The Girl In The Woods Part 17

He straightened up and returned to the car. He wore a light sweater, but the cool breeze actually felt good. He pulled the pa.s.senger side door open, making sure that the breeze didn't sweep the papers away, and pulled out a thin file folder. He stood by the side of the car and carefully opened the file, using his right thumb to hold the all-important doc.u.ments in place. They were maps of the locations in the county where he thought The Pioneer Club might have held their meetings. There were about ten possible locations, ten really good options, and over the course of the past few weeks he had been traveling to them and checking them out, crossing them off as they proved to be nothing worth pursuing further. Eight of them down, two more to go. Of course, Ludwig wasn't much of a hiker or outdoorsman, and given the remote locations and the difficulties a.s.sociated with traveling to some of them, he had decided to leave the most difficult, the most remote areas for last. Not the most logical course of action, he knew, but he had clung to the naive hope that he would find The Pioneer Club meeting ground on the first try and save himself weeks of pulled muscles and torn clothes from wandering through the underbrush.

No such luck. So he was back for more today.

And he had reason to believe that today's investigation might prove more fruitful than the ones from the past. He had pinpointed an area in the woods approximately one mile from the shrine to Jacqueline Foley, a plot of heavily wooded land that had belonged to the same family for close to two hundred years. The Donahues. At one time, they were movers and shakers in the New Cambridge area. Thaddeus Donahue ran a livery stable at the time of the towns.h.i.+p's founding, one of the first businesses to thrive in the new settlement. And his son, Thaddeus Junior, served three terms as mayor in the years prior to the Civil War. But as was so often the case, the family's fortunes ebbed over the course of generations. A family that had once been the equivalent of royalty in New Cambridge had now simply become another, run-of-the-mill country clan, their numbers and resources diminis.h.i.+ng as the town around them changed and evolved. They still owned the land-Ludwig had researched the deed at the county courthouse-but little else. At various times over the past twenty years, the taxes on the property had been delinquent, but somehow, the family always avoided foreclosure. Perhaps they managed to sc.r.a.pe together enough of a living to pay the bill, or perhaps the county simply had no interest in reclaiming land that couldn't be used for much of anything. Someday a motivated developer would come along and buy it, but until then, the current owner of the Donahue property-someone named Roger Donahue who the clerk at the courthouse told Ludwig was a "grade A odd duck"-would be allowed to stay on it, maybe even unaware of the rich history his family once lived out.

Ludwig took a deep breath. He was a fool for doing all of this, he knew. Trespa.s.sing on someone's land on a cool autumn day just might get him an a.s.s cheek full of buckshot or a couple of blackened eyes. And even if he avoided those pitfalls and found the location where The Pioneer Club met, what would he do with that information? He could only do what he had always done in the past-write a paper. But who would want to publish it? The National Enquirer? Would the headline read: "Bizarre Cult Once Operated in the Woods"?

His hunger gnawed at him. He had never fully appreciated that expression until today when it felt as though a small, furry rat resided in his belly and nibbled on his insides with sharp, pointed teeth. He really needed to eat, and it would be so easy just to cross this stop off the list without even looking. After all, no one was waiting for his report. No one cared if he found the location or not. For all intents and purposes, he was a scholarly tree falling in an empty forest. If he didn't achieve his goals, no one in the greater world would care.

So what's it going to be, Nate old boy?

The wind picked up. It rustled the tall weeds at the roadside, as well as the faded ribbons on the memorial shrine for Jacqueline Foley. She was dead. He knew it. Everybody knew it. People didn't disappear for weeks at a time and then show up alive. And that thought made him feel very, very lonely, like he was the only man left in the world, the lone occupant of a spinning planet that occupied a cold and empty corner of the universe. Not far from the truth, he thought. In so many ways, not far from the truth at all. And something about the loneliness, the sense of being a man on a pointless crusade, an eternal tilter at windmills, appealed to the iconoclastic renegade inside of him. He liked that role, relished it even.

So why turn back now?

He left his car on Connors Bend Road, a north-south stretch with barely enough room for two cars to pa.s.s at the same time. A farmer-Ludwig didn't know who-had a long, narrow rectangular field plowed next to the road but beyond the field began a thick stand of trees which he figured-based on the county records-to be the beginning of the vast acreage still owned by the Donahues. Somewhere in there, if he was right, might just be the place he was looking for.

The farmer's field had an irrigation ditch down the middle, a narrow strip of unplowed land that Ludwig felt comfortable walking through. He hoped the farmer, whoever he was, intended to stay away and work a different area that afternoon. This late in the season, with almost everything harvested and put away, chances were good he'd be left to his own devices. He didn't imagine any farmer in the county, men who were naturally suspicious of the activities that went on at the college, would take kindly to an eggheaded professor who had never worked with his hands wandering through his field.

When he reached the tree line, he stopped. He had hoped-the foolish hope of the uninitiated-that there would be a path, a simple clearing through the trees and brush that he could follow like a Cub Scout in pursuit of a starter badge. But there wasn't any such thing. Fortunately, given the time of year, much of the undergrowth had died or been thinned out by the cooler temperatures, and after examining the land that stretched out before him, he decided that it wouldn't be as challenging as he thought to walk through this section of the woods.

It wasn't too late to walk back to the car. His hunger pangs had subsided for the moment, but he knew they'd come back soon, probably when he was at his farthest point out in the woods, farthest from the car and what pa.s.sed for civilization in a small, Midwestern college town.

"In for a dime, in for a dollar," he said and entered the trees.

For a long time, he simply had the sound of his own crunching footsteps and the scattered chirpings of birds to keep him company. As a native of Was.h.i.+ngton, DC and the son of a history professor at Georgetown, Ludwig had spent most of his childhood in the streets of a large city rather than in the wide-open s.p.a.ces of the suburbs and small towns. His family had taken an occasional family trip to a state park, but even there, they clung tightly to the designated paths and, when finished, they hustled back to the car like frightened refugees, eager for an escape route back to the city and the familiar terrain of concrete and sidewalk. These days and weeks trudging through the woods, acc.u.mulating sc.r.a.pes and burrs, never growing even somewhat accustomed to the chorus of animal and bird sounds, had been akin to being an explorer on an alien planet. Every moment he expected something large and enraged-a bear? a cougar?-to emerge from behind a tree and zero in on the vital veins and arteries that pa.s.sed through his neck. That he had seen nothing more threatening than a small fox scrambling away at his approach brought him no comfort. As far as Ludwig was concerned, the longer one went without encountering trouble, the more likely it became that trouble waited around the next bend.

His hunger pangs returned after twenty minutes of walking. The landscape hadn't changed in the least, just trees and more trees. When the hunger came back, he stopped and sat on a large, fallen log. He stretched his legs out before him, felt his knees-which hurt more and more the older he got-quietly creak, bone rubbing against bone as his cartilage wore away. He looked back in the direction he had come and saw the same landscape that stretched before him, no sign of the farmer's field or the road or his car. It made sense for The Pioneer Club to meet in these woods. If it was this deserted in the twenty-first century, he could easily imagine how much more isolated it had been in the nineteenth. And the longer he sat, the more aware he became of his own isolation. If he dropped dead at that moment, if he just stopped breathing and fell off his perch, would anyone ever bother to find him? When they found his car abandoned on the side of the road, would they just write him off as another disappearance or suicide? Would he be dismissed as a lonely man who simply walked away from his life?

Maybe, he thought, that's what this is really about. Rather than a desire to help someone else, maybe he simply wanted a way for his own life to be remembered, a way to say that he did more than cloister himself away in an ivory tower.

Fair enough. He didn't need n.o.ble aspirations to keep himself moving.

He stood up, took a deep breath, and continued on, deeper into the woods.

He really didn't know what he was looking for. A clearing in the woods where nothing grew. A place that looked like it might once have been conducive to clandestine meetings. A needle in a county-sized haystack. It would be like p.o.r.nography-he'd know it when he saw it.

But he did have to see it in order to know it.

He knew eventually he'd come to the Donahue house, and that would be the point at which he would turn around and go back to the road. He glanced at his watch and told himself to go forward for ten more minutes, just ten, then turn around wherever he was and get out of there, cross this area off the list and turn his attention to the next one.

He had been walking for about nine minutes when he came across the path.

It was narrow and nearly indistinguishable, so much so that Ludwig almost thought he was forcing his mind to see a path where there wasn't one. But the more and the longer he looked, the more obvious it became. The narrow ribbon of the earth was tamped down unnaturally as though by hundreds and hundreds of human feet. It sliced through the trees at an angle, coming in from the north and bending slightly to the west, the direction Ludwig was traveling. A s.h.i.+ver pa.s.sed through his midsection, shaking his body with a slight convulsion. It was not an unpleasant feeling. It reminded him of the times when, as a young scholar, an idea would crystallize and take hold of him, and the process of writing it down and following it to its natural conclusion brought a level of satisfaction he wasn't sure he had experienced since.

He started down the path.

Any thought of a time limit to his searching went out of his mind. Paths led somewhere, and even if it just led to the Donahue's back door, he'd at least know he'd tried and exhausted the best lead he had. While he walked, his excitement grew. And also his fear. What would he do if he found exactly what he was looking for? He tried to imagine himself presenting the information to his colleagues at a conference. The thunderous applause. The slaps on the back. A landmark discovery in the field of folklore. Would they reward him with a distinguished professors.h.i.+p?

As he moved down the path, the canopy of trees grew thicker overhead, the limbs knotting together and blocking the sun. He paused and looked back again. It was even cooler under the trees, despite all his walking, and he began to doubt whether he'd even be able to find his way back to the road now. If that were the case, then he really had no choice but to keep going forward. If he stepped off the edge of the world, at least he could consider it a form of progress.

He walked on and on. He checked his Timex. Fifteen minutes since he had stood up from the log. Thirty-five minutes since he had parked and entered the woods. He hadn't worn the right shoes to be hiking so far on such uneven terrain, and his feet and calves started to ache. But he kept his eyes ahead now, looking forward, antic.i.p.ating.

He thought he saw a break in the trees. A hundred yards away, up the path, he saw an opening, a broad s.p.a.ce where the endless succession of dark brown trunks appeared to give way. He increased his pace, despite the pain in his feet, and as he moved closer, a tingling sensation began to spread through his midsection, as though a low-voltage electric charge were slowly and steadily pa.s.sing through his body. He thought it was his age and being out of shape, but the closer he came, the stronger the sensation, and he began to wonder if it had anything at all to do with his own body. He knew the signs of being old. Shortness of breath, a litany of aches and pains. But the tingling he felt, the almost s.e.xual surge of energy and adrenaline rising in his body, was unlike anything he had felt since his youth. And the stronger the feeling grew, the more intensely painful and pleasurable it became, the more he wondered if he had ever experienced anything quite like it, not even in his adolescence when he walked around in a permanent state of arousal.

He came to the edge of the clearing.

It looked just as it had been described in the surviving doc.u.ments, and strangely, it looked just as he had imagined it. Smooth, half-buried rocks covered the ground, but nothing grew there. No gra.s.s, no weeds. Around the clearing's perimeter there were bigger rocks, large enough for men to sit on, and it wasn't hard to imagine those zealous founding fathers perched there, handing down edicts and orders like they were the G.o.ds themselves. It was a simple place, really, a simple and-if everything he thought had happened here really had happened-a terrible place as well.

"This is it," he whispered. "This is really it."

But he didn't enter the clearing. Instead he lowered himself to one of the large rocks at the edge, letting his tired weight sink against it. He wanted to observe the place, absorb it with his critical scholar's eye.

The tingling started to subside. His heart rate slowed as he rested, and being off his feet relieved their pressure and pain. He felt his body returning to something like normal, except for the hunger that slowly rea.s.serted itself in his mid-section. Why had the surge subsided? He knew immediately. According to the information he had from the eyewitness accounts, the clearing possessed the greatest power at night. Here he was in the middle of the afternoon, and even with the trees above screening the sun, there could be no doubt that it was bright daylight in the world. All the better, he thought. All the better to watch the place, to get a real sense of it without interference from whatever powers or influences might exert themselves at other times.

He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out the disposable camera he had purchased almost a year ago at one of the large, chain drugstores that seemed to be on the verge of taking over New Cambridge. He had intended to use it during his research trips, doc.u.menting his travels through the county and recording the significant sights he encountered along the way. But he hadn't used it once. He hadn't seen anything worth doc.u.menting. Until now.

He started snapping away, catching the clearing from various angles, but just as quickly decided that the photographs weren't going to be the most important thing he might take away from his discovery. He didn't come close to using the twenty-four-picture allotment on the camera when he put it away in favor of more hands-on investigation.

If the Pioneer Club had really met in this place and really did what they were purported to have done, there might just be evidence of some kind, physical evidence that Ludwig could gather and bring back to campus with him. A discarded bottle. A sc.r.a.p of clothing. An inscription on a tree or rock. He started walking the perimeter of the clearing, staying on the inside of the circle of rocks, pausing every now and then to examine the ground more closely. It took only a few minutes for him to find a series of shoeprints and scuff marks in the dirt. They were faint, somewhat erased by wind and time, but by his estimation, they had to have been placed there recently. It had been an unusually dry fall so far, with rainfall amounts running several inches below normal, and that fact coupled with the thick canopy of trees overhead might have allowed the prints and marks to remain behind some time after they were created.

But their very presence begged the question: Who had been out there, scuffling in the clearing? The clearing sat too far from the road to chalk it up to the activities of h.o.r.n.y teenagers looking for a secluded place to fool around. And the struggle looked somewhat violent. He saw two different shoe prints, one large like a man's and one small like a woman's, and the larger shoes had dug deep troughs in the earth as though it were digging for something or pus.h.i.+ng hard against the ground. The shoeprints overlapped a lot, and there was also what appeared to be the outlines of bodies, wide, round s.p.a.ces in the ground like a human b.u.t.t had wriggled and squirmed on that s.p.a.ce. It did look like someone had been f.u.c.king there.

His eyes continued to scan the ground, and he saw another, fainter disturbance. This one looked older and was in an almost perfectly rectangular shape, as though someone had carefully dug a hole and buried something there, something very much like...a human body?

He blinked his eyes a couple of times to be certain he wasn't imaging the shape, wasn't again trying to make the data fit the hypothesis instead of the other way around. He moved closer to the spot, crouching a little and risking his back in order to see better. But he couldn't ignore the shape in the dirt, the neat outline in the ground that looked different from everything else around it.

It was a grave. A recently dug grave.

Ludwig tried to swallow, but it felt as though his mouth had been stuffed with cotton. If he had any doubts before, they were erased. This is where The Pioneer Club had met years ago. And someone was still using it for the same purposes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

The girl had eventually calmed down, and they settled into a sort of routine.

Thankfully, Roger thought. He missed the routine he'd had with the last girl, the lazy days of hanging around the house and fetching the groceries so she could cook his meals. The new girl wasn't much of a cook, and half the time, Roger had to tell her what to do, even with something as basic as making spaghetti or tuna salad. But she tried, that was for sure, as long as Roger watched her and made sure there were no sharp knives within her reach. He had locked all of those in the storage shed out back, hoping that one day soon the girl would calm down even more, and he could bring them back so they could live like regular people. Because that's what he wanted them to be. Regular people.

She still hadn't touched the laundry or done any cleaning. Roger asked her almost every day, and when he did the girl looked at him with hate in her eyes. Staring daggers, as his mother used to say.

If looks could kill, you'd be a dead man.

That's the way the girl liked to look at him. The girl made Roger nervous anyway, but when she looked at him like that, he grew really unsettled.

So he kept a close and careful eye on her.

He kept her tied up most of the time. At night, without question. Roger slept deep-like a felled log, his dad told him-so he needed to tie her up then. He used the same rope he had used the day he met her on the road with the story about the dog being hit by the car. At night, he tied her hands and her feet, then looped the extra rope around the metal bed frame and kept the girl right next to him through the night. If she needed to go to the bathroom, she nudged him in the side until he woke up, then he went through the slow process of untying her, while the girl cursed him and told him to hurry up. She called him a "f.u.c.king r.e.t.a.r.d" one night when he couldn't get the ropes undone fast enough, and he hit her in the face with the back of his hand. Roger felt bad, but she didn't call him that name any more after that.

During the days, he tried to let her out of the ropes more and more, but doing so worried him more than he could say. He knew that after what had happened in the clearing, when he took the girl and made her his wife, he would really get in a lot of trouble if she got away and told on him. It wasn't that Roger thought he was doing anything wrong-he told himself that anyway-but he knew people just wouldn't understand. They never understood him. The girl didn't understand him, so she called him names sometimes, and sometimes he had to hit her. Only three people really understood him. His mom and dad, of course. And the last girl. He missed the last girl. He missed their routine. He hoped that the new girl would come around, would become as comfortable to be around as the last girl had been. There were signs that she was moving that way, and at night, when Roger drifted off to sleep with the new girl breathing by his side, he almost felt as though things were becoming normal again.

Although when he really thought about it, sitting down in the woods or while sitting on the throne taking a dump, he wasn't so sure the girl was really settling in. Sometimes, when he looked at her and he thought she didn't know he was looking, he wondered if maybe she wasn't planning something like another escape. Or maybe even something more. At times like those, Roger rubbed the spot above his eye where she had speared him with the toilet plunger. The cut had healed, but it left behind a narrow strip of a scar. It was pink and soft and still a little tender to the touch. Touching it reminded him of what the girl was capable of.

So he kept a close eye on her at all times, and he was doing so on the morning the cop arrived at the front door.

No one had knocked on the door of the house since his parents died. No one ever came there. In fact, Roger couldn't remember having company since his dad's funeral, and that had been over twenty-five years ago. They just lived too far out in the middle of nowhere, and Roger didn't have any friends or even acquaintances. So for someone to show up and knock on their door out of the blue was an occurrence along the lines of having a UFO land in the back yard. It just didn't happen.

When the knocking, a rat-a-tat-tat like gunshots firing, sounded against the front door, Roger couldn't process exactly what the sound was. He thought it might have been someone throwing rocks against the front of the house or hail falling from the sky and pocking against the roof. He sat up.

The girl lay next to him, tied to the bed. He checked the clock on the bedside table. 8:38 a.m. He and the girl liked to sleep late, sometimes almost until noon. The girl hadn't moved. She breathed steadily, her eyes closed, and Roger thought maybe he had dreamed the noise. He let his head fall back against his pillow and closed his eyes when the knocking came again, harder and faster.

He sat up straight. He wasn't dreaming. Someone was at the house.

The girl stirred, making sniffling sounds like she was about to wake up. Roger clamped his hand over her mouth.

"Shhhhhh," he said.

The girl only moaned louder.

"Someone's at the door," he said.

"Mmmmmph," she said.

"Shhhhhhh."

He kept a roll of duct tape by the side of the bed, and with his free hand, he grabbed it. He used his index finger to pick the end of the tape loose, and leaning against the girl for leverage while still keeping her mouth covered, he managed to pull a strip of tape free from the roll. He brought it to his mouth and used his teeth to work on cutting it loose, and after a few long moments of trying, managed to do so.

Whoever was at the door knocked again.

Maybe it's just a salesperson, Roger thought. Or someone whose car broke down on the highway. Maybe it's a Jehovah's Witness or a kid selling candy bars and if we pretend like we're not home, they'll just go away. But Roger began to suspect that was wishful thinking. Pie in the sky, as his mom used to say. No Jehovah's Witness or kid selling candy had ever come to his door, and their house was too far from the highway for someone with a breakdown to show up there. If someone knocked on his door, they meant to be knocking on that door. It wasn't an accident.

Moving quickly, Roger stuck the strip of tape across the girl's mouth. She tried to turn her head away, and she was almost fast enough, but Roger managed to slap the tape down before she turned all the way, and so it landed at a crooked angle across her mouth. But it did the job. The girl couldn't talk. She couldn't yell or scream. She made little grunting noises behind the tape, so Roger held a warning finger up in front of her face.

"Be quiet," he said, his voice low. "Just stay quiet."

The girl stopped making noise, but her wide eyes showed a kind of excitement that Roger hadn't seen in them before. She thought she was being saved by whoever was knocking. She thought this was her chance to get out. She'd tell them everything, whoever it was, and get Roger in all sorts of trouble.

"Just stay quiet," he said again.

Roger moved slowly to the bedroom window, the one that looked down over the front yard. He slipped his thick fingers into the opening in the curtains and parted it just an inch or so. He saw the truck first. A nice black pickup, one of those Ford F-150s, and it shone in the morning sun like a new toy. Then Roger saw the man. He stepped away from the front porch and looked up, causing Roger to release the curtain and jump back into the room. But then the man moved across the yard and started looking in the big front window, allowing Roger to get a better look at him. He was tall with a shaved head, and he moved with his shoulders back like a military guy or a cop. He wore a leather jacket over a black t-s.h.i.+rt, and even from that far away Roger could tell the man was muscular and strong.

But he wasn't driving a cop car. Far from it. Roger knew that plain-clothes cops drove oversized, dark-colored sedans and wore suits and ties. None of them drove pick-ups or wore leather jackets. So maybe he wasn't a cop after all. Maybe he was just a guy, a tough-looking, well-built guy. So then why was he standing in Roger's yard, examining the house like he wanted to buy it?

Roger again hoped he would just go away, but instead the man walked over to the front door and knocked again, just as loud, just as insistently. Roger didn't know what to do, but he had to do something because the man wasn't going to go away. He took a deep breath and decided to answer the door. But he stopped before the left the bedroom.

"Remember," he said to the girl. "Silence. Absolute silence."

The girl didn't do anything. She didn't even grunt.

Roger went down the stairs and approached the front door. He stopped near the front window and peeked out again. The man wasn't on the front stoop anymore, but rather was moving around the side of the house toward the back yard, back where the path to the clearing began. He couldn't go back there, Roger thought. He might walk into the woods and find the place no one was supposed to know about.

Roger undid the lock, the tumbler squeaking and resisting after years of disuse, and when he finally got it undone, he pulled the door open and stepped outside.

"h.e.l.lo," he said. "h.e.l.lo?"

The sun was bright, the day cool. Roger squinted against the brightness and realized he had come outside barefoot, wearing only pajama bottoms and an old T-s.h.i.+rt. He thought maybe the man hadn't heard him, but then he reappeared from the side of the house, a pleasant and somewhat puzzled look on his face.

"Oh, h.e.l.lo," the man said.

"h.e.l.lo," Roger said again. He couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Nice house. How long have you lived here?"

"All my life," Roger said. "Are you looking to buy it? It's not for sale."

The man laughed. "No, I don't want to buy it. I just wanted to know if you were around a few weeks ago. Were you?"

Roger looked back at the house. "I guess."

"Did you hear that a girl was kidnapped out on County Road 600?"

Roger nodded. "I read about it in the paper."

"Did you see or hear anything around that time? Notice anything unusual?"

Roger's throat felt dry and scratchy, like he had swallowed dust. "Are you a cop or something?"

The guy smiled a little. "Yes, I am."

"But you're not in uniform," Roger said. "And you don't have a car."

"Would you like to see my badge?" the man said.

Roger nodded. "Yes."

The man reached into an inside pocket of his jacket. When he did, Roger saw a small pistol clipped to his belt. He brought the badge out in a folded leather case. He held the case open so that Roger could see the badge.

"Officer Jason McMichael with the New Cambridge Police Department."