The Little Woods

by McCormick Templeman

  “Maybe we should go hang out with those guys,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “Rain check?”

  “Rain check,” I said, and slowly we walked back to the rest of the group, still holding hands.

  Without the ersatz energy that alcohol provided my peers, I just didn’t have the staying power and soon realized I was in desperate need of sleep. Alex walked me up to my room. We stood there too long, staring at each other, both of us unsure what to do. Awkwardly, he leaned in, and I leaned in at the same time. He ended up kissing the top of my head.

  “Good night, Cally,” he said.

  “Good night,” I said, and closed the door.

  The party was still going strong when I turned out the light. I fell asleep to the discordant sounds of Pigeon singing “Stairway to Heaven” beneath my window.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I WAS AWAKENED TO HARSH morning light by pounding on the front door. Loud, vigorous blows that seemed like they’d never stop. Presumably, I was the only person in the house who wasn’t hungover, so I figured I should see who it was.

  All the bedroom doors were closed, and there were a few bodies nestled into couches or curled up in corners. The whole place reeked of old beer and fancy cheese. People began stirring as the pounding grew more insistent. I opened the door and, to my horror, found Mr. Reilly, looking haggard and worried.

  “Wood, listen, I know there are a lot of people here who shouldn’t be, but the administration will turn a blind eye if you all get in the van here with me now and head back up to school.”

  “But my weekend was approved. I’m supposed to be here.”

  “Well, good for you,” he said, clearly unable to keep that bitchy tone from his voice. Apparently my distaste for him was reciprocal. “But I’m still going to need everyone back on campus stat. There’s been an incident, and Dr. Harrison’s going to call an emergency assembly. Anyone within a reasonable distance from the school needs to come back, and that means you, Wood, so gather everyone up. I’ll wait in the van.”

  He snapped around on his heel, in danger of twisting an ankle in his requisite Birkenstocks, and I was left to round up the troops. It wasn’t easy. At first, no one would believe me. I had to drag Drucy to the window and show her the van with the St. Bede’s insignia on it to create a stir.

  Exhausted and disoriented, we straggled out the door. Helen looked wrecked, her feline eyes circumscribed with swollen red skin. With a twist and a clip, she affixed her tangled hair so that she looked like a glamorous drug addict.

  “Do you think they know?” she asked as we climbed into the van.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until then, but surely there was no way. Maybe someone else had found the body, but there was no way that person could know about us. On the short ride back to campus, Reilly put some Grateful Dead on the stereo. Noel promptly fell asleep on Freddy’s lap and Freddy stuck her head out the window, her pale skin variegated with splotches of bluish green.

  “Freddy got busy last night,” Helen whispered to me. I looked at her wide mischievous eyes, suddenly the eyes of a child. “With Tanner.”

  “Why would I possibly want to know something like that?” I grimaced.

  “Because he’s been going out with Cara Svitt for years,” she whispered, raising her eyebrows. “It’s craziness, I tell you—utter craziness.”

  I decided it was best to ignore her, so I leaned my head against the window and tried to block out “Casey Jones.”

  School was a madhouse. We arrived just as assembly was starting, and the whole room was infused with a violent energy. Everyone was talking too loudly and too quickly and no one was in his or her assigned seat. Freshman boys ran up and down the aisles, and senior girls looked intensely put out. I took a seat in my usual row next to Carlos, who was asking Asta if he could go up front to sign up for an announcement. She looked out of sorts, her hair held back by barrettes, her face pale and drawn.

  “No. No announcements this morning. Carlos, just sit down, okay, this is serious. Cally,” she said, pointing in my direction but barely seeing me, “keep track of the boys, will you? I need to talk to Dr. Harrison.”

  I watched as she waded through the confusion up to the front. Dr. Harrison looked horrible. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said he’d been crying. He leaned down to hear what Asta had to say, and I could tell it wasn’t pleasant.

  From across the auditorium, I saw Sophie looking at me. I raised my eyebrows at her as if to ask if she knew what was up, but she just shook her head and mouthed, “No idea.”

  And then I noticed the cops. They were plainclothes, but they were definitely cops. They hung back by the doors of the east entrance, which no one ever used. Something horrible was happening, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was. I put my head in my hands, massaging my temples to try to stave off the incipient headache. How could I have let this happen, me of all people? I’d never met the girl, but somehow I’d known it was her out in those woods, and I’d just left her there.

  Dr. Harrison broke off from Asta, looked at his watch, and approached the microphone.

  “I apologize for calling you all back here this morning, but I’m afraid a terrible incident has occurred. I’m sorry to inform you that your classmate Iris Liang has been found dead. Her body was located in the woods behind school by some passing hikers.”

  A wave of crazy swept through the auditorium. It moved like wildfire, hitting each person at a different time. The awful thing was that despite the genuine horror in the auditorium that morning, an overwhelming atmosphere of excitement accompanied it. A few girls started crying, but it was immediately clear that they were not supposed to, and they worked to staunch the flow. There was danger in such unrestrained outbursts of emotion. If some people started crying, then everyone would cry, and we couldn’t let that happen, so the girls swallowed their tears, and their friends kept their distance.

  Dr. Harrison patted the air with his hands, indicating that we needed to calm down. He cleared his throat. “Obviously this is horrible news. I know that many of you were friends with Iris. We will make grief counselors available to those of you who need them. Just talk to Nurse Raben and we can set something up. In the meantime, we’re going to need a lot of cooperation from you guys. Things may be kind of strange here for the next few days while we try to get our bearings, and I’m asking that you be extra vigilant about following the rules. Obviously, I don’t need to tell you that the little woods are now, and always have been, strictly off-limits.” His eyes grew wide, and he opened his mouth as if to say something, but then a wave of sorrow seemed to engulf him, and shaking his head, he changed tack. “We’re going to need a lot of help from you to find out what happened to Iris. I’m going to turn the assembly over to Detectives Cryker and Levy now.”

  The cops I’d seen earlier moved up to the front of the room and took the podium. The one who started speaking was small and hirsute. He had a goatee and a disconcerting twinkle to his eye. He smoothed his hands. The woman who stood beside him was tall and blond with an unfortunate jaw. She fiddled with her sleeve as the small man spoke into the microphone.

  “I’m Detective Cryker,” he said, a not-unpleasant crackle to his voice. He had that kind of extreme toughness that is often found in tiny men. You could picture him killing a man twice his size with his bare hands and then casually eating a jelly doughnut. “Some of you may remember me from October when I spoke with a number of you regarding Iris Liang’s disappearance.

  “Let me begin by saying that I’m sorry for your loss. I know this is tough, but we’re gonna need to ask you guys to remember anything you can about the last time you saw Iris Liang. Right now we have her last sighting at six p.m. on October third. That was the first night of your fall break. We spoke with a lot of you back in October, but the case has taken on a different light. We’re going to speak to each and every one of you, but if you think you have valuable information, please come forward right away. Try your best to remember w
hat you can. We’re going to start with people who were the closest to her. The rest of you are temporarily excused. Go eat breakfast and then come back here. And once we’ve talked to you, Dr. Harrison wants you to proceed to your normal afternoon sport. There will be impromptu practices. Okay, right.” He cleared his throat. “Drucilla Keller. Let’s go.”

  Drucy looked completely bewildered, and I was fairly certain from her reaction that she had not, in fact, been friends with Iris. I watched her disappear into a back area with Cryker as the rest of us stood up and started milling about like misplaced cattle.

  Helen, Noel, Freddy, and I found each other in the crowd and started up to breakfast in silence. Helen looked as if her mind was trying to unravel a puzzle far beyond her capabilities, and Noel looked ill. We had sequestered ourselves, taking a circuitous route along a brick path through the poplars and avoiding the rest of the students, who were bubbling and buzzing in a herd up to the dining hall.

  The rhythm of patent leather Mary Janes slapping against the brick caused me to bristle at the sound of impending Pigeon. Her cheeks were red, her dark eyes were sparkling, and she was slightly out of breath when she caught up with us.

  “Oh my God, you guys, can you even believe it?”

  “Mmm,” Helen mumbled.

  “I cannot believe it. Like, she was in my advisor group. It could have been any of us. It could have been me. Oh my God, Helen, what if she was kidnapped from your room and then she was killed? What if you hadn’t been away already? I bet he would have taken you instead. I mean, you are way prettier.”

  “Pigeon,” Freddy gasped.

  “She was not murdered,” Helen spat. “Obviously this was an accident.”

  “No, she was totally kidnapped and murdered. That’s why the police are being so aggro. Oh my God, this is so scary, you guys.”

  I noticed that Noel’s huge charcoal-lined eyes looked wild, terrified, and she was gripping her short blond locks. Helen wrapped an arm around her sister, knit her brow, and glared at Pigeon.

  “Pidge,” she snapped, “we’re all feeling kind of upset right now. Maybe we could drop it until after breakfast, okay?”

  “Um, hello, like we’re not going to talk about last weekend. We’re gonna tell that we found her now, right?”

  “Pigeon,” Helen sighed. “Why would we do that? They don’t need to know. And she was not killed, for God’s sake. She had an accident. It must have been an accident.”

  “They’re questioning the whole school,” I said. “They don’t think she had an accident.”

  “Look,” Helen said lightly, regaining composure. “Okay, it was either an accident or it wasn’t. Either way, it no longer involves us, so I suggest we stop talking about it. It has nothing to do with us. This is where we walk away.”

  Pigeon shook her head. “They’ll know we were up there.”

  “How?” Helen put her hand on her hip and tilted her head to the side, a clear indication she was ready to fight.

  “I don’t know.” Pigeon shrugged. “DNA?”

  “This isn’t some lame TV show, Pidge. It’s not like the government keeps everyone’s DNA in a giant database. And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t go around licking the floor up there. None of us touched the body. None of us touched the wall with the creepy drawing. If they get half a fingerprint off something, so what? It’s not like our prints are on file. None of us has a criminal record. The only way we could screw this up is if we act crazy and draw attention to ourselves. They have no reason to suspect that we were there, so unless they come around scraping our cheek cells, I suggest we fucking drop it. Are we clear?”

  Pigeon opened her mouth to speak, but Freddy placed a hand on her arm, and she stopped.

  “Are we clear?” Helen said again, unable to keep the venom from her voice.

  Silently, Pigeon nodded, all the frenetic Pigeon energy drained from her black eyes.

  After a quick breakfast, we gathered our things and headed back to the auditorium, where I muddled through my weekend problem set. They called Helen in around one-thirty, and immediately after she emerged, looking a little frazzled, they called me. She gave me an encouraging, complicitous smile that drained me of what little energy I had.

  Cryker looked askance at me as I mounted the stairs. They were conducting the interviews in the theater’s greenroom, which, I was pleased to find, had been painted a soft shade of lime. It smelled acrid and musty, hinting at the diva breakdowns and late-night hookups to which it was privy. Cryker pulled up a chair while the blond female detective gave me a bored look. I didn’t like the police. They’d never done anything for me but harass my family and not find my sister.

  “You’re new here,” he said, his voice scratchy.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at the far corner of the room.

  “Well,” he said, tapping his pen against his yellow tablet.

  “Are you liking it here, Miss Wood?”

  “Um. It’s okay, I guess.”

  “No problems so far?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is there anything you’d like to tell us?”

  I noticed my hands were starting to sweat, and my head was getting hot.

  “I really don’t think so,” I said.

  “Hmmm.” He stroked his beard. “Well, I’m just going to lay my cards on the table, Miss Wood. I know who you are. I know that your sister disappeared here ten years ago.”

  I shrugged and looked away. Why did adults always force me to act like a drug-addled teen in some crappy TV movie?

  “Listen, Miss Wood. I take it you don’t want your loss to be general knowledge, and I’m happy to keep things on a need-to-know basis, but we’ve got to have a conversation. I need to ask you some questions about your sister.”

  I looked into his eyes and asked the question I only half wanted him to answer. “Why? You think Iris’s death is connected to Clare or something? Clare died in a fire.”

  He tapped the desk. “In the file it says you were with your mom in Portland, and your dad was in Sacramento when Clare and Laurel disappeared. Is that correct?”

  I nodded.

  “And no one in your family had any knowledge of anyone who would have wanted to harm Clare? No strange family friends. No bizarre relatives.”

  “Yeah. No bizarre relatives unless you count my mom. Why are you asking all these questions? Clare died in a fire,” I said, my voice threatening to break. “Didn’t she?”

  He sighed. “You were very young at the time. Six years old, it says here, but maybe you remember something—something you didn’t tell the police at the time—something you were too scared to say? Maybe even something you tried to block out.”

  “Sorry,” I said, my heart beating too quickly. “But what the hell are you getting at?”

  “Calm down, Miss Wood.” He cleared his throat. “Sometimes an event is so traumatic our brain tries to shield us from it, but sometimes it creeps back in. Has to do with the breakdown of the neurons or the myelin sheaths or what is it?” He looked to his partner, who nodded.

  “Yeah. Neurons,” she said.

  “So do you remember anything—anything at all?”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked, my voice breaking, the tears starting to come.

  “Doing what, Miss Wood?”

  “You’re trying to make me think Clare was murdered. Is that what you think happened?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “But that’s what you’re suggesting,” I said, suddenly on my feet, unsure where I was going.

  “I’m not suggesting anything.”

  “Iris, she was murdered, wasn’t she?”

  He nodded. “We have reason to suspect so, yes.”

  “And you think my sister was murdered too. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “I’m simply asking you some questions, and I’d appreciate it if you would sit down.”

  “I will not fucking sit down,” I screamed, tears suddenly cascading down my face.
“My sister died in a fire. That’s what they told me. You can’t just untell me that. Not after all these years. Not now.”

  “Let me ask you something, Miss Wood,” he said, his voice smooth. “Do you believe she died in a fire?”

  “Yes,” I said, stumbling over the word.

  “Then why are you here?” He arched his eyebrows at me, his eyes discordantly kind beneath them. I wiped away my tears and glared at him. Who was he, anyway? Who was he to come into my life and speak my fears aloud as if they were the text on the back of a cereal box, as if they didn’t completely change the world?

  “Miss Wood,” he said, smiling. “I can see that you’re upset. I can assure you that wasn’t my intention.”

  I said nothing.

  Cryker sighed and looked to his partner, who rolled her eyes. “Well,” he said, scratching his beard. “If you remember anything, please come and talk to us.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that,” I said. “Is that it?”

  “For now,” he said, tapping his fingers.

  I stormed out of the auditorium, wiping away my tears. I walked quickly, my legs shaking. Clare hadn’t been murdered. She’d died in a fire. Cryker couldn’t just come into my world all of a sudden and change that. No matter what I believed in my heart, no matter what I believed when the lights were out, there was an objective truth that existed outside of me, and that truth was that my sister had died in a fire. It wasn’t his right to question that truth. Only I could do that. A sharp wind kicked up and helped shock me out of my choler. Maybe sports weren’t such a bad idea. At least they would keep our bodies occupied so we couldn’t think too much. I headed down to the gym to sign in with Ms. Sjursen. She was engaged in some kind of bizarre craft involving knitting needles, a glue gun, and Lego blocks. She looked up at me with those distant eyes.