All at once, she felt exposed again. She looked around, but she was alone. The line of Fiddler’s Woods marched off to her right, and the big house was a small shape far behind her. Not sure what else to do, she waited to be connected.
“Hello?”
She knew his voice immediately. A surge of conflicted emotions made her look at her feet; he sounded worried. Did serial killers get worried? It seemed like too human a reaction.
“Mr. Reave? Why are you phoning me?” She paused, and shook her head. “How do you even have my phone number? I seriously doubt the police gave it to you.”
“Listen.” But he didn’t continue, and she could just hear his breathing, slow and measured.
“What is it?” Abruptly she felt furious, outraged that he could call her in the middle of the day and cause her stomach to tighten with what was undeniably fear. She wanted to hit something. Hit someone. “What do you bloody want?”
“Where are you?” There was a scuffling noise, and she pictured him transferring the receiver to the other ear. “Aren’t you in London?”
“It’s none of your business where I am.”
“I wish you hadn’t done that. God, I wish you hadn’t.”
Some of her anger seeped away then. He sounded more than worried, he sounded scared. And what could scare a murderer? The wind picked up, reminding her that she was alone. I could just ask him, she thought. How well did you know my mum, really? Why were you so keen to talk to me? And am I the daughter of a serial killer? But she had a terrible feeling she already knew the answers—and to hear it from him would make it real.
“Michael, if you know something —”
“I knew they couldn’t leave well enough alone. I knew it was a mistake, to drive them away like that. They’re just like her, they see everything.”
“Like who?” His voice began to break up, tugged into electronic fragments by the fragile signal. “Like who? Who are you talking about?’ She glanced at her phone. The symbols showing the signal strength were down to a single bar. It was a miracle that he’d got through to her at all.
“They want to hurt me, like she did. You have to leave, are you listening? Get back to—” There was a strangled blast of pops and static. “… back to the ground, it’s harvest …”
“Michael?”
She heard a couple more disjointed words in the roaring electronic fuzz—“red,” perhaps, and “punishment”—and then the call dropped.
CHAPTER41
IT WAS GROWING dark, and no one knew where Heather was.
It was a strange feeling, and more comforting than she would have expected. She headed for a strip of ancient woods that she was fairly sure ran along the back of the holiday cottage—a short cut through the trees, a chance to think about things. The scents of the earth, rich and thick, filled her nostrils, and she breathed deeply, as if by doing so she could cleanse herself of it all. Out in the woods, it didn’t matter who her father was, or what her mother had or hadn’t done.
The crunch of undergrowth beneath her feet, the rustling movement of small things, the murmur of wind. With each step she felt better.
She walked on, listening to the crisp noises of her footfalls, tasting the clean air on her tongue. She came to a large tree and stopped. The cottage should be close now—she should at least be able to see lights from its windows—but the woods ahead of her promised no such thing. And a darker interior voice was asking why she wanted to hurry back at all. What would she find back at the cottage? More letters, more feathers? Reave had sounded shaken on the phone, but should she trust him? Someone was certainly trying to frighten her, but why would Michael Reave care about that? Unless what the Polaroid suggested was true. She brushed her fingers against the bark of the tree, and saw that someone had carved a shape into it, probably with a knife. It took her a second to recognize what it was.
A heart.
It was cold and she was alone; she wasn’t safe, she was in danger, and terribly exposed.
“Fuck. What am I even doing here?”
She fumbled her phone out of her pocket and pressed it into life. The light from the screen display dazzled her, lighting up the bare trees and undergrowth in a painful fizzle of artificial glow. She blinked rapidly, alarmed at how little she could see, and turned the phone out into the night. No figures lurched into sight, but she was suddenly very aware of how large the woods were, and how tiny her light.
There was a crump of noise off to her left, like something heavy moving rapidly through the undergrowth, and Heather put her back to it and began to run, as best she could in the dark, the light from her phone weaving back and forth to summon an endless crowd of chaotic shadows. The noise behind her increased as whatever it was came after her, and Heather heard herself make a small noise of terror. She was in a nightmare, the earliest nightmare, the one where you were running from something terrible but your legs were hopelessly slow. Against her will she thought of the stories Michael Reave had told her, and Pamela Whittaker’s paintings. The woods are dangerous. The woods are where the wolf waits.
She stormed up a slope, crashing into and through small bushes. Twigs and thorns caught at her skin and clothes, pulling her back as though the very woods were against her. Reaching the top of the slope, where she hoped to be able to figure out where she was, she stumbled,
