The Little Woods (13 page)

“How do we know what the sequence is?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the theme. Look at the images again. Look at them closely. What do you see?”

I leaned in, my mind straining for a moment, and then I saw it.

“Oh God,” I said, smiling. “It’s
The Odyssey
, isn’t it?” I scanned the tiles again, realizing that each represented a different station on Odysseus’s journey. It was the grotesque image of the twelve hanging women that had clenched it for
me. They were Odysseus’s supposedly disloyal maids who were hanged upon his return. I shivered when I thought about it. Then there was the whirlpool. That had to represent the Charybdis; the eye represented the Cyclops, and the lock represented Odysseus’s imprisonment by Calypso; the musical note stood in for the Sirens; the skeleton meant the Land of the Dead; the flower represented the Lotus Eaters. That left us with only the chalice.

“I’m not getting the chalice,” I said. “What does it represent?”

“Circe,” Sophie said, rolling her eyes. “The Enchantress. Remember, she offered Odysseus wine laced with magical herbs. Whoever drank it was trapped with her.”

“Oh right. With the pigs and all that.”

“Exactly.”

“God,” I said, feeling proud. “I’m glad I just read it.…”

“We all just read it, Cally. It’s on the syllabus.”

“Whatever,” I said, pointing to the box. “Let’s put them in sequence. First we’d have Odysseus imprisoned by Calypso, that’s the lock. It needs to be moved to the top left space. Then going across, we have the Lotus Eaters, then the Cyclops. On the next row we need to have Circe, followed by the Land of the Dead, followed by the Sirens. The last line should be the Charybdis, and finally the hanging of the maids.”

Sophie nodded, her hands slipping quietly over the pieces, sliding them into place. When she slid the final tile into position, it seemed to trigger something. We heard a click, and the top opened. Inside was a folded white piece of paper.

“Oh my God,” I gasped, stunned that it had actually worked.

“Maybe it’s a treasure map.” She giggled and started to open it but then handed it to me. “Where did you get this, anyway?”

“Someone left it with Ms. Sjursen for me. I guess I have a secret admirer.”

“Well, open it. Let’s see who it is.”

When I hesitated, she understood and slapped my knee. “You shit. You’re not going to read it in front of me, are you?”

“Not right now, okay?” I said, gripping the paper tightly in my fist. “And don’t tell Jack.”

“Get out of here,” she said, laughing. “Go read your stupid secret love letter.”

Outside Sophie’s dorm, I sat between two poplar trees to read what I hoped was going to be a fantastic love letter. I was sorely disappointed by what I found.

I had no idea what to make of it. Unzipping my backpack, I pulled out the manila envelope and examined the blank cover.
I reached inside and pulled out the pink wrapping paper. And that was when I saw it. Lurching across the inside of the wrapping in manic black Sharpie scrawl were the words
THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY OUT
.

I leaned against a tree and tried to swallow, but something was blocking my throat. Okay, what the hell was that supposed to mean? If there had been any doubt before then, I was now certain that it wasn’t from Alex. I had no idea whom it could be from or what it could possibly mean, but I didn’t like it.

I shoved the note into my pocket, hid the box in my room, and headed down to Ms. Sjursen, determined to see what she could remember. I found her underneath her desk, cursing at an outlet. I bent down and shoved the plug in for her. She smiled up at me, then looked triumphantly at her glue gun.

“Oh, thank you, dear. This thing can be a real bastard sometimes.”

“Ms. Sjursen, do you think you could try to remember who left that package for me?”

“What package, dear?”

“It was a manila envelope with a Post-it note on top with my name on it. Can you remember anything about the person who left it?”

She smiled and shook her head. “I can’t say that I remember any package. You say I gave it to you? When?”

I stared at her a moment. If she didn’t remember giving me the package, there was no way she would remember who had given it to her. This was a lost cause. She looked worried, so I did my best to redirect her attention back to her crafts. After
she showed me how to glue a button onto a piece of cardboard, I ducked out and started on my walk.

The air was crisp, and walking did wonders to clear my head, though the heaviness of Iris and Clare held fast to my heart. When I was confident I was out of view of the lacrosse field, I pulled the note from my pocket and examined it again. It looked like a series of random numbers, but maybe it was something. Maybe it was a kind of code.

I leaned against a tree and did my best to understand what I had in my hands. Reading “The Gold-Bug” in ninth grade had led me into a super-geeky cryptanalysis phase. I’d gotten Danny into it too. We used to leave notes in cipher for each other. We still did if it was something we didn’t want Kim to understand. My heart sank when I thought about him. Kim hadn’t returned any of my calls. I knew she was having a hard time, but it didn’t seem fair for her not to at least let me know he was okay.

I tried to focus on the note and fight back the sadness. I’d had enough emotions for one day.

“The Gold-Bug” dealt with a specific type of cryptanalysis called frequency analysis—a system based on the idea that within a given piece of text, certain letters in the English language were bound to come up more often than others. By analyzing the frequency at which each letter appeared and then consulting a table, one could plug letters in based on the percentage rates at which each given symbol appeared in the cipher text. I had been hoping that if the note was indeed an encryption, it would be one that I could solve using frequency analysis, but I could already see that whatever this was, I didn’t
know how to solve it. An encryption that could be solved using frequency analysis wouldn’t contain any numbers greater than twenty-six, and there would necessarily be repetitions, but the numbers in my note went all the way up to 190, and there were way too few repetitions.

Another oddity was the run of consecutive numbers: 53, 54, 55, 56, 57. I hadn’t seen anything like it during my (admittedly brief) foray into cryptanalysis. I couldn’t help thinking that it might be important, but I had no idea how. And then there was the inclusion of the letter
J
, which made no sense at all. Why shove a letter in there?

Crumpling the note, I shoved it into my pocket and started walking back to campus. Maybe it was just a random string of nonsense.
There is only one way out
. Maybe that was the real message. It didn’t sound like code, though. It sounded like plain English. It sounded like a threat.

I headed over to the dining hall to get a drink, the verdant splendor of the campus rising before me. Scenic view or not, I couldn’t help wishing I had somewhere else to go. I missed my dad, and I wanted to be somewhere like home. I wanted to go somewhere safe—to feel warm and loved. But home was not that. Home was my mom, and the constant fear that the worst possible thing could happen at any second without the slightest warning. Now, with Iris, it looked like school was heading in the same direction, but, I told myself, no matter how bad St. Bede’s was, there was no way it could hurt the same way home did.

Just as I was climbing the steps up to the dining hall, I saw
that Alex was leaving. He smiled at me, and suddenly I remembered everything that had happened at Helen’s.

“Hey, you,” he said. “Drink machines are off if that’s where you’re headed.”

“Damn it,” I said, and kicked a step.

“That was a little dramatic, Wood. You know there are vending machines out behind the kitchen, right?”

“No.”

“Come on,” he said, gently taking my hand. “I’ll show you.”

We wandered through the dining hall, then out the french doors and into the back patio courtyard. Soon we were behind the dining hall at the soda machine. He put seventy-five cents into the machine, then looked down at me.

“Orange or peach?”

“Peach.” I smiled.

“Me too,” he said.

“So this is all crazy, right?” he said, his voice crackly and kind. He handed me my drink. I took a sip, then set it down on the wall.

“It’s really sad,” I said.

“Yeah. I just can’t believe she’d go out into the woods like that by herself.”

I squinted at him. “Maybe she didn’t.”

“What?” he said, then took a swig of his drink. “What do you mean?”

“What if she didn’t go out there by herself? What if someone took her out there, or, like, lured her out there?”

He shook his head. “No, they’re saying she went out there
to do drugs or something, and some sick vagrant found her and killed her. I heard she was raped.”

“Really?” I choked. “God. That’s horrible.”

“I know. It makes me sick. I heard there was this weird painting up on the wall of the cave where she was found. They’re calling the bastard the Dragon Killer.”

“God,” I groaned. “So what’s going to happen now? Do you think school will keep going on like normal, or do we all go home?”

“It’s tricky,” he said. “I talked to Dr. Harrison, and he told me that all the parents are being called, and he’s telling everyone not to worry. Some people might leave, though. You never know. Nothing like this has ever happened before. There was a suicide back when I was a freshman, and school just went on as normal. I think that’s best. Not to dwell. This is different, though.”

“Yeah,” I said, my head starting to hurt.

“But I wanted to talk to you,” he said, setting down his soda, gently taking my hands in his. “So I know this is weird to talk about right now, but what did you think about last night? About what happened?”

It was a swift change of subject, but I decided to go with it. The last thing I wanted to do was think about that poor girl getting raped. He put his arm around me.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked. “Do you want to, like, be together?”

A tingling warmth rushed through me. Maybe he could be a kind of home, I thought, but I couldn’t say something like that, so I just nodded.

He bent down and kissed me softly on the cheek, but then he pulled back. “Crap,” he said. “I forgot. I have to catch Brody before dinner. Do you want to hang out with us after study hours?”

“Sure.” I smiled. “You get to stay out during study hours because you’re a cool senior, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, laughing.

“So what do you guys do when we’re in our rooms studying?”

“Honestly? The truth?”

“Yeah.”

“We go to the library and study.”

I laughed and he touched the back of his hand to my cheek.

“Come by my dorm later?” he asked.

I nodded and took a breath. He kissed me, slowly sliding his hand around my waist.

After saying goodbye to Alex, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I tried to block out the image of Iris, this girl I’d never even known, being brutalized out there in the woods. What must her last moments have been like? How much had she understood about what was happening to her? How terrified she must have been.

A wind was picking up, and I was starting to shiver, but for some reason, instead of going back to my dorm, I headed to Jack’s room. He was sitting in his balcony hammock and shredding a napkin with short, irritated bursts of movement.

“Are you okay?” I asked as I climbed over the railing. I took a seat next to him, and the hammock buckled beneath me, half throwing me onto his lap.

“No,” he said. “How could they not have known she was dead? They told us she ran away. How could they tell us that?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you were friends.”

“We weren’t. I thought she was a jerk, but she was a person, for God’s sake. She was just a girl. How could they give up on her so soon? You weren’t here, but the administration clearly didn’t give two shits about her. They just wanted to write her off and move on, lest things get too public and affect our rankings. And the cops were hardly here. I know we were on fall break for the first week, but everyone shouldn’t have given up on her so soon. If she had been white and blond, she would have been on the cover of
People
magazine for months. She would have been the top story until she was found. It makes me sick.”

“What
did
happen back in October? Why did they tell you guys they stopped looking?”

“I don’t know. They said some bullshit about her being troubled, about her being a classic runaway, whatever that means, and then someone up in Olympia thought they saw her at a bus station, and that was enough. Case closed. It was bullshit. It was racist bullshit. It’s always the same. A white girl is worth our attention, but how many Mexican girls have to be mutilated for us to pay attention to what’s going on in Ciudad Juárez? How many black kids had to die before we gave a shit about the Atlanta Child Murders?”

“I feel like a serious jerk, but I don’t even know what those things are.”

“Of course you don’t. Most people don’t. Look them up sometime and you’ll get so angry you’ll feel like your head is
exploding.” He looked at me, something soft settling over his eyes, and then he wrapped an arm around me and leaned his head into my shoulder. “Sometimes it’s all too much, Wood. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said, closing my eyes. “I do.”

THAT NIGHT I SAT OUT
on the lawn with Alex and Brody. The pall of Iris’s death hung heavy on the school, but no one was talking about it. There was such a rampant fervor to carry on with life as usual that it was almost like talking about her was taboo. So I did my best to laugh at their jokes and to seem like I wasn’t upset.