“You smell terrible.” Daniela leaned closer and sniffed.
“Yeah, I can even smell myself.” She fanned her hand in front of her face. “I’ve been out in the woods for four days. I work for the forestry department through UNH, studying insects. How’d you get my number, anyway?”
“I looked up your parents, told them I wanted to reconnect. They gave me your cell.”
“What do we do now?”
“We go to the police first thing in the morning.” Daniela’s words filled the cottage, pressing out against the windows and up against the roof as if the pressure might burst through the walls. “We need to get ahead of this. If they keep looking at my dad for this, they’ll start digging. They’ll take a second look at our papers,” Daniela said. “But you and I can stop the speculation before it gets that far.”
“Everyone will know what we did.” Consequences. Cadie had set the universe off-kilter by avoiding the natural consequences of her actions. The dark, inevitable shadow chased her in her dreams and woke her in a sweat. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. What was equal to and opposite of covering up a murder?
Cadie laced her fingers behind her head and squeezed her elbows together in front of her face. She wanted to run, to sweat, to open her mouth and roar from deep in her gut until she had no breath left to push the sound out, until she lay empty, flat, like a tube of her father’s used-up oil paint.
“Let’s go get the gun.” Cadie surprised herself with the suggestion. The past had grown bigger and twitchier since she read Daniela’s text. She could no longer swallow it down and put it back in its hiding place.
“Now?”
“Now.” Cadie put her empty beer bottle on the table.
“I’ve worked two doubles this week. I’m too tired to go traipsing through the woods this late at night.” Dark circles framed Daniela’s eyes, but more than tired, she looked scared.
“You’re the one who called me to rush home, remember?”
“It’s been out there for twenty-seven years. It’ll wait one more night.”
“You’re afraid we’ll find it,” Cadie said.
“I need one more night before explaining to my daughter what we did.” Daniela dragged her finger through the dust on the counter. “Besides, it’s too dark.”
“We’ll take flashlights.” Urgency simmered up from Cadie’s gut like steam looking for release. It hissed and burned. It had to be now. “There’s no way I can sleep now. I’m going, with or without you.”
A gentle buzz settled over her, stirring a memory she couldn’t pull into focus. Not fear or regret, but a reminder of herself, of who she used to be. The Cadie who commandeered lost boats. The girl who rode her bike down hills with her arms over her head. That other Cadie prodded at her from some deep hiding place she had tried to forget.
“Come on.” Cadie grabbed two more beers.
Her toes curled in her hiking boots as she remembered the texture of the sun-warped boards beneath her bare feet the day she saw the boat drifting by her pier. Something made her uncurl her toes that day and leap into the unknown. Ever since, she had been walking through life bearing the tension between guilt and consequences unfulfilled. Unbalanced equations.
Using their phones as flashlights, they worked their way through the woods. The path that once squished under her feet now crumbled and crunched. Cadie paused at a tall pine tree and moved her flashlight up and down the trunk, looking for signs of damage. The tree stood strong, healthy, a bubble of sap assuring her the beetles had not found a home in her woods. At least not in this tree.
“How is it, moving back in with your parents?” Cadie said.
“Okay, I guess. It’s temporary. I’ll let Sal settle into school one more semester before we get our own place. She misses her friends, school, you know. She had a hard time spring semester.”
“How about you?” Cadie asked.
Daniela did not answer.
Humidity hung low in the still woods. Stray wisps of hair clung to Cadie’s sweaty neck, although her body shivered uncontrollably. The muscles in her shoulders cinched so tight she imagined plucking them like guitar strings.
Cadie didn’t need to think about where to put her feet as they wound through the woods. Momentum guided her. The atomic weight of guilt, the incalculable mass accumulated from the compression of energy she left behind, drew her closer. Cadie imagined dirt, stone, and crumbled leaves swirling like a cyclone around the fear she’d left behind in these woods. Faster and tighter, it spun until it forged a pulsing mass with a heartbeat.
She had always been trapped in this forest’s gravitational pull.
Not fighting gravity, for once, liberated her. She sprang ahead of Daniela and leapt from rock to rock by the narrow beam of light. Daniela ran behind her. Branches grazed Cadie’s head, twigs snapped under her hiking boots. She ran faster, moved more deftly like a child, running to something, from something. Always running.
Moths pollinating night blossoms ruffled among the low-hanging branches near the boulder rising up next to the beech tree. Moonlight sifted down through the sparse clouds casting marbled, shifting shadows on the ground. The dusky silhouette of the beech tree startled Cadie, squashing the hope that her memory had invented the whole story.
Cadie climbed up the boulder beside the old beech and positioned herself next to the deep hollow where a branch had come down decades earlier. She plunged her arm into the hole. Beech nuts, twigs, and crumbled leaves lined the bottom of the otherwise empty cavity. It had to be there. She scratched and clawed at the corners and crevices, driving a splinter under the nail of her index finger with a blinding stab.
“It’s not here.” She bit her lower lip to distract herself from the pain shooting through her finger. Cadie swatted at gnats swarming around her neck. In the thin light she saw the shadow of a wide spike embedded under her nail.
“Let me see.” Daniela grabbed Cadie’s hand when she saw the blood.
Cadie pressed her lips together as Daniela probed with her fingernails, finally coaxing the splinter out. Every millimeter Daniela prodded magnified the splinter a thousand times in Cadie’s mind. Her brain magnified painful things with exquisite detail.
“Are you sure this is the right tree?” Daniela said.
“I’m positive.” Cadie remembered the slope of the rock she had to stand on to reach the hole. She stood inches taller now, and decades had widened the diameter of the trunk, but the dark hollow, the sideways eye, glared back at Cadie with mutual recognition.
“There are thousands of trees out here. We can come back in the daylight and look.”
“I’m telling you, this is our tree.” Cadie ran her fingers over the smooth bark.
“And you’re sure you never moved it?” Daniela said.
“Never. Did you?”
“No. This is bad.” Daniela wrapped the edge of her shirt around Cadie’s throbbing finger and squeezed. They sat cross-legged at the base of the beech tree, listening to the whispers of the forest. Moonlight melted down Daniela’s face. Her round cheeks had grown thinner and a few gray hairs speckled her temples.
The mossy smell of the forest at night—of this particular forest—teased at a memory. A sense of refuge, or of dread. Or maybe both at the same time. She closed her eyes and searched for that slip of time that hovered out of reach, like a color she no longer remembered.