The Little Woods

by McCormick Templeman

  “And you’re sure Iris was strangled?” I asked, trying to keep my breath as even as possible. “Someone just strangled her with his bare hands?”

  He shook his head. “The killer probably used an implement of some kind—a cord.”

  “Okay, um, okay,” I said, stumbling over myself, trying not to make eye contact. “People are saying Iris was raped. I have to know.”

  “Iris wasn’t raped,” he said, his gaze suddenly much sharper. “Who told you that?”

  “I … I can’t remember,” I lied.

  He shook his head. “Well, that’s not true. Listen, you’re going to hear all kinds of things. They’re rumors. If you don’t hear it from me, then it’s not true. You got it?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He leaned back and scratched his eyebrow. “Along those lines, there is something I want you to hear from me.” He looked for my consent to go on. “The bones. We don’t understand the significance, but it looks like the bones were bleached,” he said, his voice faltering.

  “Bleached?”

  “Bleached. Boiled, cleaned, and bleached.”

  A rip cord of tension shot up my back, and I sat up to try to ease it.

  “What? Why would someone do that?”

  “I wish I knew. It’s possible someone was looking to preserve them. Sometimes … sometimes these people like to keep trophies.”

  “Okay, so someone killed my sister ten years ago and buried her in that bag out there.…”

  “Actually, they were recently buried.”

  For a moment, I saw the impossible flit before my eyes: Clare grown, wild in the forest, having run feral for ten years, a silk dress of ruby red trailing behind her. I saw her standing behind me the day we hunted for salamanders, her feet caked with mud, her hair falling to her waist in thick black waves. I saw her perched in a tree, her scarlet lips swept into a smile as she watched me pose for Chelsea Vetiver.

  “No,” he said, alarmed at the look I must have worn. “The bones are old. The burial is new. The killer must have had them at a different location and buried them, well, we’re thinking he buried them after he killed Iris.”

  “What?” I said, trying to get myself together. “Why would he do that?”

  “My guess is the bones were somewhere close to him, and after he killed Iris, he wanted to distance himself from his past crimes.”

  “No,” I said, shifting in my seat. “This is crazy. It doesn’t make sense. Did you … Does my mom know?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t reach her. I spoke with your aunt. She said your mom goes off sometimes and no one knows where she is.”

  “Yeah,” I said, avoiding eye contact.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  I fought the urge to laugh. “No. She never tells me anything.”

  He nodded. “Your aunt wants you to come home. I gotta tell you, I’m of a similar mind. What about you? Do you want to go home?”

  I thought for a moment and then shook my head. There had been a time when I might have wanted to leave, but that was before I knew for sure that my sister had been murdered, before I knew that her killer was so close I could almost feel it. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay and finish this thing.

  “Listen,” he said. “You probably want to talk to someone. A counselor. You want me to set that up for you?”

  “No,” I started to say, but just then, the door swung open and an officer entered. Cryker practically jumped up from his desk when he saw him. The man’s eyes connected with Cryker’s, and a strange energy bounced between them. He handed Cryker a note. Cryker’s eyes scanned the page, and color rose in his cheeks.

  “Miss Wood,” he said, not bothering to look at me. “That’s all for now. I’ll contact you if we need anything else.”

  He moved across the room quickly and handed the page to his partner, her blond curls bouncing as she nodded. I looked down into my bag and saw the puzzle box staring up at me like an abandoned child. I knew there had to be more to it. There was something about that logo that wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Detective,” I said, and he looked over, already lost in whatever he was reading.

  He held up a hand. “Can it wait?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah it can.”

  “Good,” he said. “We’ll talk later, then.”

  He went back to whatever he was doing, and I walked out into the crisp air, my shoulders somehow a little lighter. Somewhere at the end of a very long thread was the answer to the question of what had happened to my sister, and I was certain that thread was somehow connected to the puzzle box. I couldn’t let it go. Not yet.

  When I got back to my room, the air felt heavy, and everything looked gray, but I had a spark inside my chest, lifting me up, pushing me forward. I would need to let go of my fantasy now. There was no fairy-tale cottage in the woods. No more kindly stranger, but now, at least, I had the truth.

  I was just returning from the shower when Helen came in.

  “Whoa, right?” she said when she sat on her bed. “How’s Alex doing?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since early this morning.”

  I’d forgotten about Alex. The day before, I’d been so sure that I needed to break up with him, but now I wasn’t. Now he seemed solid and good in a grotesque world.

  “Really?” She looked at me, puzzled. “He had kind of a shock. You should really be supporting him through this. He hurt his leg too, tripping over a log on the way to tell the others.”

  “Yeah, I’ll go see him in a bit.”

  Helen nodded. “And Asta, oh my God. Can you imagine? It was her daughter. Noel’s over there comforting her. I heard her tell Harrison she needed a few days off to process or something, but that ultimately it was good to have closure. I mean, I can see what she means.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Closure.”

  “They’re saying whoever did this probably also killed Iris,” she said, twisting her hair. “I mean, like, duh, right?”

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

  “What do you mean? We’re all going to be under crazy watch again.”

  “What’s going to happen to the school? Aren’t people going to pull their kids out, like, left and right?”

  She bit her nails. “Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know. Hardly anyone left after they found Iris.”

  “But this is different,” I said.

  “Seniors hear from colleges next week. The school has the letters mailed to us, because we live in the seventeenth century. No one’s gonna want to wait for them to be forwarded. And besides, I heard they have some hot lead—some kind of forensic evidence. They’re gonna catch whoever did this and then there won’t be anything to worry about.”

  I felt cold as I watched Helen pull out her gym bag and start packing it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “State championships.”

  “Today?”

  “Tomorrow morning. We’re leaving tonight.”

  “They’re letting you go?”

  She shrugged. “It’s state. We’re probably gonna win. You don’t want to miss something like that.”

  “But with what’s going on here, they’re still letting you guys go?”

  “It’s not like the psycho dragon killer or whoever is going to follow us and, like, attack the bus.”

  “So you’re not going to be here tonight?”

  She paused a moment and then seemed to understand. “Oh, my poor Woodsy,” she cried, and immediately wrapped me up in her arms. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not scared,” I said, pulling away from her.

  “Talk to Ms. Harlow. I bet you could sleep on the floor in someone’s room. Ask Drucy. Or Cara. I bet either one would let you.”

  “Naw,” I said, watching her zip up her bag. “I think I’ll be fine.”

  I didn’t go see Alex. I needed some time to figure out h
ow I felt before I saw him again. I spent the rest of the night in my room, reading. I knew everyone would think it was weird, but I just couldn’t stomach comforting him through the trauma of finding my sister’s bones. I also couldn’t talk to him about it. I just couldn’t.

  Like Helen had predicted, security was heavy again. They even kept the hall lights on, and most people slept with their desk lamps on, but I turned mine off and went to bed early. The bastard wasn’t worth losing a night’s sleep over. I settled into my bed and tried to let go of the day. My thoughts muddled together as I sank further into sleep, slipping into gray, charcoal, black.

  I awoke with a jolt in the middle of the night, as if I’d been pushed. I was disoriented and sweating, trying to catch my breath. I’d been dreaming about something. A monster, maybe? A dragon? I rubbed my eyes and tried to recall. Yes, it had been a dragon guarding a treasure. No, it wasn’t guarding a treasure; it was guarding a secret.

  I switched on the light and stared at the closet. What had that dragon meant to Iris? Was it a good luck symbol to her? Why had she drawn it up in that cave? Why had she drawn it in my closet? I was close. I could feel it.

  I found Helen’s flashlight in her desk and set about emptying my closet and confronting the great blue dragon. I stepped into the closet. In the dark, with the dragon illuminated only by the flashlight, it was now clear why I’d missed the beast when I’d first moved in. Each of its scales was filled in with graffiti, and its body seemed to sink back deep into the years of semiprivate inscriptions. Only its horrible eyes peered out at me, like great gashes of disbelief. As if it were shocked that someone dared invade its domain.

  “Okay, Iris,” I heard myself say aloud. “What’s your treasure? What were you hiding in here?” I shone the flashlight around the area, focusing on the darkest crevices and corners, but nothing. Then it occurred to me. The floor. So what was underneath the floorboards? In an instant I was on my knees, searching the floor of the closet, my fingers grasping at floorboards, my nails working their way into the slits. And then one gave way. I was fairly certain my heart missed a beat, and I faltered, suddenly hypoxic. I shone the flashlight on the loose board, now tipped up at the edge like a seesaw. I set the flashlight down and it rolled away, against the back of the closet, the stream of light growing thick and eerie as it did. With trembling hands, I pulled the board the rest of the way up and reached underneath. At first nothing, but then I reached farther, until I was in up to my forearm, and that was when I felt it—a sheaf of paper, rolled up and wrapped with a ribbon to make it the same width as the boards. Bingo.

  My heart pounding, the papers shaking in my hand, I moved to the bed. I untied the red velvet ribbon that bound the sheets. Page after page of letters and symbols, complicated schematics and complex equations. I settled on one of the pages. It resembled something an architect might create. It seemed somehow familiar. I pulled back a little, trying to let my vision adjust to it, and then my breath caught. It was a rough schematic for a complicated sort of box. A puzzle box.

  “You made it, didn’t you, Iris?” I said aloud. “It wasn’t some stalker boy. It was you. You made the puzzle box.”

  I pulled the box from the drawer beneath my bed and examined the diagram more closely. The two resembled each other, but they weren’t identical. Mine wasn’t the first puzzle box she’d made.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said, aloud again, startling myself. Quickly I leafed through the pages. No wonder Iris’s grades had slipped. She’d been an extremely busy girl. My eye caught on a page that looked vaguely familiar. It was identical in form to the note my puzzle box had contained, but the numbers were different:

  R&J 2.1.75–78

  4 36 72 1 91 5, 112 114 10 21 53 16 104 64 91 50 9 61 41 35 3 23 25 16 2 110 38 46 58 110 54. 30 44 50 24 60 10 59 104 59 64 58. 71 74 73 67 61 12 3 1 33 53. 9 21 39 23 10 35 3 47 14 41 30. 57 6 27 2 53 46 89 12 59 88 82 93 74 33 17 8 7 16 91 20 19, 64 15 71 53.

  I had been right. They were using a key text, and these were notes for another enciphered message, only this one gave the key text in the margin of the page. R&J had to mean Romeo and Juliet. And 2.1.75–78 meant Act 2, Scene 1, lines seventy-five to seventy-eight. I scanned Helen’s shelves. Somewhere she had The Complete Works of Shakespeare. She’d had it out when she was auditioning for The Tempest. It wasn’t on her shelf. On a whim, I looked in her closet, but it wasn’t there. I sank to my knees and was relieved to find it under her bed. How unlike Helen. Perhaps I was rubbing off on her. I pulled out the giant volume and leafed through to find Romeo and Juliet and the line number.

  O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

  Deny thy father and refuse thy name;

  Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

  And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

  Pulling out my pen and notebook, I set about deciphering the text. I assigned a number to each letter as follows:

  The first symbol in the cipher text was 4, so I counted four spaces from the start of the key text and ended up with M. The next letter was Y. I continued on from there until I had the entire message deciphered:

  M Y L O V E, P L E A S E G I V E M E A N O T H E R C H A N C E. M E E T M E A G A I N. I N T H E W O O D S. M A Y T E N O N E A M. Y O U R S A L W A Y S A N D F O R E V E R, I R I S.

  I was overwhelmed with sadness. Iris wasn’t some cold-hearted narcissist incapable of love. Iris had in fact been in love, had begged someone to meet her in an attempt to rekindle that love. Had someone met her out there in the woods, or had she waited alone? But who was this other person? Had the secrecy been necessary or just another aspect of Iris’s melodrama, another eccentricity?

  I tapped my pen against the notebook and wondered. Would this key text work for my note as well? It was worth a try. I had worked for only a few minutes when I realized I was on the wrong track. Using Romeo and Juliet as the key text rendered my note complete gibberish. But I was closer. No matter how far away I might be, I was getting closer. Around three a.m., I rolled up the sheaf of paper, secured it with the same velvet ribbon Iris had used, and slipped it inside my pillow. I drifted off to sleep with numbers and letters swirling behind my lids.

  I didn’t go to class the next morning. I figured that given the events of the previous day, the administration was bound to cut us some slack. They were probably just hoping the whole school didn’t empty out. Without Helen’s alarm clock, I slept in until eleven, and when I got up and opened my glass door, a breath of honeysuckle flitted into the room. I retrieved Iris’s blueprints, and sitting on my bed, I began examining them. I was just starting to jot down notes when Mr. Reilly knocked on my window. I gathered up Iris’s pages and, slipping them into my notebook, beckoned him in. I wondered how much he’d seen.

  “So, Cally,” he said, and with a bitchy grin spread across his face, he took a seat on Helen’s bed. “Did you forget what day it was?”

  “No,” I said, picking up my notebook again.

  “Are you ill?”

  “No,” I said, anger surfacing, my head growing hot and jumbled with it.

  “Then why weren’t you in chemistry?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with that bag of bones you guys found in the woods.”

  “True. We’re all suffering here, Cally, but we can’t let tragedy overrun our lives. We can’t let it win.”

  “Let tragedy win? What are you even talking about? There was a bag of children’s bones up there.”

  “Look,” he said, sighing, bringing his palms together and lifting his fingers to the tip of his nose as if to pray. “I don’t want to argue with you. I just want you to know that you’re not exempt from the rules.”

  “I am when the rules are stupid.”

  The color started to rise in his cheeks. “That kind of attitude is not going to get you asked back to St. Bede’s. You guys …,” he said. His face flushed completely crimson, and for a moment it looked like he really might lose it, but then he did his best to swallo
w down his rage. “You have no idea the kind of work we do for you guys, the sacrifices we make.”

  He had that whiny, overly familiar tone I’d heard him take with other students when he wanted to play with the power dynamic. It made my stomach ache.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, smiling, hoping to irritate him out of my room. “I love St. Bede’s. I find it rigorous, yet nurturing.”

  He shook his head. “Whatever, Cally. I’m not going to reach out to you if you won’t meet me halfway. This dialogue is over. Here,” he said, retrieving a note from his pocket. “Dr. Harrison wanted me to give this to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said brightly, placing it beside me on the bed.

  He started for the door but then paused and stared at me with such loathing in his eyes that I almost asked him why he hated me so much. Was it because I wasn’t frightened and pliant like Shelly Cates? Or maybe he just didn’t think I was pretty.

  “You only get one slip with me,” he said, raising a tensed finger. “You miss my class again, and I’ll have you kicked out. Understood?”

  I nodded.

  “One slip,” he said again, and then jostled himself out the door.

  When he was gone, I read Harrison’s note. It offered condolences and invited me to drop by his office if I wanted to “process things.” He’d also arranged a weekly appointment with the school counselor. It was sweet, really, but I wasn’t looking forward to the therapy time-suck. I slipped the paper into my drawer, then opened my notebook and got back to work.

  “This is unbelievable.”

  Sophie sat and I lay under an oak tree near the front edge of campus. She leafed through Iris’s papers, which I’d concealed in a binder. She shook her head. “I just can’t believe this. If Iris made it, then who left it for you?”

  I shrugged and bit my nail. I’d taken to doing that lately. It was better than taking up smoking.

  “Do you think it could be from the killer?”

  “Not necessarily,” Sophie said, squinting into the afternoon sun. “It could be from this person, from whomever she was secretly dating, and that person doesn’t have to be the killer.”