“Son of a bitch,” he mutters.
In a daze, he tacks from one locus to another, reading the signs. Someone did some bleeding on the couch, someone dripped blood to the front door. More splashes and spatters in her bedroom, where he notes her backpack, her gym bag on the floor. Her high-tops flung in the corner. What’s she wearing on her feet?
Panic wells in his throat and he spins around and bounds up the stairs to look in the other bedroom and she’s not there either. He jerks open a closet door and stares at a few women’s dresses, a couple of pairs of runover spiked heels on the floor. Stumbling down the stairs, he opens a door that leads to a back shed full of rancid garbage and boxes of empties and then another one that is also a closet—coats and boots. And he realizes how stupid he’s being—she’s not here, whatever they’ve done to her, she’s not here.
If she’s the one who did the bleeding, maybe she’s in the hospital. Snatching up the phone in the kitchen, Sam punches in the numbers for the hospital. He lucks out. It is Sonny Lunt’s sister who answers, a former Nodd’s Ridge girl, and she knows him. Because he’s Reuben’s boy, and the answers are negative anyway, she answers his two questions promptly. Deanie Gauthier hasn’t been admitted in the last twenty-four hours nor has she been treated as an outpatient in the ER. He hangs up before she can ask him why he wants to know.
Blinking in the sudden brilliance of outdoors, Sam scans the snow in the narrow yard, finds disturbing but ambiguous signs—a churned-up patch where maybe someone fell or maybe only some kid or dog rolled around, and here some very pale pinkness that might be more blood or maybe someone spilled a can of fruit punch, and then there is this depression, the right size and shape to be her foot in socks instead of her high-tops, outdoors in the goddamn snow with no shoes on and here’s a handprint, hers, he’s sure of it, the proportions that make her hands so beautiful, the snow reminding him of the color of her skin.
He curses.
Shoeless, she ran out into the snow and fell and she picked herself up and ran for the woods. There are no more distinguishable signs to his untrained eye but he goes a hundred yards into the woods. The strip of woods is thick with brush and undergrowth and tracked with paths tramped by kids headed for the Playground from all over this side of Greenspark. The uneven terrain falls in general toward the Mill Brook. If she ran from the house because she was afraid or hurt, instinct and habit would take her to the refuge of the Mill.
Bolting for the truck, he fishtails it onto Depot Street. In less than a minute, he abandons the truck on the verge of the other edge of the woods and plunges down the path toward the Mill.
The padlock is on the ground by the door. He leans into the door. A gentle shove creaks it open. Stepping through, Sam flicks the switch and the floods show him the hollow grubby vastness, the hoop that seems so pathetic in the harshness of the electric light. Again he listens, straining for the sound of breathing that will tell him she’s at least alive. All he hears is the panicky hitch of his own breathing and the pigeon burble of the wind through a broken clerestory window. And then there is a tremulous sucking breath, mouthbreathing, a struggle for air through narrowed passages.
He traverses the space to the cubby, without being conscious of the passage or acquiring any memory of it. He’s there and there she is, curled up fetally inside the shabby old orange sleeping bag on the mattress, the brocade headrag loosely scarving her bare head against the cold. With an inarticulate rattle in her throat, she moves inside the bag. They reach for each other simultaneously. She clutches spasmodically at the chains around his neck.
Training takes his fingers to the pulse in her throat and she’s steady, her breathing’s steady, her fingernails pale but not blue. Space heater’s on—assuming she was here all night, it and the sleeping bag probably saved her from hypothermia. She’s clammy, pallid, she’s lost blood, but as he gropes carefully, he finds no broken bones, no bleeding through the sleeping bag. Around her left fist and lower arm she has wrapped her waist chain rig as if for combat. She still wears the clothing she was wearing yesterday and she stinks of stale urine and old blood. The brocade covers half her face; the other side is smeared with dried blood, mucus, drool. Blood soaked into the brocade has raised the pattern in maple-leaf maroon and the stain is oddly beautiful.
Lifting the cloth away from her face to see what the source of the blood is, for a moment he cannot make sense of what he sees. Her flesh and her face chains have become one. It looks as if some terrible accident has opened her face right to the gums and her teeth are made of chains. The whole left side has lost its shape. It has no contour of cheekbone or jawline or temple and the eye is lost in swollen bluish flesh.
For an instant he thinks the bones underneath must be totally pulped and then he seizes on the idea it’s edema, swelling from accumulated blood and fluid. This didn’t happen today. She’s been lying here since sometime after he went home—probably soon after, to judge by the color of bruising. Whatever happened in that house, she’s a fucking mess. She crawled away like a wounded animal,
