‘Duran,’ Kurt repeated more urgently, grabbing the old man’s shoulder. ‘Do you want to find Mary alive?’
Duran looked at the sergeant and nodded, the wild look in his eye vanishing in a blink to anger.
‘Can you track it?’ Kurt asked.
Duran looked into the forest and his paralysis vanished. ‘Damn right,’ he hissed, and reached down to grab his rifle.
Agry stood up and looked at them all. ‘We’re not running anymore,’ he said. ‘We’re going after this thing. Anybody have a problem with that?’
Ethan watched as everybody shook their heads. He looked back to where the dead elk lay somewhere in the distance, then at Duran Wilkes, and then out to where Mary had been dragged away into the forest.
‘Yeah,’ he said finally, ‘I do.’
‘What?’ Kurt snapped, grimacing at him. ‘You want to go home instead? I thought you were a goddamned marine?’
‘What’s on your mind?’ Lopez asked.
Ethan gestured back to where they had hung the soldier’s body as bait.
‘We set a trap for this thing,’ he said. ‘It then deceives us to distract us away from Duran and his group, steals Simmons’s body, and then takes Mary away. Doesn’t anybody else think that’s a deliberate plan of action on its part?’
‘I don’t care if this thing reads War and Peace every night and plays fucking chess,’ Kurt snapped back. ‘Only way we’re getting out of here is if it goes down, and it’s going down.’
‘That’s what you said yesterday,’ Lopez pointed out.
Kurt gestured at Duran. ‘He’ll take us to it, and we’ll kill it.’
‘And that’s my problem,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t think it’s doing any of this randomly. I think it wants us to follow it.’
Kurt stared at him for a long moment. Ethan noticed that Duran now turned his head and looked straight at him.
‘You think?’ the old man snapped.
‘I can’t figure out any other reason for why this is all happening,’ Ethan replied. ‘It stopped us from getting back out of the valley, but let us travel north. It took Willis, then hurt him so that we’d hear it, to keep us following. Now, it’s outwitted us and taken one of our number again, giving us a reason to keep following it. It killed that elk as bait and tore off the antlers so that we wouldn’t identify what we were looking at until it was too late.’
Duran clenched his rifle tightly as he shook his head. ‘That’s not what happened to my wife. It just took her and disappeared.’
‘Different circumstances,’ Ethan said. ‘If we start following it instead of trying to kill it, we might be able to figure out why it’s doing what it’s doing.’
Kurt Agry turned away from them in disgust. ‘This is bullshit. You really think the ape’s gone all Einstein on us?’
Duran Wilkes got up from his knees and hefted his rifle onto his shoulder.
‘We’ve done things your way twice now, Kurt,’ he said, ‘and both times it has cost lives. Now my Mary is gone. You’re not my priority right now: she is. I’m going to follow this thing and find out where it leads me.’
Duran looked at Ethan and nodded once before he turned on his heel and walked away between the broken and trampled ferns. Ethan looked at Lopez, who shrugged.
‘I’m in, if you want to go for it?’
Ethan nodded and picked up his bergen. ‘What we’re here for.’
‘What you were here for,’ Kurt Agry corrected him, ‘was to find Cletus MacCarthy’s body, and he was killed miles from here in Fox Creek.’
‘That’s right,’ Ethan agreed, ‘and we haven’t found him yet. This creature just strolled out of here with at least two bodies in its grasp and didn’t seem to find it that hard, so my guess is that wherever it takes them is where we’ll find Cletus and the answers we need. You got any better ideas, how about sharing them?’
Kurt’s features creased with indignation.
‘You need to get yourselves out of this,’ he uttered.
‘Out of what, exactly?’ Lopez snapped.
Kurt looked at her for a moment. ‘Out of this forest.’
‘We will,’ Ethan replied, and turned to follow Duran. ‘Right when we’ve done what we came here to do.’
43
Ben Consiglio stepped into the office of the principal, an elderly lady named Martha Knight who had overseen the residents of the orphanage for almost forty years. Conservatively dressed and with a sharp eye like a bird of prey, Ben guessed that she was one of the old-school types, a firm but fair hand. Certainly the orphanage itself was immaculate in its appearance.
‘Thank you for seeing me,’ he said as they sat down opposite each other at her desk.
‘We get a lot of visitors,’ Martha replied by way of an explanation. ‘Often from biological parents seeking to contact their lost children. Lives change, people change, and sometimes parents who could not afford to raise a child in their youth find themselves in different circumstances in later life.’ She smiled. ‘Was that why you came here?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Ben said. ‘I was one of the lucky ones, my folks are still together. This is regarding an investigation by a Congressional committee. I’m on the analytical team and we’re trying to gather information.’
‘On whom?’ Martha asked. ‘We have detailed records of all residents here.’
‘Joanna Defoe,’ Ben replied, ‘she would have been resident here somewhere between—’
‘1986 and 1996?’ Martha suggested with another smile.
‘You have a remarkable memory,’ Ben said. ‘I can barely remember what I did last week sometimes.’
‘I have a thing for names,’ Martha explained, ‘which then leads me to recall everything else. Joanna was indeed a resident here after her father died tragically young, a heart attack I think?’
‘Cardiac arrest,’ Ben confirmed.
‘Joanna was sent here shortly afterward,’ Martha went on. ‘I remember her well because she was so active, a real handful but in a good way. She was a wonderful sportswoman, keen on tennis and field sports. I thought that she might have pursued a professional sporting career but she seemed more interested in politics and world affairs. She went to college after she left here and then became a journalist, I believe, but I haven’t heard from her for some time.’
‘When did you last speak to Joanna?’ Ben asked.
‘She used to come by here if she was in DC,’ Martha said. ‘I suppose the last time was probably about four or five years ago.’
‘And did she seem as if anything was troubling her at all?’
Martha shrugged.
‘Joanna was a closed book,’ she said. ‘She was always upbeat, optimistic, cheerful, but it meant that you could never really tell whether she was actually happy or not. She very rarely opened up.’
‘But she did?’ Ben pressed. ‘Sometimes?’
‘Occasionally,’ Martha replied sadly, ‘when she spoke of her parents. She never knew her mother, you see, which must be an extremely difficult thing to deal with. Then her father passed away. You must understand, Mr. Consiglio, that these things all happened before she was eight years old. Joanna Defoe was scarred even before she reached adulthood. Who knows how she really felt inside?’
Ben frowned as he thought for a moment. ‘Who actually sent her here?’ he asked.
Martha stood up and strode across to a bank of filing cabinets that stretched along one wall of her office. She pulled one open that was marked with a D, and rifled through for a moment before lifting out a thick file. She sat down again opposite Ben, who saw the name printed in neat ink on the top corner of the file: ‘DEFOE, J’.