The Little Woods (12 page)

“Pigeon,” Freddy gasped.

“She was not murdered,” Helen spat. “Obviously this was an accident.”

“No, she was totally kidnapped and murdered. That’s why the police are being so aggro. Oh my God, this is so scary, you guys.”

I noticed that Noel’s huge charcoal-lined eyes looked wild, terrified, and she was gripping her short blond locks. Helen wrapped an arm around her sister, knit her brow, and glared at Pigeon.

“Pidge,” she snapped, “we’re all feeling kind of upset right now. Maybe we could drop it until after breakfast, okay?”

“Um, hello, like we’re not going to talk about last weekend. We’re gonna tell that we found her now, right?”

“Pigeon,” Helen sighed. “Why would we do that? They don’t need to know. And she was not killed, for God’s sake. She had an accident. It must have been an accident.”

“They’re questioning the whole school,” I said. “They don’t think she had an accident.”

“Look,” Helen said lightly, regaining composure. “Okay, it was either an accident or it wasn’t. Either way, it no longer involves us, so I suggest we stop talking about it. It has nothing to do with us. This is where we walk away.”

Pigeon shook her head. “They’ll know we were up there.”

“How?” Helen put her hand on her hip and tilted her head to the side, a clear indication she was ready to fight.

“I don’t know.” Pigeon shrugged. “DNA?”

“This isn’t some lame TV show, Pidge. It’s not like the government keeps everyone’s DNA in a giant database. And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t go around licking the floor up there. None of us touched the body. None of us touched the wall with the creepy drawing. If they get half a fingerprint off something, so what? It’s not like our prints are on file. None of us has a criminal record. The only way we could screw this up is if we act crazy and draw attention to ourselves. They have no reason to suspect that we were there, so unless they come around scraping our cheek cells, I suggest we fucking drop it. Are we clear?”

Pigeon opened her mouth to speak, but Freddy placed a hand on her arm, and she stopped.

“Are we clear?” Helen said again, unable to keep the venom from her voice.

Silently, Pigeon nodded, all the frenetic Pigeon energy drained from her black eyes.

After a quick breakfast, we gathered our things and headed back to the auditorium, where I muddled through my weekend problem set. They called Helen in around one-thirty, and immediately after she emerged, looking a little frazzled, they called me. She gave me an encouraging, complicitous smile that drained me of what little energy I had.

Cryker looked askance at me as I mounted the stairs. They were conducting the interviews in the theater’s greenroom, which, I was pleased to find, had been painted a soft shade
of lime. It smelled acrid and musty, hinting at the diva breakdowns and late-night hookups to which it was privy. Cryker pulled up a chair while the blond female detective gave me a bored look. I didn’t like the police. They’d never done anything for me but harass my family and not find my sister.

“You’re new here,” he said, his voice scratchy.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the far corner of the room.

“Well,” he said, tapping his pen against his yellow tablet.

“Are you liking it here, Miss Wood?”

“Um. It’s okay, I guess.”

“No problems so far?”

“Nope.”

“Is there anything you’d like to tell us?”

I noticed my hands were starting to sweat, and my head was getting hot.

“I really don’t think so,” I said.

“Hmmm.” He stroked his beard. “Well, I’m just going to lay my cards on the table, Miss Wood. I know who you are. I know that your sister disappeared here ten years ago.”

I shrugged and looked away. Why did adults always force me to act like a drug-addled teen in some crappy TV movie?

“Listen, Miss Wood. I take it you don’t want your loss to be general knowledge, and I’m happy to keep things on a need-to-know basis, but we’ve got to have a conversation. I need to ask you some questions about your sister.”

I looked into his eyes and asked the question I only half wanted him to answer. “Why? You think Iris’s death is connected to Clare or something? Clare died in a fire.”

He tapped the desk. “In the file it says you were with your mom in Portland, and your dad was in Sacramento when Clare and Laurel disappeared. Is that correct?”

I nodded.

“And no one in your family had any knowledge of anyone who would have wanted to harm Clare? No strange family friends. No bizarre relatives.”

“Yeah. No bizarre relatives unless you count my mom. Why are you asking all these questions? Clare died in a fire,” I said, my voice threatening to break. “Didn’t she?”

He sighed. “You were very young at the time. Six years old, it says here, but maybe you remember something—something you didn’t tell the police at the time—something you were too scared to say? Maybe even something you tried to block out.”

“Sorry,” I said, my heart beating too quickly. “But what the hell are you getting at?”

“Calm down, Miss Wood.” He cleared his throat. “Sometimes an event is so traumatic our brain tries to shield us from it, but sometimes it creeps back in. Has to do with the breakdown of the neurons or the myelin sheaths or what is it?” He looked to his partner, who nodded.

“Yeah. Neurons,” she said.

“So do you remember anything—anything at all?”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, my voice breaking, the tears starting to come.

“Doing what, Miss Wood?”

“You’re trying to make me think Clare was murdered. Is that what you think happened?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“But that’s what you’re suggesting,” I said, suddenly on my feet, unsure where I was going.

“I’m not suggesting anything.”

“Iris, she was murdered, wasn’t she?”

He nodded. “We have reason to suspect so, yes.”

“And you think my sister was murdered too. That’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m simply asking you some questions, and I’d appreciate it if you would sit down.”

“I will not fucking sit down,” I screamed, tears suddenly cascading down my face. “My sister died in a fire. That’s what they told me. You can’t just untell me that. Not after all these years. Not now.”

“Let me ask you something, Miss Wood,” he said, his voice smooth. “Do
you
believe she died in a fire?”

“Yes,” I said, stumbling over the word.

“Then why are you here?” He arched his eyebrows at me, his eyes discordantly kind beneath them. I wiped away my tears and glared at him. Who was he, anyway? Who was he to come into my life and speak my fears aloud as if they were the text on the back of a cereal box, as if they didn’t completely change the world?

“Miss Wood,” he said, smiling. “I can see that you’re upset. I can assure you that wasn’t my intention.”

I said nothing.

Cryker sighed and looked to his partner, who rolled her eyes. “Well,” he said, scratching his beard. “If you remember anything, please come and talk to us.”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” I said. “Is that it?”

“For now,” he said, tapping his fingers.

I stormed out of the auditorium, wiping away my tears. I walked quickly, my legs shaking. Clare hadn’t been murdered. She’d died in a fire. Cryker couldn’t just come into my world all of a sudden and change that. No matter what I believed in my heart, no matter what I believed when the lights were out, there was an objective truth that existed outside of me, and that truth was that my sister had died in a fire. It wasn’t his right to question that truth. Only I could do that. A sharp wind kicked up and helped shock me out of my choler. Maybe sports weren’t such a bad idea. At least they would keep our bodies occupied so we couldn’t think too much. I headed down to the gym to sign in with Ms. Sjursen. She was engaged in some kind of bizarre craft involving knitting needles, a glue gun, and Lego blocks. She looked up at me with those distant eyes.

“Oh,” she whispered. “I’ve got something for you.”

“You do?”

“Mmm-hmmm. Now let me see here. Where is that?” She rummaged around beneath her desk and extracted a bulky manila envelope.

“This is for me?” I asked.

“Yes, dear. They said to give it to you. Said you’d understand what it meant. There was a Post-it note on top with your name on it. Oh, where is that?”

“Who left it for me?” I asked, my heart suddenly surging. Alex? Had Alex left it for me?

Ms. Sjursen squinted her eyes, and her cheeks flushed. “I don’t remember, dear.”

I didn’t want to push her too hard, but I needed to know. “Was he tall and African American?”

She stared at me, her smile dropping, that devastating windowless gaze sinking back into her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head, her voice filled with shame. I didn’t want to upset her, so I took the package and smiled brightly.

“Thanks for the package, Ms. Sjursen.”

She smiled again and changed the setting on her glue gun. I walked out into the cold afternoon, staring at the package, a lump in my throat.

I ripped it open and shook out a small present wrapped in thick pink paper. Unwrapping it, I found a wooden box, sculpted from lush mahogany and riddled with carvings. The top was composed of eight delicately engraved tiles, though there were clearly meant to be nine, and where the missing tile ought to have been, there was a flat, hollow space.

Examining the sides of the box, I saw that they had been crosshatched with intricate detail. My fingers searched the lines for an opening, but I could find no hinge, no apparent aperture. Turning it over, I found that the bottom was a cubist mélange of geometric shapes and patterns. At the bottom left corner, two small circles stood side by side, each containing two letters, an upside-down
Y
and an
O
, and a backward
E
and an
I
respectively. They were separated by a
T
. It looked almost like a factory logo, one I felt I’d seen somewhere before, and yet I was fairly certain the box was handmade. Gingerly, I shook it, and a faint rattling replied from within. There was something inside.

My eyes scanned the top. The tiles were smooth and stood
in contrast to the rest of the box. Each tile contained a different symbol: a flower floating on water, a chalice, a skull, a whirlpool, a musical note, a lock, an eye. And then one of the pieces contained a disturbing scene: twelve female bodies strung up by their necks. It was a gruesome image, one I vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. I wondered what symbol the missing tile might have held. I wondered why it had been removed.

It didn’t seem right. I was missing something. Despite my supposed academic prowess, I was about as mechanically inclined as a pile of dead mice. I needed Sophie. I’d heard that Alvarado had canceled softball practice despite Harrison’s mandate, so I headed over to Prexy to see if she was in her room.

I’d yet to be invited to Sophie’s room. We usually spent time with Jack, which mostly necessitated hanging out in open spaces. I also got the sense that Sophie’s room was an intensely private space, and when I knocked on her door, I noticed that I was slightly nervous about doing so. It was the ideal of a girl’s room. Her pale yellow comforter was feminine but not cloyingly so. A Georgia O’Keeffe print hung above the head of her bed, and a light perfume lingered in the air. The only thing out of the ordinary was a quote from Linus Pauling that she’d tacked up on her wooden door. She sat on her soft yellow rug, reading
Lolita
. She gave me a sad smile.

“Aren’t you glad you transferred here?”

I sat down on the floor opposite her.

“So I guess you were right,” I sighed. “About her being murdered, I mean.”

“I feel terrible about saying that now,” she said, closing her
book. “I was just trying to be dramatic, trying to make life less dull. But Jesus, the poor girl. How awful.”

“What was she like?” I asked.

Sophie sighed. “I wasn’t really in her field of vision. I mean, she was into art and fashion. She wore designer clothes and paraded around claiming she was going to be a model. Not really my thing, you know? But she was good at math and physics, so we ended up together sometimes because she and Freddy and I would be the only girls sent to the Math Bowl or whatever. She seemed nice enough, but we didn’t have much to talk about, and she didn’t seem interested in being friends. I only ever really saw her with boys.”

“Her poor parents,” I said, unable to suppress the image of a man and woman just biting into their morning toast, staring in horror as the phone rang. “Is this what it was like when the police were here in October?”

“Not even remotely. They talked to some of the kids who knew her best, but God, it was nothing like this. I can’t believe she was out there all this time. But the little woods are scary as hell. That’s why they make such a fuss about us not wandering in there. A few years back they found this guy living out there, and it turned out he’d murdered an entire family in their beds over in Sonoma. He’d taken their prescription drugs and nothing else. Just murdered them, and was hiding out here, back in those woods.”

“God.” I shivered. “I had no idea.”

“Well, it’s not exactly the kind of thing they put in the viewbook. Yeesh. I’m getting creeped out. You want to go for a walk?”

“Actually, I was wondering if you could help me with something,” I said, pulling the manila envelope out of my backpack. I shook out the box and handed it to Sophie. “I can’t get this open, and I’ve got a suspicion I’m missing something.”

She examined it and a silly grin spread over her face. “Oh man. This is awesome. It’s a puzzle box.”

“A what?”

“A puzzle box. Like, to open it is a puzzle. I love these. But this one’s handmade. Look at the tiles. Cool.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at all these tiles on the top. See the empty space?”

“Yeah. One of the tiles is missing.”

“It’s not missing. It was never there. This is a classic slide puzzle. We need to arrange the pieces into a specific order, and that’s the free space so we can maneuver them.” She slid the flower tile over into the empty space and then pulled the skeleton down into the space the flower had previously occupied. “Now we just need to arrange them into sequential order, and we’ll see what happens.”