Cold Woods

by Karen Katchur

Dannie picked it up, noticed the engraving, ran her fingers over the S. S. and the heart. Trisha must’ve brought it with her when she’d slept over last night. It was the only thing that made sense. The truth of it stung. Include me, Dannie begged silently. It felt like an obvious betrayal of their promised friendship. And Dannie needed her friends. She hadn’t been herself ever since Lester had touched her on the side of her house.

  The longer she stood in Carlyn’s bedroom holding the bat, the more her anger flared.

  She stormed from Carlyn’s room, the bat gripped in her hand by her side. She’d find them and show them the engraving with the heart, remind them that there were three of them in this club. They were supposed to all be in it together. Always. Underneath her anger that they’d had a sleepover without her ran a deeper resentment, one that had to do with her father leaving, the care she’d had to give her mother in his absence. And then what Lester had done to her, and having to live with the fear of bumping into him again. The strain was getting to her. She wanted to find her friends, be a kid with them, if only for a little while.

  Where could they be?

  There was only one place she could think of, and she made her way to the mountain trail. It was likely they’d be hanging out near the Kilroy tree. It was their favorite place, even in winter. They weren’t expecting more snow until later that night.

  She trudged up the trail, bat at her side. Every step brought a sharp pain in her knees, her chest. She was out of shape. The fat friend, the boys at school called her whenever they’d talk about the three of them. She looked at her feet, the couple of inches of snow on the ground, and pushed forward. She’d been pulled tight the last few weeks: a rubber band that had been stretched too far. She didn’t look up until she reached the Kilroy tree.

  She had a peculiar feeling: an instinct she wasn’t alone. The chill at the back of her neck had nothing to do with the weather. She looked around, and that’s when Lester stepped out from behind another tree not far from where she was standing. Oh, God, no! She didn’t know what to do. She was too frightened to move. Blood dripped by his temple. He reached up and wiped it away, smearing it onto the back of his hand. “She’ll pay for that,” he said.

  Dannie had no idea who he was talking about. He walked toward her. Something about him wasn’t right. It was his eyes; one of his pupils was dilated more than the other.

  “Stop,” she said or thought she said. She heard the word inside her head but didn’t know if it ever reached her lips.

  He kept coming toward her.

  She might’ve warned him not to touch her, not to hurt her. It was as though someone else were talking as she watched from the sidelines, unmoving, unblinking, a kind of out-of-body experience.

  Her limbs hummed with fear. Stay back! Don’t come any closer!

  She didn’t hear Scott come up behind her, didn’t feel him take the bat from her hand. What was he doing here? He was supposed to be at indoor baseball practice. He must’ve been looking for Trisha too. Scott was saying something to Lester. He was angry, warning Lester not to step any closer.

  “I’ll do it,” Scott said. “I swear I’ll do it.”

  The swinging bat was a blur, something Dannie saw out of the corner of her eye. It happened so fast. She didn’t recall Lester falling to the ground. And yet, the sound of his body hitting the frozen ground reverberated in her ears, in her head.

  Scott stared at her. The bat fell from his hands.

  And then he was gone, running down the trail.

  Wait, she tried calling, but she couldn’t speak. Her voice failed her, as it had so many times before. Now she was alone, listening to the sound of silence, the kind of quiet you heard when you were in the cold woods, the only one breathing.

  Forty-eight hours later, Dannie sat curled in a ball on the far end of the couch, her mother propped up at the other end. Mrs. Haines sat in the chair across from them, wiping her eyes and nose with a tissue. Mrs. Walsh paced the living room.

  Outside, Second Street bustled with activity, kids playing, sledding. The neighbors were up early, clearing the sidewalks of the snow that had fallen overnight. Carlyn and Trisha were still sleeping in their bedrooms the last time Mrs. Walsh and Mrs. Haines had checked.

  Dannie rocked quietly, made herself as small as possible. The tears kept coming, no matter how many times she’d tried to get them to stop. She shouldn’t have gone back to the trail with Carlyn and Trisha. Although, to be fair, she’d stayed at the bottom of the mountain, too frightened to see what she and Scott had done.

  Her friends had found Lester buried in the snow.

  Dead.

  Trisha had thought she’d killed him, and Dannie hadn’t corrected her. Instead, Dannie had gone home and prayed and prayed and prayed. Forgive me, Father; forgive me, Father; forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. But no amount of praying could undo what had happened on the mountain. She had run down the trail after Scott, leaving Lester lying on the ground, and hadn’t told anyone. Scott had protected her. She was scared. She didn’t know how to carry such a burden, and praying to God wasn’t helping. So early this morning, before the sun had come up, she’d confessed to her mother.

  “No, no, no!” her mother had shouted. “No, Danielle, not you!” She’d held Dannie, her heavy arms draped around Dannie’s shoulders. Dannie had cried into the creases of her mother’s neck. When she’d cried herself out, her mother had said, “Wait here.” She’d pulled herself up from the couch and left the house for the first time in three years. She’d lumbered to Mrs. Walsh’s place, told her what Dannie and Scott had done. Then Dannie’s mom and Mrs. Walsh had confronted Mrs. Haines.

  Now they were sitting in Dannie’s living room, waiting for Scott. Mrs. Walsh had asked Dannie to call him and have him meet them here.

  Mrs. Haines wiped her eyes, looked at Dannie. “You’re sure he was doing those things to my girl? You’re sure he was . . . he was touching her?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And now he’s dead.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I was scared he was going to do to me what he’d done to Trisha. He tried once before, when he was supposed to fix the downspout.”

  “Oh, Danielle,” her mother said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Dannie looked down, ashamed even now. She’d always believed it had somehow been her fault for attracting his attention, for having large breasts.

  There was a knock at the door; then Scott stepped inside. He stood in the doorway, shoved his hands in his pockets, his shoulders rounded.

  “Good,” Mrs. Walsh said to him. “You’re here.”

  “Come,” Dannie’s mother said and reached her hand out to him. He took it, and she directed him to sit on the couch next to her. “Thank you for protecting my baby,” she said. She looked at Mrs. Haines. “They’re just kids. And that man, that husband of yours, he’s, he’s . . .” She tugged the collar of her robe. “They don’t deserve to go to jail for protecting themselves against the likes of him.”

  Mrs. Walsh stopped pacing. “No one is going to jail. We’re going to fix this.”

  “I saw a poster was knocked off her wall,” Mrs. Haines said.

  They all looked at her.

  She continued. “There was a hole in the wall, pieces of plaster on the floor. I saw it in her bedroom yesterday after she’d gone. I didn’t see her again to ask her about it before I left for work. But I knew. Deep down in that place you don’t want to acknowledge, I knew, and I still didn’t want to believe it,” Mrs. Haines said. “He hurt my kid.”

  Mrs. Walsh stopped in front of Mrs. Haines, placed her hands on the woman’s shoulders. “He can’t hurt Trisha anymore,” she said, kneeling on the floor in front of her. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but we can fix this. We will fix this.”

  Mrs. Haines nodded. “Okay,” she said. “But how?”

  “No one’s going to find him on the mountain now. There’s too much snow. There’s too much snow for us to hike up it. We’re going to have to wa
it for most of it to melt, but that buys us some time.” She paused. “In the meantime, Sharon, you’re going to let everybody think he skipped out on you. You’ll be upset, of course, but you’re going to pretend you expect him back. After all, he would be crazy to leave you, right? And then later, after we take care of him, that’s when you’re going to report him missing. You’ll report him missing because you can’t accept that he left you. The cops will ask around; they’ll hear the story from the neighbors that Lester skipped out. Husbands take off all the time. They’ll buy it. It will work. No one will find him. No one will know what really happened to him. No one but us.”

  Mrs. Walsh looked to Dannie. Dannie nodded. She’d never tell. All eyes turned to Scott.

  “You . . . you need to know something,” he said. “I-I knew when I swung the bat it would kill him. And, and I swung it anyway.” His face looked stricken, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d admitted about himself.

  “No one here is judging you,” Mrs. Walsh said. “You did what you had to do. You protected Dannie. Now, we’re going to protect you.”

  He might’ve nodded; Dannie wasn’t sure. He looked so small, like a little boy who had lost his way.

  “No one will ever know but us, Scott,” Mrs. Walsh said again. “No one but us.”

  “But, but what about Trisha?” he asked.

  “And Carlyn?” Dannie added.

  “No,” Mrs. Walsh said. “We leave them out of it. It’s for their own good. We do this, we become accessories to a crime. And what they don’t know can’t hurt them.”

  They were quiet. Dannie thought about what Mrs. Walsh had said. It would be hard keeping the truth from her friends, but in the end, Mrs. Walsh was right. By not telling them, they would be protecting them too.

  “Okay,” she said. Then Scott nodded, wiped his eyes.

  Dannie’s mother asked, “But why should we report him missing at all? Why can’t Sharon just say he left, and leave the cops out of it?”

  “If someone tries to find him and can’t, and Sharon doesn’t make some kind of public effort to get him back, they’re going to get suspicious that maybe something did happen to him, and he didn’t just leave town on his own.”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Haines said. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “You have to,” Mrs. Walsh said. “We all have to play our part if it’s going to work. We have to stick together. These kids will never survive in the system.” She whispered the last part. “And what will become of Evelyn? What will become of all of us? We have to take a stand. We can’t let him win. And he wins if these kids get sent away. They all win. Every last one of them. Who do they think they are? They think they can leave us, beat us, touch our children, and get away with it? We do this, and he doesn’t get away with it.”

  Mrs. Walsh was talking about more than Lester. She was talking about her own husband, who had run out on her when Carlyn was five years old. And then Dannie’s father had done the same a few years later. They were single moms, trying to make the best of an awful situation.

  “Linda’s right, Sharon,” Dannie’s mother said. “He’s dead. Why should we continue to pay for it?”

  Mrs. Haines lit a cigarette. Finally, she nodded. “You’re right. I know you’re both right.”

  “And Scott,” Mrs. Walsh said. “We do this, you have to promise never to be like them. You have to promise to grow up and be a good man. That’s all we ask.”

  “I promise,” he said, sniffed.

  When they were all in agreement and their plan was in place, Dannie’s mother asked, “What did you mean, ‘After we take care of him’? How are we going to take care of him? There’s no way I can walk up that mountain.”

  “You won’t have to,” Mrs. Walsh said. “You’re going to be our lookout. Sharon and I will make the trek up.”

  “And then what?” Mrs. Haines asked.

  “And then we bury him.”

  EPILOGUE

  Dannie pulled into the parking lot of the county jail. It had been two weeks since Sharon had been arrested, arraigned, denied bail. Dannie parked in the first spot she could find and cut the engine. She reached up, touched the cross around her neck that lay in the soft spot between her clavicles. She took a minute to collect herself, to think about everything she needed to say.

  There were good men in the world.

  Her husband, Vinnie, was a good man. A good father. Dannie counted her blessings every day for him. If she’d done one thing right in her lifetime, it had been marrying him. They’d met soon after she’d graduated high school, at the deli where she’d worked full time. Outside of work, her free time had been taken up caring for her mother, volunteering at church, and Vinnie had soon joined her in both. She’d been so lonely without her friends, and he’d helped her forget her troubles at home. They’d married after one year of dating, and she hadn’t looked back.

  And then there were bad men.

  She’d known two bad men: her father, a man who had left his wife and child for no other reason than he’d been selfish. And there was Lester. He was the worst kind of man, in Dannie’s mind, a man who had done terrible, unthinkable things. The way Lester had stared at her that day on the trail, looking at her in a way no man should ever look at a child. It could’ve easily been Dannie who had swung the bat. She had no doubt she would’ve struck him if Scott hadn’t been there. But Scott had been there, and she’d promised to keep his secret and in turn had become an accessory to murder.

  Dannie unhooked her necklace. She slipped her wedding ring off. She put both pieces of jewelry in her purse, along with her cell phone, and locked the car with everything inside but her ID. Vehicles were subject to searches in the facility parking lot. Personal property wasn’t allowed inside the prison. She lifted her shoulders, her chin, and walked up the steps to the main entrance. Beyond the brick walls was a high fence with barbed wire. To say she was intimidated was an understatement, but she had resolved to do this. She kept moving. She went through a metal detector, filled out the appropriate paperwork before she was escorted to the visiting room.

  Sharon was waiting, sitting on the other side of a glass partition. Her spiky gray hair was no longer spiky without the hair products she’d used at home. Her eyes were hollowed, ringed with dark circles.

  Dannie sat across from her, picked up the phone, tried to keep her hands from shaking.

  “How’s Trisha?” Sharon asked, glancing at the guard. “I heard the DA decided not to press charges.”

  “She’s recovering,” Dannie said. “She bought a new couch for your place. She’s fixing it up real nice for you.”

  “You tell her she doesn’t have to do that. That fancy lawyer she got me is enough. More than enough.”

  “She wants to do it,” Dannie said.

  “Well,” Sharon said, smiled.

  “How are you?” Dannie asked, although the question seemed stupid under the circumstances.

  “I’m fine,” Sharon said, paused. “What are you doing here, Dannie?”

  “Linda, Scott, and I—we talked.” When Dannie had learned Sharon had confessed, she’d had to do something. She couldn’t keep pretending, lying. Linda and Scott had met Dannie in her mother’s house, like they’d done all those years ago, except they’d stood in the empty living room now that all the furniture had been removed. Scott had told them he’d had every intention of telling the detectives what he’d done when they’d questioned him. He’d said he’d gotten as close to the truth as he could, but then he’d gotten scared. He was sorry it had gotten this far. He’d faced his own demons through the years, but he’d tried to be a good man. Dannie and Linda had said they understood.

  “Some criminals we make,” Linda had said. “Never even thought about where that bat might’ve been.” Dannie had considered whether they’d be in this position had they gotten rid of the bat all those years ago. But they hadn’t.

  In the end, they’d agreed that Dannie would visit Sharon in prison, and whateve
r happened next would be up to Sharon. She was the one in jail, taking the blame. They’d stand or fall by her decision.

  Sharon leaned forward, whispered, “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Why did you do it? Why did you confess?” Dannie asked in a quiet voice.

  “Because I had to,” Sharon said. “It was the only thing that made any sense. Everyone knows he was beating on me. And when I tell them what he was doing to my kid . . .” She sat back, took a breath, then leaned forward again. “They’ll go easy on me. I’m an old lady. They’ll see me as a woman who did what she had to do to protect herself and her kid. There isn’t a mother alive who wouldn’t understand that.”

  “We can’t let you sit in here for something we did.” Dannie wiped her eyes. “It’s not right.”

  “Shut it,” Sharon said, glancing at the guard again. “Of course it’s right.”

  “No, it’s not. I can’t.” She sobbed.

  “You can and you will,” Sharon said and paused, waiting for Dannie to look at her. “You listen to me, and you listen good. I brought that man into our lives. And to think what he was doing to my own kid? It was my job to protect her. My job. And I didn’t do it. I didn’t. This is my penance, my price to pay. Let me pay it.”

  Dannie shook her head.

  “You want to do something for me?” Sharon asked.

  “Anything,” Dannie said.

  “Get out of here. Go home and take care of those two beautiful daughters of yours. Go home and do your job of being their mother. Tell Scott the same thing. Tell him to be a good father to those kids of his. And tell him to continue to be a good cop and to protect women like me. What we did, what happened, wasn’t for nothing. Do you hear me? It wasn’t for nothing.”

  Dannie nodded. “If you’re sure,” she said. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want. You go on home now, tell your girls hi for me. Linda and Carlyn too. And give Trisha a hug. Tell her I’ll see her soon.”

  “Okay,” Dannie said. “I will.”

  Sharon hung up the phone, turned toward the guard.