SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  WHEN THEY PULLED into the parking lot at Saratoga Woods, there were no cars present and no bicycles locked against the information board. They got out of the car with the dog. Seth said, “Gus, sit,” and that was exactly what the Labrador did. He licked his chops, though, and looked toward the woods. He gazed meaningfully at Seth.

  “Impressive sit,” Becca told Seth.

  “Only as long as there’re no rabbits or squirrels in sight.” Seth bent to the dog and rubbed his head as he clipped on the leash. They headed across the meadow with Gus trotting along beside them.

  Becca pointed south where a distant trailhead opened into the towering Douglas firs. “Derric was up that trail, but I didn’t get to him from there. I came out that way after I found him, though.”

  “Yeah. I remember. That’s Meadow Loop,” Seth said. “You c’n get onto it from Coral Root Link. You want to go that way first?”

  “Let’s retrace everything, just like it was. Except I don’t think we need to let Gus run off.”

  “Glad of that,” Seth declared. “I can’t promise he’d come back. He’s not that well trained.”

  They headed for the main trail, directly in front of them at the end of a path through the last of the season’s rustling meadow grasses. Seth gave the dog more leash so that Gus could sniff the nectar of a thousand other dogs, and they made their way onto the trail into the woods.

  It was hushed among the trees, which made Becca think of how many sounds she’d heard on that day when Derric had fallen. There had been whispers coming at her from all directions, as well as scent and the barking. She remembered how everything had seemed to stop suddenly except the barking of the dogs, which went on and on.

  Seth said to her as if reading her mind, “What I remember is that Gus heard dogs barking. He took off. I went straight after him up Indian Pipe Trail.”

  So that was what they did, following the trail on the damp ground with the scent of decomposing vegetation rich in the air. When they came to the first junction, Seth paused and said, “Yeah. I remember I was happy he hadn’t gone onto Wintergreen. It was muddy in that direction, and there weren’t any paw prints. So I figured he stayed on Indian Pipe until Twin Flowers Trail, and that’s what I did, too.”

  “This is where I got lost,” Becca said. “You disappeared and I heard the dogs. I turned left somewhere but I didn’t know the forest, so I ended up on a trail that went way up and through some private land. That’s where I ran into Diana Kinsale. Gus was with her, and she gave me a leash to use, but he still got away.”

  “Private land?” Seth repeated. “That sounds like the Coral Root Link. It connects this woods over to Putney Woods. To Metcalf Woods, too. If Gus was with Mrs. Kinsale on that trail, we need to head that way.”

  Seth led her to the left onto the secondary trail and they began to climb. The ascent was immediate and narrow, carving an edge into a hillside covered with shrubbery and trees. The only sounds came from Gus’s snuffling along the sides of the path and from a woodpecker rat-tat-tatting against a dead tree trunk.

  Some distance along the trail, another veered off and the area looked familiar. Becca saw a flat-topped rock backed by a thick wall of ferns from which spiderwebs stretched like Halloween decorations. She remembered sitting on a stump here, she recalled the sounds of dogs coming closer. She said to Seth, “This is where I met up with Diana Kinsale and the dogs. Then Gus took off on that trail”—she pointed to it—“and I went after him.”

  Seth pointed to a small sign onto which M.L.T. had been carved. “Meadow Loop Trail,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Becca followed him. It was all coming back to her now, but what came back most strongly was how it felt, not what she saw. She remembered the moment when the scent that she associated with Derric had disappeared, as if cut off peremptorily by a slap in the face. She remembered the feeling of all at once being set adrift in a place that she didn’t know and couldn’t understand. She remembered the solitude and emptiness of it.

  Seth said over his shoulder, “So where’d you see that footprint? Seems to me we need to find that next.”

  She told him that the footprint had been at the steepest point of the trail, above the spot where Derric had fallen. He nodded and went back to the hike, and in a few minutes of climbing they had come to it. Becca said, “Here, Seth,” and she pointed to the tree far down the bluff against which Derric’s body had rested. “Gus was down there. It was like he knew Derric was hurt. He was lying right next to him.”

  “Where was the footprint?”

  Becca looked around to see if she could remember the precise spot, but instead of spying where the footprint had been, she saw that there was a secondary trail leading up the hill that comprised the other side of Meadow Loop Trail. This was more of a path, like the myriad paths that people made on their own throughout the woods. Like those, this one wasn’t official. It forged a way up to the remains of a large moss-covered trunk of an old-growth hemlock. Leaning against this were the remains of several other fir trees, long ago downed by storm. Together they formed the shape of a small teepee covered in ferns and moss.

  “Oh my gosh,” she said, “Seth, look at that,” and she began to climb up to it, not knowing exactly why she was doing so, only knowing it felt right to her.

  Seth said, “Be careful. There’s a lot of deadfall. If it slides out from under you and . . . Gus, stay. I don’t need you going up there, too.”

  At the top, Becca crawled into the teepee, and sat cross-legged. She was some thirty feet above the trail, looking down on Seth and on Gus next to him, his tail whisking the ground. She said slowly, “Seth . . . this is . . . It seems very special.”

  “It’s probably a raccoon den, and you’re probably sitting in the middle of a pile of raccoon poop. Better hope they’re out for the day ’cause they can be nasty. You better come out.”

  Becca looked around. The hollow was deep and dimly lit from the daylight. There didn’t seem to be any poop, and the place didn’t smell of animals or anything else except vegetation. But then she spied something tucked into the deepest part of the hollow, and she crawled to inspect it as Seth called up, “What’re you doing?”

  Becca said, “Found something,” and she saw that it was a plastic supermarket bag, covering two other plastic supermarket bags, and all of them were tightly fitted around what felt like a box. The box turned out to be an old Star Wars lunch box, a little rusty but otherwise usable.

  Becca crawled out of the teepee and opened the lunch box. Inside, she found envelopes. There was a stack of them, each with the same word printed on the front of it. The writing started out as simple block printing, became clumsy cursive, and then gained confidence. Becca was somehow not surprised when she read the word written over and over again as she flipped through the collection: Rejoice.

  THEY WERE LETTERS, dozens of them. They began “Dear Rejoice” and no matter the block printing or the cursive, they all ended identically: “Your loving brother, Derric.” Becca read this with the dawning understanding that Derric had crept up to this place to hide letters he’d written to a beloved sister.

  Dimly, Becca heard her name called again. She said, “It’s a person, Seth. Rejoice is a person!”

  “What the heck . . . ?” Below her, Seth’s face was screwed up in confusion. Hastily, Becca put the letters back into the box, wrapped the plastic bags around it, and got to her feet.

  She felt dizzy for a moment. Then she understood. She said, “Oh my God. He just fell. Seth, he just fell. No one pushed him. You rushed by looking for Gus and he probably stood up quickly, but then . . . He just fell.”

  “How d’you figure that?”

  She held up the package. “These’re letters he wrote. He came here to write them or maybe just to hide them but it doesn’t matter because he stood up and he slipped and he fell all the way down to—”

  “No way,” Seth said. “Good try but no way.”

  “Why not?” She began to descend, but within
four steps, she slid and went down. As if to prove Seth’s words, a root broke her fall. She clambered up, went the rest of the way down to the trail, and Seth caught her arm when she got there.

  “Rest my case,” he said. “Anyway, Derric could walk on a shoestring across Niagara Falls. He’s an athlete, Becca. He’s an excellent athlete. No way did he slip. Even if he did, he only would’ve slipped to here, the main trail. He wouldn’t’ve kept going. He would’ve hit a root or some salal or something. Nice try, though.” He nodded at the box. “What’s that?”

  “Letters,” she said. “Like I said. To someone called Rejoice.”

  “What the heck kind of name is Rejoice? How d’you even know it’s a person?”

  “’Cause he told me about her right when I met him,” Becca said. “Only I didn’t understand what he meant till now.”

  * * *

  FORTY-TWO

  Even Gus knew something had happened. He was lying flat on the backseat of the VW instead of sticking his head out of the window or leaning it on Seth’s shoulder. Becca was sitting with that lunch box clutched in her lap. The only thing she had said since they’d hurried down the rest of Meadow Loop Trail was, “We’ve got to get to the hospital.” She had said it so urgently that, for a second, Seth had thought she was sick. Now as they drove she was just chewing her lip and he wondered if she was thinking that he’d hurt Derric after all.

  Out of nowhere, Becca said, “I know you didn’t hurt him. Your footprint was there but I bet your footprints were all over the forest that day.”

  Seth was freaked. It wasn’t the first time Becca had said something that clicked right into his thoughts. He said, “That’s just what I was thinking about.”

  “I figured.”

  “There’s Dylan, though.”

  “He doesn’t like Derric,” Becca agreed. “He hassled him at lunch one time when I was there. But do you see Dylan going after Derric by himself, Seth? I mean, he seems to be the kind of kid who only does stuff for an audience. And there were no other footprints as fresh as that one I saw. It had to be yours.” She opened the box and flipped through the letters.

  Seth glanced over and saw how the printing changed to inexpert cursive and then to nice script. He said, “I don’t get why he didn’t just mail them. Or d’you think maybe Rejoice is just an imaginary friend? I had one when I was a kid. Jeter.”

  Becca looked at him from under her eyebrows and smiled. “What kind of name is Jeter?”

  “The perfect name for an imaginary friend. A non-name. They don’t need real names. Rejoice could be like that.”

  “Did you write letters to your imaginary friend?”

  “Why would I? He was always there.”

  “That’s just it,” Becca said.

  Seth considered this. She had a good point. They said nothing more until they arrived in Coupeville and pulled into the parking lot of the hospital.

  Then Seth said, “You sure about this? His dad could be in there with him.”

  “He doesn’t really know what I look like,” Becca pointed out. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter now. This box is what matters. Derric needs to know that someone knows.”

  “What’s that going to do?”

  “It’ll take too long to explain. Just trust me, okay?” She looked at him earnestly when she said this, and Seth got the distinct feeling that she knew a lot of things that she wasn’t revealing. He thought about this for a moment and decided that just as he had unfinished business in his life, she probably had unfinished business in hers and some of it might have to do with Derric Mathieson.

  She nodded as if he’d said all this aloud, which made a shiver go down Seth’s spine. He said, “Okay, let’s go. Stay, Gus,” and he cranked the window down halfway so the dog could enjoy the scents of Coupeville.

  When they got to Derric’s room, the door was open but no one was there visiting. This was the first time Seth had seen the other boy since his fall, and he looked around the room and noticed that there were wilted flowers that could be dumped in the trash. He thought about making himself useful and doing this, but instead he made himself look at Derric. The other boy was hooked up to tubes and peeing devices and whatever. Seth saw how the athlete he’d envied was now completely reliant on other people’s willingness to care for him.

  Becca went to the bed. She said over her shoulder, “C’n you stay by the door? If someone tries to come in, c’n you ask them to wait?”

  Seth nodded. He eased the door closed and asked Becca what she was planning to do. He thought about Sleeping Beauty and the kiss from the Prince and then about Snow White and the kiss from the Prince, and he thought about how being kissed by a prince was something every girl was supposed to be waiting for: someone to save her when the reality was that there was no saving anyone, really. There was only saving yourself.

  Becca glanced back at him. Seth saw in her eyes a kind of knowing. He couldn’t work out what to make of this, but he suddenly trusted her completely.

  He watched Becca put the lunch box on the bedside table and open it. She flipped through the letters and selected one, which she took out of its envelope. She unfolded it, smoothed it out, then put it on Derric’s chest, faceup so that she could read the writing. Then she took up a framed picture from the bedside table and held it. With her other hand, she laced her fingers with Derric’s flaccid ones. She leaned over the bed so that she could see the letter on his chest. She began to read it to him.

  Seth heard only the first part, which was “Dear Rejoice,” and after that he caught the occasional phrase like “track team at school this year” and “likes to talk to me about the Peace Corps” and “Goss Lake for the bicycle trials.” He listened to this and tried to stay patient, but it wasn’t easy. It seemed wildly unlikely that reading a letter was going to do any good, and he was about to say this when Becca reached the phrase “miss you so much, Rejoice,” followed by “bring you here,” and then the impossible happened.

  Derric’s foot moved. Then his free hand eased up to his chest. It moved across the letter and settled there so that Becca couldn’t read any more of it. Only this didn’t matter because she’d reached the end of it, which Seth could tell by the way she’d said “loving brother” and then “Derric.” She’d said this last the way you’d say it if you were calling to a person, and that was what she was doing, Seth realized. She was calling to him.

  Seth felt his heart seizing up in his chest. He said, “Becca, Becca, he’s waking up.”

  She said, “Yeah,” and then she spoke to Derric, saying, “I found the letters in the woods, Derric. I know about her. I understand.”

  At this, Seth saw Derric’s eyes flutter. He saw his head turn with enormous effort so that he could look at Becca. His lips parted and his voice, when he spoke, was cracked by disuse. Just before Seth crashed out of the room in order to get to the nursing station, he heard Derric’s words. They were clear in every possible way.

  Derric said, “Where’d that stupid dog come from, Becca?”

  They’d all been such fools, Seth thought.

  SETH’S GRANDFATHER ALWAYS liked to use the expression “Can’t see the forest for the trees,” but Seth knew that for him and for most everyone else the opposite had been true. They’d all been unable to see the tree for the forest. The single tree of truth had been in front of them all along. But no one had seen it because everyone had been confused by their own individual, personal stuff.

  Seth had chased Gus all over Saratoga Woods that day. He’d gone up one trail and down another and Becca had been doing the very same thing. Gus, of course, had thought it was a game. The faster Seth ran, the faster Becca ran, the faster Gus ran. How easy it would have been, then, for the Labrador to come racing around a bend in the trail where he’d come upon Derric just down from his hiding place, where he’d leaped upon the boy in a joyful Gus greeting, causing him to lose his footing and go over the bluff. So minutes later Seth had crashed by just running after Gus who was already streaking
up ahead. And Seth had noticed nothing at all because in that moment when he’d passed by, there was nothing to notice. The fall had occurred, and he wasn’t thinking about someone falling anyway. He was only thinking about finding his dog.

  No one’s fault, Seth thought. Absolutely no one’s frigging fault.

  At the nurses’ station, he said, “He’s waking up,” and they knew at once what he was talking about. One of them picked up a phone and began to punch in numbers while another got to her feet and headed to Derric’s room.

  From all of this, Seth knew that the undersheriff would be arriving in short order to see his son. Because she was still a missing person to him, Becca was going to be someone the undersheriff probably would want to talk to. Plus, there was still the matter of that cell phone and how it would look to Dave Mathieson if he made the connection between her, it, and leaving the scene of Derric’s accident. So Seth went back to the hospital room and stood in the doorway to get her attention.

  The nurse was bustling around the bed saying, “Look who’s awake! My, my, we’ve had a sleep, haven’t we,” and generally talking to Derric in the way someone talks to a five-year-old. She was writing on a chart and checking the IV bag and chatting away about “Mom and Dad are going to be very happy with this turn of events,” and completely ignoring Becca who was sitting next to the bed with Derric’s hand in hers like a lifeline he was clinging to.

  Seth was about to call out to her and tell her that they should split before the undersheriff showed up when she stood and said to him, “Yeah, we should go,” and then said to Derric, “I’ll be back. I’ll keep them safe for now.”

  Derric didn’t seem to want to let go of her hand, though. The nurse didn’t like this one bit. She said with false heartiness, “Now, Derric, the doctor’s going to want to have a look at you and we can’t have your little friend here when that happens, okay? She’ll be back, won’t you dear?”—this to Becca—and then, “See there? She’s nodding. That means yes. You can let go now.”