In The Forest Of Harm (10 page)

“Mom, I'm going to D.C. for a couple of days.”

“Fine, dear.”

“I've got a meeting about the dam.”

“Fine, dear.”

“I'll be back soon.”

He did not wait to hear the third “Fine, dear.” Instead, he turned and walked toward the closet in the hall, wondering what her response would have been if he'd announced his true intentions.

“Mom,” he would have said. “I'm going to kill Mary Crow.”

“Fine, dear. Have fun.”

TWELVE

Come look out the window,” the voice commands. “You can't do anything for your mother now. Come look out the window!”

Mary looks up from her mother's body. She cannot move. Her
feet feel nailed to the floor.

“The window,” the voice insists again, then Mary hears something else. A dull thudding that grows louder. Footsteps. Slow.
Methodical. Moving closer. This time coming for her.

“Mary! Wake up!”

Mary opened her eyes. Brilliant light surrounded her. Someone was kneeling in front of her, talking.

“Mary?” Alex's voice hummed above her as her face and blonde hair came into focus. She was frowning, her blue eyes squinting as if she were peering into a microscope. “Are you okay?”

Mary sat up, breathing hard. “Someone was stalking me.”

Alex threw one arm around her shoulders. “You were dreaming, honey. Nobody's here but Joan and me.”

Mary closed her eyes, the earthy-sage smell of Alex's flannel shirt stilling her panic. “Alex, I heard the footsteps again,” she said, her mouth dry as a cracker. “I haven't heard them since college . . .”

Alex squeezed her shoulders, then started to rub her back in slow circles. Outside the tent, birds chirped and buttery morning sunlight streamed through the open flap.

“You know, Mary, maybe the mountains aren't where we need to be right now. Why don't we pack up and hike out? We can throw our stuff in the car and drive back to Atlanta. We'll have a nice dinner there tonight and just table the rest of this trip.”

“No.” Mary couldn't stop trembling. “This is what we planned. We're almost there, and I want you guys to see Atagahi.”

Sighing, Alex sat back on her heels. “Honey, you can't come up here and visit your mother's murder scene and pretend it's some picnic in the country. Stuff like that takes a toll. Let's go home and come back another time. I'll come with you again.”

“No, Alex. We're already here and Atagahi really is special. One cup of coffee and I'll be fine. I promise.” Mary peered through the tent flaps. “Where's Joan?”

Alex snorted. “In the middle of her morning
toilette
. Sunscreen. Moisturizer. The whole nine yards.” Alex rolled her eyes. “She's as bad as my mother.” She scooted backwards out of the tent, summoned by a thread of steam that whistled from a small kettle of water heating on top of her stove. With a wide grin she waggled a packet of instant coffee. “Since you're determined to stay up here, would you like some nice fresh coffee from the stove you made such fun of yesterday?”

“Please.” Mary rubbed her eyes, trying to erase all vestiges of her nightmare. Maybe this was mountain payback. You nose around some, the Old Men lob over a tiny little psychotic flashback in return. Just like a psychic tennis match.

She crawled out of the tent as Alex poured the coffee. Overnight a blanket of mist had arisen from the forest floor, and Alex looked as if she were about to tumble into a cloud bank. Mary sat cross-legged by the fire and took the cup she offered. It was not her usual freshly brewed French Roast, but it was a marginal jolt of caffeine that would bump her into the day. She had just taken her first sip when Joan materialized through the fog, makeup kit and canteen in hand.

She sang some vaguely familiar aria as she walked, her light soprano trilling through the damp air.

“Morning, Joan.” Mary smiled, suddenly grateful for Joan's taupe eyelids and the scent of perfume that preceded her. The fact that one of them had risen and was singing opera helped to rivet her to the here and now, away from the manic tangle of her dreams. “Your first night in the forest must have been okay.”

Joan stopped singing and rotated her shoulders. “Are you kidding? My feet feel like petrified wood. My thighs are on fire. I have an awful pain in my right shoulder and I just popped three Excedrin for a sinus headache. And if that isn't enough, Alex snored all night.”

“I did not!” Alex snapped. “I never snore.”

“Well, then it must have been some bear that slept outside our tent,” Joan retorted. “Or maybe it was that ghost you were dying to tell us about.”

Relishing Joan and Alex's wrangling, Mary stretched her legs out in front of her. In the crisp morning air, her nightmare seemed far away and silly, nothing that a grown woman should be afraid of.

“Hey, Mary,” Alex asked, “when can we hike on to the spring?”

“Soon as the mist burns off.” Mary looked out across the huge cauldron of thick white mist that roiled just beyond the lip of the fissure. Only the tops of the mountains pierced through the swirling clouds. The view reminded her again of San Francisco, only here the mountains were the whales, dark forms breeching in a wispy white sea.

Joan flopped down between them. “Is all this fog why they call these the Smoky Mountains?”

“Shaconage,”
Mary said without thinking.

“Excuse me?”

“That's Cherokee. It means ‘land of blue smoke.' Although actually,” Mary continued as she warmed her fingers around her coffee cup, “we're in the Unicoi mountains, which comes from the Cherokee word
Unaka
.”

“Which means?”

“White mountains.”

Joan laughed. “You're a regular thesaurus, Mary.” “Don't get excited. Ten more words and we'll be at the end of my Cherokee vocabulary.”

Alex fixed them oatmeal with raisins for breakfast, then they waited for the fog to lift. By the time they struck their tent and repacked their gear, rust-colored mountains began to reappear as the thick white mist drained away. Overhead the sky turned from white to dazzling blue, and the breeze carried the aroma of apples and damp earth. It promised to be one of the singularly gorgeous fall days for which the Appalachian Mountains were famed. Mary grinned at her friends, suddenly exhilarated. “Are we ready for the final assault on Atagahi?”

“I'm ready for any kind of hot tub,” replied Joan. “Electric, solar, or thermonuclear. These old bones need to soak in some nice warm water.”

Alex laughed. “Joan, you're only thirty.”

“That's in Atlanta years. Up here I feel three hundred.”

They doused the fire, buckled on their backpacks and followed Mary as she began to pick her way down from the cave.

Each step down the steep path sent currents of pain up their shins. The packs they'd worn so lightly the day before rubbed against sore muscles and stretched tendons, and the air itself seemed against them—buzzing with small, nearly invisible gnats that hovered around their eyes and stung their faces.

“How much farther?” huffed Joan when they stopped to rest at Blacksnake Creek.

“Not much,” Mary replied, her own breath coming in short gasps. “It's a stiff climb, but it won't last more than half an hour.”

“That's what you said two hours ago,” Alex growled, shifting the backpack on her shoulders and wiping the sweat from her forehead. “There's not going to be much left of me after these damn bugs get through.”

They pushed on, climbing a steep path that blazed with red sumac. The forest slanted away to their right, trees stretching up from a waist-high carpet of electric-green ferns. Soft pine needles brushed delicate fingers against their cheeks, and at a rushing mountain stream, Alex pointed to a cluster of thick black berries that dangled from the pink stem of a poke plant. “That looks like one of those sci-fi films where the earth's been nuked and the plants are fifty feet high and the people are the size of ants.”

“Don't talk so much, Alex,” Joan said grumpily, her face the color of a stop sign. “It takes too much effort to listen.”

They climbed higher, the rush of the creek growing fainter and fainter until they heard it no more and finally saw it only as a silent flash of distant silver far below them.

“How much farther now?” Joan panted, slurping from her canteen as they plodded along.

“Over this ridge,” Mary promised. “Then we're there.”

They walked on, no longer stopping at creeks or listening to birds, just doggedly planting one foot ahead of the other, determined to make their destination. They crested the mountain, then Mary led them around the jutting roots of a massive overturned maple.

“There.” She grinned triumphantly and pointed below them. “Atagahi.”

A hundred yards away, ringed by huge boulders, a clear green pool glistened iridescent as a hummingbird in the sunlight. The calm waters glittered like an extravagant emerald on the finger of a czar.

Alex gasped. “Good grief! That looks more like Acapulco than Appalachia.”

“It even smells different.” Joan sniffed the air. “More like flowers instead of forest. And there aren't any of those awful bugs!”

But Mary couldn't speak. Atagahi was even more beautiful than she remembered. She could almost hear her mother's laughter tinkling up over the water as they'd lain floating on their backs, watching white clouds sail across a blue sky.

Hurrying now, the three women picked their way among the rocks to the spring, ditching their backpacks under a drooping willow tree, their aches and complaints forgotten in the excitement of reaching their destination. At the lowest rim of rock they knelt and dipped their hands into the water.

“Hey, it is warm.” Joan looked up at Mary in surprise. “You weren't kidding.”

“How deep is it?” Alex was peering into the fluorescent green depths.

“I've never known anyone who's touched the bottom.” Mary sat down and began to unlace her boots. “But in a minute I'm going to try.”

She undressed. Her clothes made a small pile on the rock. She stood naked in the warm sun for a moment, then she poised on the edge of the pool and dived, her skin flashing pale bronze as she arced over the water. Seconds later she surfaced ten feet away, her black hair slicked back and shining.

“This is incredible!” she cried exultantly. She arched her back and exhaled, floating, letting her weary arms and legs relax in the warm green water.

“Did you touch the bottom?” Alex called, fumbling with the buttons on her shirt.

“Nope. I saved that just for you.”

“Are you sure nobody will see us naked?” Joan, who felt uncomfortable in the dressing rooms of Bloomingdale's, peered around anxiously.

“Only that gun-toting red wolf we heard last night,” Alex replied. “And of course the ghost who slept outside our tent.”

“Oh shut up, Alex!”

Mary closed her eyes and smiled as her friends' voices danced in the air. They could swim or not, as they pleased. She would be content to float here for the rest of her life. In a few moments, though, she heard a western
Yee-hiii!
and felt a splash. Alex swam beside her; a moment later Joan did, too.

Her mother's body is sleek as an otter's. Martha smiles in the
sun and dives headfirst into the spring as if she might find diamonds hidden in the deep green water. Her head breaks the surface and she calls to Mary. “Come on in, baby. Don't be afraid. I
won't let anything hurt you!” Mary strips down to her bathing
suit and leaps into the water with far less grace than her mother.
Down, down she goes, bubbles nibbling at her toes like tiny fish.
She looks back up above her and sees the sun shining gold
through the water and she gives one strong kick and surfaces in
the honeyed air.

They swam for an hour, diving, splashing, laughing, letting the warm water soothe away the rigors of the trail. Joan sang little bits of
Rigoletto
; Alex tried to yodel. It was only when their fingertips shriveled like prunes that they decided to climb out and relax in the sun.

“Mary, I've got to give you credit. I was doubtful at first, but this was worth every sweat-soaked step,” Alex declared, positioning herself spread-eagle on a sunny boulder.

“I agree.” Joan dug through her clothes on the rock and stepped into her underpants. “It's just too bad you have to walk so far to get here.”

Alex looked over at her and frowned. “Why are you getting dressed? I'm not moving an inch until the sun goes down.”

“Misericordia girls don't sit around naked in the woods,” answered Joan primly. “Sister Mary Xavier would have a
stroke
.”

“I'm getting dressed, too,” Mary told them. “I want to go back up the trail and sketch that old maple tree.”

“You mean I'm the only one who's going to rest
au
naturel
on this rock?”

“Looks like it,” said Mary.

“Suit yourselves, then,” Alex sighed with contentment. “I'm going to stay buck naked in the woods for as long as I possibly can. Tuesday will come soon enough, and then ugh! It's back to suits and heels and panty hose.”

Joan frowned as Mary pulled on her jeans and quickly laced her hiking boots. “You won't be gone long, will you?”

“No. The tree's just up there, behind those boulders. My mother and I used to sketch underneath it.” She pointed at the high ridge behind them. “I'm going to make a couple of drawings. It shouldn't take me more than half an hour.”

Alex lay flat on her back, one knee bent, one arm under her head. Her hair shone gold and the sun made her skin glow like the petals of a lily. She squinted up at Mary. “Hey, Killer, throw me a PayDay before you leave, will you?”

“And my smokes?” Joan added.

Mary dug the candy and cigarettes out of Alex's backpack. She tossed the candy to Alex, the cigarettes to Joan.

“Thanks.” Alex grinned. “We'll be right here stoking up on nicotine and sugar. Holler if you need us.”

“Right.” Mary looked at her friends and smiled. They looked like goddesses fresh from a hunt, lying with their faces raised to the sun.
Thank you
, she said silently to the Old Men as she glanced at their distant peaks and began to climb up to the tree.
Once again, you have been kind
.