Calla settles back onto the floor, leaving the Foxtail book where it sits. “He buried the book in the garden?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“If he brought it here,” she says, reaching back into her pocket to retrieve the silver charm, the metal glinting in her palm. “Then he must have buried it. He probably buried both books.” She nods to the larger book on the floor between us. Her voice sounds clearer now, more lucid, like she’s shaken off the lack of sleep. “And maybe he wrote ‘Remember Maggie’ on the inside.”
“No,” I say. “He didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“His handwriting in the journal is sharp and slanted. It’s nothing like the note in the book. Someone else wrote ‘Remember Maggie.’？”
“Who?”
Again, I shake my head—I don’t have an answer. I peer down at the book, still resting on the floor, a harmless thing, merely paper and ink and glue. And yet, it frightens me: the thick quantity of pages; the dark, lusterless cover that contains only the title of the book; the place where Calla found it—buried, concealed away in the garden, where only my wife would find it.
“You read it?” I ask.
Calla’s mouth curves, one side dipped down. “Some of it.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s just a children’s book,” she answers, simple enough, but I can hear the shiver in her voice. Something inside the book frightens her, too.
I want to touch it suddenly, draw the book to me and turn through the pages, but I resist. I know she doesn’t want me too. “The images inside seem dark, for a kid’s book.”
Calla nods, eyes still focused on the black cover. “I don’t like it.”
A bird thumps against one of the kitchen windows, wings flapping manically—confused by the reflection of blue sky in the glass—and the window rattles in its casing. But my wife doesn’t turn toward the sound.
“Is there an image of Maggie?” I ask, “an author image, in the back of the book?” If there is a clear photo of Maggie St. James, better than the one I found in the truck, we might finally see who she is, recognize her in the community.
But Calla shakes her head. “The dust jacket is gone. The author photo was probably on the back flap.”
My heart sinks.
“You think she was here?” Calla asks now, eyes anchoring themselves to mine. “You think that man, Travis, found her here?”
A knocking begins against my ribs, and it feels as if we’re speaking to each other with stones in our throats. “Yes. I think she was here; I think he found her. And then something happened… to both of them.”
“Maybe they left,” Calla surmises. “Maybe he found her and then they went back down the road through the trees. Maybe they…”
She was going to say, Maybe they got sick and died out there in the forest.
“Maybe,” I answer. And maybe they did. Their bodies curled together, illness leeching through their pores, turning everything black: fingernails and corneas and lips. While panic seized their minds. But if they were here and then fled, why did we never see them, never know they were here? And why have these clues been left behind?
“Or maybe something else happened to them,” my wife dares to say, the very thing I’ve been worrying over since the night I found the truck.
Maybe Maggie and Travis never left Pastoral.
Calla scoops up the book into her arms and stands, looking unsteady on her feet. Off-balance. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you before,” she says now.
I touch her hand and she doesn’t flinch away.
“They were here—” Her eyes are watering at the corners, little dewy drops. “They were in our house and—” Again her voice breaks then reforms. “We have to find them.”
BEE
I sleep outside, among earthworms that make shallow tunnels through the loam beneath me, and under a swarm of dying stars so vast and abstract that sometimes I feel an ache in my solar plexus when I peer at them for too long.
Blades of grass press against the nape of my neck, braiding into my hair, knots that twist and bind. I bury my fingers down into the dirt and press myself flat against the earth. I want to remain here, in the dark, and let the ground absorb the life growing inside me.
I want to disappear.
But instead, I lie awake and listen for the cracking of trees, disease spilling out, infecting the air. The hours pass and the scent of smoke fills my nostrils, remnants of the smoldering sage.