“How come you never told me?”
“Told you what?”
“That you fought somewhere far away.”
“Aw, I don’t know, Finch. Never came up, I guess.”
“Where were you? Where did you fight?”
“Mostly a place called Afghanistan.”
“What was it like?”
“Brown. Lots of different shades of brown. Light brown, dark brown, green brown, tan. Yellow brown. Dusty brown.”
She giggles. “Cooper.”
When we get home, I light the kerosene lamp in the kitchen and the candle on the trunk. Finch heads straight to the bedroom and gets her notebook and colored pencils. She pulls the chair from the table and starts sketching. Walt Whitman leaps onto her lap and settles in, purring.
I step outside. Pump some water from the well, splash my face, hoping to wash off the fatigue. A screech owl hollers nearby, fluttering in the dark. Other than that, silence, darkness, cold. Inside, I stir the stew on the stove, scraping the sides of the pan. I grab two bowls and ladle us our food, giving Finch a little extra.
“Dinner, sugar.” I set the bowls on the table and nudge the cat. “Off you go, Walt.”
Finch slides her notebook to the side. She has already rendered an image from the woods: the King of Trees, the river, a girl with a blue backpack and long red hair.
FIFTEEN
We eat our stew in the almost-darkness, the light of a candle throwing shadows across the walls, the woodstove purring. My body aches from the panic attack, burdened by a heaviness, and my vision is still blurred a little, slow to return. A headache flares behind my eye sockets, pushing at the temples.
“What do you think she was doing?” Finch asks.
I rise from the table, put the kettle on the stove. “I don’t know, sugar.”
“I mean, why was she there?” She pokes at her stew. “In our woods.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know, Finch. I’ve got no idea why she was there.”
“That thing she had, the black thing she was looking through—that was a camera, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” The kettle begins to hum.
“I wish I had one.” She takes a bite of stew. “Think of the pictures I could take. How close I can get to animals. She was so pretty, wasn’t she?”
I pluck a mug from the cabinet and don’t answer her.
“Her hair, the way the wind blew it.” She winds her hair around her pointer finger. “Do you think I’ll be like that, someday? I mean that pretty.”
I scoop half the suggested amount of powder in the mug and pour the hot water over it. “You’re the prettiest girl I ever knew, Finch. I’m not just saying that.” I set the mug in front of her and squeeze her shoulder. “Even prettier than your mother, if you want to know the truth.”
She grins and leans forward, blowing on her hot chocolate.
I walk the bowls to the counter and submerge them in the washbasin. Look out the window, scan the yard. My mind is twisting and weaving through all the things to consider about our run-in with that girl, but I don’t want to think about them until Finch is tucked in for the night.
Once I finish my two squares of the quilt for the evening, we head to the bowl in the kitchen and brush our teeth.
“Open,” I tell her, and she obeys, mouth stretched wide. I brush each quadrant, counting to myself. No dentist out here, so I make sure I take good care of Finch’s teeth.
“Okay, spit,” I tell her, and she leans over the stainless-steel bowl and splatters it with foamy toothpaste. I take the towel from the kitchen and wipe the sides of her mouth.
“Don’t brush so hard, Coop. You know I have a loose tooth.”
“Sorry, I forgot.”
She opens her mouth and points to one of the top center teeth, wiggling it back and forth. “See?”
Once Finch is tucked in, I go back to the main room and pull the lens cap from the shelf, because as my head is clearing from the panic attack a troubling thought has come to me. I walk the cap over to the candle. Lean in close, have a good look at it. Maybe it wasn’t from Scotland’s spotting scope, after all. Maybe those weren’t his footprints in our hunting blind. Which means that girl could’ve been around for who knows how long, snooping, and what if she knows about the treestand, the cabin, the chickens, us?
I pull a long tube from the coffee-table trunk and take out the big rolled-up piece of paper inside, a hand-drawn sketch of the property that Jake’s father made at some point. It details everything, not just the cabin and the small clearing where it sits, but other things as well. It’s only because of this map that I know that there used to be two sweet cherry trees in the yard next to the apples. I’m assuming they didn’t last long, because they weren’t here when we arrived, not even a trace of them. But the map shows the wild raspberries and blackberries at the yard’s perimeter, the outhouse, the pump for the well, a compost pile out back, close to where we buried Susanna. All of this is in great detail, and from what I can tell, to scale.