“Izzy, please.” Dad’s expression softened into need. “I can do this. Ihaveto do this. And after… I’ll go wherever you want me to go.”
She straightened. “To the hospital?”
He sighed. “Yes. Fine.”
It was the best she was going to get. Isobel stood and plucked Dane’s keys off the hook on the wall. “Then let’s go.”
Even with the branches of his saplings snapped off, Dad was almost too big to fit inside the back of Dane’s patrol car. He didn’t complain, though. When they turned onto the north road, he started speaking, so softly that it could have just been for himself. “The Appalachian mountain range is one of the oldest on Earth, you know.”
Dane shot him a quick, inquiring look but didn’t interrupt.
“Ancient places are something of a breeding ground for theunusual, but I didn’t believe the impossible stories I’d grown up on until I stumbled into one myself.” As he spoke, Dad’s voice fell into a cadence she remembered from the many nights he’d spent weaving bedtime stories for her and Eva when they were little. “It was my first summer out of college, and a buddy and I were meant to go camping. When he bailed, I went up this road alone, until I hit a stand of aspens.”
The car rattled and bounced over a muddy pothole.
“There was something strange about those trees. They felt more alive than the forest surrounding my family’s farm. I couldn’t help the feeling that they were… watching me. And there was this voice,” Dad said, his words slowing. “It knew my name. I could hear it, not in the wind but from the roots beneath me. I followed it for miles, until I found her.”
“Her?” Isobel said, twisting to face her father in the back seat.
Dad nodded. “The spirit of the wood. She was a woman, once, given the gift of everlasting life so long as she remained in the meadow where I found her.”
“I don’t understand,” Dane said.
Outside, the wall of trees began to change from pine and poplar to the pale, chalky white hues of aspens. Isobel sifted through her father’s words with a frown. “What did you do next?”
Dad’s voice turned wistful. “I freed her.”
Isobel wanted to ask more questions, but around the next bend, Arthur’s Volkswagen came into view. Dane sucked in an audible breath and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. His keys clicked together, the only sound to break up the silence in the car as the three of them got out and walked to the sagging vehicle.
Dane knelt and ran a hand over the tread of a flattened tire. “Slashed,” he muttered.
Lenny’s face flashed through Isobel’s mind. He’d come up this road. That had to have been done by him and Avi Dawson.
Dane straightened and tipped his chin toward her father. “So, Jack. Where did they go?”
Her father stepped past both of them. His movements were slow, his breaths still too shallow, but he wore a grim determination as he lifted a finger to the trees. “There.”
At first, Isobel didn’t understand. Then her eyes fixed on a trail of wildflowers starting at the edge of the road and stretching deep into the trees. Where the rest of the undergrowth was sprinkled only with occasional goldenrod, the wending line of flowers was lush with the sunny blooms.
A trail not of breadcrumbs but of seeds coaxed to life. Isobel’s heart gave a jolt.
Eva.
“There is a flower that only grows in a meadow up this way,” Jack said, falling back into his story. “For years after I freed the spirit of the wood, I ignored her warnings and utilized its healing properties by drying it into a tea, as I had for so many other herbs I collected. I even cultivated a few hives up the mountain that pollinated a field of the blooms, concentrating its life-giving power into—”
“Honey,” Isobel said in a hush, the pieces clicking into place.
Her father nodded, his eyes still fixed on the trail his youngest daughter had left behind her in the grass.
Isobel’s mind whirred. So that’s what he must have been doing every time he took a solo trip up the mountain. He’d never permitted her and Eva to tag along on those particular hikes like he did on others.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Isobel said softly.
The question made her feel like a hypocrite.
Dad’s brows drew into a slow frown. “Because this story doesn’t have a happy ending.”
Most of his stories didn’t. Isobel opened her mouth to respond when a voice called out roughly.
