Chapter 22
Walking back, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was following me. I kept hearing noises. Footsteps. But every time I stopped and turned around, there was no one there.
It’s not real, I told myself. It was hardly surprising that my imagination was so overstimulated. It was as if I’d hooked it up to a caffeine drip.
Back at the cabin, Frankie was still asleep. Trying to relax while I waited for her to wake up, I kept coming back to the same question.
Could Everett Miller really have been living around here for twenty years without being found?
I thought about what the children had said about a secret cabin and a ‘him’ who was supposed to live in the woods. Could this secret cabin be real? Was that where the sound of the wind chimes was coming from? And had Everett been living there all along?
As unlikely as it seemed, I let myself run with the idea. I imagined that Everett really had retreated into the woods after the murders and hadn’t fled to Canada. Somewhere in this vast wooded area, between the town and the lake, was a cabin. Everett could have lived there, surviving on wildlife that he trapped. Sneaking out at night when there was no one around, maybe going into town and rifling through the garbage. A hermit. It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened. There had been numerous cases of people, even whole families, who had retreated into the American wilderness, living off the land, hiding from society. In Everett’s case, hiding from what he’d done.
For twenty years, these woods had been almost empty. He would have had them to himself.
And then the construction workers had come. The resort was built. Suddenly, Everett wasn’t alone any more. There were strangers in the woods. Pony treks. Foot traffic between the resort and the town. His lifestyle, his very existence, was threatened. He couldn’t roam around now. He might be spotted. His freedom would be taken away.
What would I do in his shoes? I could think of only three options.
One: cower and hide.
Two: run away. Finally head for the border.
Three: try to make things how they were before.
But how, exactly, would he achieve that?
Chapter 23
A month had gone by since Abigail’s body had left the earth, but Crow felt closer to her than ever. Whenever he came to the woods, she would fall into step beside him. She talked to him. Carried on her teachings. He had a book that she’d given him before she died, and they would talk about it, discussing the history of the Hollows. He re-encountered the words that hadn’t sunk in when she had first used them. Words like ‘animism’。 That was the most important one. She helped him understand how the world worked, how humans and nature and animals were connected.
Best of all, she showed him secret paths.
On a day in late May, when the ground was still damp and black flies swarmed in the air, she had taken him deep into the woods, a secret tangle of undergrowth and firs, the trees crowded together so closely that there wasn’t even room for a bird to fly between them. It had rained heavily the week before and the ground squelched underfoot, sucking at his soles as if it were trying to hold him there, prevent him from going deeper. The sky was blue but it was cold here, in this place the sun never reached. He could sense animals watching him, hostile but afraid.
Follow me, Abigail whispered.
And there it was. The cabin.
He had, of course, shown Goat and Fox right away. Up to that point he wasn’t sure they believed that he could see Abigail, that she was still with them, but when he led them to the cabin and told them Abigail had brought him here, he finally saw it on their faces. Belief.
‘I can feel her here,’ Goat said.
‘She decided to show herself to you, now you’ve finally shaved that dumb peach fuzz off,’ Crow laughed.
‘What about you?’ Crow asked Fox, and she nodded, dumbstruck. She was as awed by this place as he was. It was so close to Penance, but nobody knew it was here.
They began to spend all their time there. It became their true home. Crow created a kind of altar to Abigail, with a photo they had stolen from her house, along with candles and rocks from the lake shore, a pine cone, and a perfectly preserved skeleton of a mouse that Goat had found in the woods. They hung wind chimes on the porch.
They got together every day after school, shooting the shit, listening to metal on Fox’s old boom box, getting high. Abigail had shared joints with them sometimes, telling them it would make them feel closer to the earth, and she had been right. Whenever Crow smoked and went out into the woods, he felt like he had that day they’d gone to the ancient forest. The power of nature thrumming inside him. It made him feel like an animal, flooded by smells and sounds, reading shadows like they were words in a book.