“It is,” Daniel answered without turning. “But the trail’s clear.”
Beth was not reassured. She yanked a bramble out of her hair and teased, “Alice, are you sure your grandmother even came this way? Maybe she’s sitting in a Denny’s, eating pancakes and laughing at us.”
Alice didn’t slow. She kept her gaze locked on Daniel’s back, her face pulled taut. “She’s not at Denny’s,” Alice said, almost growling. “She’s here. I can tell.”
Daniel raised a fist and stopped short. I nearly barreled into him, my hand pressed to his lower back, and the warmth surprised me. He held still, head cocked.
“No birds,” he murmured.
He was right. Not a single trill. No woodpecker. Not even the endless, irritating twit of a chickadee. It was a silence that had density. The wind itself bent around the trees and left us in a pocket of stillness, as if we’d been placed in a bell jar.
Alice shivered. “Maybe we should turn on a flashlight,” she said, her teeth chattering even though it wasn’t all that cold.
“It’s eight in the morning,” I said, then realized I wasn’t sure about that anymore. I checked my phone. No service, but at least I could tell the time. 7:57 a.m., but the sky above looked like someone had thrown a heavy coat over the sun.
“This place is so weird. I can see why you got confused about how many days you were out here,” I told Alice.
Alice nodded, but she looked spooked. “With you guys, at least, it’s easier to stay focused. To remember who I’m looking for and why I’m in the woods. Something about this place made me feel crazy.”
“Don’t worry. We’re not going anywhere,” Henry told her softly.
Daniel plucked his battered flashlight from his belt, snapped it on, and gave it to Alice. “Lead the way, kid. You know what you’re looking for.”
“Maybe she’ll see something we don’t,” I said. She moved with uncanny certainty, her flashlight beam as steady as a surgeon’s hand. It traced the ground, the bark, the burned-out holes punched through the trunks of older trees.
I reached to touch one, the edges charred and smooth like the inside of a church bell. “What could’ve done this?” I asked.
Beth peered down at it. “Lightning, right?”
Daniel shook his head. “No scorch marks up the trunks. No recent storms, either. It’s not natural.”
“‘Not natural.’ Great,” Beth repeated. “What is it then, like, a death ray?”
He shrugged, but his jaw was tight, and I recognized the look. Someone steeling himself for something he’d seen before and never wanted to see again.
The holes kept getting bigger and more frequent. Soon, entire trunks were hollowed out, as if something hungry had bitten through decades of tree in one gulp. Alice led us through these, her breathing so shallow I thought she might faint. She stopped at a patch of soft dirt where the ground was peppered with holes the size of gopher burrows, all radiating from a single spot.
She squatted. “Grandma was here,” she whispered. “Her perfume is—” Her nostrils flared. “It’s under everything. Like she was fighting something.”
I squatted next to her. “You think she got hurt?”
Alice didn’t answer. Daniel crouched low and sniffed the air. “Smells like chemicals. And copper.” He scraped the soil, exposing a shred of pinkish wool.
I showed it to Alice. “Is this hers?”
Alice nodded, tears filling her eyes.
Beth crossed her arms and studied the trees with open suspicion. “You know what’s wrong? The shadows.” She pointed. “They’re wrong. Look, those should all point the same way, right?”
She was right. The light, what little made it through the canopy, threw the shadows in spirals, some east, some west, some straight up into the arms of other trees.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Daniel stood, grunted, and took the flashlight from Alice. He aimed it at the ground, then swept the beam in a wide arc. “There’s tracks,” he said. “But not human.”
He was wrong. There were human tracks. Several, pressed deep into the mud. But the stride was off, long and dragging, the heels never lifting. I imagined a person walking with their shoes full of stones. Or maybe a sleepwalker, dead on their feet.
Beth started counting the tracks aloud, her voice a whisper. “One, two, three... But there’s only us and grandma, right?”
