“No, I mean the fire’s here. Or close, anyway. I have to go.”
“You’re not a firefighter. Why do you have to go?”
“We need to start evacuations in some parts of town, just in case.” Garrett fumbled for his clothes.
“How far away is it?” The evening air chilled Cadie’s skin where Garrett had been pressed against her. She reached for her shirt. “Where’s the evacuation zone?”
“I don’t have all the details. But you might want to get anything important out of your house. It’s probably fine, but just to be safe. They’re setting up a shelter at the rec center. I’ll find you there later.”
“Wait, what were you going to tell me?” Cadie grabbed his arm as he buttoned his shirt. “What don’t I know?”
“I’ll explain later. I promise. And we need to figure out who wrote that note. Clyde didn’t do it. I’m sure of that.” He leaned over and kissed her, letting his lips linger on hers a few seconds, then abruptly jumped up and disappeared into the shadows.
31
PRESENT DAY
By the time Cadie got dressed and back to the cottage, Garrett’s truck was gone. The small house felt empty. A seeping loneliness filled the kitchen and spilled down the hall toward her bedroom. She grabbed her backpack and sprinted to her car. If a fire was coming, maybe she could help.
At the fire station Cadie found three middle-aged men bent over a desk, looking at maps. “We already dug firebreaks here, here, and here,” Chester said to the other firefighters.
“Have you seen any of those dying pines I told you about? If you have, those are the areas you should be most worried about.” Cadie walked up to the men and looked at the maps.
“I think we’ve got this covered, young lady,” Chester said.
“No, you don’t. Will you listen for one fucking minute?”
“Whoa there, settle down.”
“I will, if you do your goddamn job,” Cadie said.
“Exactly. It’s our job. Not yours. Aren’t you Ryan’s friend?” The man turned to the other two firemen, who had pulled back from the maps. “Ryan bet me ten bucks he could get her number. I’m no fool, I figured there’s no way a cute thing like that’s giving her number to Ryan, so I took the bet. Damn if he didn’t come back with her number in less than two minutes.”
“What areas are you evacuating?” Cadie ran her hand over the large map of the state on the wall. Four different fires, most of them far north of Maple Crest, appeared to be burning. “Wait, these are all active fires?”
“They’re all small. Most started in the last several hours. One of them’s already contained. One’s near us, and we’ve got crews from all over the state on their way,” a firefighter said.
“The fire won’t make it past this ridge, will it?” Cadie pointed to a natural barrier ridgeline.
“Maybe you should be packing up your belongings if you’re so worried,” a firefighter said.
“The woods between here and here.” She pointed to the range just outside of town and the forest that edged close to the lake. “This whole forest is at risk if it gets past the ridge. There’s too much dead wood, and with dried-up marsh in there, there’s no way you can stop a fire once it hits this line.” Cadie drew a slash across a stretch of forest dangerously close to the base of the Hook. “These woods are already infested with that beetle I told you about. And that means dead wood.”
“Like I said, Forest Service firefighters are on their way. At least it’s not anywhere near the town center.”
The firefighters looked at the map, no longer teasing Cadie.
“How do you know all of this?” The older man’s voice no longer sounded confrontational.
“This is what I do. I’m an entomologist with the forestry department.” Cadie paced the floor in the small office. “We needed to thin trees days ago. It’s too late now.”
Cadie’s phone buzzed.
I won’t be a part of your lies anymore. I’m putting it back, read a message from Sal’s phone number.
“Is that Ryan calling to ask you out?” Chester laughed, although even he no longer appeared amused by his jokes.
Putting what back? Cadie wrote back. A chill ran up her spine.
Whatever you did, you keep my mom and my family out of it.
“Shit,” Cadie said out loud. Sal had the map. Of course Sal had the map. She’d all but told Cadie that night they met at the Garcias’. I read The Poachers’ Code, she had whispered, but Cadie had assumed Sal found it on the underside of the bedroom shelf.
The Code had been hidden with the map. And the map led directly to the gun.
Sal was going to put the gun back into the hollow tree.
“Shit, shit, shit.” Cadie fumbled to dial Sal’s number, but it went straight to voicemail.
“Don’t get so worked up. Ryan won’t answer right away. He’s out warning folks to evacuate.” Chester hiked his pants up. “We need to head out.”
Don’t go into the woods. There’s a fire evacuation order. Where are you? I’ll come get you. Cadie waited for confirmation that Sal had received her text, but the message remained unread.
Cadie ran out of the fire station without acknowledging the heckling of the firefighters.
She tried calling Daniela, but it went straight to voicemail again. Dolores answered when Cadie called the Garcias’. “Have you heard from Sal?”
“No.” Dolores’s voice sounded tight. “We’ve been looking for her. There’s a voluntary evacuation order. I think we should leave. But I can’t find her.”
“I think Sal’s in the woods. It’s a long story. I’m going to go look for her. My phone’s about to die. I need you to call Garrett and tell him I’m looking for Sal. Tell him to go to the place where I used to winter the boat. Do you understand? Tell Garrett to meet me in the place where I wintered the boat to help me find Sal. Tell him it’s an emergency.”
“What’s she doing in the woods?”
“I can’t explain now. You and Raúl need to evacuate.”
“Raúl’s at the store. I told him I’d meet him at the evacuation shelter. But I’m not leaving without Sal. What if she comes back here?”
“Leave her a note. I’ll go to the house and look for her if I can’t find her in the woods.”
“I’ll tell Daniela.” Dolores’s voice sounded calmer than Cadie would have expected.
“If my phone dies, I’ll text you from Sal’s phone. We’ll meet you at the shelter. Call Garrett right now.”
Cadie sprinted toward her car, parked in front of the hardware store. A thirteen-year-old girl in the woods with a gun. The fire shouldn’t move as far as their woods, even according to the models in the fire station. But she could already smell it.
What if Sal got trapped in the woods? Did she know about the fire or the evacuation?
“Answer the phone, Sal,” she said out loud, hitting redial again and again. She stopped as she approached her car. A man leaned on the hood. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other.
Clyde looked up at her.
Cadie thought about running back to the fire station a few blocks away, but Clyde’s voice all those years ago echoed in her head. Don’t be an idiot. You know I can catch you.
“Raúl didn’t shoot anybody and we both know it,” Clyde yelled, slurring his words. He took a few wobbly steps toward her.
Cadie backed up. She wrapped her hand around the stone in her pocket, the one she’d picked up outside the post office two days earlier. She held the flat side against her palm, a sharp, jagged point facing out as he approached her.
Clyde moved toward her and leaned so close the alcohol on his breath formed a mist in front of her face. “I tried to take care of him. I even threatened a little girl to protect him.” Spittle sprayed the side of Cadie’s face.
Clyde’s eyes looked wet and far away. He straightened his back.
Cadie pulled the stone from her pocket and squeezed it. They both stood motionless for stretched-out secon
ds. She could smash him in the head and run back to the fire station. In his drunken haze, he wouldn’t be able to catch her. The cool granite felt powerful in her fist. She raised her arm to hit him.
“I was supposed to keep him safe.” Clyde stepped back from her reach and smashed his beer bottle on the ground.
“We both know what you did.” Cadie readjusted her grip and held the stone in the air above her shoulder.
“I’m not letting Raúl go down for this,” Clyde said. His face looked so much like Garrett’s. The same asymmetrical droop to his eye. But the opposite eye. As if they were mirror images of each other.
Cadie eased her grip on the rock, but held it in striking position.
Clyde turned his back to Cadie and shuffled over the gravel. Without turning to face her, he yelled, “He’ll do anything to protect his secrets.”
“Raúl isn’t hiding anything,” Cadie yelled.
He swatted his hand at her and shook his head. “I promised my sister I’d take care of her kid,” Clyde muttered to the ground as if he’d forgotten Cadie was there.
The street was quiet, too quiet, even for Maple Crest.
“There’s a fire moving this way,” Cadie called to Clyde. He swatted his hand back at her again, as if he didn’t care, and continued down the center of the empty street, his hands stuffed deep in his pants pockets.
With less than an hour of light remaining, the woods would fall dark quickly.
As she unlocked her car, another vehicle skidded into the parking lot and pulled in behind her, blocking her in.
“Cadie, thank God.” Daniela jumped out of the car. “No one can find Sal. The fire’s getting close.”
“She just texted me.” Cadie showed Daniela Sal’s message. “I think she’s got the gun, but I’m not sure. She won’t answer me. I’m headed to the woods between our houses to look for her.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Daniela thrust both hands into her thick hair and dug her fingernails into her scalp.
“You go back to the house and get your mom.” Cadie put both hands on Daniela’s shoulders. Daniela’s whole body trembled. Daniela had always been the strong one, the brave one. Her fear sent a chill through Cadie.
Daniela pressed her lips into a tight white line the exact way Dolores did when she was scared. She pulled Cadie into a tight embrace. “I’ll find my parents. Call me when you have Sal and we’ll meet up at the rec center.”
Cadie remembered that feeling of floating in the lake, head to head with Daniela, clinging to each other’s fingers. Holding Daniela now in the parking lot, Cadie felt the surge of her friend’s desperation pulsing inside her.
“We’re going to find her.” Cadie tried to sound more confident than she felt.
Gravel sprayed as Daniela sped out of the parking lot.
Green-gray smoke from the mountains made it feel like dusk, although the sun still hovered above the horizon line. Cadie couldn’t help but marvel at the colors nature created when it was about to lose control.
32
TWO YEARS AFTER THAT SUMMER
Cadie spent the two years following Juan’s death trying to reclaim the control she lost that day. She learned to suppress the reflex to jump when she heard a car backfire, but couldn’t quash the impulse to hide when she imagined she saw Clyde at the movies, at the grocery store, everywhere she went.
The night before the movers arrived, Cadie sat in the only bedroom she had ever known. She looked at the sad drape of her Girl Scout sash slung over the hutch above her desk, where it had drooped, untouched, for two years.
She ached to leave this place.
When her father had approached her with news of his job teaching art in Boston, his eyes looked guilty, as if he expected her to beg him to stay. But she had thrown her arms around his neck and nuzzled into his scratchy whiskers.
“I’m so proud of you,” she had whispered.
“But we’ll have to move.”
“Boston will be fun.”
Her father had pulled back from her embrace and stared at Cadie.
“When did you grow up?”
Cadie shrugged. She knew exactly when she had grown up, and she couldn’t wait to leave every reminder of it behind.
She hadn’t packed anything with her but clothes and a few books. All the evidence of her childhood—the trinkets, the favorite toys, the unopened bike seat she could never bring herself to put on her bike—would stay in the house that they planned to use as a summer retreat. She had not informed her parents, but Cadie vowed never to return.
That final night before the move, Cadie curled up into a tight knot in bed, trying to conjure a flicker of nostalgia. But all she felt was relief. The oak branches outside her window cast shadows of spindly spiders on her ceiling and down the wall toward the foot of her bed. The stone in her gut had grown to a boulder. It slowed her down as she walked and resisted when she tried to get up. It rolled around, taking up space and crushing her appetite.
She spent her nights waiting. Waiting for sleep to come. Waiting for the nightmares to wake her. Waiting for the sun to rise.
A rustling of footsteps outside crunched over twigs and brush near the edge of the woods. The heavy paws were too big to be a skunk or raccoon. Cadie froze as the deliberate steps moved closer to the house, tromping over the gravel. She pressed into the corner where her bed tucked against a sloping wall, her pillow tight across her lap. She wished she could disappear into the shadow world on the walls. The steps approached her windowsill and stopped, sniffing for Cadie.
The beast outside her window snuffled and exhaled with a slight vocalization no animal could make. The footsteps, the breath, were human. If she tried to get to the door, the person at her window would see her. If she tried to crawl under the bed, he would hear her.
The distinct outline of a person stood against the shifting shadow branches on her wall. An arm rose toward her open window. Cadie ducked under her quilt as knuckles hit the window frame.
“Cadie, it’s me,” Daniela whispered. “Are you awake?”
“It’s one in the morning.” Cadie crawled down to the foot of the bed to look out the window.
“I can’t sleep,” Daniela said. “You’re leaving tomorrow, aren’t you?”
The purple circles under her eyes and unbrushed hair made Daniela look as vulnerable as Cadie felt. When their hands touched, palm to palm through the screen, Cadie saw that the same stone crushing her from the inside weighed on Daniela too. Cadie popped the screen out and helped Daniela climb over the windowsill. Flakes of dirty white paint from the exterior clung to her shirt as she shimmied over the edge.
“I was afraid Friar would bark and wake everyone up.” Daniela held a folded towel under one arm.
“Friar’s gone,” Cadie whispered. “We buried him in the woods a month ago.”
“Oh, God, Cadie. I’m sorry.” Daniela’s wide eyes did not convey sympathy or a requisite gesture to console. Daniela appeared heartbroken for her own sake. Tears welled in her eyes. “I loved that dog.”
“I put a stone in that clearing near where I stashed the boat,” Cadie said. They both looked out the window into the darkness. “I hate leaving him here.”
“I could check on him every now and then, if you want.”
Cadie nodded, not trusting herself to speak without crying. Knowing someone else missed Friar, that someone else might visit the stone, felt important. An ache not relieved, but shared.
She wanted to tell Daniela how much she’d missed her and tell her she was sorry. Sorry for not keeping her promise. Sorry for getting Dolores involved. Sorry for putting Daniela’s family in danger. Regret and fear stabbed Cadie in her gut every time she had seen Daniela after that summer. Losing her best friend had been the price she paid to keep the guilt away.
But Cadie said nothing. As much as she missed her friend, she wanted to let go. Too many dark memories haunted these woods. She would be better off with nothing to miss when the moving truck drove away in the morning.
/>
“I brought you a going-away present, but you need to be quiet.” Daniela sat next to Cadie on the edge of the bed and unfolded the towel as if she were handling fine crystal. Inside lay one of the small wooden tambourines from Daniela’s bedroom wall. The tiny stacks of cymbals caught the moonlight and cast faint glimmers, like waning stars, onto the tree limbs on her wall.
“It’s to keep the bears away. I don’t want you to be scared anymore.”
“But you love this thing.” Cadie fingered the smooth wooden circle the diameter of a salad plate. The delicate shimmering discs made a muted chime, diffused by the towel.
“Shhhh!” Daniela whispered as Cadie turned the jingling instrument over in her hands. “I still have the other one.”
“Thanks.” Cadie rewrapped the towel around the tambourine and placed it on her nightstand. “I’ll never worry about bears again.”
“I’ll always have your back, Cadie Braidy.” Daniela held her thumb up to Cadie so the scar on her thumb faced out. Phantom pain shot through Cadie’s thumb as she pressed her own scar against Daniela’s. She felt the rush of their blood pulsing against each other. Scooting backward toward the corner of her bed, she made room for Daniela next to her. Daniela put her head on Cadie’s shoulder and they sat silently in the stillness.
“I’ll never tell,” Cadie whispered.
“I know.”
The minor key of a Bicknell’s thrush cut through in the forest. They were preparing to head south soon too. Cadie sat up straight and put a finger to her lips. She strained her ears, hoping to hear the call one last time.
“Why do you love that bird so much?” Daniela whispered.
“Because no one else notices it. You hear the day song all the time. Most people don’t even know it sings at night sometimes,” Cadie said.
“Maybe it only sings for you. Maybe no one will ever hear it again after you leave.”
The tiny thrush was never meant to live in that forest. Maybe Cadie no longer belonged there either.
Cadie slipped off her paracord bracelet and fastened it around Daniela’s wrist. “In case of emergency.”
Waiting for the Night Song Page 26