alone in the dark, sending up brilliant fountains of fire into the sky. Cries for help that would never be answered.
“I will,” she said. “I’ll look for your light.”
You sure you heard it this way?” Billy Ellis looked doubtfully at his hunting companion.
“As sure as I can be. Gimme a break, Bill. Sound travels funny in the mountains, you know that. But trying to find it’s the least we can do.”
Billy sighed as loudly as he could, signaling he’d play the part of responsible citizen, but he didn’t have to like it. Chuck high-stepped over a tangle of briars and held back a handful of whiplike forsythia so Billy could follow him. Normally, he liked hunting with Chuck. They both had the same attitude: namely, that deer season was an excuse to get away from the wife and kids for a few Saturdays in a row, to eat huge, heart-attack-inducing breakfasts in a greasy spoon, and to partake liberally from their flasks of coffee brandy.
This Saturday had been all set to pleasantly repeat their usual pattern, up to the moment when they heard a faint, faraway cry for help shivering through the empty branches. Billy argued it was probably some damn fool who sat in poison oak taking a dump and who now needed help wiping his ass. Chuck didn’t buy it. A born crusader, if ever there was one, he had been dragging them over brush and briar for the last half hour. At this point, a twelve- point buck could have jumped up and offered Chuck a drink and he wouldn’t have noticed.
“Chuck,” Billy said, trying again.
“Dammit, Billy. That was a call for help. What if somebody’s seriously hurt? Maybe got himself shot?”
“Then it’s like to be some idiot flatlander on his first trip into the woods who saw a doe and shot his foot off in the excitement. If you help ’em, you know, you’re only encouraging ’em to come back.”
Chuck looked back and glared at him.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Billy said. It was hard going. This part of the forest must have been logged or burned over sometime in the past decade; the trees were slim and close-set, still competing with each other for the space and light that only a few mature trees would eventually share. Brambles were everywhere, and Billy kept his gloves cinched tight around his cuffs for protection. They broke through a final screen of bittersweet and sumac and stumbled onto a wide dirt road.
“Where the hell are we?” Billy asked.
Chuck unbuttoned his coat pocket and pulled out his map and compass. He folded the map and held both it and the compass in front of him, squinting in the strong sunshine after the fitful shade of the woods. He turned himself right, then left, then completely around.
“What are you doing?” Billy was losing his patience. “Are we anywhere near the car? Because there’s no way I’m going through that piece of woods again.”
“I think we’re on one of these lumbering roads.” Chuck pointed out a dotted red line on the map. “If we go downhill”-he pointed right-“we’ll come to Route 117. Could be whoever yelled for help is along here someplace. I don’t think we woulda heard it so well if it was on the next access road marked.” He pointed to another dotted red line farther west.
“If whoever yelled is still here-and that’s a big if-he better be downhill. ’Cause I’m damned if I’m hiking uphill for some flatlander.” Billy took off without waiting to see if Chuck followed him. He didn’t have to. He had their car keys.
“We ought to go uphill first.” Chuck ran to catch up with him. “What if we don’t find him downslope?”
“Chuck, I hate to burst your balloon and all, but I gotta tell you this, as a friend. I’ve seen you lose keys and coats and your glasses, and once at the Washington County Fair you lost your kid.”
“I found her again!”
“She turned herself in at the office. What I’m trying to say is, and don’t take this the wrong way, you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”
That was when they rounded the bend and saw the girl sprawled in the road. Billy was frozen in place by the surprise for several seconds while Chuck pelted forward, laid down his rifle, and knelt beside her. He turned toward Billy. “C’mere, dammit. You’re the one who took the Red Cross course.”
That broke the spell. Billy ran downslope and skidded to a stop next to them. The girl’s head was bloody; her hand, when he took it into his own, cold. He pinched his fingers over her wrist.
“Is she…?” Chuck looked like he was going to puke.
Billy shook his head. “Get down to the road, see if you can raise some help. She’s alive.”
Sitting felt good. Too good. The tiny, enclosed area inside her Shelby made Clare forcefully aware that she had stepped in and splattered through some unpleasantly decayed substances and that, in her haste to make it out to the search zone on time, she had forgotten to apply her deodorant before she dressed. She stank.
She unrolled her window, then glanced toward Lisa. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.” Wonderful. Her passenger could smell her, too. She threw the car into gear, said a brief prayer that nothing would break or fall off on the Haudenosaunee drive, and left the great camp behind.
“Where do you live?”
“You go left on Highway 53, then cross Muddy Brook Road, and it’s down Route 127 a ways.” She looked sideways at Clare. “So, I gotta ask, what was in those papers you were reading?”
Clare, startled, took her eyes off the road. That was when she heard it. Two shotgun blasts, one right after another, the sound so close through her open window that she instinctively flinched in her seat.
“What the hell?” Lisa whipped her head around, looking for the source of the shots.
“That’s an alarm signal.” Clare glanced in the rearview mirror. “For hunters. If there’s trouble, they fire twice.” The road was empty in both directions. She stepped on her brakes. She leaned out into the cool air. “Hallo the alarm!” she yelled. “Where are you?”
A garble of voices resolved into a single “Here!” Close.
Lisa pointed down the road. “There’s a dirt road that leads onto the Haudenosaunee land down thataway.”
Clare shifted the car into neutral and let it coast down the county road’s gentle incline. “Keep yelling!” she shouted.
A sound like an underpopulated pep rally swelled up from the woods in front of her. In front and to the left. It grew louder and louder as she rolled down the two-lane highway, until she reached another barely-there dirt road.
“That’s it,” Lisa said. “The lumbering company my husband works for kept its machines there over the summer. Jeez, I hope it wasn’t some kids fooling around got hurt.”
A lone hunter stood at the entrance of the road. He waved his gun in the air and hotfooted it out of the way as Clare turned off of the surfaced road.
“Thank God you heard us,” the hunter said. “There’s a girl unconscious about a half mile up the road. My buddy Billy’s staying with her. We didn’t want to move her. There’s lots of blood, and I think she’s hurt bad.”
Clare and Lisa looked at one another. “A girl?” Clare asked. “A little girl? Or a woman?”
“What does she look like?” Lisa asked, leaning past Clare toward the open window.
The man frowned. “She’s-I dunno, a young woman. Younger ’n you.” he nodded at Clare. “She’s got long blond hair. That’s about all we could tell. I didn’t want to move her any in case she’s hurt her back.”
“Do you think…?” Clare asked Lisa.
The housekeeper nodded. “It sounds like her.”
“Who?” The hunter shifted his gun into his other hand and wiped his face.
“A young woman’s been missing from the van der Ho-even estate. There’s a search team out for her now.” She glanced over at Lisa. “You did say this is Haudenosaunee land, right?” Lisa nodded.
The hunter looked back up the dirt road. “I can tell you at this point, the girl doesn’t need a search team, she needs an ambulance. Do you have a phone? A cell phone?”
Of course. She was an idiot. She reached into her minuscule backseat, tugged her knapsack into her lap, and
