"Yes, my love," he murmured to the cat. "I’ve trained you into what you are. Just like I’ll train the woman. One such as Sean would take her with a glamour and expect to hold her. I know better. Her will must be changed. Changed into an extension of my will. Changed like you, my lovely one."
Chapter Five
Sunshine splintered off the ice, turning the Maine woods into a kaleidoscope of prisms that flashed with the slightest breeze. Blue sky, white ground, black and brown and gray and lichen green of the mottled trunks, all wove together into a world of crystalline beauty and mystery.
Maureen contented herself with finding beauty in the shadows; the sunbeams stabbed at her fading hangover. Waking up, even her teeth had throbbed with her pulse.
"Very smart," she said to herself. "Extremely smart. Mixing booze and sleeping pills."
The sound of her footsteps crunched out into the hushed forest and faded away. She barely sank into the crusted snow, evidence of the cold-front that had followed last night's storm, coating everything with rippled glass. The scattered pines and firs mixed in among the hardwoods bent down like penitents under their coating, white and stiff and crackling. Even their sharp sweet incense seemed frozen or washed from the sky.
No other footprints marred the path into Carlysle Woods this morning. Squirrels, snowshoe hares, birds--none of them were heavy enough to mark the hardened snow.
A candid observer just might have called it suicide, girl. You know, for example a shrink or the county coroner, they don't necessarily ask for a fucking note to be left behind. Do they, girl? Just ask if the deceased had been acting strange, depressed, had just suffered some personal loss? If they had a history of being, well, disturbed? In a clinical sense?
She glared at a shelf fungus on the trunk of an old birch snag, daring it to talk back. The oyster-shell edge wore a necklace of glittering diamonds, the gift of the storm.
The forest wasn't interested in her problems. Some quirk of ownership had left it here, two miles from the rail-yards of downtown Naskeag Falls, a patch of old-growth woods half a mile across and three times that in length. Surrounded by shopping malls, subdivisions, and the regional high school, laced by trails, it sheltered lovers and bird-watchers and the occasional poet.
The city owned it, now. On days like this, Maureen owned it. She had it to herself, sole proprietor. Possession was nine tenths of the law.
She reached out and ran her fingers over the scaly bark of a hemlock, savoring the slowness of its winter thoughts. Owning a forest would be heaven--talking to the trees, guiding their growth and health, understanding the tangled relationships of all the plants and animals. Even before Buddy, she'd been more comfortable with trees than she had been with people.
You would fucking think that a fucking honors graduate of the fucking forestry school could get a fucking job in the fucking forest industry in the State of Fucking Maine.
All she had to show for her degree was a degenerate vocabulary from hanging around in beer-halls with the sexist-pig machos of the unemployed Forestry Club.
Supply and demand. It doesn't matter that the sovereign State of Maine is something like 90 percent goddamn trees. Tree-raping paper companies aren't hiring. They don't need a professional forester to tell a woodcutter to nuke a hundred fucking acres.
So Maureen Anne Pierce worked six-to-midnight at the Quick Shop and parked her skinny redheaded bod in a cheap two-bedroom apartment with Cynthia Josephine Pierce, similar description, because she couldn't even afford a set of bedbugs of her own, much less a goddamn car that started when she asked it to. Mo and Jo, the sister act.
It didn't help her self-esteem any that Big Sister earned more than twice as much as she did, with health insurance and benefits, out of her tech-school associate degree in computer drafting.
So much for education as an investment in her future. But that was Old Business on the agenda, not her current problem.
Okay, Miz Psychiatrist, what's our next move? Back to square one in our habituation program? Treat our patient with gradually increasing doses of the phobia object? Have our acrophobic stand on a cushion, on a chair, a stepladder, increasing the height bit by bit until she can stare straight down into the Grand Canyon without a tremor? Until she can strip off her clothes and climb on top of a man of her own free will?
She walked further in, gradually relaxing, soaking up the silence and the privacy that the forest always gave her. She reached the patriarch beech she used as a signpost, with the hole twenty feet up where a limb had broken off decades ago. For three years now, a female barred owl had been roosting there and coveting small yappy dogs as their unknowing owners walked them on the paths below.
Maureen smiled at the thought and looked up. A faint patch of brown and gray lurked in the depths of the hole. The goddess Athena was home, resting from another night's hunting.
Carlysle Woods was Maureen's sacred grove. She felt like the owl bunkered in her hole, safe here from the mobbing crows of life. She walked among friends--trees and animals she trusted far more than she did any human.
The trees and elusive foxes had seen it all--birth and death, seduction and rape and simple friendship--the forest had seen that life went on, no matter what. Still, Maureen patted her pocket for the .38 she always carried with her. It no longer seemed quite as reliable a friend as it used to be, but she went with what she had.
She crunched her way over the ice, leaving the buried path for her own remembered route. It led across the ghost of a small stream where summer raccoons washed food and left their dainty footprints in the
