Go back there? No. I kept on going, slowly, deeper into the woods. I was too scared to have held onto any sense of direction. I looked upward to see if there was any break in this huge canopy of leaves and branches; light was gathering in, I was sure, and anyway the branches looked locked together in some kind of death dance. Because I’d lost direction, I wasn’t sure I was going in a straight line away from the house; I could have gone off at an angle—several angles, maybe, a zigzag pattern.
Twigs snapped. I jerked around. It was one of those noises you think someone’s trying hard not to make. My stomach seized up. I couldn’t tell what direction the snapping came from in this dense place, or whether my ears magnified it, which wouldn’t be surprising, what with every nerve and muscle, every cell and filament cocked to hear. I stood perfectly still, worrying over how my calling out for Mr. Butternut could have given away my position. How stupid that had been. But then I’d supposed I was safely near the road.
Carefully, I moved to a huge oak whose trunk and lower branches were so gnarled and deformed the tree looked blasted. The way the branches grew, the tree would be easy to climb, at least its lower branches would. I got easily to the second tier of branches, some of which swooped down so far their ends drooped heavily along the ground. I sat with my legs dangling on either side of a big knuckle of wood; it was like sitting in a saddle. Even though I was not all that far off the ground, I could be well hidden by the drapery of leaves I was now looking through. With some care, I could go even farther up the tree, but the branches directly above me reached upward as if they were beseeching heaven.
Here I was in a place as dense and damp as a rain forest, where there might have been bright birds and unfamiliar foreign flowers, but I saw nothing except my white socks sticking out below my jeans. They were as bright as the light had been in my face. I almost got my feet up on the branch and was taking off a shoe when I heard a shuffling nearby. I froze. Rabbit, ’coon, possum—it could have been anything. Fox, mouse. But it wasn’t the startled movement of an animal; it was measured, like footsteps coming across the wet, black leaves and undergrowth.
I was so intent, so listening, that I knew every sound must have been magnified and distorted. I forced myself to move my hands and part the leaves. There was a flare of light that showed a man’s face, or at least the part I could see from my perch in the branches looking down. He had a shotgun, broken, over his arm, and was smoking a cigarette. The light had come from a match.
Like a coal miner, he had a light attached to a cap. I could see this because he switched it on to bend down and look at something; then he straightened up and switched it off. He was wearing a wool jacket. He leaned against the tree and went on smoking. He did not have a flashlight, I was sure, as the light strapped around his forehead would serve that purpose and leave him free to handle the gun. This light was yellow and duller than the one that had shown in my face, but could I be sure he was not the person inside the house? Could
I be sure of anything?
But why was he hanging about down there? Then I remembered arguing with Mr. Butternut about poachers. He was probably just a poacher! My body went slack with relief and I sighed and let my head fall against the bump of wood.
“Hey!” Suddenly, he’d stepped back and looked up. Then he snapped the shotgun up.
“Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!” Quickly, I left the branch for another.
“What the fuck?”
I was scrambling down as fast as I could.
“Who in hell? ... What’re you doing up that tree, for Lord’s sakes?”
Once on solid ground and picking scabs of bark from myself, I told him I’d got lost.
He was taller than he’d appeared, looking down on him. He was also strong-looking; even through the jacket I could see a slight bulge of muscle in his upper arm as he broke the shotgun again (which I appreciated) and leaned it against the tree. It wasn’t a jacket he wore but a heavy shirt that did service as one. It was red or blue plaid. In the dull yellow light of his lamp, I couldn’t tell colors. I couldn’t tell the color of his eyes, either, but he had long eyelashes (the kind Ree-Jane claimed she had but didn’t); in the downward reflection of the light, the lashes cast a little fretwork of lines under his eyes. The lamp lit the slant of his cheekbones and nose and the tilt of his chin, making dark slopes of the rest of his face. If he was ever in a lineup and I was the witness, he wouldn’t stand a chance. Then he moved and the shadows shifted. He had crouched down and had his hand on a dead rabbit.
“What in the fu—?”
(I was hoping he’d say it again, but he caught himself.)
“—in the devil you doing out here in this place to get lost in? Ain’t nobody comes out here, or never has been.”
“There’s you.”
He stopped stuffing the rabbit in the sack (which already held others, I was sure) and just looked at me.
“All I was trying to do was to get to that road. Yonder.” It was a word I’d always hoped to say. “Yonder somewhere.” For it was the location of the road that had been causing me trouble.
He pointed at a slightly different angle, but not off mine by much. “ ‘Yonder’ is that way.”
“Maybe you could walk me there. I mean if you’re through. What’re you doing with those rabbits?”
“Never mind. I ain’t going that way.” He was really grumpy. I guess I’d butted into his poaching.
“But it’s so dark. I’m only a kid.” It was going against my principles, but I whined.
He just snorted. “Not too much of a one if you came in here in the first place.”
I sighed. “How many rabbits you got in that bag, mister?”
He had slung the bag over his shoulder. The question made him a little uncertain. “None of your beeswax.”
I couldn’t help but smile. We used to say tnat in second or third grade. I always wondered what it meant, but this was no time to find out.
He must have thought my smiling meant something else. “What do you care about rabbits? I shot a ‘coon, too. In case you got any special feelings about ’coons.”
“No. But hunting season’s not until October. So you’re poaching.” This brought to mind the perfect circles of gold and white of my mother’s poached eggs; I was hungry after being out here so long.
He just stood looking at me, trying to make me add up. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“Yes, I do. I’m friends with the Sheriff. He’s told me about poaching.”
“The sheriff.”
It came out a statement, rather than a question. Now, he was sizing me up all over again. I smiled. “To get back to the road, I’d have to walk past that house,” I pointed in its general direction, “and I’m afraid to.”
He followed the line of my arm. “Brokedown House? There’s nothing there.”
“There is, too. There’s somebody.” As much as I didn’t believe in hunting, I offered to carry the sack. “You’ve got that gun; you wouldn’t want to trip.”
“I ain’t about to.” He’d tossed his cigarette on the ground, pulverized it with his heel, and picked up the sack. “Okay, I’ll walk you. Just remember: we never had this conversation.”
“Right.” Blackmail was a heady experience.
We started back in the direction of the house. Wanting him to have both hands free to handle the shotgun (if necessary), I offered again to carry the bag.
He said, “Never did tell me what you’re doing here.” The sack bounced on his back.
I tried to think, but it was hard, moving through the trees, getting closer to the house. “I lost my flashlight inside. It rolled away.” I told him about the light in my face and Mr. Butternut.
He snorted: “That’s one of the most damn fool stories I ever heard.”
It wasn’t, but it would be. “I’ll tell you the truth: I’ve got this crazy old aunt lives out this way,” I filled him in.
Shaking his head, he stopped. “I don’t think even Billy Faulk
ner could come up with something like that.”
“Who?”
He pulled the paperback book from the bag and held it up. Light in August was its title. “Oh, him,” I said, hoping I sounded well-read. “You mean William Faulkner.”
“Yeah, well, I read so much of him, I figure we’re on a nickname basis.”
“We aren’t. We don’t even know each other’s names.”
He seemed to be thinking this over. Then he said, “ ‘A shape to fill a lack.’”
I screwed up my face. “What do you mean?” For a poacher, he sure had a way of talking.
“That’s what Faulkner says about words. Or some words. Like ‘love.’ ”
I squinted up at him. This talk didn’t sound like his other talk.
He told me his name was Dwayne and I told him mine was Emma. He said that was a really nice name, but it didn’t match up with me. I did not appreciate that, but didn’t give him the satisfaction of asking what kind of girl it would match up with.
We were on White’s Bridge Road now, and Dwayne said his truck was parked up there in the clearing, near the pond. He offered to drop me at the Silver Pear if I wanted. I’d said a friend was to pick me up there. It was by now nearly nine o’clock and Bunny would have come and gone, but that was all right, as I could always call Axel’s Taxis. I didn’t tell Dwayne it was past the time for my ride, as I didn’t want him to feel guilty for leaving me at the Silver Pear, when, with his own vehicle, he could drive me the ten miles into La Porte. I pondered this, then decided it wouldn’t be fair to blackmail him again. Besides we were by way of being pals by now. We were on a first name basis.
He wouldn’t tell me his last name in case I forgot and “mentioned” it to “somebody.” Why would anyone ever ask me? And even if they did, how many Dwaynes that looked like him and drove a truck were there around here? But I didn’t say this so as not to insult his “power of deduction.” The Sheriff talked about a person’s “power of deduction” and that mine was extremely good. I don’t want to compliment myself, but I think this is true, for I can almost always figure out who’s guilty before the big courtroom scene on Perry Mason. So Dwayne’s power of deduction was pretty bad if he couldn’t see I knew enough on him to turn him in.
If it goes too hard on you, turn me in, came the voice of Ben Queen; it was the last thing he said to me. That got me thinking about Ben Queen’s deductions. Because that’s what it came down to; Ben Queen didn’t know Mary-Evelyn Devereau’s death was an accident. He was deducing it from what Rose said must’ve happened. Rose said it was an accident. And then a thought—more a hint than a thought—struck me almost like the white light flashed in my face in Brokedown House. Rose herself could easily be wrong. But you’d think from living in that house, she surely knew how awful the three sisters were to Mary-Evelyn. Unless—unless what? This was something I had to think about very clearly and I would have to wait until I was alone, back in the Pink Elephant, or on my corner of the porch.
Dwayne asked me what the matter was. He said I looked kind of pale. I told him because of a memory I had, and he said I was awful young to have memories that turned me pale. He said it as if he knew all about memories that turn you pale.
We picked up walking again, this time with me carrying the rabbits. I don’t know why I insisted. The bag bounced against my back and I could feel their warm bodies. Or probably I was just imagining this, as I felt somehow guilty for their fate. I asked Dwayne if he’d read about the murder of this woman, Fern Queen, out here. Of course he had, he said, hadn’t everyone? What about it? he said. You thinkI took a shotgun to her? he said. Of course I didn’t think so. Of course not. I only wondered if he’d been out poaching that night—I could’ve put that better——and maybe saw something that he didn’t want to tell the police because then they’d ask what took him over to that clearing that night.
To all of this, Dwayne grunted.
I asked him again if he was sure he’d never seen anybody in Brokedown House, or even seen anything at all, or heard anything. He told me no, and how many times did he have to say it? He was kind of crabby.
We were nearing Mr. Butternut’s house and the clearing when we saw the cars and the lights, the domed red lights of three police cars. Several policemen were gathered around the cars. I could see one of the cars was La Porte’s, the other two were state troopers. They were all angled in right in front of Mr. Butternut’s. I was so surprised by this, I dropped the rabbit sack.
Dwayne grabbed it up and pulled me behind a moss-covered tree by a bed of nasturtiums so dark they looked black.
They were about forty or fifty feet ahead and I was trying to see if the Sheriff was there. I saw Donny standing with the troopers, his hand on his holster, as if he was going to draw at any moment and people better watch out.
Then the screen door opened and the policemen gathered on the road looked up at the porch. The Sheriff stood there and Mr. Butternut was holding the door open and they were talking. I couldn’t hear anything except “Okay” and “I’ll let you know.” The Sheriff went down the steps then.
Dwayne whispered, “It’s old man Butternut. What the hell’s he been up to?”
“Do you know him?” I whispered back.
“Sure. He’s lived around here forever.”
What Mr. Butternut had been up to was (I was uncomfortably sure) not the point. What I’d been up to was.
The cars passed us and we watched them heading down the road we had just come up. We couldn’t see them stop, but we heard them, heard car doors slam and voices raised. They were going to search the woods.
I should have told Dwayne we would have to stop by and tell Mr. Butternut I was okay, but it didn’t mean as much to me to be nice to Mr. Butternut as it did to not get in bad with the Sheriff more than I already was.
Dwayne and I left our hiding place and walked on a path he knew that paralleled the main road, passed Mr. Butternut’s house, and ended up near Mirror Pond where his truck was parked. He seemed to be under the impression the cops had come for him until I asked why the La Porte police and the state police would get together just to look for poachers? Dwayne allowed as how that made sense. So they were here for some other reason, and maybe I was right; maybe there was somebody back there.
By the time we piled into Dwayne’s beat-up truck, I wasn’t so concerned any longer about the person in Brokedown House as I was with whether the Sheriff knew I was the one Mr. Butternut had called in about. (I guess I should have been more grateful.) But he didn’t know who I was. I’d simply forgotten to introduce myself. All he could do was describe me, but there was nothing about me particularly describable. As the truck bumped over White’s Bridge, I looked down at myself as if that might turn up something a person would remember about me and me alone, but I found I was perfectly ordinary. And my face looked like a lot of other faces so no one would recall anything particular. (Now, if it’d been ReeJane Mr. Butternut had met up with, I could hear him telling the Sheriff: Pale blue eyes, look like they never had a thought behind ’em, and a real dumb expression, you know, emptylike, and this blond hair come out of a bottle. Skinny, too.
We got to the Silver Pear, whose parking lot was crowded, for it was a fashionable hour for the Lake Noir people to eat, I supposed. All I needed to do was hop inside and call up Axel, and tell him to get here quick, since I was needed back at the hotel right away. For if the Sheriff did give it some thought, he might wonder what other child would be inspecting a crime scene (his powers of deduction being a lot more advanced than anybody else’s). Well, I wanted to be home and in bed in case people came looking.
“Thanks a lot, Dwayne,” I said, holding out my hand. “It was really interesting.”
He turned in his seat to look at me, and I realized he was very good-looking. It was really my first opportunity to rate his looks. He was dark like Ben Queen, his hair and eyes much darker than the Sheriff’s, and on the basis of looks alone, it would be hard to say who was the handsomest. I won
dered how I came to be surrounded by handsome men—or was it just that they looked that way up against my plainness?
He said, “You sure do have a peculiar life for only being twelve years old.”
“I’m actually nearer thirteen.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “Oh, well, that explains everything.” The silver-headed owner was very obliging about letting me use the restaurant’s telephone, mostly, I figured, so he could listen in. For he was lavishly excited when he saw me, because hardly a half hour ago the sheriff’s department had come in and asked if he’d seen a little girl in the vicinity. Well, of course he said yes, and asked what had happened.
“He—the sheriff—said you’d been reported as lost somewhere near here. Lost in the woods, he said.”
I stood there frowning, holding my mouth open a little and breathing in an adenoidal way. At least I think I was; I’ve never been sure what an adenoid is, but I think it affects your breathing and makes you look sort of out of it. I shook my head in a wondering way, as good as asking, Are you stupid, or what?
I said, “Why do you think it was me? Do I look lost?”
He blustered. “No, no, not now. You don’t look lost now.”
“Well, I didn’t look lost before, did I?” I spread my arms out. “Do I look like I was recently lost?”
He sighed heavily and looked about to give up. It’s interesting about adults, how little it takes to make them just roll over and refuse to deal with it. Talking to me, I can’t say I blame them. “There are other kids around here, aren’t there? I mean, I don’t even live here. So it must be some kid who lives here and just wandered off into the woods.”
He pursed his mouth and shoved the telephone toward me. We’d been standing by the wooden column with the little light where he kept the reservation book.
I called Axel’s Taxis and was told he’d be at the Silver Pear in a jiffy. I went out onto the porch, where diners sat at tables lit by candles, every once in a while flicking moths away. I rocked and munched a roll I’d taken from one of the bread-baskets lined up on a side table. The roll was cold and hard, a roll that would never have seen the inside of my mother’s kitchen.
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