doorbell rang just after noon. It was Paulette, wearing a formal black suit. “My God, is it a funeral?”
“Had a job interview this morning.” Paulette pulled a face. “I got sick of sitting at home thinking about those bastards shafting us and decided to do something for number one in the meantime.”
“Well, good for you.” Miriam picked up her backpack and led Paulie out the front door, then locked up behind her. She opened her car, put the pack in, then opened the front doors. “Did it go well?” she asked, pulling her seat belt on.
“It went like-” Paulette pulled another face. “Listen, I’m a business researcher, right? Just because I used to be a paralegal doesn’t mean that I want to go back there.”
“Lawyers,” Miriam said as she started the engine. “Lots of work in that field, I guarantee you.”
“Oh yeah,” Paulette agreed. She pulled the sun visor down and looked at herself in the mirror. “Fuck, do I really look like that? I’m turning into my first ex-boss.”
“Yes indeed, you look just like-naah.” Miriam thought better of it and rephrased: “Congresswoman Paulette Milan, from Cambridge. You have the floor, ma’am.”
“The first ex-boss is in politics now,” Paulie observed gloomily. “A real dragon.”
“Bitch.”
“You didn’t know her.”
They drove on in amiable silence for the best part of an hour, out into the wilds of Massachusetts. Up the coast, past Salem, out toward Amesbury, off Interstate 95 and on to a four-lane highway, then finally a side road. Miriam had been here before, years ago, with Ben, when things had been going okay. There was a rest area up on a low hill overlooking Browns Point, capped by a powder of trees, gaunt skeletons hazed in red and auburn foliage at this time of year. Miriam pulled up at the side of the road just next to the rest area and parked. “Okay, this is it,” she said. There were butterflies in her stomach again: I’m going to go through with it, she realized to her surprise.
“This?” Paulette looked around, surprised. “But this is nowhere!”
“Yeah, that’s right. Best place to do this.” Miriam opened the glove locker. “Look, I brought my old camcorder. No time for explanations. I’m going to get out of the car, grab my pack, and walk over there. I want you to film me. In ten minutes either I’ll tell you why I asked you to do this and you can call me rude names-or you’ll know to take the car home and come back the day after tomorrow to pick me up. Okay?”
She got out in a hurry and collected her pack from the trunk. Then, without waiting to see what Paulette did, she walked over to the middle of the parking lot. Breathing deeply, she hiked the pack up onto her back and fastened the chest strap-then pulled the locket out of the outer pocket where she’d stashed it.
Feeling acutely self-conscious, she flicked it open and turned her back on the parked car. Raised it to her face and stared into the enamelled knot painted inside it. This is stupid, a little voice told her. And you ‘re going to have your work cut out convincing Paulie you don’t need to see a shrink.
Someone was calling her name sharply. She screened it out. Something seemed to move inside the knot-
This time it was raining gently. Miriam winced at the sudden stabbing in her head and pocketed the locket. Then she did what she’d planned all along: a three-sixty-degree scan that took in nothing but autumn trees and deadfall. Next, she planted her pack, transferred the pistol to her right hip pocket, retrieved her camera and the recorder, and started taking snapshots as she dictated a running commentary.
“The time by my watch is fourteen twelve hours. Precipitation is light and intermittent, cloud cover is about six-sevenths, wind out of the northwest and chilly, breeze of around five miles per hour. I think.”
Snap, snap, snap: The camera had room for a thousand or so shots before she’d have to change hard disks. She slung it around her neck and shouldered the pack again. With the Swiss army knife Ben had given her on their second wedding anniversary-an odd present from a clueless, cheating husband with no sense of the difference between jewellery and real life-she shaved a patch of bark above eye level on the four nearest trees, then fished around for some stones to pile precisely where she’d come through. (It wouldn’t do to go back only to come out in the middle of her own car. If that was possible, of course.)
As she worked, she had the most peculiar sensation: I’m on my second moon mission, she thought. Did any of the Apollo astronauts go to the moon more than once? Here she was, not going crazy, recording notes and taking photographs to document her exploration of this extraordinary place that simply wasn’t like home. Whatever “home” meant, now that gangsters had her number.
“I still don’t know why I’m here,” she recorded, “but I’ve got the same alarming prefrontal headache, mild hot and cold chills, probable elevated blood pressure as last time. Memo: Next time bring a sphygmomanometer; I want to monitor for malignant hypertension. And urine sample bottles.” The headache, she realized, was curiously similar to a hangover, itself caused by dehydration that triggered inflammation of the meninges. Miriam continued: “Query physiological responses to… whatever it is that I do. When I focus on the knot. Memo: Scan the locket, use Photoshop to rescale it and print it on paper, then see if the pattern works as a focus when I look at it on a clipboard. More work for next time.”
They won’t be able to catch me here, she thought fiercely as she scanned around, this time looking for somewhere suitable to pitch her tent and go to ground. I’ll be able to nail them and they won’t even be able to find me to lay a finger on me! But there was more to it than that, she finally admitted to herself as she hunted for a flat spot. The locket had belonged to her birth-mother, and receiving it had raised an unquiet ghost. Somebody had stabbed her, somebody who had never been found. Miriam wouldn’t be able to lay that realization to rest again until she learned what this place had meant to her mother-and why it had killed her.
With four hours to go before sunset, Miriam was acutely aware that she didn’t have any time to waste. The temperature would dip toward frost at night and she planned to be well dug-in first. Planting her backpack at the foot of the big horse chestnut tree, she gathered armfuls of dry leaves and twigs and scattered them across it- nothing that would fool a real woodsman, but enough to render it inconspicuous at a distance. Then she walked back and forth through a hundred-yard radius, pacing out the forest, looking for its edge. That there was an edge came as no surprise: The steep escarpment was in the same place here as on the hiking map of her own world that she’d brought along. Where the ground fell away, there was a breathtaking view of autumnal forest marching down toward a valley floor. The ocean was probably eight to ten miles due east, out of sight beyond hills and dunes, but she had a sense of its presence all the same.
Looking southwest, she saw a thin coil of smoke rising-a settlement of some kind, but small. No roads or telegraph poles marred the valley, which seemed to contain nothing but trees and bushes and the odd clearing. She was alone in the woods, as alone as she’d ever been. She looked up. Thin cirrus stained the blue sky, but there were no jet contrails.
“The area appears to be thinly populated,” she muttered into her dictaphone. “They’re burning something-coal or wood-at the nearest settlement. There are no telegraph poles, roads, or aircraft. The air doesn’t smell of civilization. No noise to speak of, just birds and wind and trees.”
She headed back to her clearing to orient herself, then headed on in the opposite direction, down the gentle slope away from her pack. “Note: Keep an eye open for big wildlife. Bears and stuff.” She patted her right hip pocket nervously. Would the pistol do much more than annoy a bear? She hadn’t expected the place to be quite this desolate. There were no bears, but she ran across a small stream-nearly fell into it, in fact.
There was no sign of an edge to the woods, in whichever direction she went. Nor were there signs of habitation other than the curl of smoke she’d seen. It was four o’clock now. She returned to her clearing, confident that nobody was around, and unstrapped her tent from the backpack. It took half an hour to get the dome tent erected, and another half-hour with the netting and leaves to turn it into something that could be mistaken for a shapeless deadfall. She spent another fifteen minutes returning to the stream to fill her ten-litre water carrier. Another half- hour went on digging a hole nearby, then she took ten minutes to run a rope over a bough and hoist her bag of food out of reach of the ground. Darkness found her lighting her portable gas stove to boil water for her tea. I did it, she thought triumphantly. I didn’t forget anything important! Now all she had to do was make it through tomorrow and the morning of the next day without detection.
The night grew very cold without a fire, but her sleeping bag was almost oppressively hot with the tent zipped shut. Miriam slept lightly, starting awake at the slightest noise-worried at the possibility of bears or other big animals wandering through her makeshift camp, spooked by the sigh of wind and the patter of a light predawn rainfall. Once she dreamed of wolves howling in the distance. But dawn arrived without misadventure and dragged her bleary-eyed from the tent to squat over the trench she’d remembered to dig the day before. “The Girl Scout training pays off at last,” she dictated with a sardonic drawl.
