A Hawk in the Woods

by Carrie Laben

  Buddy leapt over the seat and down from the truck as soon as Abby opened the door, and rushed to douse a tree by the edge of the driveway. Martha, on the other hand, continued to sit silently, not even undoing her seatbelt.

  Abby stared at her for a moment, and then noticed that the moon had moved.

  “Knock it off. Get out of the car and help me get shit inside.”

  Martha slouched off to the porch, Buddy at her heels. But she wasn’t about to be the first one through the door, any more than she would be at home; and so after a minute’s pointed staring and not moving on Abby’s part, she slouched back down to the truck again.

  “Here.” Abby handed her the heaviest bag and gathered up the rest. “Now we only have to make one trip.”

  The property management company sent someone to check up on the cabin every so often when it wasn’t rental season, to keep it from falling apart under the stern uncaring hands of weather and rot. Like Bonetrager back home, but Abby didn’t know this man, not well enough to hate him the way she had Bonetrager. Still hated Bonetrager, she thought, when did she imagine she’d stopped hating Bonetrager?

  This guy in Minnesota, though, he seemed to have done his job well enough that she wouldn’t need to start hating him either. The lock turned smoothly to her key, the door opened without squealing. She had to set down two of the bags in the mudroom to fumble for the pull string for the overhead light, but it came on when she tugged and didn’t flicker.

  “Leave the bag here,” she said to Martha, who was close behind her, crowded by a curious Buddy. “I’ll get all this crap sorted out in the morning.”

  Martha dropped the bag with a thud. “Where’s my stuff? If we’re not having dinner then I want to go to sleep.”

  If she was sleeping, she wasn’t sulking. Abby glanced at the bags and picked up the one that seemed to have the most Martha clothes showing at the top. “Here.”

  Martha left without another word, although the overloud sound of her footsteps was comment enough. It was easy to hear that she’d taken their old childhood room, which was good—it would be tedious to have to fight her for the master bedroom. ‘Master’ was a bit of a stretch, it wasn’t like it had its own bathroom or anything, but it was the biggest and Abby was going to need the space.

  Buddy looked up at her, the white showing at the edges of his eyes.

  “Go on, go with her,” Abby said, and he did. She picked up two of the bags. She didn’t feel like sleeping, she might as well get started.

  There was a tiny thrill of transgression in stepping into the room that Grandfather always claimed. The cabin didn’t have the dark, seething power of their childhood home—in fact, as Abby switched on the light she heard the rustle of a mouse in the walls, proof positive that Grandfather’s aura never sank in here. But this didn’t worry her. She had power enough of her own now. Any old shadows would just be distractions. This was a better place than home for a fresh start.

  Over the years, the cabin had been updated a bit to appeal to hunters and fishermen, as first Mom and then Abby agreed to lease it out short-term to more traditional Minnesota vacationers. There was nothing here that an unknowing idiot could damage, and relatively little that they could be damaged by—at least, not in a way that would make people wonder or whisper. Plus, it had delighted Mom and Abby both to think how much the presence of ruddy-cheeked, camouflaged men would annoy Grandfather if he could see it, drinking beers by the fireplace and cooking steaks on the old-fashioned stove.

  So now the master bedroom, which Grandfather always kept spartan, had a dark green throw rug made of knotted rags covering the pine floor in the space between the bed and the window. The bedspread and curtains were also green, not quite a perfect match. There was a large print just above the bed, a fisherman wrestling a man-sized fish, bear-hugging it as they stood on the water, the sun going down in the mountains behind them. Abby rather liked it, but it was what would pass for weird among the ruddy-cheeked men; she couldn’t help but wonder why the property manager chose it. She leaned in to see the artist’s name but spotted the title first: “Dancing Trout”.

  Dancing. She stepped back from the picture, a little disgusted. They were being cute.

  Still, she had to admit that the room was more comfortable than it used to be. There was an armchair in the corner, deep blue and forest green woven together in a nubbly fabric, with a convenient lamp at its shoulder. She set the bags near the chair and went back for the rest.

  Once all the bags were retrieved she shuffled the clothes into the old maple dresser—a few of the clothes were Martha’s but they could sort that out later—and discovered to her delight that the last renter left a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in a drawer, a quarter full. She went to the bathroom and stole the glass from beside the sink, only because the kitchen was whole steps farther, then returned and settled into the chair. It was perfect for reading—comfortable, but firm and straight-backed. The lamp could be brighter, she was going to have to squint at Grandfather’s handwriting, but it would do for now. She’d buy new bulbs in the morning when they went grocery shopping.

  The first sip of whiskey burned bright, then raced straight from her stomach up her arteries to her head. It erased hunger, erased the nighttime slump. It even erased what little sleepiness she’d managed to build up.

  She flipped through a notebook—it wasn’t the one she needed. Neither were any of the three others in the bag she pulled it from.

  She was only irritated as she pulled a notebook out of the second bag, but by the time she reached the bottom of the last bag her stomach had hardened into a knot of denial. She couldn’t have left the most important notebook behind. She knew she’d packed it. She remembered, specifically, picking it up, flipping open the pages until she saw a date, letting it fall closed and sliding it into the shopping bag. Unless… but no, she’d have some trace if Martha had changed that too, and also, why would Martha do that? What would make her think she needed to?

  Which bag she’d slipped it into, though, that she was not sure of. It had the natural mistiness of something that didn’t seem important at the time. And they’ve shuffled things around so much, and… Jesus, it could have slid out in the accident, gotten lost under a seat. She checked, she thought, but she was in a hurry too. If it was still in the rental car, with those fucking yokels poking around with nothing to distract or destroy them, that was as bad as if she’d left it behind completely. Worse.

  It could be in the bag she gave Martha. That was the answer—it had to be. But Abby didn’t get out of the chair, even though she could go knock on Martha’s bedroom door and get the bag back. If it wasn’t there, she didn’t want to know until daylight. She couldn’t start driving back in the dark, without sleep, with a half-gut of whiskey, and she would if it wasn’t there, even though it wouldn’t help. And, too, she didn’t want to knock on Martha’s door like a supplicant.

  Instead she took Grandfather’s skull from the bottom of the bag where he’d lain concealed and carried it across to the dresser where she could watch it from the corner of her eye as she read. She had the Hutchinson-Orne book, and Grandfather’s notes on that. They should be enough to keep her occupied until she got tired.

  It seemed like tired would never happen now, though. She sipped more whiskey, hoping it would tip her over, but it didn’t help. Every time she tried to lean back, relax and settle her body into drowsiness some note in the margins caught her eye and she went flipping through the heavy book for another reference to some key point of Orne’s or another of Grandfather’s annotations. Eventually she thought she had it all, even without the notebook.

  The cell phone said it was three in the morning. She should have felt drained. In fact, she knew she did, but the feeling hadn’t reached the front of her brain to tell her eyes to stop and close. If she got into bed, she knew her mind wouldn’t shut off, it would search for the missing notebook all night, or worse, pick over the past and try to find the hole, or go start the kind of Twitter fig
ht that would cost her more in the long run than she’d gained right now. At least sitting up she was doing something productive.

  The ritual was simple, really, for something they made such a big deal of. But so cool. And it needed to happen soon. She could do it right now, middle of the night and all. Why not?

  She should only need a little bit of Grandfather. His notes said an ounce was enough, but Orne and Hutchinson insisted that more is always better. They used to have to use whole bodies, got weird subhuman gibbering things if parts were missing. Hard to imagine how they got anything done that way. Dig up a guy who’s been dead for centuries, some mage or alchemist who supposedly knew the secrets of the ages, how were parts not going to be missing? Plus the chanting for hours at the top of your lungs, Hebrew, Latin, Greek and the whole nine yards, and nothing could save you if you mispronounced something or fucking stuttered. It all belonged in the era with leeches for medicine and horse shit in the streets.

  No, Abby had a plan, and there was nothing in Orne and Hutchinson to say the plan wouldn’t work. Part of it was based on Grandfather’s own experiments, so it served him right. She giggled at that like she was in fifth grade again.

  She sipped, and realized that half the whiskey was gone. She poured more, three fingers this time instead of two, since she was in it for the long haul now. Then she Instagrammed the glass. That was always popular with the late-night crowd.

  It was warm in here. Much warmer than it should be, in the middle of the night with the furnace not on. She couldn’t work like this; she went back to the dresser, pulled out a sun dress, and abandoned her jeans and blouse on the floor. The dress felt looser than she remembered. At least the road food wasn’t getting to her.

  Okay. To work.

  She retrieved a knife from the kitchen. It wasn’t silver. It wasn’t even iron—stainless steel didn’t count, for reasons she’d never really understood and Grandfather had given up trying to explain. It would do anyway.

  The voice recorder app on her phone was simple, and she could turn it on and off without thinking; a good thing, since she needed to get the words she was recording just right. Only a few lines at a time, though, and all the elocution practice stood her in good stead. She set it beside the glass and let it get going as she made the rest of the preparations.

  She’d have to go outside in the dark to get firewood, but the flame of a candle would do, and there were candles stashed in every room against the power outages that came with the summer thunderstorms and the winter ice. She had matches. She was all set.

  Now for Grandfather. He’d never taken very good care of himself to begin with and now his dirt-caked teeth were loose. A molar pried out easily. She just needed to smash it up somehow. It was doubtful that there was a mortar and pestle in here.

  The edge of the socket that the tooth was in, though… that was crumbling on its own. She could break enough of that up with her fingers, maybe. It hurt, the bits were pointy, but she needed to just keep at it.

  Abby tried the obvious first, faking sick for three days straight so she could stay at home. It didn’t work—she couldn’t find a thing in the notebooks or inside her own mind to tell her what to do about this. All she could do was watch terrible TV and wonder what the hell Mom was even up to. Why did she want to be Martha and mooch around in Alden Central High School all day? Abby couldn’t wait to get out of this place, that was one thing she agreed with Carl on. When Grandfather did it, it had made sense, he was getting weaker and must have seen death getting ready to take its shot at him, he needed a body that could still do things. But Mom seemed fine. She liked her job. She had friends who took her out to dinner or drank with her sometimes, and for a while a guy had come around, although Abby didn’t like him and had pushed him away and Mom hadn’t liked him enough to stop her.

  It probably didn’t matter why. It just had to stop, was all. Martha had to be rescued.

  By the time Abby went back to school, Duane + Martha was an established social fact. Nicole even said something catty in chorus class about wasn’t it a surprise that Abby was the single one.

  Abby did manage to find Martha alone in the newspaper office, eventually, while Duane had math. It was Martha, too. Not only was she alone, she was picking at the price sticker on the back of her notebook and not looking at anything in particular.

  “What are you doing?”

  Martha looked startled. “Nothing. I mean, what do you mean?”

  “All of the sudden you’re just fine with dating Duane? When I’ve been busting my butt to keep him away from you like you asked?”

  “No! It’s not like that, I…”

  “So you guys aren’t dating.”

  “We are. But I don’t want to be. He put…” Martha glanced around the empty room. “He took my hand and put it in his lap under the table on Thursday. With Carl and Kristen sitting right there and everything. It was weird. He’s not acting like before. It’s like he thinks he can do whatever.”

  “And you’re just going along with it?”

  “That’s what people do when they’re dating? I can’t just dump him if he didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I’m pretty sure you can. Tell him you’re dumping him and he’s dumped.”

  “I’m not you, Abby. I can’t just make people do what I want.”

  Abby stared at Martha while she peeled the price sticker the rest of the way off. “He’s not going to let me dump him when he’s this happy to have a girlfriend at all.”

  “Okay,” Abby said in disgust. “Have fun at prom, then.”

  She wasn’t actually going to give up and let Duane have her. Or Mom. She never meant that. She was just mad at Martha, and sometimes she said things she didn’t mean when she was mad. Martha should have known that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Abby woke up on top of the comforter, still wearing the sun dress. A little bit of morning light had managed to sneak through the drapes and was trying to stab out her eyes; her stomach wobbled as she turned over and covered her head with a pillow.

  The old college program to check up on herself ran without actual thought. She was in an otherwise empty bed, good. She was dressed, good. She just had to find her shoes, and make sure she still had her wallet, her keys, her phone…

  Her phone. Shit. She sat up and lurched across the room in such a pure state of panic that she was at the dresser before the dizziness hit her and she sank down onto the rug.

  But at some point during the night, after the liquor knocked her down, the battery on the chanting iPhone ran out. No way to know exactly when, but… if it hadn’t, she probably wouldn’t have woken up in the first place. Stupid, stupid. Careless. And not like her, even without dinner.

  God damn it. And now today was going to be half wasted on recovering. Martha was going to want to go to the store—and she wasn’t wrong, Abby had a dim awareness that she’d want food again someday herself. What a mess.

  As if on cue, she heard the front door creak open and Buddy’s toenails clicking on the floor. Martha came in behind him, and she probably wasn’t really stomping as loud as she could on purpose but Abby was in no position to tell.

  She pushed herself to her feet and dug through the bags until she found the phone charger, plugged it in. A few tweets about hangovers should help. Although “Don’t pass out in the middle of necromancy” was probably a bit too on the nose even for her audience.

  Martha was in the bathroom now; Abby heard the shower running. She braced herself and looked out the window. A beautiful day. Driving east to the nearest town with a grocery store was going to be hell.

  As she stood at the window, she heard a motor far off. So far off that for a little while she wasn’t sure whether it was approaching or driving away, but of course it was approaching. Of course it was, when she felt like she could barely stand up herself, let alone push anything or anyone else.

  And how? Had Martha’s work come undone, despite her promises? Did they have another way to follow? Was s
he all wrong about the hawks after all?

  The truck pulled into the driveway just a bit before the moment that she reached the door, having poured and slammed down a glass of water in the hope that it would help. Unfortunately, the water only seemed to have started the whiskey circulating again, making her brave and stupid and maybe just desperate to get it over with and stop hurting.

  She opened the door before they were even all out of the truck, hoping to wrong-foot them just a little. It worked. All three looked startled. And then, suddenly, hope bubbled dull and distant to the surface of her hangover, because these were just men, not Waites at all. Just common, ordinary duck-men, turning up here by coincidence. If she hadn’t been in so much pain she would have laughed out loud.

  “Ma’am?” The driver, a man of about forty with a brown cap and a flannel shirt, stopped with his hand still on the fishing rod he’d been unpacking and looked up. “Are you all right?”

  Abby took a deep breath, made sure her feet were set so that she was steady, ignored the more unpleasant implications of the ‘ma’am’. “I’m fine. What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  “Well, we’ve rented this cabin, here, for the next week or so. There must have been a mix-up.”

  The other two men, both younger than the driver, were out and staring at her now. She was surprised at how hostile they felt. She must have looked like a wreck, and the bubble of hope had popped into swamp gas. She needed these guys out of here, now, even if they weren’t Waites. And she needed not to have them complaining later or comparing notes with the rental agent, and how the hell was she going to do that?

  She felt Buddy slide past her legs and the men grew even more tense, though the dog wasn’t being aggressive, just sniffing around in friendly Lab fashion. She called him back anyway, just to be safe. But he ignored her and trotted towards the interlopers, head up, utterly confident of his reception—he’d no doubt spent hundreds of happy hours with men like these.