Darkest Part of the Woods (39 page)

WHEN she'd finished peering at the last page in a vain attempt to identify some evidence of tampering, Heather let the book slump shut. She might have sat there staring at the cover if its blackness hadn't too closely resembled the way the inside of her head felt. She had a sudden notion that the book was offering its blackness to the woods. As she leaned across the desk to close the window, her body shrank away from the lump of dark and all its contents. She pushed the chair back and retreated to the door, leaving the smell of centuries to take possession of the room. She was going to rid her house of the book, but not until she'd decided whether to confront Sam with the drawing or destroy it if she learned he hadn't seen it. Just now she was desperate to talk to someone, perhaps only to convince herself that not every aspect of life she had taken for granted was keeping secrets from her.

She was hardly conscious of descending the stairs and laying a hand on the phone. She would have picked up the receiver if she'd been able to think of anyone who could help. She wasn't about to bother her mother in hospital, and she mustn't trouble Sam at his interview, not that he was likely to be there yet, though Selcouth's journal had absorbed more of her time than she'd realised. When she began to contemplate calling Sam's father or even Randall if she could manufacture some pretext that wouldn't betray she was close to panic, she did her best to seize control of her thoughts. She rang Mercy Hill to learn that Margo had been restless during the night, though her injuries were healing well, and was now asleep. While Heather was glad of her mother's progress she found she would have liked to speak to her, however briefly and inconsequentially. Relinquishing the phone, which was no more of a lifeline than it felt like, she wandered out of the house.

The thud of the door behind her sounded unnervingly final, a conclusion for which there were no words to some part of her life. As she trudged out of the gate she couldn't tell whether she was being hindered more by her own mind or by the oppressively humid air, which felt heavy with undeclared thunder beneath the pallid clotted sky. At the far end of Woodland Close the tarmac was quivering as though invaded by a swathe of energy. Around her the houses kept stonily still, and she felt as though they were isolating her with the prospect of an instability the quaking haze only symbolised. The haze slithered backwards as she advanced, and when she turned the corner it was lurking beyond J's and J's, reshaping cars parked on either side of the road.

Jessica was alone in the shop. She turned from unloading a carton of packs of American cigarettes onto a shelf behind the counter as the bell above the door sprang its brassy note. She ran a hand through her haphazard curls as if they mightn't be sufficiently dishevelled, then spread wide a finger and thumb to raise her spectacles on her small nose. Her eyes grew large in the thick lenses to no especially welcoming effect. "Oh, hello, Heather," she said.

The step Heather took across the threshold felt as tentative as her greeting.

"Hello,

Jessica."

"What's it about now?"

"I wish I knew."

A further hint of sympathy found its way into Jessica's voice. "Is it all getting to be a pain?"

"All..." The problems Jessica might be expected to know about came to a kind of rescue.

"Did you hear mother was in an accident?" Heather said.

"Wandered out in front of a car near the Arbour, somebody was saying."

"I hope that doesn't mean you think she ought to be in that kind of hospital."

"Not unless she's a lot different from all the times I've seen her recently, and I wouldn't go round saying it if I did."

"You're making me wonder if someone else has been."

"A

few."

"Do I have to ask who?"

"I'd rather you didn't, Heather, to tell you the truth."

"Maybe you could let them know next time you see them," Heather said with a fierceness mostly aimed past Jessica, "that her attention was distracted for a moment. That can be all it takes."

"I

will."

"Dr Lowe at the Arbour didn't seem to think she needed his kind of help."

"I'm glad," Jessica said, and less uncomfortably "How is she?"

"On the mend when I spoke to Mercy Hill a few minutes ago."

"That must be a weight off your mind."

It felt more to Heather as though her mind was a weight in itself. "You'd imagine so,"

she said.

"Oh dear, poor Heather. More's wrong, I know."

Jessica let her hands stray onto the counter, where they remained face down on the day's newspapers, not having quite reached for Heather. Heather felt as if the array of headlines about politics and crime and stardom was a barrier between herself and Jessica, an indication of how remote her unvoiced problems were from the everyday. She couldn't begin to discuss Selcouth's journal and its implications; it was more to fend those off that she admitted "If anyone's wandering, it's my sister."

Jessica met this with a look as careful as her words. "How would that be?"

"I don't know where she is."

"That's..." Rather than define it, Jessica said "Since when?"

"Since before mother was hurt. I'm sure if Sylvie knew she'd come back."

"I'm sure," said Jessica, blinking at the newspapers as if they might display some trace of Sylvia. She kept her gaze on them even after she murmured "Is it because of how she is?"

Heather felt detected on her sister's behalf. "How's that supposed to be?"

"You know." Jessica frowned and glanced streetward to confirm that nobody was in earshot. "Having a little one."

Heather saw how befuddled she must be to have suspected Jessica of guessing that Sylvia had needed mental treatment. "She's researching another book. That's what the note she left me said," she explained, and instantly realised it mightn't have meant that at all.

"Then she's bound to be in touch once she's settled wherever, isn't she?"

"I'd have hoped so." Heather was scarcely aware of thinking aloud as she said "I can't believe nobody saw her going and mentioned it to me. I mean, a pregnant woman with three suitcases..."

"I expect she took a taxi, did she?"

Heather thought of phoning all the taxi firms in Goodmanswood and Brichester to ask if anyone remembered Sylvia, but what could that achieve? Amid the snarl of her thoughts she found nothing to say beyond "Even so..."

"Can I say something as a friend?"

"I'm glad if you're still one."

"Forgive me for saying, then, but maybe they didn't want to see her."

"I do. Why wouldn't they?"

"You have to understand there's been talk."

"There always is. About what now?"

"Some friend of your sister's. Some strange American who was asking the way to your house. The people she spoke to think she was on drugs."

The truth rose to Heather's lips before retreating, having found no reason to declare itself. "Did you meet her?" Jessica said.

"I may have."

"Then you'll understand why people don't want anyone like her having an excuse to hang around anywhere near here."

Heather was feeling unable to argue, given her own reaction to Merilee, when Jessica added "You mustn't think I'd ever mean you or your family."

"You're saying others would."

"I don't think I can be telling you anything you haven't already noticed."

Heather was struggling to grasp what else she should have when Jessica said "By the way, you weren't looking for Sam."

"I wasn't, no. Should I be?"

"Not if you know where he is, I suppose."

"He's gone for a job in London. I don't mind telling you I'll be happy to see him leave Goodmanswood."

What she saw just then was the drawing in the journal. She was willing Sam to put as much distance between it, not to mention whatever it implied, and himself as he could when Jessica gave her a blink beneath a frown. "I don't believe so, Heather."

"What don't you believe?"

"He hasn't gone that far."

"Why not?" As Heather tried to clarify her question it came out harsher too. "Why do you say that?"

"Because I saw him."

Heather found herself ready, however irrationally, to blurt that it might only have been someone who resembled him, but the idea was as dismaying as the situation it was meant to resolve. "You saw what?"

"Sam going where he keeps going."

Heather tried to tell herself that he'd assured her he was bound for London, but couldn't recall his having said anything so unambiguous. "Where's that?" she said, a last despairing attempt to put off the truth.

"Across the common, and you know where that leads."

"How long ago?"

"I'd say at least an hour."

Heather was distressed to think she might have seen him crossing the common if she hadn't been so reluctantly engrossed in Selcouth's journal. "I don't understand how you could have seen him from here," she said.

"I saw him walk past and I went out to ask how Margo was. I called after him but he couldn't have heard me."

"But he wasn't walking when he left the house," said Heather, and tramped out of J's and J's to stare along the street. At the far end, its base wallowing in a pool of haze, she saw a green hump that appeared to resemble an overgrown mound at least as much as a Volkswagen-a mound that quaked as though its contents were struggling to emerge. When she strode towards it the number plate dredged itself up and quivered into focus. Once she'd identified it she kept walking towards it until she made herself swing round and hurry back past the shop. "Thanks, Jessica," she called, and marched down an alley between houses to the common.

The forest stretched itself wide as though to acknowledge her, and so did the pale overgrown sky; she could have thought one was a symbol or a version of the other. Clammy grass dragged at her ankles as she strode towards the woods. The grass in their shadow appeared restless, though the rest of the common lay inert, and she saw the shadows behind the outermost trees begin to grope about the forest floor despite the utter stillness of the woods. It must be an effect of the heat, since it continued to withdraw as she advanced, and she couldn't let it trouble her. All that mattered was that Sam was in whatever state had prevented him from leaving Goodmanswood.

She glanced back at Woodland Close in the faint hope that he might have returned to the house, but his window was blank. Some trick of the light made it look almost as black as the cover of Selcouth's journal. Feeling as if the massed ranks of houses had cast out both her and Sam, she grasped a creaking scaly branch to help her step over a fallen tree into the woods. For the briefest instant her hand tingled as her skin used to after an April shower, though last year Sam had suggested that was the fault of chemicals in the rain.

Across the common several dogs started to bark, but fell silent once she was past the barrier. As soon as she thought she was beyond earshot of the houses she began to call Sam's name.

Her calls seemed incapable of travelling far. It sounded as if much of her voice was being walled in by the multitude of tree-trunks or absorbed by the canopy of branches. She had apparently never noticed how soon the branches closed overhead, nor how few places among the trees offered a sight of the open sky, although today the sky resembled whitish fungus caught in the net of wood. When she raised her voice she felt it scarcely left her, as though the forest had pressed imperceptibly around her to compensate. She was almost certain she knew where Sam was: at the remains of Selcouth's tower, the location that had so obsessed Lennox and then Sylvia. If Sam didn't prove to be there, at least it was the middle of the woods, from which Heather would be more likely to make herself heard throughout them.

She wasn't going to let anything remind her of the contents of Selcouth's journal. There were a good few hours between her and nightfall. The shapes and patterns of the foliage around her and above her weren't relevant to her search, nor were the objects in the treetops- greenish bulges that could be nests or growths, with a tendency to resemble faceless heads-let alone the impression that a shape as wide as the forest was keeping pace with her above the trees, using them or shapes that they concealed for limbs. "Sam," she shouted with growing anger. "Answer me. I know you're here."

Her sense that he was failed to encourage her. She kept feeling she was about to blunder past a tree and come face to face with him-with someone who was close to her, at any rate. That was the kind of prank Sylvia might play, though surely not in her present condition. 'Sam," Heather called at the top of her voice, "will you show yourself," as she dodged around a fallen tree that formed with its neighbours a shape like an enormous hieroglyph.

She wasn't aware of disturbing the roots that were matted with upheaved soil, but she thought she heard a pattering of earth; perhaps it was somewhere ahead.

She opened her mouth to shout again, but instead cupped both ears, to be met by a silence that challenged her to believe she'd heard anything. She was pacing forward, leaves cracking like beetles under her feet, when the woods produced another sound-a thump like a ingle giant heartbeat muffled by the earth.

It was ahead of her. She couldn't judge how far-how distance night have minimised it and its source. She made herself keep moving, though before long she grew reluctant to call out, not for fear of in impression that the presence above the trees had halted to await her but because she'd identified the cause of the impression: the patch of toadstool sky that was visible between the trees. She was coming to the space in the middle of the woods, and there was no sign of Sam.

Then what had made the sound? Perhaps a branch or a nest had fallen. It was absurd of her to be nervous in broad daylight of entering the largest open space the woods contained.

There was nothing to be seen in it except the mound encircled by brick-nothing that need remind her of Selcouth's journal. She stalked forward, furious with herself for being wary when her concern should be for Sam. She Tamped into the clearing between a pair of trees shaped no more oddly than their neighbours and tipped with half-revealed green objects that had to be leaves. She was striding to the centre of the space, less interested in identifying what she'd heard than in locating Sam, when she faltered. Someone had dug up the mound.