Waiting for the Night Song

by Julie Carrick Dalton

  “Cadence under fire.” He extended a hand. “I’m Joe. I’ll show you around.”

  That hashtag was going to haunt her.

  After walking the site and showing the team how to identify infested pines, Cadie broke away to collect her own samples before heading back to the cottage.

  “I’d like about eight to ten unburnt, heavily infested trees from the periphery of the fire line,” Cadie told Joe before she left. “As intact as possible.”

  “No problem,” he said. “I’ll have them delivered to the lot behind the research trailer.”

  “Mostly older growth. And a couple of younger ones.” Cadie only needed three trees for her research. She would negotiate with Thea to let her keep the rest to mill into floorboards. They had plenty of space behind the lab, and once she had the boards milled, she could store them in the garage at the cottage until she was ready to build. Although where, when, and how she would build a house were not questions she could answer yet.

  Her home would not be constructed out of polished marble or gleaming pine boards. It would be built of obstacles. Rocks from her hikes. New Hampshire granite. Boards marred by beetles. The intricate lace carved by the beetles would remind her every day how magnificent her adversary had been. How beautiful destruction could be.

  As she left the crew, heading toward the trailhead, Cadie heard Piper whistling. She wanted to leave without talking to her. She didn’t have the strength or the time for another lecture. The bird chirp of Cadie’s cell phone shattered the quiet, and Piper looked up with a broad smile and a wave. Cadie waved and answered Garrett’s call, grateful for the excuse to walk by without talking to Piper.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about last night, about ditching you in the middle of all that mess,” Garrett said. “I needed to get Tino away from the fight. I didn’t want Ryan provoking him to do something stupid.”

  “Ryan provoked Raúl instead.” Wind hissed in the bare branches overhead. “I heard the body was ID’d. You said it wouldn’t come out until tomorrow. You know it’s going to leak out,” she said. “And, hey, what are you doing about the graffiti on the hardware store?”

  “Raúl refused to make a statement. He wants it all to go away. Can I come over so we can talk about all this?” Garrett said.

  “It’s been a long day and I have a bunch of research to go over.” She longed to curl up on the couch with Garrett and have a glass of wine. But her past tenderness toward Garrett had driven her to put the Garcias at risk and destroyed her friendship with Daniela. She couldn’t risk doing it again. She needed to focus.

  “A few more small fires started up. A couple were close by, but it sounds like they’ve been contained. At least they’re finally listening to you.”

  “How close?” Cadie said.

  “They caught a small brush fire about twenty miles north. Sounds like it started from a cigarette butt tossed out a car window,” Garrett said. “If it would just fucking rain.”

  “That’s way too close. I’m heading back now.”

  “You’re going back to Concord?” Garrett said.

  Cadie liked the disappointment in his voice.

  “No. I want to stay close by in case Daniela needs me.” Cadie could rummage through her mother’s clothes closet for another day before going back to her apartment.

  “Right. So, can I call tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, but call sooner if anything changes.”

  Cadie held the phone to her ear a few seconds after Garret hung up. She almost called him back to say she had changed her mind, that she wanted him to come over. Fuck the fires, the beetles. Didn’t she deserve a little happiness?

  Bony trees seemed to be pointing at her as she walked back to her car. She wanted to throw herself down in front of the trees and beg forgiveness. For cutting them down. For craving the recognition of her colleagues. For resenting Piper’s contrarian views. For always asking the forest to protect her secrets. And for not keeping the secrets she had vowed to keep herself.

  She dialed Daniela’s number, but it went straight to voicemail.

  A logging truck rolled into the parking lot near Cadie’s car. The hiss of the air brakes and the grinding gears made her shudder. The truck would be piled high with pine trees when it pulled out. It would take a hundred trucks to make a dent. The engine continued growling at her even after the driver had parked. A puff of thick black smoke belched out of the exhaust.

  “Turn off the fucking engine,” Cadie yelled to the driver, knowing he couldn’t hear her. No one could hear her.

  30

  PRESENT DAY

  She ran a bath with her mother’s lavender-scented bubbles and poured a few splashes of her father’s bourbon over ice. The stiff alcohol warmed her throat, coating the scratchiness left behind from her walk in the ashy woods.

  While the tub filled, she puttered around, looking at objects her family had left behind when they moved to Boston. It occurred to Cadie that her most prized possession was a pile of rocks. She had nothing else to show for her life’s work, other than a degree and perpetually dirty fingernails. And now Piper’s questions nagged at her, forcing her to reconsider her own scientific theories. What if she was approaching the fires from the wrong angle? What if the answer was to let everything burn?

  She went into her parents’ room to find a shirt to sleep in. The earthy clay, the malleable perfume of her mother, clung to every surface in the room. Her father’s comforting scent of ChapStick and Halls Mentho-Lyptus, mixed with the traces of his oil paint, surrounded her.

  She picked up a ChapStick her father had left by his bed and spread it on her dry lips.

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel driveway. She hadn’t heard a car approach over the sound of running water. She pressed her body against the wall next to the window. Boots clunked on the deck stairs. They continued around the side porch, rattling the loose boards. She hadn’t locked the door. Her joints felt rusted in position.

  She could hide under the bed or in the closet, but if anyone wanted to find her—if Clyde wanted to find her—it wouldn’t take long. She gnawed on her thumb as he paused. Water heading to the bathtub coursed through the pipes in the walls, splashing into the half-full basin.

  Cadie flinched as the kitchen door slammed shut. Without the rusty spring, she hadn’t heard it open. The uninvited footsteps entered the cottage. The house no longer had a landline. Her cell phone was in her bedroom. Her parents had replaced the old, warped windows with narrow louvered panels. She couldn’t escape without running down the hall and through the kitchen.

  The pipes trembled inside the walls. The water level rose in the tub down the hall. She swallowed the last of the bourbon in a gulp that burned her throat and heated her belly with a slow roar. Cadie had been hiding from Clyde her entire life, making excuses to leave public events early because she convinced herself she had seen him in the crowd. He had taken too many years from her, robbed her of too much.

  Floorboards in the kitchen creaked under the intruder’s weight.

  She picked up a large blue vase. She placed her thumb in the imprint of her mother’s thumb on the bottom, the signature on every piece she made. The thick ceramic base felt heavy enough to crack a skull. She could stop it all. Right now.

  Her hands stopped shaking as she lifted the vase over her head and waited by the bedroom door.

  The footsteps paused in the kitchen. The creak of the floor told her he stood in front of the refrigerator. Muscles in her shoulders twitched. She raised the vase higher, ready to smash it down with the force of three decades of compressed rage.

  She imagined his hot breath in her ear. You want your friend to disappear?

  The heightening pitch of the water told her that the tub was about to overflow, but she didn’t care. She wanted him to come. She wanted to rip her chest open and unleash the fear and guilt that gnawed at her in the middle of the night.

  She adjusted her grip on the vase and prepared to open the door. She would startle him, smash him on t
he head, and run outside.

  Footsteps moved down the hallway. A shadow slid under the gap between the bedroom door and the floor.

  “Cadie?” Garrett called. “Are you here?”

  Relief, or maybe disappointment, made her steady hands tremble.

  “What the hell? You scared the shit out of me.” She pushed open the bedroom door.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He looked sheepish, standing in the hallway. “I should have called.”

  “Or maybe knock?”

  “Are you redecorating?” He gestured toward the vase she clutched with white knuckles.

  “I was about to smash it over your head. I thought you were…” Cadie walked into the kitchen and put the vase on the counter. “I thought you were Clyde.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Who else would break into my house and try to kill me?”

  “No one’s trying to kill you.”

  “Wait here.” Cadie sprinted down the hall and closed the tap just as the water was about to crest over the lip of the tub. The bubbles rose almost a foot above the water.

  “You smell like smoke.” He lifted a fistful of her curls to his face.

  “I spent the afternoon surveying a snag forest left behind after that fire on Mount Griffin.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Well enough.” She tried to calm her breath and her heart rate.

  “God, you’re shaking,” Garrett said. “I should’ve knocked. But really, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Besides Clyde? Or that everyone will know I covered up a murder?” She didn’t mention the bigger fear that consumed her: that she would never be brave enough to own her past.

  Garrett walked to the window overlooking the lake. The sun hung low in the sky. An impatient crescent moon peered through the haze.

  He sat on the edge of the kitchen table, his knee bouncing.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” Cadie needed to calm her own jitters. The oppressiveness of steamy lavender made the house feel stuffy. The air felt thick. She needed to get outside.

  “Now?”

  “Now.” She put a bottle of red wine, the one her mother had been saving, two plastic cups, and a wine opener in her backpack. Garrett followed her into the woods.

  “This is where Daniela and I met up every day.” She guided him down the overgrown path between her house and the Garcias’.

  She gulped at the air, trying to saturate her body from the inside with the earthy smell, but even the fragrance of the forest seemed off-balance. Instead of the mushroomy aroma of decay, the premature scent of crumbling leaves and broken pine needles hovered in the stagnant air.

  Cadie paused at a pair of thick pine trunks, both dotted with resin tubes that had not been there two days earlier. They shouldn’t be here, not at this elevation. The beetles were moving faster than Cadie thought.

  She walked farther down the overgrown path, stopped in the clearing, and spread her arms wide. “And this is where I stashed your boat.” She pointed to the shape of the boat outlined in watermelon-sized stones Cadie had painstakingly arranged to elevate the upended boat over the winter. Cadie had dragged it through the woods by herself that October, not wanting to call Daniela for help.

  To passersby, the patina of moss, pine needles, tree sap, and time covering the stones might have camouflaged the shape of the rowboat. But to Cadie’s eye, the outline remained sharp.

  A plush pad of moss grew in the center of the boat skeleton.

  Garrett stepped inside the frame and tilted his face up to catch the day’s remaining light. He extended his hand to her, and she joined him.

  He sat cross-legged in the middle of the ghost ship and opened the wine.

  A chorus of bullfrogs bellowed from the water’s edge, gulping air. Crickets filled in the spaces between the frogs’ pleadings. She felt more like herself in the woods than she did indoors, closer to some undefinable, wild place she longed to inhabit.

  He handed her a cup of wine and she took two swallows.

  “I’m really sorry I scared you,” he whispered.

  She crawled closer until her nose was inches from his. “Call first next time?” She kissed him and pulled back to study his face. She tried not to see Clyde in his features. His hairline and posture mimicked Clyde’s, but the smoother line of Garrett’s jaw and his gentle smile erased his uncle’s harsh edges.

  He touched both hands to her face, tracing the contour of her cheekbones and down the nape of her neck and arms until they came to rest on her hips. She inched closer; residual adrenaline coursed through her, heating the wine that lingered on her tongue. The unresolved edge of fear amplified the woodlands night orchestra, the smell of moss, and patterns of waning light.

  His fingers inched under the edge of her shirt, caressing the bare skin of her lower back.

  Cadie held Garrett’s gaze as she eased off her button-down shirt and pulled her tank top over her head. She unbuttoned his shirt and pressed her palms against his warm chest.

  Under the canopy of branches, the clicks of the woods blended with Garrett’s breath in her ear, in her mouth. She wrapped herself around his body, under his body, slipping deeper into the forest floor, becoming part of the muscular decay and renewal of the forest as they made love with the intimacy of a first kiss and the fierceness of unrecoverable time.

  The crowns of oak trees framed a window straight up to the sky, where starlings billowed like lace. Cadie inhaled Garrett’s exhale. Mineral iridescence tingled on her tongue. Garrett tasted like the lake. Or maybe the lake had always tasted like him.

  Cadie lay with her head on his chest, floating in the ghost of a ship that had been the foundation of her greatest joy and deepest wound. She traced the contour of a lichen-covered stone next to Garrett’s shoulder on the port side of the boat skeleton.

  “It feels like a different lifetime,” she said. “A wayward boat, secret love letters from a mysterious stranger. Daniela and I even drew treasure maps. But they’re all gone. Like none of it ever happened.”

  The forest soaked up her words, her sweat, her regret.

  “But if it hadn’t happened,” he said, as he pulled a leaf from her hair, “we wouldn’t be here now. How do I reconcile that?”

  Evening sun shone through gaps in the pine trees, casting a shadow over Garrett’s face and backlighting the messy outline of his hair. He traced the shadow of a tree branch across her arm, sending a chill over her skin.

  “None of what happened was your fault, Cadie. If you never found the boat, if I never set it loose, Clyde still would have robbed that store. Juan would still be gone,” Garrett said.

  “But we should have turned Clyde in. You can’t make that part okay.”

  Garrett propped himself up on his elbow and kissed her shoulder. “I wish I had known about your illicit business, your maps, your secrets.”

  “I’d show it to you, the map, but it’s gone.”

  “What was on it?”

  An eerie calm settled in the forest. The birds quieted. The wind stilled itself.

  “The cove, these woods.” Cadie swallowed twice. “And where we hid the gun.”

  Garrett turned his head to one side as if he didn’t understand her words. “I thought you threw it in the lake.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Where is it?” Garrett’s eyes widened in that same expression Cadie had seen in the Summer Kid’s eyes whenever they paddled too close. A blue vein pulsed against his temple.

  “We hid it in a hollow tree in the woods back along the easement, but it’s gone. Neither of us ever told anyone. I think Clyde found it.”

  “Why didn’t you get rid of it like I asked?”

  “I don’t know. I was scared. I was eleven.”

  “But you never showed anyone or told anyone?”

  “I told you, no one else knew, not even Dolores.”

  “Cadie, this is a big problem. If whoever has the gun links it to Juan’s death…” Ga
rrett paused and looked around the clearing, as if making sure no one could hear them. “That gun is registered to Clyde. It could all come back on us.”

  “I’m pretty sure Clyde’s the one who found it.” She fumbled to reach her pants to get the note she found in the tree. “Who else would have left this in my hiding spot?”

  Garrett grabbed the note and stared at it for a few seconds. “This isn’t Clyde’s handwriting.”

  “So maybe he disguised his handwriting. It’s him. I know it.” Cadie felt less certain as she watched the perplexed look on Garrett’s face.

  “Clyde thinks the gun’s at the bottom of the lake. I did too, until just now. He wouldn’t have gone looking for it, and even if he had, how could he have found your exact hiding spot in this giant expanse of woods?” Garrett said. “Clyde isn’t this monster you make him out to be.”

  “In case you forgot, he’s a murderer. I get it that he thought he was being noble by getting Juan’s money back from that racist shopkeeper who stole it. It was stupid, but I can maybe believe he had noble intentions. But Juan? I was there. I heard them fighting.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Stop. Even if shooting him was an accident, Juan was his friend. He just let him die. He didn’t even try to get help.” Cadie felt Garrett’s heart rate accelerating as she spoke. “We left him there too. Clyde isn’t the only one who needs to atone. I’ve spent my whole life running away from this. All of us have.”

  The noises lingering at the edge of evening—the waning warbles of birds, crickets tuning up their evening chorus—filled in the emptiness around them. The woodland chatter usually calmed her, but lying in the outline of the rowboat with Garrett, the pitch of the crickets’ wings rubbing together seemed off-key, the harmony of chirrups, out of sync.

  “Cadie.” He took a deep breath. “I haven’t told you everything, either.”

  His pager buzzed from his pants pocket behind him. Garrett reached over to read the message. “Shit. There’s a fire.” He let out a long stream of air as if grateful for the distraction.

  “No kidding, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell everyone,” Cadie said. “What didn’t you tell me?”