Callie nods, and of course after seeing the case files, she has to agree that yes, what happened was heartbreaking, brutal, but she feels herself gripping the can in her hand a little tighter. There’s something else here, something that none of them are seeing. She waits a beat to point out that Gary Hines hadn’t exactly answered her question.
“No, no, no. That girl was sweet. She didn’t have it in her to do that horrible thing.”
She can’t help but feel impatient with Hines, senses she won’t get anywhere else with him. But at least he’s confirmed that the bracelet belonged to Sabrina, which isn’t nothing.
“Okay, well, thank you for talking with me. If by chance you do think there’s anything I should know, please leave a message with Della at the station.”
She stands inthe parking lot for a moment, surveys the morning. The air is cut through with a chill. The first leaves pinwheeling to the ground. In the quiet she picks up the trickle of water nearby and she scans the perimeter until she spots a narrow path between the trees. She can picture Sabrina Riley toeing her way along that path, taking a break away from the clutter of the shop, smoking a cigarette at the edge of the water, and so Callie follows it to see where it leads.
Gnats buzz around her incessantly as she walks, and no matter how many times she swats them away they find her, humming close in her ear, intimate. The path narrows to a pinch and even through the legs of her pants the underbrush scratches, claws at her shins. Finally, she emerges at the bank of a stream, wider and clearer thanshe would have expected, tree branches spanning across each side, connecting in a canopy overhead.
She sighs, puts her hands on the back of her head. Maybe Fauver had tried to hurt Sabrina that night, his temper boiling over, and she just got lucky that time, the bystander driving by who reported the broken window to the cops. A new picture of Sabrina Riley emerges, still hazy and uncertain: fighter, and possibly victim. At first she wanted to consider Jenna and Sabrina as opposite sides of the same coin. Jenna the innocent, Sabrina the evil one. But the more she learns, the more similar they become, two vulnerable teenagers whose lives went off course. Sabrina Riley, whom everyone was content to malign or turn away from and then forget about. Jenna, who saw something so brutal, something from a nightmare, and was sent back out into her life and expected to forget, deal with it, to move on.
A twig snaps to her right, brings her back into her surroundings. “Hello?” she calls, wary. She hopes it isn’t Hines, poised to scold her some more, or lord around his so-called goodwill toward the cops. She’s met with silence so she raises her voice, her mind throbbing with all of these stories and theories, about young women being touched in ways they don’t want, about women finding some kind of ugly fate out here among the trees. “Police! Who’s there?”
“Uh… Adrian,” a voice says, and a man rises from behind a bush a little way upstream. He holds his hands in the air near his waist. There’s a plastic test tube in one of them. “I’m just here collecting a sample. Is that okay?”
She’s embarrassed by her zinging heart rate, by the beads of sweat that have sprung along the back of her neck. This place is fucking with me, she thinks. All these things she thought she escaped: that constant press of the woods from every angle. The way it always makes her feel small and conspicuous at the same time. Like something hunted.
The man is still staring at her, waiting for her answer. She casts about for an excuse but can’t think of any. “Sorry,” she says instead.
“That’s okay. I’m used to slipping around through the woods butI can get how that might make someone else on edge. I’m not used to running into people while I work either. So, all good if I collect some samples?”
The adrenaline drops away and she feels wrung out, and she can no longer ignore the tension headache that has pulsed across her forehead ever since she first laid eyes on Jenna’s purse. “Sure, yeah. I’m just—” She looks over her shoulder at the narrow thread of the trail, her shins still stinging. “I’m just going to take another minute here, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. Are you… are you okay?”
“Bad day. Or maybe a bad year. I don’t know.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“What are you measuring?”
“I test for salt water intrusion. Or at least that’s what I’m looking at today. The waterways here are fascinating.”
“Sounds like it.” A hurt look flashes across his face and she hates herself for it. He’s young, her age, good-looking in an academic sort of way. Thick-framed glasses, ropy muscles, good posture. Another gnat tickles at her ear and she shakes her head, grunts. He smiles, reaches into one of the many pockets on his vest, tosses her something that she is almost too surprised to catch.
“Most people don’t throw things at officers in uniform, you know.”
“I think I’m doing you a favor.”
She turns the bottle in her hand. Bug spray. “Thanks.” She spritzes her wrists and rubs them together, relaxes a little at the idea of doing this one small thing that should bring her relief, even just for a few minutes.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asks. The way he looks at the water, the woods, is too reverent.
“No. Or, I didn’t grow up here. I’m from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. My parents were professors at Bucknell. I teach down at Stockton. But I live in Mullica, right on the river.”
“Nice.” What must that be like, she wonders. A profession handed down. A legacy that wasn’t trauma or dysfunction or pain.
“I like it well enough. It’s good kayaking and the sunrises are something to behold.”
“I’ve never been on a kayak.”
“Well that’s a crime. It’s the best way to enjoy the woods, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Yeah I’ve heard that before. My friend, Jane, she and her husband own Pines Adventure Company. She was always after me to go.” It hits her a beat too late, that the way she’s talking about Jane makes it sound like she’s dead.
“You should take her up on it.”
