Angel Sister

by Ann Gabhart

  Of course that was who had opened the closet and taken Lorena. Fern. Just the same as she’d let Kate out of the Baxters’ outhouse on Monday morning. Kate looked around and listened. She fervently wished Graham would appear out of the trees, but there was no sign of him. She didn’t hear Poe baying in the woods. She didn’t hear Graham whistling. She didn’t hear anything except some crows fussing over her head and the crickets and tree frogs beginning to tune up their night songs.

  She made herself walk away from Graham’s house. She could find Fern by herself. She wasn’t afraid of Fern. Not really afraid. That wasn’t why her heart was pounding in her chest. She’d been running. She was scared for Lorena. She was worried about what her mother and father might do to her when she had to go home. She would have to go home. She and Lorena couldn’t live in the woods the way Fern did.

  She breathed in and out slowly as she hurried through the trees. Each time she heard the brush rustle near her, her heart bounded up in her throat as she imagined tramps stepping out on the path in front of her or rabid foxes or Fern with her hatchet. But she wanted to find Fern, and the only way to do that was to keep moving deeper into the woods. And stay calm so she could think. If she didn’t pay attention to where she was in the woods, she might start walking in circles and never find anybody.

  She didn’t know where Fern’s newest cedar palace was, but she did know where the cedars grew. If she walked back and forth through the cedar thicket, she’d surely find it eventually. She bent down and pushed her way into the cedars and entered a different world where the thick canopy of evergreens blocked out the dying rays of sunlight. It was going to be very dark under there soon.

  Kate moved as fast as she could on the thick layer of fallen cedar needles as she ducked and twisted to get through the low-growing trees. When she ran smack into a spiderweb, she yelped and slapped frantically at her hair to knock away the spider. She pulled in one deep breath and then another before she managed to calm down enough to pick the sticky web off her face.

  She couldn’t let a little spider stop her. She had to find Lorena. After grabbing up a stick to do battle with any new spiderwebs, she pushed on through the trees. The sound of a screech owl sent chills down her back.

  She wanted to pray. The “want to” scratched at the inside of her heart, but she mashed her mouth together and didn’t allow the words to whisper up inside her. It would do no good to pray. The Lord didn’t answer prayers. Not for people like her who went around pretending to be angels. Besides, she didn’t believe there was a God anymore. Wasn’t that what she’d told her father? That if there was a God, he wouldn’t have let Grandfather Merritt take Lorena away?

  You don’t believe that. You know there’s a God and you want him to help you. So pray, for heaven’s sake. Kate didn’t know where the voice came from, but it was there in her mind. Maybe her mother. Maybe Aunt Hattie.

  A dog started howling off in the distance. It could be Poe. She wasn’t sure. It sounded so far away. She felt separated from the rest of the world here in this cedar thicket. Lost and alone.

  Stop it, she ordered. You’re not lost. You know exactly where you are. But the lost feeling didn’t go away as she made her feet keep moving. Somehow even while waving the stick back and forth in front of her face, she ran into another spiderweb. She hit at her dress and hair again as she felt spiders crawling all over her. She wanted to sit down and cry, and she never did that. Not boohoo crying like Tori or Evie. Never. And she still wanted to pray. So much that she could hardly breathe.

  She dropped down on the cedar needles under the trees, pulled her legs up against her chest, and laid her forehead down on her knees. “Dear Lord,” she whispered. “I don’t know if you’re really there or not, but if you are, I could use some help. I don’t know what to do. I thought you wanted me to help Lorena, but then you didn’t stop them from coming and taking her away. I thought you’d help me. And now I don’t know where she is. If you’re there, if you’re listening, please help me find her. Please help me know what to do. And don’t let the spiders get me. You know how much I don’t like spiders.”

  No answer came falling down out of the cedars over her head, but she felt better. She stood up and started walking again. She still felt a little lost but not nearly so alone. She could almost see the words in her Grandfather Reece’s Bible. And lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.

  She wasn’t to the end of the world. She was right in the middle of Lindell Woods, and it wasn’t dark yet. She had time to find Fern. And Lorena. She didn’t know what she would do then, but there wasn’t any use letting her worries race on ahead of her.

  She smelled the pungent odor of newly cut red cedar before she stumbled across a freshly chopped stump. She touched the sticky sap oozing up from the bark on the stump and looked around. In the dimming light, she spotted other stumps here and there among the cedars. She had to be close.

  Fern hadn’t exactly cleared out a path through the cedars. The cut cedars were more like stepping-stones through a creek. Then there were dozens of cut stumps, and rising up in front of Kate a wall of green cedars piled on top of one another higher than her head. She’d seen Fern’s cedar palaces before, but never one this big or this green. Usually Fern had already deserted the place by the time Kate came across it, and the dead cedars shed their needles at the slightest touch.

  Kate reached out and felt the cedar walls. The trees on the bottom felt dry and brittle, but the top trees were soft and green as if they’d only been cut that day. Fern had to be close by, and she didn’t like people messing around her palaces. Kate thought about all the stories she’d heard on the school playground about kids being swallowed up in Fern’s cedars never to be seen again.

  She never believed the stories. When she asked what kid, nobody could come up with one single missing kid, but that didn’t make the idea of it any less scary. Or keep them from believing it might happen, and now maybe it had. To Lorena.

  Kate held her breath and listened. She heard the screech owl again and another dog barking in the distance. This one definitely not Poe. It wasn’t a hound. Bugs were chirping from among the cut cedars and a whippoorwill sang its name not far away. Kate could almost feel night falling around her as she stood there.

  “Lorena.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. There was no way Lorena would hear that even if she was right on the other side of the cedar wall. Kate opened her mouth to say Lorena’s name louder, but then she shut it again as she stared at the barrier of cedars. She had the uneasy feeling they might all fall on top of her if she made too much noise.

  She started walking along the wall. There had to be a way inside. A faded pink flour sack hung over an opening at one of the corners. Kate reached to pull it back and then hesitated. Fern might be waiting on the other side of the cedar wall for Kate to stick her head through the opening. She’d have her hatchet.

  The back of Kate’s neck suddenly felt very bare, but she swallowed hard and got down on her knees to push back the flour sack and crawl through the low opening. Fern had never actually killed anybody. At least not that Kate knew about. But that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Hadn’t she been finding out about other things she’d never known about before now? Fern chopping somebody’s head off could be one of those things nobody in Rosey Corner talked about.

  “Lorena? Are you in here?” Kate kept her voice low as she gingerly crawled through the opening. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might jump out of her chest.

  “Kate!” Lorena piled into Kate and started hugging her before she got all the way through the opening. “I told Fern you’d come.”

  “Wait, sweetie. Let me get in here. We don’t want all these trees to fall on our heads.”

  “Don’t worry.” Lorena giggled as she backed up to let Kate scramble the rest of the way through the opening. “Fern says none of her palaces have ever fell down while they’re green. Just after they turn brown.”

  Kate looked aro
und as she sat down and let Lorena crawl into her lap. It was lighter inside the cedar room than outside under the cedars because the space was open to the sky where the first stars of evening were appearing. A wooden table sat in the center of the cedar room. Its legs had been sawn off to make it low enough so the blocks of wood around it could serve as chairs. A couple of quart mason jars sat on the table. One was filled with daisies and black-eyed Susans. The other one had water in it. To Kate’s left against the cedar wall a gray-looking sheet covered a mound of more cedars. Fern was nowhere in sight.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it? Me and Mommy and Daddy and Kenton could have lived here.”

  “But there’s no roof.” Kate was breathing easier without Fern and her hatchet to worry about. She kissed Lorena’s head. The little girl’s hair smelled like cedar, but then everything smelled like cedar in here.

  “Fern likes stars.” Lorena looked up at the sky. “I do too.”

  “What does she do when it rains?”

  “She takes a bath,” Lorena said as if Fern had figured out the perfect way to live.

  Kate had to laugh and then Lorena was laughing too. It was all just too crazy. Sitting out in the middle of the woods in a batty woman’s cedar palace as night fell. Yet she didn’t want to go home where people might be waiting to grab Lorena away from her.

  She tightened her arms around the little girl. “Whatever are we going to do, sweetie?”

  “I don’t know, but I told Fern you’d think of something.” Lorena didn’t sound a bit worried.

  “Where is Fern?”

  “She went to get something for us to eat,” Lorena said. Then she looked over Kate’s shoulder. “She’s back now.”

  Kate jerked around and couldn’t keep from jumping. She hadn’t heard even a whisper of noise as the woman came through the cedars, but there she was standing a few paces behind Kate, holding a sack and the hatchet. Kate tore her eyes away from the hatchet and tried to think of the right thing to say, but Fern spoke first.

  “They’re coming.” Her voice was flat without feeling. But then a look of sadness settled on her face as if she knew her cedar palace couldn’t keep them away.

  37

  ______

  The fervor of the hunt quickly overtook the men in spite of Victor’s plea for calm heads. After they had discovered Kate missing, everybody trailed Victor out of the house to wait while he yelled for her. His voice had rung out over the yard and the fields, but there’d been no answer.

  At least not from Kate. His cow had bawled for her nightly milking. Victoria sat down on the edge of the porch and began sobbing. Haskell Cox’s dog down the road started barking and kept it up when his barks echoed back to him off the barn behind Alvin Holt’s house. Other dogs in the neighborhood joined in. Haskell and a couple of other neighbors came over to see what was going on.

  “Two girls are missing,” Victor’s father told them, not bothering to explain that Kate had only been “missing” a bare ten minutes.

  “Nobody’s missing,” Victor said. “At least not Kate.”

  “What about Polly?” Ella Baxter said. “She’s run away. No matter what else we think, we’re obligated to try to find her before something out in the woods gets her.”

  Victor tried to be the voice of reason. “Nothing is going to hurt them out in the woods. All we need to do is give them time to come home. Kate’s a sensible girl. She’ll bring Lorena home.”

  “Then you’re admitting that your daughter stole her out of my house,” Ella said.

  Nadine got right in Ella’s face. “Kate didn’t set foot in your house and do anything of the sort. She’s been with me all afternoon.”

  Ella backed up a few steps, but she didn’t let Nadine silence her. “Then why did she run away? She had to know where Polly was or she wouldn’t have done that.”

  “The child’s name is not Polly.” Nadine was almost shouting. Victor put his hand on her shoulder, and she took a deep breath before she went on in a calmer voice. “Her name is Lorena. Lorena Birdsong.”

  “That’s not a decent name. And not one a child of mine will ever have.”

  “She’s not your child,” Nadine said.

  “She’s not yours either,” Ella shot back.

  “She is now.” Nadine looked from Ella to Victor’s father as though defying him to say the first thing against that.

  He twisted his mouth with disgust, turned away from her, and spat on the ground.

  When he didn’t say anything, Ella started in again. “If you ever find her. She could be gone for good. You and your Kate with her. The gypsies may have stolen them both or who knows what tramps are out in the woods. Not to mention that crazy Lindell woman. We know she’s out there somewhere. By now she may have chopped them to pieces and be burying their parts out in the woods where you’ll never find them.”

  “Ella!” Joseph Baxter said, his face pale. “We don’t want nothing bad to happen to the little girl. Or Kate either.”

  “Speak for yourself, Joseph Baxter. I’m sick of the whole bunch and I’m going home.” She started for the road. When Joseph didn’t follow her, she looked over her shoulder at him and said, “Come on.”

  “I think I ought to stay and help with the search, Ella.” He winced a little as he spoke in anticipation of her displeasure, but he stood his ground.

  She turned and threw a challenge at him. “You’d better come with me if you want breakfast in the morning.”

  The man stayed put as he almost twisted his hat in two. “I guess it won’t hurt me to miss breakfast.”

  Ella stared at him as her face turned as red as his was pale. “Well, I do declare.” She spun on her heel away from him and stomped off.

  The men standing around in the yard sneaked looks at Joseph, who straightened out his hat as best he could and jammed it on his head. Then Haskell spoke up. “She could be right. About the tramps and all. We can’t just stand here and not go looking for them.”

  “There’s nothing in that woods to hurt them,” Victor said.

  “What about Fern Lindell?” It was Victor’s father talking again. He seemed to want to stir up the men. “Ella’s right. Who knows what that woman might do?”

  “Fern has never hurt anybody. She just chops down cedars,” Victor said, but nobody paid any attention.

  “It’s going to be dark soon,” one of the men said. “We’d better get some torches.”

  “I ain’t going in there without a gun,” another man shouted.

  “No guns. We don’t need guns.” Again Victor’s words fell on deaf ears. He stepped over to his father. “Stop them, Father.”

  “I can’t stop them,” his father said as the men ran back to their houses to get what they thought they needed for the search.

  Victor stared at him. His father was almost smiling. “What is the matter with you? Have you lost your mind?”

  “You should have listened to me. You should have done what I said.”

  Victor frowned. His father wasn’t making any sense. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. All my life I’ve done what you said.”

  “No.” The look on his father’s face changed. “I told you to follow Press Jr. To make sure he didn’t get into trouble with that girl.”

  “What’s Press Jr. got to do with any of this? He’s been dead for years.”

  “Because of you.”

  Victor shut his eyes and pulled in a long breath. His father had gone around the bend. He wasn’t making sense. Victor wasn’t going to be able to reason with him. He let his breath out slowly. “All right, Father. Punish me if you must. But don’t put my daughter—your granddaughter—in danger by inciting some kind of wild search.”

  “She should have listened to me.”

  Victor turned his back on his father then. He touched Nadine’s cheek. “Stay with Evangeline and Victoria. I’ll find Kate and bring her home.”

  Nadine looked frightened. “Be careful.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get Gra
ham to help me. If Kate and Lorena are in the woods, he’ll know where.”

  “What about your father?”

  “I don’t have a father.” The words set something free inside Victor. Too long he’d tried to be what he could not be. Too long he’d tried to please a man who could not be pleased. But at the same time he knew it wasn’t that easy to shake off years of guilt.

  “I’ll tell him to go home,” Nadine said.

  “Tell them all to go home. I can find the girls without help.” He could only hope they would listen to her better than they had him as he saw Haskell coming across his yard with a torch, and another man running down the road with a gun. He turned his back on them and walked swiftly toward the woods.

  He didn’t know why they were all so sure Kate had run to the woods. None of them had seen where she’d gone. She might be hiding out in the barn with Lorena. Or be at the Baxters’ house. She could be at Aunt Hattie’s. Yet he kept walking into the woods. She’d gone this way. He sensed it.

  The light was already fading under the trees, and an eerie stillness filled the air as night crept closer. His feet crunched down the carpet of leaf litter, and a crow flew up out of the tree beside him and cawed out a warning to the woods creatures.

  He’d walked through the woods the night Press Jr. had died. Not these woods, but the woods on the other side of Rosey Corner that went down to the river. The memory came out of nowhere. Perhaps his father was right. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten it all. Maybe he’d just pushed it away for so long that he thought he’d forgotten it.

  He wasn’t going to think about it now. He could do nothing for Press Jr. or for his father. He could find Kate. He didn’t think she had anything to fear in the woods, but he’d feel better when she was safe back at the house. Both her and Lorena.

  He hadn’t walked far into the woods when Graham stepped up beside him. “What’s going on, Victor? I heard you hollering for Kate. Is she all right?” His dog was right behind him as always.