son, I don’t. And I’m offended that you would think ill of me after I did my best to teach you and entertain you.”
The barrel of the rifle swayed. The man reached for the thick root of a hemlock to pull himself out. It was close but his fingers couldn’t quite touch it.
“Stay where you are,” Alice said.
“Or what?”
It was really the only question worth answering that day, and they both understood it. Or what?
“Tell me your name and I’ll let you go. And don’t lie to me, because I’ll know if you do.” A bad hand in the hand of a good bluffer is still a bad hand, and Alice had been trained to spot a lie since she was five. She hoped that she was a good bluffer because she was holding a 7-2 and it was a fold ’em hold ’em hand.
For the first time the man looked at the girl with something other than disdain. “You’re a little grunt, but you’ve got some balls on you. Put the rifle down and I’ll let you go.”
Lie or truth? Definitely lie.
What would happen if the man went on his way, free to return to his tracking and trailing? Had the hikers gone back to their camp? Wou
ld he go back to them, back to the hunt? What if he made them pay for her cheek?
The crack of thunder had gobbled up the man’s words, as if they had been too repugnant for Alice to hear.
“What did you want me to do?” she said, and her voice carried the exhaustion of days.
“I wanted to teach you something that you would never, ever forget,” the man replied.
Alice nodded, yes, she could see what he meant. “You have,” she said. “I’ll tell the rangers about you. I’ll tell the police. I’ll tell everybody. They’ll have helicopters looking for you and for the hikers. If you hurt them, they’ll know.” The rifle shook with her words. “I’m going to leave now. Follow me and I’ll shoot you dead.”
“You’re a sick puppy,” the man whispered.
But Alice was already backing away from him, picking up her bat, hardly even turning to see where she was going. He tried to get himself out, but he couldn’t lever his weight on the bad leg. Alice watched him until she reached a bend, then turned and sprinted down the trail.
When she was out of sight she spotted a rotten log on the ground and slipped the rifle inside it. The man would manage to get out, she was well aware of that, but he wouldn’t run anywhere for a while.
Alice walked as fast as her feet would carry her. The storm had cleared and the way down lay straight in front of her.
She soon lost track of time.
She heard the voices before she saw the people. There were kids, somewhere ahead. There were kids, which meant a family, with grown-ups.
What was she going to tell them? What was she going to say? She looked down and she saw her ripped jeans and muddy T-shirt, the baseball bat still gripped in her grimy, scratched hands. What if the man caught up with her, with them?
Behind a shrub Alice took off her T-shirt, found the pink top in her pack and slipped it on. She took off her blue jeans and put on a pair of clean white ones. She rubbed some water from her canteen on her hands and face and, lastly, she pushed her baseball cap deep into her bag. As an afterthought she ran her fingers through her short hair in an attempt to primp.
When a blonde little girl walked out into the clearing where they had stopped for a snack, Mrs. Williams of Portland, Oregon, thought that her parents would be close behind her. When the girl came up to her and she saw her face she knew that something was wrong.
There were questions—more questions than Alice knew how to answer. Five adults and six kids more or less her age, all flocking around her.
To her immense relief two cars were parked next to each other by the recreation area. There were no tents. These people were going home that night.
“How long did you say you were lost?”
“How many days?”
She had to repeat it a couple of times and she was pretty sure that they didn’t believe her, that they thought she might be confused. It was decided that they would take her immediately to the park rangers’ station—only a few miles away—where they would try to contact her parents. Alice decided not to tell them about the man—if they hadn’t believed she had been gone a week, they wouldn’t have believed that she had been hunting campers with a crazy man.
The kids seemed to be particularly curious about Alice and peppered her with questions about every little detail of her life, from her name to, bizarrely, her favorite color. Alice answered easily and was glad to be with other children—it brought the world to a normal place—but she always kept an eye on the trail, because she knew that he was coming, knew that he would come after her, knew that the hole in the ground would not hold him forever, and that was a shame.
“Where do you go to school?”
“What happened to your hands?”
“Let her be, let her draw breath, for Pete’s sake. Here, baby, are you thirsty?”
Alice saw the shadow approaching behind the line of firs: she recognized the slope of the shoulder and the tilt of the head. The man was studying the group and looking among them for the boy who had stolen his rifle and left him in a ditch. Alice turned sideways. The boy the man had met was gone and his ragged clothes had been left under a pile of leaves. He had never seen her without her baseball cap, never seen her smiling.
The man had his knife but she trusted that the mountain would not give him back his rifle; it would rust and fall apart, just like Alice’s red bicycle.
Alice’s heart beat hard as she waited to go. Her pack was already in the trunk of the car as she felt the man’s eyes seeking her out, searching the busy, chattering group.
Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.
She helped fold a picnic blanket—one kid among many on a sunny day out with their families. In the gloom the shadow stirred as if to make a move toward the group.
They all clambered into the cars.
“Do you like dogs?”
“Come sit next to me, darlin’.”
Alice took a shuddering breath. He hadn’t seen her: the man’s eyes had passed over Alice and he had only seen a little girl with a pink top. She turned back as the car sped away and the shadow was still standing by the tree. She couldn’t look away and she hadn’t even realized that she was crying until Mrs. Williams put her arm around her and hugged her tight.
“You’re going to be all right, honey. You were so good. Your parents are going to be so proud.”
The woman smelled of vanilla. Sweet after death, Alice thought.
Alice woke up on the narrow cot of the bare on-call room in the rangers’ station. She didn’t know how long she had slept. It was night and on the chair next to her were the remains of the sandwiches the rangers had given her. Alice had hardly taken a bite.
She heard her father’s voice next door and another voice she didn’t recognize. It was not exactly an argument but it was getting close to being one.
Alice stood up and found that every cell in her body ached, as if she had been stretched under a steam roller like Wile E. Coyote. She made it to the door and turned the handle.
“Alice . . .” The voice she hadn’t recognized belonged to her grandfather. She had only met him once, at her mother’s—his daughter’s—funeral the previous March. His smile when he saw Alice was the sweetest thing.
Her father stood to one side. He was signing papers by the desk, and when she came in he looked up. Her grandfather hurried to put his arms around her and hug her tight. Alice found that she didn’t mind at all. He felt like warm linen.
She wasn’t sure what she had seen in her father’s eyes and didn’t know that she wanted to look at him just yet: she had left him asleep on his bed after a night of card games, after gambling and losing all that Alice had left of her mother. Before running away she had stuck his switchblade knife into his bedside table to make sure he knew how she felt about him.
Alice sighed. I’ve done worse since. At last she looked at her father.
He looked drained under his summer tan. He had not brushed his hair or shaved for days, it seemed.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes,” she nodded.
“Sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You gave us a scare, sweetheart,” her grandfather said. His voice was gentle, and with his arm around her he gave her a little squeeze.
“I’m sorry,” she said to him, and she meant it.
“Your dad and I were thinking that maybe it would be a good idea if you came to Seattle for a while, spent some time with us. What do you think?”
“A while?”
“Yes, a few weeks, if you like. We’d love to get to know you better. What do you think?”
“Dad?”
“Your grandmother would like it very much,” her father said.
“She sure would,” her grandfather added with warmth.
Okay, yes, she got it then. At twelve Alice could read her father better than anyone in the world, and he had barely looked her in the eye since she’d walked into the room: he was not going to ask her to go back home with him to Friday Harbor. He wa
sn’t going to talk to her, he wasn’t going to explain what had happened. Not after the switchblade knife, not with the intricate fabric of anger and pain that lay between them.
After the last seven days Alice didn’t know what she wanted anymore. And yet, maybe, exhausted as she was, it would have felt good to see her father fighting for her, just a little bit—instead of standing there like a stranger. Even the two rangers in the corner had to wonder what the heck was wrong with the girl when the dad didn’t so much as give her a hug after she’d been missing for a week. Maybe he could have fought for her a little bit.
“What . . . what about the man?” Alice abruptly asked the ranger she had spoken to when she first arrived.
“What man?” her grandfather said.
“Your girl told us a story about a man in the park—”
“It’s not a story,” Alice interrupted him, and the steel in her voice startled the grown-ups around her. “I can take you back to the place where I hid his rifle. I can take you back to the place where the hikers’ camp was—it’s not far from the waterfall.”
“A rifle?” her grandfather said.
Alice’s father turned to the ranger. His voice was soft and each word was measured. “My daughter lost her mother five months ago. She’s been going through a tough time. We all have. Sometimes she goes off into her own world. You understand?”
“I do,” the ranger replied. But he was a kind man, and to Alice he said, “We’ll look. I promise you that we’ll look for him.”
Alice could have forgiven her father for not wanting her back, but to let them believe that she was lying was more than she could bear. Tears stung her eyes.
“He has a hunting knife and he taught me how to skin a rabbit,” she said through gritted teeth. “Do you want me to show you?”
Chapter 49
When Alice Madison woke up on Tuesday morning her thoughts did not tumble back to the fire or to the shooting the previous day. She gazed at the ceiling above her and thought about a skinny boy who had written in the mud with a stick because it was the only way he could communicate with her.
In spite of everything she had been ready to believe, the mosaic of truth had not delivered Jeb Tanner as the murderer and Madison couldn’t ignore that. The words evidence as truth were coming back to mock her. And yet there was still the message—no, the appeal—that someone had given Robert Dennen on the scrap of cloth; and he must have thought that it had been sent from the Tanner children—otherwise why would he have called Children’s Services?
Sweet After Death Page 31