At Woods Edge

by E. M. Fitch

  Stephanie grunted after each pitch, her high ponytail swinging in an arc behind her, much like her arm. The ball spun into Cassie’s mitt with a smack! Dust rose after each impact. She tossed the ball back gently each time, never rising from the crouched position she took behind the spare plate. Between pitches, Cassie let her fingers fall between her legs, holding the number for whatever zone she wanted the ball to fly into. The batter’s zone was an imaginary grouping of squares over the plate. Four numbers designated in which square Cassie wanted the pitch to land. Stephanie had a variety of pitches. A fastball, a slowball, and she was working on a slider. She could also throw this crazy pitch, the ball wobbling the whole way over the plate. She was good.

  Her twin sister, Sara, called out from the shortstop position she played, taunting them. Cassie shook her head slowly and brought two fingers to her mask, pointing to her eyes. Stephanie nodded back, understanding. Ignore Sara, focus only on Cassie.

  They had a good relationship like that.

  Ten more minutes and a dozen more pitches and Cassie stood up as Coach Kelly called for all the girls to huddle up. Cassie dropped her mask by her bag before moving to the pitcher’s mound. The girls gathered in a tight circle around their coach, hands thrown into the middle of the group. Cassie and Rebecca led them in a round of short cheers. It was another good Captain-like thing they had to do that Jessica would have been so much better at, Cassie thought.

  It was only after the last cheer that Cassie noticed Officer Gibbons leaning against the chain link fence. Coach Kelly noticed too and she frowned.

  “Which one of you is he here for?” she asked, eyeing the girls suspiciously. A few shrugged, walking from the pitcher’s mound toward the dugout and their water bottles. Sara and Stephanie both laughed though, pointing slyly at Cassie.

  “Your new pal, right, Cass?”

  “Leave her alone,” Rebecca admonished, pushing the twin who was closest to her. Stephanie turned to push her back as Coach Kelly rounded on Cassie.

  “Anything I should know about?”

  “No,” Cassie assured her. “He’s a friend.”

  The team started to pack up as Cassie left the group, jogging back to her bag and the fence where Officer Gibbons stood.

  “Team looks like it’s shaping up pretty good,” Officer Gibbons said, taking a casual sip of his coffee. His thinning gray hair, pushed back from his forehead, barely wavered in the light, but cold breeze. His eyes were on the field, not Cassie. She shrugged anyway, knowing he was watching.

  “We’re okay,” Cassie allowed. It was the best she could say.

  Office Gibbons grunted, sipping his coffee. He spilled a bit on his shirt and muttered a few select curses. He was still in uniform, the brown coffee stain almost matching the beige dress shirt he wore. He would have looked like an overgrown Boy Scout missing a few badges, if it wasn’t for the shiny, black belt loaded down with clips and cases and, mostly noticeably, a holstered gun.

  “In uniform today, huh?” Cassie asked. He shot her a look before nodding back toward the field.

  “That one’s a bit young,” he said, pointing toward Joanie. “Freshman? And I always wear my uniform on duty.”

  “Yeah, that’s Joanie,” Cassie said, nodding toward the pitcher’s mound where the younger girl was now collecting all the balls they had used and loading them into a bucket. Freshmen always got assigned the worst clean-up jobs. Cassie never had to worry about cleaning up, her job was her catcher’s equipment, and she was still wearing most of it. “You didn’t have your uniform on the last time I saw you.”

  “Keep an eye on her, eh?” Officer Gibbons said, finally catching Cassie’s eye. “And I’m not always on duty. How have you been?”

  “I’m okay,” Cassie answered, finding his concentrated stare too much. She looked down to the dusty ground and kicked at a small patch of gravel that had traveled under the fence. The shin guards she still wore were spattered with the kicked-up dust of the infield. The dirt was red clay, but when it caught the rays of the setting sun, it flickered with darker undertones that resembled blood. Office Gibbons grunted.

  He drank his coffee, more carefully this time, but showed no other signs of movement. It had been a strange development over the winter. Officer Gibbons was just … there. It wasn’t like with Aidan though, where Cassie felt she was being stalked. Instead, it felt like Gibbons was watching over her, a bizarre, older guardian angel. An angel who carried a gun.

  He spoke with her often, normally about stupid things like what kind of pie she was ordering at the diner or how her classes were going. There was an undertone though, something that went mostly unsaid. He was checking in on her.

  “Anything else going on?” Gibbons asked, his eyes sweeping her once more. Cassie pressed her lips together and shrugged before answering.

  “Math test on Thursday,” she offered. A small grin emerged and he barked out a laugh.

  “Whelp, good luck with that,” he said, pushing back from the fence and stretching. “I’m back to the—”

  Before he could finish the thought, Officer Gibbons’ walkie-talkie broke into static. Cassie couldn’t understand half of it, part of the words were just numbers and most was too garbled. She would have been surprised if he could pick out more than half the words either. The address, though, was perfectly clear. He was being called to the high school.

  “Get a ride straight home, got it?” he barked, already turning away from her. Cassie nodded as he moved in a brisk walk back toward the parking lot.

  Cassie scanned the tree line, attuned to the gentle whispers that once plagued her. The trees waved in the breeze, concealing shadows of the forest beyond. Nobody was out there, but that intrusive, icy feeling prickled her skin. In the air, the faint but acrid smell of something burning wafted toward the softball field. As if sensing Cassie’s unease, Rebecca turned just as Cassie rushed away from the fence, tugging off her shin guards as she moved.

  Rebecca glanced from Cassie to the darkening sky above the high school. “Need a ride home?”

  “That’d be great.” A nervous fluttering erupted in the center of Cassie’s chest as a trail of smoke snaked into the sky over the soccer field.

  The rain had just started to kick up and Jon flicked the wiper twice to clear the windshield. He shouldn’t have to do it again for a while. The rain was light and they weren’t moving anywhere anyway. The interior of Jon’s truck cab was crowded with five teenagers, all fogging up the glass with their breath. They’d parked down a side street, directly across from the parking lot to the school.

  There were no cars parked in the lot today except police cruisers and a Pontiac that Cassie recognized as Principal Rossi’s. She looked for the squat little man, expecting to see him darting about the uniformed police officers. She hadn’t seen him yet.

  “Is it starting again?”

  Samantha’s voice was timid, a soft breath in the muggy cabin of Jon’s truck. He flicked the wipers again unnecessarily and they dragged across the foggy glass, squeaking in protest. No one answered right away.

  The flash of red and blue lights lit the exterior of the truck and the five instinctively ducked. Cassie didn’t really think they were breaking any laws by being there. Still, she knew her parents probably wouldn’t like it. Neither would Office Gibbons. She had seen him already, sipping coffee on the edge of the scene, his eyes studying the marking on the brick side of the building. The intermittent rain had already dampened the shoulders of his police jacket. Cassie watched as he swiped a hand over his eyes.

  He seemed the most composed of any of the police officers on scene. Several officers held a ladder secure by the side of the soccer field so that one of their men could climb to the top to take a picture. Cassie could see two men in beige uniforms, black jackets gleaming with rainwater, climbing the hill that rose beyond. One slipped in the wet grass and almost lost the grip on the camera he held. They seemed to be trying to get the full scene in the sho
t. Cassie wasn’t sure they’d be able to do it.

  No one had understood, at first, the intricacies of what had happened. A fire on the soccer field had been reported. The burning grass was what Cassie had smelled at the end of her softball practice. It was a strange fire; no one had seen it started. Someone had laid some kind a fuel in a neat and intricate design. Once set ablaze, the burning tracks through the green grass emblazoned a blackened rose over the entire field.

  It wasn’t just an outline of the flower, it was every delicate petal, every dip and curve, every thorn that sprung from its stem.

  It was gorgeous. Raw. Scary.

  Cassie and Rebecca hadn’t seen it on the way home, that particular exit from the school grounds had already been blocked by police cars and firetrucks. And while Cassie had been tempted to stay, to sneak around the school building and try to spy on what was happening, she didn’t, remembering her promise to Officer Gibbons. Rebecca hadn’t seemed to want to anyway. They both heard about it by the time they got home though.

  Cassie may have wondered at the origin, if it hadn’t been for the scrawled message that was also left on the side of the building. Used again as a large, obvious canvas, someone had painted in red on the side of the school:

  Join me.

  They weren’t the same words that had been painted in blood on the side of the school at the beginning of the year. But they were so, so close. The police insisted on shutting the school down. All classes had been canceled. It was a Friday anyway. That gave the authorities three days to get it photographed and cleaned up.

  Jon had swung by Cassie’s house early that morning, just after her father had gotten the call from Principal Rossi canceling school. Ryan was already in the back fold-down seats in the truck cab. Samantha, Jon’s girlfriend, was riding shotgun. Cassie had insisted they stop to pick up Rebecca, too. It seemed only right. The last time they had all seen graffiti written in red on the side of the school, Laney had been right beside Cassie. Jessica had stood with Rebecca.

  “Nothing is starting again. There’s nothing to start, Sam,” Jon finally said into the tense quiet of the truck cab. “It’s just a prank, like it was last time. It has nothing to do with Jess or Laney.”

  His voice caught as he said their names, and for this reason, Cassie could forgive Jon’s obtuseness. At the mention of their dead friends, Rebecca’s firm grip on Cassie’s hand spasmed.

  Cassie had never told her friends just what had happened, just who the men from the carnival really were. She tried once, in front of a mirror, to say the words out loud and see how they sounded. They sounded crazy. She knew that, but she couldn’t think of any way to make them come out right. Even she didn’t know what she had seen anymore.

  The men were able to shift and disguise themselves; they spoke through the trees and commanded the roots. They could cause the earth to swallow you whole and spit you back out changed, like they had with Laney. Or they could kill you, forcing you to dance to your death in misty circles in the forest.

  She had thought once, seriously, about telling Officer Gibbons just after Laney’s wake, when he had started checking in on her, and she realized what he was doing. He had popped in, completely soaked because it had been pouring rain, as she and her mom sat down to grab dinner in the local pizza place. Cassie had seen him only a few days before at the library when Ryan had been photocopying trail maps and Cassie had tagged along. But that day, when he came into the restaurant, his eyes scanning the booths before settling on Cassie, she realized for the first time that his popping in had been deliberate.

  “Did we have an order for you, Robert?” the waitress had asked. Her name was Kate and she had worked in the restaurant for as long as Cassie could remember. Officer Gibbons had startled, wrenching his eyes from Cassie to Kate.

  “Ah, no,” he muttered. “Must’ve forgotten to call it in.”

  “The usual?” Kate asked. “That’ll come with mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, onion, garlic … ”

  He nodded as she continued listing off ingredients, sitting on the opposite side of the restaurant, where a long row of tables and single chairs lined the wall. Her mother didn’t seem to notice the appearance of the officer. Cassie waved and smiled. He nodded back but never moved toward her.

  She never did tell Gibbons the whole story; but she felt he knew part of it. Both Laney and Jessica had been taken by the same group of men. Cassie had said that right from the start. Though they shared that connection, there was no foul play evident in either death. That, in and of itself, seemed ridiculous. How could both girls turn up dead at the age of seventeen? But the coroner’s reports were clear. Both girls officially died of natural causes.

  Of course, Laney wasn’t really dead. Just changed. But the body that was buried, the one that looked just like her, had been examined and it was determined that she had died of heart failure. Jessica was dead. And even though her feet were misshapen at the time of her death, grossly swollen and cut up, the trauma to her feet alone couldn’t have killed her.

  So, in the eyes of the law, though suspicious, neither death was criminal. Even the kidnapping, as reported by Cassie, was now suspect. The police could never find anything, other than Cassie’s testimony, that could substantiate it. After all, Laney turned up with a note in her pocket. It had been sealed, a stamp already stuck to the corner. It had been addressed to the Blakes and was, Cassie was told after the wake, a goodbye letter from their daughter. Laney and Jessica were labeled as nothing more than two runaways with heart conditions.

  It was an uneasy calm that had settled over the town. Even if no one believed it, there was no open case for the police to investigate anymore. Search efforts were dropped; no one was looking for the carnies that Cassie had insisted were to blame, and Cassie knew pursuing it would be fruitless anyway. No one would be able to see them. Not like Cassie could.

  But Officer Gibbons hadn’t given up. It was nothing that he said, more the manner in which he held himself and the way he watched Cassie. It wasn’t out of suspicion, it was protective, as though he knew it wasn’t over yet for her.

  And here was the proof—charred bits of earth and red splatters on a brick wall—that it really wasn’t over for her, maybe not for any of them. Aidan would keep pushing until Cassie cracked. Her mind already felt fractured.

  “I don’t know if it’s just a prank, Jon,” Ryan said, breaking the silence that had descended once more in the cab. The rain picked up a bit and Jon hit the wipers again, clearing an arced path of visibility through the glass. “They shut the school down. I heard the words were written in blood again. That can’t mean nothing.”

  “It means something,” Rebecca said. “I’m not sure what. But something is definitely starting again.”

  Her friends seemed to be waiting. Cassie could feel their attention shift to her, but she had no words. Rebecca had said it. Whatever it was, it was starting again.

  The house was quiet and still when Ryan dropped her off. The sun had long since set. Someone had left the lights on inside Cassie’s home though she couldn’t see any movement through the large bay windows that faced the street. Her father had probably gone out and neglected to switch them off. Patrick Harris was forgetful at the best of times. Cassie knew her mother had been working all day and wouldn’t be home before Cassie went to bed. She wasn’t sure where her father was with no school to keep him occupied, but she was suddenly glad Jon had come to pick her up that morning, and she was glad she had insisted Ryan spend the entire rest of the day with her once Jon had dropped them off at his house. She didn’t like the thought of being stuck home all alone.

  She waved her boyfriend off, smiling as his car’s taillights faded into darkness. That warm glow that settled in her stomach whenever she thought of him, of them, hadn’t dimmed. That was new. With any of her past boyfriends—not that she had many or they lasted that long—she bored easily, finding their hovering annoying and suffocating.

  Not so with Ryan.
Cassie wasn’t sure if that was because they were friends first, friends still, and it was only the other parts of their relationship that had shifted; or if it was just because it was him. She hoped it was that they fit really well together. The thought that maybe it was a residual reaction, a response to the fear that gripped her so fiercely still, worried her. She didn’t want to think that. She wanted to believe that whatever they were building was real. But it was hard to be sure of anything anymore, even the thoughts rattling around in her own head.

  Cassie called out when she opened the door. As expected, no one answered. The front hall mirror had a pile of sticky notes attached to the frame, most written in her mother’s hasty chicken scratch. They were all reminders to her father. What day garbage pickup was, when she was working late, what casseroles were in the freezer. Cassie often wondered if her father purposefully acted forgetful just to rile his wife up. It always seemed to genuinely amuse him when her mother started yelling.

  Cassie kicked off her shoes in the foyer and dropped her bag by the front door. It hadn’t stopped drizzling throughout the day and she felt cold throughout. Her skin was covered in goosebumps and she longed for a hot shower.

  The thought of doing that, of stripping off her clothes and stepping into the steamy shower when she was otherwise alone in the house, sent a shiver up her limbs. It shouldn’t be scary, bathing in your own home. But the vulnerability of being without clothes, alone, knowing that something could be out there watching her through the windows, forced a coarse shudder to rock her body.

  Join me. The words, painted with jagged lettering, felt imprinted on the back of her eyelids. They bothered her more than the rose. The words glowed and taunted whenever her eyes flittered closed.