Then she climbed down and limped across the lawn as if she actually knew what she was doing. She hoisted herself back into the truck. She started it. She backed out into the street — even checked both ways. And then she drove off, almost like she had someplace she had to be. Like an appointment, or job, or something.
Jackie.
Kate drove the truck on autopilot, trying to leave her daughter's ghost behind. Video kept looping through her head, Jackie standing over Alice's wounded body, aiming the old Browning automatic straight down at point-blank range, firing a last shot. Firing a 9mm slug into the back of Alice's skull. Execution. Only reason she missed was magic, was illusion. Alice wasn't exactly where Jackie thought she was.
Remembering that, do you want your daughter back?
Kate couldn't answer that one. She drove, taking turns at random, checking in with Sunrise Dispatch on the cop radio, the excuse that she was on patrol. She couldn't go back to the trailer. That damned dump still smelled of Jackie, over three months later — faint memories of her bath oil and shampoo, of her softball uniforms still dirt-stained after two runs through the wash. She couldn't go back to Alice, nerves still raw over Highlands Trust and money.
The autopilot kept her moving, left and right and left again, running away from pain and memory, no place to run to. She passed Grannie Rowley's old cape in her search for sanctuary, bare gray clapboards warped loose and dangling from rusted nails, broken windows framed by shutters missing half their slats, sagging roof with dark holes showing through the cedar shakes.
A couple of aging hippies had bought house and land after Grannie's death. Now their heirs snarled back and forth at each other by way of lawyers, bickering over the estate. Most of the heirs lived in Boston or New York, anyway, none of them interested in forty acres of scrub hill-pasture and no indoor plumbing on the backside of nowhere.
Sometimes Kate thought she ought to torch the place out of pity. Put her memories out of their misery. She squirmed awkwardly on the truck seat, trying to ease her hip. Grannie stood strong in her memory, an anchor to the world, white-haired and tall and proud and gnarled like a salt-blasted spruce turned back-to the wind on a granite headland. She'd lived alone on that old farm for thirty years, died there, the sudden sharp knife of a heart attack in her sleep. Some of Kate's best memories hung around that house.
And then, two miles further on, the autopilot turned her down a woods road and along the south face of a ridge. That same ridge. She rolled down the two-track gravel, faster this time with the knowledge that cop cruisers and mobile crime lab and medical examiner's meat-wagon had already scouted out the potholes and high-center boulders.
Yes, Alice had been right. Kate had had to drive out here to show them where to go. Even the local deputies hadn't been able to find the right road on their own.
Spooky.
She slowed and then stopped, truck looking down into that final hollow, and shut off the engine. Crickets and cicadas flowed noise back to fill the silence, the survivors of the first frosts racing to breed before winter shut them down. Jays called deep in the forest, chickadees scolded back, and a woodpecker hammered away on a hollow trunk somewhere nearby. All the sounds she'd missed, that morning when she first followed this road.
She owned this. Even owned the road — no public right-of-way. God, that felt weird. Grannie had owned it, set up that trust that never dribbled through good ol' Frank's fingers to vanish like the money from the house and farm. She'd known. Sharp as a tack, into her eighties.
Kate felt tears damp on her cheeks, remembering. "Don't cut the trees, less'n you need the wood, child. Need the wood. That's your future you're looking at." "Put your hands on this lump of stone and listen to it. Not what you want to make it into, what does it want to be?" "Listen to the water and the wind, child. They know everything that happens." Snatches of memory.
So much she'd forgotten. She'd been what, seven, eight, when Grannie died? She had memories, lots of memories, but they made photos rather than movies. They didn't stitch together. No plot.
They'd taken long walks, the old woman strong enough she'd had to wait on the child. Walks in the fields, walks deep in the woods, walks along a ridge so high you could see Morgan's Castle, the bay and the open water beyond. Walks to places Kate had never been able to find again, when the old woman was dead and the house sold to strangers from away. Kate had thought those memories were from forgotten trips, or dreams.
This place.
A shiver ran down her spine.
She slipped the brake and let the truck roll down into the hollow, engine off, slow and silent. Trees, God, the trees, huge and straight and old. Cedars, white pines, spruce, tall, dark, proud. A brook ran in the bottom of the hollow, chattering clear and cold this late in the year, the forested slopes still holding water and letting it flow months after it fell as rain.
She stopped and climbed down. The road crossed on a small stone bridge, almost a culvert, old quarried slabs dark with moss and thick brown fronds of autumn fern spotted with blazing red from a few swamp maple leaves. She knew that stone — the same color and grain as Morgan's Castle. They'd cut those slabs miles away and hauled them here, ox drag in winter most likely, rather than set chisel to local stone. Shivers touched her again, the work, the care.
Back into the truck, she had to crank the engine for the final hill. The sound walled her off from the forest, the shrill buzz of the cicadas and the sharp cussing of red squirrel
