“Birdie!” she calls.
Her voice echoes across the dirt and hits the woods. Suddenly she hears another branch snap. She slams the passenger side door and tears off into the copse of trees beside the drive that leads to the main house.
The cedar trees scrape and grab at her clothing, tearing it in places, but she doesn’t have time to stop or mend fabric. She has to get Birdie.
She spots a shape in the shadows. A woman. Stumbling, trying to run. The trees make it all but impossible to carry on at anything faster than a hiking pace. They’re thick. Jeff had recommended that Tom take them out. Cedar trees are a fire hazard, he’d told him. But Tom had liked the way they looked.
The tree line stretches around the property, lining up next to the main house and the cabins, the old art studio that belonged to the former owners and down by the creek that marks the property line. Engulfed in flame, they’d make a ring of fire.
Moonlight pours in through gaps in the branches and makes Vanessa’s skin glow a milky silver. An odd thought strikes her. How beautiful her wedding ring used to look in the moonlight when she sat on their old patio. She hasn’t worn it in over a year. She glances at her hand—at the spot just between her knuckles on her left ring finger—where the indention used to betray her marital status when she slipped it off. And God knows that she’d slipped it off.
As she stalks through the brush, she thinks about Tom and Mark. She thinks about the way things ended before everything really began. Before the book was published and before she and Tom broke each other’s hearts. She wonders if that’s what keeps them tied to each other; the way they keep hurting each other. When you wound each other enough with the same weapons, the blood bonds you.
A twig snaps to the right, bringing her back to the task in front of her. She strains her eyes, trying to make out a figure in the darkness, but sees nothing.
“Birdie?” she calls, making her voice sound as inviting as she can. “I’m not going to hurt you, Birdie.” She repeats the girl’s name, remembering once when Tom told her it was one of the most effective ways to get someone persuaded to your point of view. That when someone is called by their name, they feel important. She wonders, though, in all the ways he could manipulate people—and he could write a book on it—if he could have handled this situation any better.
She can’t find Birdie. Wherever she’s gone, she’s hidden herself well from Vanessa. Vanessa sighs though not resigned to this fate. She’s determined to get to the girl. She’s determined to make her see exactly how things have to be.
Vanessa traipses through the trees, fighting her way out of the little patch of woods, rumbling with the undergrowth for every step. She wonders how in the hell Birdie had been able to make such short work of it. Her foot gets caught in a vine and Vanessa momentarily feels like the growth on the floor of the copse is going to pull her under. The thought is fleeting, but it’s enough to give her the creeps. It seems like it doesn’t take much out in this part of the country, so isolated from other people, to make you feel like you may not be alone after all.
Finally, she can make out the white siding on the little art studio, beaten and weathered, much like the paintings inside. She refocuses. She calls to the girl again and hears nothing in response. The trees are beginning to thin and she walks out into a small clearing that sits just on the edge of the old art studio. Vanessa wonders if anyone ever cleaned it out. When they first arrived at the ranch, it was a disaster. Oil and acrylic paintings from decades past, never properly stored and barely shielded from the elements. The paintings were beautiful, visionary even, capturing the zeitgeist of a generation long since gone. But whoever had painted them hadn’t cared about sharing them with the world. How opposite the mindset was from Tom’s. How opposite it was from the mindset that got them here, to this night.
Vanessa turns, looking around for a sign—any sign—of Birdie. She can’t imagine where the girl could have gone. Her options are limited. There’s no way she made it back down to the road where the FBI agents were waiting. She calls out to her again.
“Birdie?” This time her voice carries a note of sympathy. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, she wants Birdie to think she can help her.
Vanessa walks back through the woods, searching, hunting.
Tom has always been the storyteller. The keeper of those things. He was the writer in the family, but Vanessa feels that she has a story to tell now. The story of how she would have been a great mother had she been given the chance. And here, before her now, is that chance. And she has no intention of letting Birdie make it slip through her hands.
VANESSA
7 YEARS AGO
The story that Tom had told Vanessa was that the girl was just a student of his. A student that he’d grown fond of because he felt sorry for her. She’d been through a lot: losing her father at nineteen, for starters. And she had a strange obsession with the macabre. Tom told Vanessa he saw something in her, a potential, a talent, that he believed he could nurture into something great.
Vanessa hadn’t bought it then. She knew right at the moment that the girl’s name came up between them that Tom was sleeping with her. But she didn’t say anything, because she was sleeping with Tom’s best friend, Mark Rose.
That started shortly after the night of the party at which Mark kissed Vanessa. They’d met
