The Forest of Forever (The Soren Chase Series, Book One)

by Rob Blackwell

  When he was around her, he tried not to talk about John, yet it felt like he came up constantly anyway. John might as well be some ghost who continually hovered around them. Soren felt like there were three at their table instead of two. He wondered if it could ever be any different.

  “What happened to your glasses?” Sara asked.

  Soren involuntarily put a hand to his face. As stupid as it was to think it, he missed his sunglasses. He’d grown used to seeing the world through them, and now everything seemed ridiculously bright. When he’d walked out of his apartment this morning, he felt like he spent at least three minutes blinking in the morning sun, trying to get used to it.

  As he sat across from Sara, he thought that the glasses had shielded more than just his eyes. He realized the other reason he missed them—they were a protective cover from searching looks like the one Sara was currently giving him. He preferred to be inscrutable, especially to her, and the glasses were a big help in that department. He made a mental note to pick up another pair as soon as possible.

  “I lost them while I was on the case,” Soren said, trying to avoid the specifics.

  “How’s it going?” Sara asked.

  “It’s disturbing and dangerous,” he replied. “So, you know, the usual.”

  “You okay?” she asked.

  Soren thought of the car flipping off the bridge, and nearly drowning. He thought of the way Evan had looked at him when he’d been discussing Coakley. Soren was shaken; he just didn’t want to admit it.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  Sara looked unconvinced.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing, Sara,” he said, and shrugged. “I’m okay.”

  “How long have we known each other?” she asked.

  “Since we were eight,” Soren replied.

  “So you know I can tell when you’re lying, right? It doesn’t matter if you disappear for a few years; you’re no better at hiding it than you were twenty-three years ago.”

  “Oh, please,” Soren replied. “You never knew when I was lying. Remember the time all your Ginny dolls ended up buried in a jar outside in your yard? I blamed John, and you totally bought it.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You totally did.”

  “Soren, no, I didn’t,” Sara said.

  “Then why did you yell at John?” Soren asked. “You refused to talk to him for a week.”

  Sara looked at him for a long time without answering—long enough that Soren grew nervous he had said something wrong.

  “You really don’t remember, do you?” she asked.

  “I remember the Ginny dolls,” he said. “Pretty clearly, actually. Why?”

  “It’s just you and I have had this conversation before,” she said. “A long time ago.”

  “About the dolls?”

  “Yes,” Sara said. “You don’t remember that?”

  Soren shook his head.

  “Sorry, no,” he said. “It’s a little hard to tell what I should remember and what I shouldn’t. I don’t remember you and me ever discussing it. Should I?”

  Sara was still staring at him in a way that made him uncomfortable.

  “It was an intense conversation,” she replied. “To be honest, I would assume you were more likely to recall that conversation than the actual incident.”

  “Was I an asshole or something?” Soren asked. “The way you keep staring at me makes me think I was.”

  The comment seemed to snap Sara out of something. She stopped looking at him so intently and brushed her hair back behind her ear, making an unsuccessful attempt to be nonchalant.

  “No, Soren, far from it,” she said. “It was a very honest conversation between you and me. Probably the most candid we’ve ever had.”

  It was Soren’s turn to stare at Sara.

  “What did I say?” he asked.

  He didn’t know what he meant by the question. Something about the way Sara made the remark worried him, but he couldn’t say exactly why.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” Sara said, looking away.

  “Now who’s lying?”

  Sara didn’t bother to respond immediately, instead drinking her coffee.

  “What exactly do you remember?” she asked. “Are there particular things you’ve forgotten?”

  “It’s kind of hard to remember what you don’t know,” Soren said. “Like this conversation we’re talking about. I assume it must have been memorable to me at some point, but it’s just not in my head. Please don’t feel too bad, though. I don’t like to admit it, but I’ve forgotten whole people. And places, like Mary’s Cafe you mentioned the other day.”

  “I want to ask you something,” Sara said. “I’ve wanted to ask it for a long time.”

  Soren felt an acute sense of dread creep over him. He knew what the question was and desperately did not want to respond. People always asked it, but Sara was the sole exception.

  “Sara,” he started.

  “I think I’ve waited long enough,” she said.

  “Please don’t,” Soren said.

  He wanted to push away from the table and leave her there. Soren did not consider himself a coward, but in that moment he would have gladly accepted the label if he could just escape.

  “You told the police that you don’t remember what happened that night,” Sara said.

  He didn’t need to ask what night she was talking about. In his head it was always in capital letters: That Night.

  “Was that a lie?” Sara continued.

  Soren’s response was automatic.

  “I was driving to get help when my car spun off the road and into the lake,” he said. “During the crash I hit my head on the steering wheel. I don’t remember much about that night. I don’t even remember how I got myself out of the car. The doctor said—”

  “I know what happened to you, Soren. I don’t need a replay. And you never went to a doctor. You wouldn’t let them touch you.”

  “I went to one later. A shrink.”

  “What was his name?”

  Soren looked at her in confusion.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” she replied evenly. “What was your shrink’s name? Who’d you see?”

  Soren opened his mouth to reply but nothing came out of it. He’d seen a shrink, hadn’t he? He was almost sure he had; he remembered the prognosis quite clearly—selective amnesia brought on by a traumatic event. The problem wasn’t physical, it was mental.

  “I don’t remember,” he said finally.

  “Uh-huh,” Sara said. “It’s interesting to me what you do and don’t remember.”

  The comment felt like a slap in the face. Soren jerked his head up and stared into Sara’s eyes.

  “I didn’t kill them, Sara,” he said. “You said you can tell if I’m lying. Look at me now. I swear to you I didn’t kill them.”

  This time it was Sara who looked like she’d been struck.

  “That’s not . . .” she said.

  She reached across the table and put her hand to Soren’s face. For a moment he feared she was going to hit him, but instead she stroked his cheek gently.

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” she asked. “Do you think I would be here now if there was the slightest chance you killed John, Mikey, or Edward? I never doubted that, Soren. It was never a question of that.”

  She put her hand back on the table. Soren wished he had kept driving when he had spotted Sara on the road. He wished she had never come to see him at the office.

  “Wasn’t that your question?” Soren asked. “Isn’t that what you wanted to know?”

  “No, honey, it wasn’t,” Sara said. “I defended you, remember? When they arrested you, I said you didn’t do it. I told anyone who would listen. But only John’s little sister backed me up on that. His mother hated us for that. She threw Meredith out of the house until she came around to the everyone-blame-Soren-and-Sara line of thinking.”

  Soren
couldn’t remember John’s sister, another victim of his faulty memory, but he recalled his mother well enough. She was a bitter, controlling woman who never forgave John for falling in love at the tender age of seven, displacing her as the preeminent woman in his life for all time.

  “John’s mother disliked you a long time before then,” Soren replied.

  “True enough. I guess it would be fair to say she had a reason to hate me then, one she could share with the ladies over tea and win sympathy for. I became ‘the bitch that killed her son.’”

  “Nobody thought you did it, Sara,” Soren said.

  She stared at him for a moment, her mouth hanging open.

  “You really are fucking stupid sometimes, you know that?” she said.

  “They thought we were in it together?” Soren asked. “Why?”

  But the answer came to him abruptly.

  “Oh,” he said. “They thought we . . .”

  Sara just nodded.

  “Kinda what I figured,” she said. “You were pretty wrapped up in your own shit at the time; you seemed oblivious to the whole thing. It was Meredith who started that particular rumor. Not sure when she turned—she always had a big crush on you—but once she started spouting that stuff, everyone in town hated me, too. Why do you think I live here? I got tired of all the dark looks and the hate mail.”

  “I’m sorry,” Soren managed.

  “I don’t need your sorry,” Sara replied. “I don’t actually think this is all your fault. I know that’s why you stayed away from me afterward. You thought I blamed you. But look at me. I don’t know what happened in that cabin, but I know you and John better than any other people I’ve ever known. You would have never hurt him, or he you. Not over anything, even me. You would have taken a bullet for each other. So do not believe for a moment that I thought you killed him. Ever.”

  “Okay,” Soren said.

  He should have felt relief. After all these years of feeling like she must blame him, Sara was letting him off the hook. Instead, he would have happily welcomed an asteroid strike at his location. He knew what inquiry was coming, and he would have done anything to avoid hearing it.

  “But you didn’t let me ask my question,” Sara said. “It wasn’t ‘Did you do it?,’ so stop squirming in your chair like you used to at church.”

  “What do you want to know?” he said after a moment.

  “You told everyone that you didn’t remember what happened,” she said. “You said the accident wiped your memory of that night completely clean. Was it true? I need to know, Soren. Do you remember what happened in that cabin?”

  It wasn’t the question he feared the most, but it was close. It was the first crack in the armor he’d built for himself around those events. And it was a question that led to more. There was no good way to answer it. But Sara sat there patiently, waiting for him to respond. And after what she had just told him, there was no way he could keep avoiding it.

  “Yes,” he said. “I really do have localized amnesia, but I remember most everything that happened that night. Some of it’s a little blurry, but the vast majority of it’s there.”

  He waited with bated breath for the next question, the terrible follow-up. But it didn’t come.

  “Okay,” Sara said.

  He watched her face to see if she was going to say more, but she didn’t. Instead, she smiled at him.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I’m not going to ask you what happened, because I don’t want to know. I just wanted to make sure you knew, that someone knew, what had really occurred. I didn’t believe you didn’t remember, but I had to be sure.”

  “Oh,” Soren said.

  Sara laughed unexpectedly.

  “You look like Alex does when he thinks I’m going to do something awful to him and it turns out not to be that bad,” she said.

  “I just—”

  “I know what you thought,” she said. “I will say something else, though. Have you ever told anybody what really happened? I’m not asking for it to be me, but have you ever come clean?”

  “The shrink and—”

  “Soren, you never saw any shrink,” Sara said. “I know you. I knew your father, too. That man would have no more admitted he had a drinking problem than you would have fessed up to sleeping with our twelfth-grade math teacher.”

  “Ms. Gallup,” Soren said, happy for once to recall something specific. “She was hot.”

  “It’s not in your nature to admit weakness. So don’t tell me you saw a shrink when I know that’s not possible. But back to my secondary question: Have you ever told anyone what happened?”

  “No,” Soren said. “No, I haven’t. Nobody would believe me. I’m not even sure—”

  “I would believe you, Soren, but that isn’t the point. The point is you need to get it off your chest. You’ve been carrying around this weight for years and it’s holding you down. I don’t care who you tell the story to. It doesn’t even have to be a friend. Pick up some woman in a bar if you have to, or find the local priest.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “Just tell somebody,” Sara finished. “Promise me you will.”

  “Okay,” Soren said.

  “Say it like you mean it,” Sara said.

  “Okay,” Soren said again, this time with more sincerity.

  Sara stared at him a long moment.

  “That’ll have to do for now,” she said. “But you have to understand, if you don’t tell the story, that guilt and anger is going to end up making you do something stupid. I’m worried it’s going to get you killed.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Soren woke up with his face lying on top of a dusty history book. A small dribble of drool escaped his lips. He sat up, wiping his chin in the process.

  What worried him wasn’t the dream—it was the same nightmare he had time and again—but that he could have sworn he heard a noise just as he was waking up, the sound of breaking glass.

  He felt nauseous and unsteady, but he stood up. He looked down at the books scattered across his desk and realized he must have fallen asleep while researching Jeremiah Coakley. He had returned home after seeing Wallace and Sara, determined to find some clue as to why the Association cared so deeply about the forest. He felt sure Coakley was connected; he just didn’t know how. Except for a brief stop on the way home to buy himself another pair of sunglasses, which were now resting on the edge of the desk, he’d been researching all day. Apparently he’d been so bored with his lack of progress that he’d eventually nodded off.

  But now he had a new problem. Soren walked carefully through his darkened apartment. He didn’t know what time it was, but it was clearly late in the evening. He walked into the living room to find broken glass scattered across his wooden floor. The window lay wide open, and the wind was blowing the curtains into billowing shapes. Soren’s mind snapped awake and he was abruptly aware of two things.

  The first was that someone had broken his window so that they could open it.

  The second was that whoever did so was now in the apartment with him.

  Soren whirled around, expecting to find the intruder right behind him.

  Instead, there was nothing but his empty apartment. He listened carefully and could just make out the sound of something moving nearby. It was nearly silent, but Soren heard a scraping noise and then quiet. He stood still and heard it again. His intruder was moving in quick bursts.

  Soren needed his gun. He’d felt foolish for not bringing it with him to Reapoke Forest, but at the time he hadn’t known he was going there. All Annika had said was that they were going to a police station, and since his weapon was unregistered, he thought it unwise to show up with it in his pocket.

  But he still had it in his apartment, sitting inside the desk drawer by his bed. He should have grabbed it as soon as he woke up, but he’d been too groggy to think clearly. Now he was paying the price.

  He heard the scraping sound again and realized whatever it was had moved away fro
m him deeper into his home. It took no imagination to predict where the intruder was headed. The invader was hoping to find him asleep and vulnerable in the bedroom. But for Soren to have the upper hand, he had to get there first.

  It sounded like the intruder had gone into his dining room. Next it would head through the kitchen and into the hallway that led to his bedroom.

  Soren had two choices. He could creep back to his bedroom and hope to beat the intruder there without making a sound, or instead run as fast as he could and hope to grab his gun before the surprised invader realized Soren was awake. A third option—opening the front door, which was just behind him—never occurred to him.

  Whatever he was going to do, he had to act now. Hoping to catch the intruder off guard, Soren opted for speed over stealth.

  He burst forward from the living room, sprinting down the hall and turning toward his bedroom, but he barely got to the door before something large scuttled across the kitchen and hit him from behind. His attacker collided with him at full force and he sprawled forward, his hands barely keeping him from landing on his face.

  His attacker pounced on top of him. Soren heard a ripping sound and felt a sharp pain on his back. It felt like someone was raking several knives down it. But he knew they weren’t knives; whatever was attacking him had claws.

  Soren threw his left elbow to the side and pushed up from the ground with his right arm at the same time, throwing his attacker off him and sending it sliding out into the hallway. Soren didn’t turn to see what it was but tried to stand up and move into the bedroom to get his gun. He felt a wave of pain in his back.

  The intruder recovered barely a moment later and sprang toward Soren, grabbing his legs and yanking him down. Soren screamed as the claws tore into his calves. He threw his elbow out a second time, but his blow found only empty air.

  Soren attempted to push himself up, but his attacker raked its claws across his back again, tearing through his shirt and into his skin. Soren screamed anew.

  The pain was intense, but he had to concoct a strategy. He was never going to make it to the gun without first facing whatever was on top of him. The thing was simply too quick.

  Soren smelled the creature’s rancid breath and jerked his head backward, hoping it had brought its face too close to him. He felt the blow connect and heard a sharp rasp of pain. He bucked his body, trying to throw the creature off balance somehow. Instead of pushing up from the ground, he rolled over.