Wicked River

by Jenny Milchman

  Late that afternoon, another whole day gone by, they finally ground to a halt. They had come to neither trailhead nor endpoint. Whatever trail this was, they weren’t going to be able to keep going on it long enough for it to save them.

  “We’re due home tonight,” Natalie said, her voice heavy with sorrow. “I think. Maybe it’s tomorrow. Soon though.”

  Doug didn’t seem to register what she’d said. He opened and closed his mouth a few times as if he had to get a running start before speaking. “Nat?”

  She looked up from the matted leaves on the ground. “What?”

  “I don’t think we’ve been following a trail.”

  Doug sounded more lucid than he had all day, but the cloak of clarity didn’t reassure her. Whether they died with their wits about them, or utterly scattered, what did it matter? They were still going to die.

  “At all?” Natalie asked. “I know those earliest marks were pretty worn away. But the ones we’ve been seeing lately are in good shape.”

  “Probably all of them were this red color once and just faded over time,” Doug said. “But that’s how I know it must be a decommissioned trail. The DEC wouldn’t allow variability in the blazes. And anyway, they use metal tags for trail markers now. I didn’t remember that the other day. I wanted so badly to find a way out.”

  Natalie couldn’t take another step and sank down against a tree, clasping both dirty knees with her hands. “You mean these marks aren’t in use anymore? I guess that makes sense.” She found she couldn’t work up the strength to care. She’d moved past the shock of it already, without even feeling the impulse to deny it. Instead she was grieving for herself and Doug, for all they could’ve been, together.

  Doug dropped down beside her. He turned his head in her direction, though it looked as if he couldn’t quite bring her into focus. “We can keep following the blazes,” he said. “I could be wrong. But I think we’d just succeed in tiring ourselves out.” He let out a laugh, coarse and broken. “Even more than we already are.”

  Natalie lowered her face, attempting a nod, but was unable to bring her head back up again.

  “Unless someone’s out here with us,” Doug said abruptly. His voice rose on an alarming note. “And painted those flags himself. To fuck with us. To get us worse lost.”

  Natalie mustered breath. “Oh, honey, I don’t think so—”

  “Sure!” Doug broke in raggedly. “You don’t think anybody could be that malevolent? You don’t know shit, Nat. You never did.” He jerked his head around as if the hypothetical villain might still be there, observing their plight with glee.

  And indeed the branches swung and stirred, as if somebody was lurking nearby. Natalie narrowed her eyes, trying to see. There couldn’t be anyone there, could there? This was a delusion on her husband’s part, contagious in Natalie’s own weakened state.

  The desperation of their situation had caused something to become unfettered inside Doug, uncorked a fury that had until now lain dormant.

  He got to his feet, looming over Natalie while she hunched like a turtle on the ground. She felt so frail, and her husband’s voice was so loud. That suspicious toss of his head—his gaze shooting behind every tree, into every cleft of rock—made her hesitate to so much as look up.

  What she really wanted to do was scream.

  Stop it! If you have this much energy, use it to come up with a plan!

  But she didn’t have enough strength herself for such a riotous display, neither to yell at him nor to say something that might result in them taking one more step.

  “You don’t know shit,” Doug said again. He lowered his face into his palms. When he took them away, his features were smeared with streaks of dirt, like war paint. “How can you be so naive, Natalie?”

  Allusion, she thought. Naive, Natalie. Or no, that was alliteration.

  That she was thinking about the terms at this moment frightened her more than the fact that she had gotten them wrong.

  “We already know there’s a murderer out here!” Doug raged on. “We were the ones who found Craig’s body, remember? We know that he was killed!”

  It took Natalie a few seconds; she was still cringing away from Doug’s anger and warrior-like stance. But then his words drifted back to her on a current of breeze.

  “Craig?” she echoed, and paused to catch her breath. “How do you know his name?” She finally lifted her eyes. “Did you know the man who got shot?”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Mia’s parents weren’t talking to each other more since the incident—as they had taken to calling it—four days ago with the skeezy men outside Aunt Nat’s apartment, but they sure were trading a lot of tight, angry texts, making plans, coordinating logistics. If Mia had been making progress on the whole get-to-stay-on-her-own thing, then the incident had screwed it up big time.

  Today, since her mother was still working extra shifts—that Shelley person was really sick, like with something that lasted—Mia had to go with her dad way the heck up to the wilds of the Bronx while he led a scrimmage. Might as well have been Australia. Mia would act as manager, record goals and penalties and the final score. Too bad her dad coached field hockey in the fall. No cute boys to watch run around on the field.

  Mia’s mother stopped her in the kitchen, smoothly lifting the coffee carafe out of Mia’s hand. “This wasn’t supposed to become a habit, Mi.”

  “Fine,” Mia said. “I’ll have tea instead. It has just as much caffeine.”

  “Have herbal,” her mother said, the kind of suggestion that was really an order. “Hey, Mi?” her mom added. “Your father says you told the police that the men—you know, the ones from the incident—asked about another guy. Craig Something.”

  “Yeah,” Mia said. “I can’t remember his last name though.”

  Mia’s mom began studying her, but finally she nodded, as if satisfied Mia was telling the truth. Which really ticked Mia off since she basically never lied, at least not directly. Maybe an oversight once in a while, something left out, or an exaggeration. Still, did her mom have to act so distrusting? In a way it was flattering, like Mia had a way bigger life than she did, the kind where stuff actually happened.

  “And you never got to tell me what you were talking about last week, what Uncle Doug’s groomsman said,” Mia’s mother went on. “The thing he didn’t tell anybody else.”

  Mia felt her face fire. Still not a lie, but Mia knew she’d made what Mark had talked to her about on their walk back to the hotel sound like a big deal, when in truth, it had been too meaningless even to mention.

  “Mia? I’m just trying to clear up some loose ends, if I can. Things seem to have gotten kind of…out of whack since the wedding.”

  Mia could see her mother gearing up. She wasn’t going to let this go. “Mark just wanted to make sure the canoe stayed a surprise.” She shrugged. “He asked me not to say anything to Aunt Nat about it.”

  Mia’s mother looked relieved, and Mia flushed again. She wished there was something she could do that really would startle her mom, make her stop and take notice.

  Then again, there had been something weird, not about what Mark had said, but how he had said it. He’d seemed on edge, awkward kind of, and Mia had wished that it’d been her making him feel that way. Why would a boat make anyone nervous?

  “Oh shoot,” her mom said, glancing at her phone. “I’m late. Can’t keep this new schedule straight.” She began writing a text so fast that it practically sizzled, and then Mia’s mother was gone.

  Her father showed up a few minutes later—buzzing to be let in like some kind of guest—and asked with this I’m-so-sorry-you’re-dead kind of sympathy how Mia had been doing. Meaning since the incident. The two of them rode the subway uptown in silence, swaying and swinging and grabbing on to separate poles.

  The truth was, Mia hadn’t thought very much about the
incident at all, at least not once her phone had been found. One of the people who hung out in front of the apartment building saw when it got dropped in the gutter—a brand-new iPhone—and went to retrieve it. Steal it, more likely. But whoever it was admitted to having the phone when the police questioned them, which Mia had to admit was pretty decent. Maybe the neighborhood wasn’t as bad as all that.

  When they got to the school, Mia’s father handed her a clipboard.

  “I’m going to call every foul, so keep a close eye out, okay? I need a record because the parents get irate when I make cuts.” He jogged onto the field where a group of girls in micro shorts swarmed him.

  Mia glanced at the sheet of paper clipped to the board. There was a grid of boxes that didn’t make much sense. She lifted her eyes—the sun glaring, even this early in the morning—to see what was taking place on the field. How complicated could this game be? Just a bunch of girls around Mia’s age running between two goals. But she felt distracted, unable to focus. Mia let the clipboard drop to the ground. This was just practice. She probably didn’t really have to concentrate until the scrimmage started.

  She drew her phone out of the pocket of her not-so-micro shorts and swiped at the screen. In addition to the fact that she’d had no life without it, Mia was glad to have her phone back because of the pictures she had taken of Mark and Brett. Her phone was the only place they existed, unless if she went back to Aunt Nat and Uncle Doug’s apartment. And with her parents acting like jailers these days, that wasn’t gonna happen.

  After the super-tall policeman had brought her phone back—giving it to her mother instead of Mia, which had to be like a violation of her civil rights or something—Mia had downloaded an app that compared photos to faces online. Mia had searched through her mom’s stuff, but couldn’t find a copy of the wedding program. Unlike Aunt Nat, her mom was not the scrapbooking type. So now, instead of having to scroll past hundreds of links, with only a guess as to Mark’s last name, Mia had a way to hone in on exactly the right guy—and hopefully Brett too.

  She felt pretty clever to have thought of this, almost like a cop herself.

  Mia bent over and placed her phone on top of the clipboard so that she would catch sight of any notifications. The sun climbed higher in the sky, Mia roasting beneath it. Sweat glistened on her bare arms. It’d been hot ever since they’d returned from the wedding, even though the weather people kept forecasting an end to the heat wave. Out on the field, the girls were swigging out of water bottles, but Mia had forgotten to bring hers. Had the scrimmage started already? A couple of shouts rose up from the field, and then one girl was suddenly surrounded by the others, like a gazelle by a pack of lions. Probably she’d scored a goal.

  Mia crouched down and checked off a box on the grid.

  Her phone dinged, and she snatched it up. She had to walk away from the field, find some shade beneath a tree in order to see the screen.

  The calls and cheers from the field grew distant.

  No one else was on campus; the school grounds had the graveyard feel of summer. With the rays of sun blocked by branches, the temperature dropped, and Mia actually shivered.

  She could make out her screen, and what had popped up didn’t have anything to do with the photo app. Instead, it was a reminder on her calendar. Aunt Nat and Uncle Doug were coming home tonight. Mia’s heart lifted with gladness. She could go downtown and see them tomorrow. She wondered if Scowly and his friend with the weird walk were still looking to find her aunt or uncle, or that Craig Whoever guy. Mia definitely didn’t want to run into the men from the incident again.

  There was a shrill whistle from the field, and Mia jumped, scraping her arm against the tree trunk. Her eyes had to adjust as she left the dimness and protection of the leaves. Still nobody around, but shouts of protests rose through the air like smoke. Mia trudged in their direction. It wasn’t only the shade that had caused the temperature to drop—the sky was graying over, and it seemed to be growing cooler in general, the heat finally releasing its grip on the city. Hey, the weather people had been right for once.

  Mia saw her father standing at one end of the field, not looking at the play but casting his gaze around impatiently.

  “Mia!” he called when he saw her. “Did you catch that foot foul?”

  Some of the girls on the field stopped playing and looked over at her.

  Mia caught a glimpse of the clipboard, abandoned on the grass, and broke into a jog. She felt a pinch of anger in her stomach. Didn’t she have her own life to lead?

  Her phone dinged again, and she ground to a halt, forgetting about the scrimmage, the girls, even her father.

  The sun was gone from the sky, and so she could see.

  She’d been sent a link, which she clicked on.

  PhotoSearch has found a match for your entry.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Doug didn’t speak for what felt like hours while Natalie stared up at him. She clambered onto her hands and knees, then lifted herself off the ground. The motion ate up the final reserves of energy she had.

  “Did you know the man whose body we found?” she repeated.

  At first it seemed as if Doug had no memory of what he had said. He didn’t appear to understand what Natalie was asking him. He stared at her, trying to lick his lips with a tongue that contained no moisture, flopping out of his mouth like a dead thing.

  But then the cool light of descending evening lit his eyes. “Of course I knew him, Nat. He was my best friend.”

  “Mark and Brett are your best friends,” she whispered.

  Doug shook his head. “You know how there are always people you’re closer to, and then others you’re less so?” he said. “Or maybe you don’t know,” he added, his tone taking on a knife edge. “Your bridesmaids had to be dug out of a vault. You haven’t seen Val or Eva since we announced our engagement.”

  Natalie tried to swallow, but couldn’t. The reflex had been lost. She had never experienced this side of Doug before—a careless cruelty that left her skinless, flayed.

  “Mark and Brett were part of my gang, like I told you. But they weren’t the guys whose backs I really had, or who had mine. Not the ones I—how would your former girlfriends put it—clicked with. Nope. That was Craig. My bestie, as your niece might say.”

  Doug was losing it; he hadn’t been making sense off and on for a full day now. This announcement sounded like it could’ve been delivered by someone in the last stages of delirium, or a particularly mean drunk. If Doug had had such a good friend—someone Natalie not only hadn’t met, but had never heard a word about—then why wouldn’t he have been at their wedding? She had no idea what was real, true, to be trusted, and what might’ve been the product of hunger, pain, and dehydration.

  Except that the things Doug was saying did contain a certain note of truth. They cast light on a stack of events that in hindsight seemed just a little too ordered, poised to fall like a row of dominoes. The river eating their GPS, and Doug’s sudden suggestion to hike out early, when he’d never given up on an outdoor challenge in all the time Natalie had known him. And a trail being conveniently located right nearby.

  Not to mention Doug’s earlier scythe-sharp statement that Natalie didn’t know shit. She’d had no idea. Of anything. She still didn’t.

  Betrayal began to crawl across her body like a swarm of flies.

  “Doug.” Natalie raised her head, meeting her husband’s gaze in the low, lavender light. “Why did we come here?”

  Again he seemed to have lost the ability to answer.

  Fury and confusion gusted through Natalie, and she ran at her husband. “Doug!” she shrieked. “Tell me! What have we been doing out here? What are we doing?”

  The wound on her cheek pulsed with every word. She had to stop shouting, or it would burst through her skin, leave it open and caving.

  Plus, yelling at Doug was acc
omplishing nothing.

  It was like screaming at an animal struck down in the road, succeeding only in making Natalie feel even worse about herself.

  How easily fooled was she? How hungry had she been for someone to love her that she would have settled for a love as full of holes and craters as this?

  Doug stood there, blinking and uncomprehending.

  Was this Craig guy real, and even if he was—a best friend Doug had lost touch with—was he the murder victim they had found, or had the two simply become linked in Doug’s mind, the result of some hallucinatory, compromised state?

  Her husband leaned forward to grab Natalie’s hand, and she screamed.

  Doug’s fist felt like burlap, or hide. Something so slick and impenetrable that water would sluice right off its surface, accounting for its arid touch.

  “Do you hear what I hear?” Doug demanded.

  Wasn’t that the start of a Christmas carol? But the notes rising in Natalie’s head sounded more like Jack Nicholson. Heeeere’s Johnny.

  Doug began dragging her toward a stand of trees.

  Tiny hearts blurred before her eyes as she fought to keep up—the dimpled hoofprints of deer on the ground—amidst other less-identifiable depressions. All headed in the same direction, toward some destination.

  Natalie and Doug followed the tracks like bread crumbs.

  It began as an inky black line, winding and writhing like a snake through the undergrowth before widening out. The sound Doug claimed to have heard seconds earlier finally became audible, her husband’s senses so uncannily heightened that Natalie feared anew for his sanity.