What a strange thing to write on a postcard! Liz shook her head.
She changed the period at the end of the second sentence to a comma and added, “fortunately, your pen pal remains much on my mind.” She turned over the card and examined it, then turned it over again. “On this card,” she continued, “you can see the bright red cranberries, as well as the colored leaves typical of an autumn landscape in eastern Massachu— ”
Abruptly, Liz stopped writing. She wished she had not sent DeZona’s photos to Cormac Kinnaird before studying them better, for suddenly she called to mind something in the wrong color family that appeared in the foreground of a couple of the photographs. Now she realized that when she had scrutinized the pictures to get a glimpse of the remains, she had not looked carefully at the out-of-focus elements in the photos’ foregrounds.
Signaling the waitress, Liz paid her bill and made haste to Forges Field Recreational Area. By the time she arrived there, she had to phone in the press conference story to the city desk, cursing the fading afternoon light all the while. With the story filed, she strode over to DeZona’s telephone pole. Standing at the base of it, she realized she needed to climb the pole to get the correct angle on the scene. The pole must be climbable if DeZona had managed it. But Liz was not so skilled, nor did she have the telephone company–issue climbing belt that had helped DeZona clamber up the pole. Giving up on scaling the pole, she moved her car next to it and stood on its roof. She saw nothing out of place in the scene. That was not surprising, since the car’s roof was nowhere near as high as DeZona’s perch had been.
If she could not look down on the scene from above, there was one more option: walk into the scene and look up. But how would she ensure that she did not get lost as dusk fell completely while she was in the hollow? Returning to the car, Liz grabbed an extra reporter’s notebook and a flashlight. Then, she stepped into the woods. When her car was nearly out of sight, she attached a page from the notebook to the branch of a tree at eye level. She marked more trees and shrubs this way as she worked her way into the depression from which the police had so recently removed the remains.
Liz made it to the base of the hollow—the place where the deer had taken their rest so close to those human bones—without seeing anything out of the ordinary on the way down. In the heart of the hollow, she paused and shivered. It seemed only right to do something to honor the pair who’d met their ends here, whoever they were. But the light was fading and there was a hint of pink in the sky, signaling sunset. There was no time to linger. Very quietly humming the hymn “Amazing Grace,” Liz stood quite still as she regarded the reddening sky. She asked herself which way felt right for retracing her steps and pointed her arm in that direction. Dropping her eyes to look, she saw that, without her paper markers, she would have walked into the woods in a direction that was about thirty degrees off from the correct one.
Thanking herself for marking the path, Liz made her way up the slope again. It was an easier task to remove than to attach the papers to the trees, so Liz was able to concentrate better on examining the branches above her. When she came to the end of “Amazing Grace,” she hummed it again, a little more loudly. This time, she was humming it as much for reassurance as to honor the dead. She longed to share the intensely lonely scene with something living, even a chickadee. But there was no sign of the little birds, not even the sound of their distinctive call, chicka-dee-dee-dee.
But it soon became evident that Liz was not alone in the darkening hollow. Suddenly, the silent woods did produce a noise sounding, for all the world, like an old biddy shrieking, “Drink your tea!” There it was again, “Drink your tea!”
As a branch moved off to her left, Liz realized the noise had been a birdcall. She could not call to mind the name of the bird, which she now saw possessed an iridescent black body and a brown head. The bird dropped to the ground, poking its beak at the underbrush. Liz looked away from the bird, scanning the landscape.
And then she saw it. The same metallic red color she’d seen in the blurry foreground of DeZona’s photo. A synthetic strand of knitting material, worked into a bird’s nest on the ground. But it was the tree branches, not the ground, that must have formed the foreground to DeZona’s photos. Had the nest fallen from a tree? No, it looked as though it had been built where it lay, nestled into the twigs and leaves there. Liz shone her flashlight on the nest. It also contained some finer strands of strawberry-blonde human hair.
Grasping the sap-covered trunk of a young pitch pine for support, Liz heard a sound she recognized. The same kind of keening she’d heard from Veronica when the child flew across the Newton City Hall Common and threw herself into Liz’s arms. This time, however, the sound came from Liz’s own throat.
She turned her eyes to a sky that had turned the color of flame. And as she did, she saw the glint of another piece of synthetic yarn snagged on a tree branch, the kind of yarn that might well be knitted into the nose of a reindeer in a Christmas-patterned sweater.
Chapter 28
Although it was in easy reach, Liz did not remove the bird’s nest from its place. Instead, with delicate movements born of respect for the dead, she pinched a few strands of hair between her fingernails and pulled them gently from the nest. She also used the scissors on the small Swiss Army knife she carried on her key chain to snip off a tiny segment of the synthetic yarn. Carefully folding the evidence into another sheet of paper taken from her reporter’s notebook, she put the little packet into the pocket of her leather jacket.
Next, Liz looked around at the increasingly dim scene. The only outstanding landscape feature was a boulder, looking like a ghostly white mound in the falling light. She would have loved to measure the nest’s distance from the boulder but had nothing except her feet or her notebook to use as a ruler. She was reluctant to pace the distance without having another landmark to find it by in the future. In her mind’s eye, she drew a line from the boulder through the bird’s nest to the first tree beyond the nest. It was the same pitch pine she grasped for support earlier. But, amongst so many other pines, how would she recognize this one later? She could tag the tree with paper but paper is not weatherproof and she did not want to call anyone else’s attention to the spot. Looking fruitlessly for something to mark it with—even a pile of pebbles to place by its trunk—she realized she could bend and break some branches on the tree to mark it. Only after breaking three of them did she pace out the distance to the boulder. Then she used her flashlight to help her find and remove one piece of paper after another until she left the hollow behind her.
As she approached her car, which stood alone in the parking lot, she reproached herself for failing to comb the scene for any dark hairs the police might have left behind. Kinnaird would wish to compare them with the paler strands, she was certain.
In her car, she placed a call to her answering machine in the newsroom, hoping she would find a message on it from Cormac. There was no word from him. Instead, a message from Jan Van Wormer prompted her to phone him immediately.
“Al told me he returned to the topiary garden in Wellesley today,” the piano builder said. “He said it was the first time, since that long-ago incident, that he could bring himself to visit a place he had once loved. When he was there, he saw an older woman tossing things to her dog. She didn’t look particularly familiar, he said, but when he heard the sound of her voice he took another look. It was Ellen’s mother, Olga Swenson.”