The Little Woods

by McCormick Templeman

  “He’s an investment banker,” Noel whispered as if that meant he cured cancer, and I nodded and tried to seem impressed. The girls would perk up whenever he entered, and seemed to deflate in his absence.

  Freddy and Pigeon showed up just as I had solved an argument over who should have the last piece of pizza by taking it for myself. They looked flushed, like maybe they’d been drinking with dinner, and they carried grocery bags, one of which seemed to be clink-clinking with wine bottles.

  I avoided drunken teenagers, Danny and his Strawberry Hill Boone’s excepted, because where there were drunken teenagers, there tended to be an inordinate amount of groping and puking. It was clear, though, that things would be different at the Slaters’. I had the impression alcohol was condoned, encouraged even, by the parents who practically extolled the virtues of adolescent drinking—stopping just short of using the phrase on the Continent. Everyone adjourned to the loggia, and Helen’s parents poured us each a modest amount of red wine. I waved mine off.

  “Antibiotics,” I said.

  “So, girls, what’s all the gossip?” Magda asked, staring over her wineglass.

  “Well,” said Freddy, leaning back and giving her wine a little swirl, “I’m starting to think being president is no fun. I want a dictatorship.”

  “Next on to the White House, am I right, Miss Bingham?” Richard laughed and poured himself a plentiful glass of red.

  “God willing.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Richard said, taking a seat across from me. He had sharp, clean good looks that he’d passed down to his daughters and a set to his jaw that made him seem jaunty and fun. Guys like him always creeped me out.

  “We’re all holding out hope,” Noel said, sipping lightly.

  “And how are your parents, dear? Still spending a lot of time on the Continent?”

  There we go. Where was I? What was I doing with these people? I felt like a foreign exchange student struggling to understand inscrutable customs. I wondered if it would be rude to excuse myself and head up to bed. But just then, a knock sounded on the glass loggia door, and I jumped a little in my seat.

  “My God, Calista. You are such a chicken,” Pigeon said, laughing. “It’s only the boys. Don’t worry, I won’t tell them about how you are such a chicken.”

  Alex Reese strolled through the front door with Brody Motley. My heart simultaneously leapt and constricted. I’d forgotten about the boys. I wasn’t ready for this. I was one step away from crawling into my moose pajamas. I’d thought I was in girl territory. I’d thought my actions were allowed to be sleepy and safe. Now I was going to have to sit up straight and tuck in my tummy, worry about how my boobs looked and check for crap in my teeth. I didn’t have that kind of energy.

  I liked the idea of being around Alex Reese, but I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I set myself talking to Brody, a hockey-player type with shaggy brown hair and a sweet way about him.

  The parents went up to bed after the boys arrived, and soon several bottles were uncorked and the wine started flowing more freely. At some point, Alex got up to go to the bathroom, and when he came back, he sat in the big easy chair next to my end of the sofa. He smiled and leaned over to me.

  “So how are you liking St. Bede’s?”

  “It’s nice, I guess.” I shrugged.

  “Nice?” He laughed. “St. Bede’s is a lot of things, but nice isn’t one of them.”

  “You don’t like it here?”

  “Like it? Of course I like it,” he said, then took a big easy sip of his wine. “This place is my ticket to the Ivy League. It’s just competitive, that’s all. But tell me about you.”

  For a moment I considered telling him the truth, but no one wanted to hear about dead family members and drunken moms. I knew there were certain kinds of girls—damsel-in-distress types—who could expose their family dysfunction and still be attractive to boys, but I wasn’t one of those girls. I was more of a Wednesday Addams type, and since my new mission statement was basically just try not to freak anybody out, I decided to play it cool.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” I said.

  “You have a boyfriend back home?”

  “No,” I said. “Boyfriends are boring. They always want to, like, hold hands or make out to Coldplay.”

  “I’m not boring, and I don’t listen to Coldplay,” he said.

  “Good to know.”

  He nodded, and when he held my eyes for a moment too long, I began to wonder if something was going on between us. But just then Chelsea Vetiver materialized, a thick swamp cloud of effluvium gusting into the room.

  “Reese, Brody, what’s up?” she asked, planting herself firmly on Alex’s lap.

  He lit up when he saw her, the dumb-puppy-dog look washing over him like so much syrup. She had won the battle, but maybe I could still participate in the war. Though, I had to admit, if she’d won the battle simply by walking into the room, things did not look especially good for me.

  “So are you guys creeching?” she asked, and rolled her eyes.

  “What’s creeching?” I asked, sipping the soda water Noel had given me.

  “It’s when you sneak out of your dorm at night,” Helen said. “It’s pretty much the worst thing you can do other than cheating.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Next you’ll be mainlining battery acid. Kids these days.”

  “Yeah, pretty wild, right?” Alex said.

  “So you walked here?”

  “There’s a trail through the woods behind school. Lets out basically right here.”

  “It was scary as hell with just two of us, though,” Brody said. “I’m used to meeting up with the whole crowd.”

  “I was there, man. I had your back.”

  “You’re big, but I bet you’d just lose it if you saw a ghoul or demon or whatever the hell’s out there.”

  “You guys are a couple of weenies,” Chelsea said, lighting a cigarette. “There’s nothing scary in these woods.”

  “Like hell there isn’t.”

  “Chelsea, dude,” Alex said, adjusting her on his lap so he could look her in the face. “All due respect, but everyone knows these woods are straight-up haunted. We do this walk all the time, and there’s always some scary fucking noise that can’t be explained. Ask anyone.”

  “That’s such nonsense. I grew up in these woods. You’re hearing coyotes.”

  “We’re hearing fucking Bigfoot or the yeti or some shit,” Brody said, laughing.

  “I’ll tell you what we’re hearing,” Alex said, leaning in, his voice lowering to a moody whisper. “We’re hearing the lost girls.”

  Helen straightened up. “That’s not funny, Alex. Don’t talk about it.”

  My chest clenched.

  “Oh my God, you guys, Wood doesn’t know,” Pigeon said, getting all flustered and gesticulating haphazardly. “The woods are haunted. These two little girls were murdered out there.”

  I coughed, and the cracker I was eating went spewing all over the glass coffee table.

  “They weren’t murdered,” Noel said, color rising in her cheeks. “They died in a fire.”

  “No.” Pigeon shook her head dramatically. “Seriously, you guys. They wandered off into the woods or whatever, but they were totally murdered.”

  I clenched my teeth and tried to slow my breathing. This was not the turn I’d expected the conversation to take.

  Chelsea stood up and circled the group, leonine, in search of something to pour into her empty glass. “Um, why have I never heard this story?”

  “Because you don’t go to our school,” Brody said, pretending to snarl at her. “Why are you even here, Chelsea Vetiver? Aren’t you supposed to be at Exeter?”

  “The semester hasn’t started yet. Anyway, I call bullshit.”

  “No,” Noel sighed, resigned. She poured more wine into Chelsea’s glass and then into her own. “It’s true. It was before you and your grandparents moved here. One of them was our bio teacher’s daughter.”

>   “Yeah,” Freddy said, shaking her head with the appropriate level of detached sympathy. “The little girl and her friend died in a fire out here in the woods. It was incredibly tragic.”

  “So, what,” Chelsea sneered, “they just wandered out into the blazing forest and died? And one of them was your bio teacher’s kid? What the hell?”

  “I know, right?” Pigeon expectorated. “You’d think she’d be, like, all weird, with too many scarves or something, but she’s totally normal. Like nothing ever happened. People only act that innocent when they’re guilty, am I right?”

  Helen raised her eyebrows. “Pigeon, tell me you’re not suggesting that Ms. Snow killed her own child.”

  Noel drew in a sharp breath. “Pigeon.”

  “I assume she set the fire too?” Helen sneered. “Think before you speak, Pigeon.”

  “No, it’s like … suspicious, right? They never found the bodies. How did they just disappear?”

  “Whoa, Pidge,” Alex said. “Watch it.”

  “No. She’s probably right,” Chelsea groaned, draining her glass. “It’s always the parent. Hey, Wood, you okay there? You’re looking a little peaked.”

  I tried to get myself together and smile along with the rest of them. God, what an idiot. How naïve of me to think they wouldn’t know about Clare just because she was before their time. Of course a thing like that lingered. It was, I knew, now or never. I would never be able to go back to this moment and say, Hey, you know, that was my sister who died in that fire. I guess I just forgot to mention that. If I kept quiet and someone found out later, it would be a disaster. The smartest thing would be to tell them right then and there. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Clare was a part of me I didn’t share.

  I furrowed my brow and cleared my throat. “Doesn’t it seem weird to you guys, though? I mean, I just got here, like, five days ago, and this is already the second story of disappearing girls I’ve heard. So is St. Bede’s, like, the Bermuda Triangle of boarding schools or what?”

  That got an unexpected laugh from Alex Reese.

  “They didn’t disappear,” Helen said snippily. “They died in a fire.”

  “Either way,” Brody said, his voice suddenly low. “There’s something weird going on out in those woods. The Bermuda Triangle is a good way to describe it, actually.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “This area has a sort of reputation.”

  “Oh, not this again.” Alex rolled his eyes.

  “It’s true. It’s not like I’m into any of that crap, but my sister did a report on it when she was here. Trust me, there’s been some freaky stuff over the years.”

  “Define freaky,” Chelsea said, leaning in.

  Brody shrugged. “According to my sister, there are places that have something kind of strange about them. It’s something about the electromagnetic fields or vortices or something. And these places, these vortices, maybe they attract weird things, or maybe they generate them. Dude, I don’t know, but these places—like the Bermuda Triangle—there’s something wrong with them.”

  “The Bermuda Triangle is a fairy tale,” Chelsea said dismissively. “Name me one other place.”

  “Okay.” Brody shifted around in his seat. “There’s this place back east. The, um, the Bridgewater Triangle. And then in Arizona there’s the Sedona Triangle.”

  “Don’t forget about the Fresno Quadrahedron,” Chelsea said, laughing.

  “Stop being a jerk,” he said, and beyond the alcohol flush of his cheeks, I could see real color rising. He was genuinely upset. “I’m serious. You can look it up. There’s documented proof. These places, I’m telling you, it’s like the land is bad.”

  “And St. Bede’s is one of those places?” Noel asked, her voice almost a whisper.

  “No, but the little woods are.”

  “What are the little woods?” I asked.

  “Duh. Those are the little woods,” Pigeon said, pointing out the window. “What we’ve been talking about, like, all night.”

  “So the part you guys just walked through, then. The place where you were hearing noises.”

  “Yeah,” Brody said. “These woods are at the top of a triangle that stretches way out into the wilderness behind us. I’m telling you, there are things out there—weird things, bad things.”

  “Like what?” Helen asked. “We haven’t seen anything.”

  “It’s not like people see stuff all the time, but there have been problems with these woods since the first settlers—before that, even. My sister said the Miwok name for the area was the Woods Where Spirits Walk, and apparently they avoided it like the plague.”

  “How helpful of us to take it from them, then,” Chelsea said, examining her black-polished nails.

  “Seriously, though, over the years there have been all kinds of bad stuff,” he said, a slight tremor to his voice. “I don’t remember the figure, but the number of unexplained disappearances and murders in these woods is like ten times what it should be.”

  “What do you think is going on, Brody?” Helen asked, her voice perfectly even.

  “Hell if I know. Some people think the land is cursed.”

  “I don’t believe in curses,” Helen said, but everyone else was focused on Brody, and I noticed that I could barely breathe.

  “Well, I do,” he said. “And I’m telling you, whatever happened to those girls, whatever happened to Iris, I think there’s more to it than we can know. Whatever’s out there, it’s powerful. It’s dark.”

  “Okay, dude,” Alex said, placing his hand over Brody’s glass. “I think I’m cutting you off. You’ve had enough.”

  Brody slumped back in his chair, and after a moment of awkward silence, Freddy shifted the conversation to the upcoming spring play auditions. I tried to seem interested, but I was so shaken I decided I’d better excuse myself early.

  Up in my guest room, I changed into pajamas and stared out into the woods. The trees moved against the darkness like an unquiet sea. This way, I could almost hear Clare whisper. Catch me if you can.

  I read somewhere once about a little boy who’d disappeared, and it turned out nothing really horrible had happened to him. A lonely woman had taken him because she wanted a child. Long ago, I’d decided that was what had happened to Clare. She’d never died in that fire. Like Pigeon had said, she’d disappeared. Someone had taken her because they’d wanted a daughter, and they’d loved her and raised her, and now she was a normal girl. Part of me believed that she was still out there somewhere in those woods, and that all I had to do was look and I would find her.

  I climbed into bed, turned out the light, and pulled the covers over my head to muffle the distant wail of the wind through the pines.

  I awoke to crisp blue sky and sunshine. I zipped up my jeans and let my hair hang loose. I slipped on my shoes and started downstairs, trying to convince myself that the faint scent of strawberry on the landing didn’t remind me of Clare. It had been ten years, and I had been young, but the olfactory system was remarkably pitiless.

  Breakfast was catered. Catered. Despite my being disgusted by the very idea of it, the food was kind of amazing. The boys were gone, presumably having creeched back to campus during the night, and we were all to head off too after we’d had our fill of quiche and gravlax and crêpes.

  Freddy chatted amiably about politics with Richard—everything about her poise and calculation.

  “Where do you stand on immigration?” she asked, sipping her coffee with a mildly concerned brow.

  Helen and Noel tittered while they picked abstractly at one croissant. They seemed nice enough, especially Noel, but their lives were so different from mine. Their breakfasts were catered, for Christ’s sake. Noel noticed me staring and, giving me a big grin, waved me over. Helen looked up and smiled too.

  “So, Cally,” Noel said, “you went to bed so early last night. You missed everything.”

  “What did I miss?”

  “Just stuff. So”—she smiled
—“do you have a boyfriend back home or anything?”

  “Me? God, no.”

  “Do you like anyone here?”

  “What? No. I mean, I just got here.”

  “I saw you hanging out with Jack Deeker.”

  “Him? Yeah, he’s really nice.”

  “Well, can I give you some advice?” she whispered, leaning in.

  “Sure,” I said, still trying to decide whether gravlax was delicious or disgusting.

  “Jack’s totally cute, but he’s a train wreck. Helen went out with him for a while freshman year. Now he says he’s asexual, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

  “Yeah,” Helen said. “I wouldn’t go there if I were you. He’s hot and all, but he’s a total loser.”

  “Seriously.” Noel nodded. “And sometimes it’s better to go for the nice guy who doesn’t have any baggage, you know? Like Brody or someone. You know, Brody doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Noel,” Helen sighed. “Stop playing Yenta.”

  “Whatever,” Noel said, then took a swig of her coffee. “Gross. Helen, did you put sugar in my coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God, this is so yummy,” Pigeon crooned from her perch on the loggia steps. “It reminds me of the Coeur de Lyon. Have you guys ever been there? My mom’s coming in the spring and we’re all going to have brunch there.”

  Freddy rolled her eyes at me and I smiled back. Chelsea slunk in just as breakfast was winding down, and managed to grab a little bit of everything before it was taken away.

  “Detective Inspector Wood,” she said, laughing and sliding a fistful of gravlax into her mouth. “How goes it today? Did you catch any criminals in your sleep?”

  “Yep. I nabbed Jack the Ripper.”

  “Great,” she said, clapping. “I knew you were a talent.” Then she headed toward Freddy, but Freddy stopped her.

  “Did you have a good time last night, Chelsea?”

  Chelsea glanced over her shoulder, then frowned at Freddy.

  “Yeah,” she drawled. “It was fairly monumental.”

  I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what she was talking about.