The inside was a masterpiece, covered in leaves and dotted with water spots. The steering wheel was huge and part chrome, the seats black leather with white piping. I pulled on the door that I imagined had been rusted open for years, and it creaked, but it shut, heavy, full steel, like closing the door on a vault.
My heart raced; my skin pricked in my armpits.
I knew there was strange shit in the woods. People always said that somewhere there was an old refrigerator with the body of a little kid in it. I’d never seen it. But then, I’d never seen the car either. People also said that if you went far enough north off trail, you’d find a cabin, and that an old fur trapper still lived there, eating the animals he skinned, living on gamy meat and berries and melted snow.
There was no cell service once you turned the corner on the way out of town. Much of the woods hadn’t been mapped. It was just dense green, filled with chasms and secret waterfalls that froze half the year.
After I got out of the car, I kept looking back at it—from the other side of the ravine, from the trail as I wound in with my bike. When the path curved to the left, the car was out of sight, and so I stepped back, making sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.
It flashed into view all at once, and my heart skipped a little. I noticed from this vantage point that another cairn stood on the edge of the cliff, five rocks high. I could see the lights of town from up here: the lit-up football field, the parking lot at the IGA, the new houses being built way up on the opposite hill.
It seemed like a magic spot, a secret. Tomorrow after work I’d bring a book, and some cigarettes, and maybe something to drink, and I’d hide out while the last light came through the windshield, safe, in a steel vault.
By the time I got home, it was dusk, the woods purple and close. Our house was lit with one lamp in the living room, but I knew I’d find the TV on as well. My mother never turned the surveillance cameras off.
They were asleep already. My mother, sweaty from a pill, was out cold on her back with the baby crooked in her arm.
Except when I looked at the baby, and the length of her four-year-old body alongside my mother, I thought, she’s not a baby anymore, and realized, looking at the muscle tone of her arms and legs, naked on the sheet, that this baby, this sweet little pudge of a girl with fire-red hair and the temperament to match, might someday rise up against us.
* * *
The following day was payday, and I gave Junior Savage money back from the cash he paid me to go across the street and buy me a small bottle of whiskey.
I could buy my own cigarettes, but at nineteen, I had to finagle liquor.
He did it without hassle. He brought back a flat plastic bottle of Canadian Club, and I left the restaurant at three thirty and headed straight to the car.
I had an old paperback with me. My mother would grab them from the library trash and bring them home. Sometimes they were too moldy, but lots of them were fine. Old dime-store pulp titles that had once sold for sixty cents. I had a copy of Giovanni’s Room with yellowed pages and tiny print. The spine turned to dust where it cracked open. It was hard to see in the dim light inside the woods, inside the car, but I loved just the smell of it, the feel of the brittle paper in my hands. I drank, and smoked, and read while I could, stuck in the dream of the story until a stranger appeared alongside the car, looking in at me.
I was too scared to scream.
His face appeared in the passenger’s side window, watching me smoking and drinking with the book propped open in one hand. My mouth went dry and my heart took up all the sound in my own head, pounding. It sounded like the ocean.
I thought, I’m going to die.
He waved. One hand raised, moving slowly.
I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.
* * *
I was a kid who was used to getting in trouble. Getting yelled at for cutting through people’s yards, getting suspended from school, having the cops called on him. There wasn’t anything in me that believed this wasn’t something that would get me arrested, beat up, or killed.
The stranger was wearing a soft button-down white shirt and gray pants, and his outfit was trim to his body like it had been tailored for him. His hair was blue black, cut like an old-fashioned movie star’s, and swept up off his forehead.
“I’m sorry” was the first thing I said when he opened the door and stood there looking in at me.
“For what?” he asked. He slid in but left the door open, one foot still outside in the leaves. His shoes, even, were shiny black leather.
I couldn’t look at him. “Am I on your property?” I asked.
“You are,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and went to open the driver’s side door and get out. Run. He put his hand on my arm, his finger on the part of the burn that wrinkled the underside of my bicep.
“Don’t,” he said.
He held me like that, stock-still, for longer than I would have thought possible. He kept waiting for me to look at him. When I did, his face was unusually kind, with a soft mouth and bright blue eyes.
He let go of my arm and fished a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Lucky Strikes. He lit one with an old flip-top Zippo.
“Is it your car?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“I didn’t—” I stammered. “I thought I could cut through the woods to my house.”
“You can,” he said.
“I’ve never done it,” I said.
“You did it the other day,” he said. He smiled.
“You saw me,” I said.
“I was watching,” he said.
I thought for sure I had never seen him in my life. I’d gotten used to everyone in town—everyone who came in and out of the diner, who worked in town, who went to the school. I would have remembered. I asked him if he was new.
“I’m just here on business,” he said. He blew out a straight line of blue smoke.
“I’ve never seen you,” I said.
“You’ve just never noticed,” he said.
It left me with just one response. I took at drink from the bottle and offered it to him. “But you’ve noticed me,” I said.
He smiled again, his eyes narrowed, and he took the bottle from my hand, brushed my fingers. “I know who you are,” he said.
I asked him his name, and he told me people called him Baby Jane, a name I’d never heard, didn’t understand, and didn’t question. I said it back to him. It felt like uttering a magic word. Like learning to say Rumpelstiltskin.
I said my name was Shannon.
“I know,” he said.
THREE: KATERI
MONDAY, OCTOBER 16
“My name is Kateri,” she says, making herself small, lowering her hips to the floor by the little girl. “What’s your name?” The girl has on jeans and little hiking boots, a sweater that’s caked with mud and what looks like blood.
She raises her head and peeks out through her fingers. Her hands and face, too, are speckled with spatter. Her fingertips, deeply stained.
“It’s okay,” Kateri says. “You’re safe with me.” She pulls her own sweater down, concealing her weapon and her cuffs. “May I sit here with you?”
The girl nods. When she takes her hands down, her little face is gaunt, hollow under the eyes, which makes them look huge. She has a round, turned-up nose and chapped lips. Over the bridge of her nose and across the tops of her cheekbones are a smattering of light freckles.