The realization brought fresh tears, and behind them, a surge of anger. She had always thought herself strong. After her divorce, she had maintained a household, provided for her daughter, and resisted any temptation to reconcile with Mark, who would occasionally make overtures that seemed more like the pat chatter of a horny male than the sincere revelations of a man suffering regrets. She had moved on, moved up, and though this new marriage hadn't been the stuff of dreams, she was determined-
"DO YOU LOVE HIM?"
This time the breeze was staccato, deep, the sounds rounded off into syllables. The voice was female, as frigid and calm and dead as the lost echo from a forgotten grave.
"Who's there?" Katy said, not really thinking anyone was there. The house was locked. Only crazy people heard voices when no one was there. And she wasn't crazy.
"Mom?"
The voice was behind her now. Younger, higher…
"Jett?" She turned. Her daughter stood in the shadows of the hall, her silhouette visible against the slice of light leaking from her room. Katy was aware of her exposed body and wrapped her arms around her chest.
"Are you okay, Mom?"
"Sure, honey. I was just checking on something in the kitchen."
"I thought I heard you talking to somebody."
Had Katy spoken? She couldn't be sure. A horrified part of herself wondered if she had actually answered the Voice's bare and bald question. But the Voice wasn't real and the house was quiet and it was always easy to lie to yourself when you didn't like the truth. What she couldn't avoid was her daughter's stare. Katy had never been a prude about nakedness, but there was an unwritten rule that you didn't go starkers around your kids once they passed the toddler stage.
"It's okay, sweetie," Katy said. "Go on back to bed. You have school tomorrow."
"It's not even ten yet, Mom. That's pretty lame even for Solom."
"Well, go read or study or something. Listen to some music."
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine."
Jett stepped back into the light of her doorway. Her dyed-black hair was tied back in a ponytail, her face bare of makeup, braces glinting silver. A sweet, round-eyed child. Not a drugged-out potential menace to society, as Gordon saw her, and not a disruption to learning, as her teachers claimed. Just a sweet little girl. Her baby.
"Whatever," Jett said. "It's not like we get through problems together or anything. That's just a line we use for the counselors, right?"
Jett was about to close the door, but men stuck her head back out and said, "By the way, what's that smell? Like somebody farted flowers or something."
The door closed with a click and the hallway went black and Katy slid down the newel post and sat on the top stair until her tears had dried.
Chapter Eighteen
Elliott was being a total dick. Carolyn Everhart didn't like to think of her husband in such bald, crude terms, but he'd taken the whole vacation as a measure of his testosterone levels. From booking the rental car ("Let's go with the guys who try harder") to deciding on restaurant stops on the trip down, Elliott always had a snappy answer for her every question, and a good reason why he knew best. As they'd followed the Appalachian foothills south, Elliott seemed to have grown wax in his ears and a fur pelt that hadn't graced humans since they'd started shaking their Neanderthal origins.
Solom had been picked almost at random. Elliott worked at PAMCO Engineering with a guy who'd attended Westridge University and said the North Carolina mountains were relatively unspoiled ("A perfect place to get away from it all while still having it all"). An Internet search and credit card reservation later, and they were booked in the Happy Hollow retreat for a week, and since September was leaf season, the cabins cost a premium. A two-day drive from White Plains, with a Holiday Inn Express layover ("Complete with a 'lay,' what do you think, honey?") in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and they had arrived with not a single argument over road maps.
But here in the failing light, she couldn't get Elliott to even look at the map, much less admit they were lost. The pocket map they'd picked up from the outfitters' had been fine as long as they stuck to the river road, which was flat and gently curving. But Elliott had insisted on what he called "a little off-roading," though after two hours her legs had begun to cramp and the air temperature dipped into the low forties. Instead of complaining, she pointed out that the bikes were geared for road racing and not mountain climbing. Too late. The name "Switchback Trail" had intrigued him. Besides, he'd complimented her on how the biking shorts snugged her ass, and that had bought him a little slack. Elliott chased down a forest trail barely wide enough for a fox run, and that trail branched off twice, crossed a narrow creek, and cut around a cluster of granite boulders that had risen like a backwoods Stonehenge from the swells of the earth. Two forks later ("The road less traveled or the road not taken, what do you say, you liberal arts major, you?") and he'd juddered over a root in the gathering darkness and been thrown over the handlebars. No bones broken, but some serious scrapes that would require antibiotic ointment.
Now they stood in a cluster of hardwood trees whose branches were nearly devoid of foliage. If any houses were around, their lights didn't show. Small, unseen animals skirled up leaves around them and darkness was falling harder and faster than a Democratic presidential hopeful's poll numbers. Carolyn, a homemaker, Humane Society volunteer, member of the Sands Creek subdivision bridge club, and devout Republican, resisted the urge to say, "Well, we really got away from it all, didn't we?"
Elliott pulled a penlight from his fanny pack and played it over the bicycle. "I think the front wheel's warped. We'll have to pay for the damage when we get back."
"You mean 'if we get back."
"I know exactly where we are."
"Show me, then." She pulled out her copy of the fourfold pocket map. It was bordered with ads for area tourist attractions, fine dining establishments, and investment Realtors. The river road was marked by a series of arrows, and the Solom General Store and Back2Nature Outfitters were marked with red X marks. State Highway 292 leading from Windshake was clearly delineated in thick black ink. Tester Community Park, about five miles from the outfitters' judging from the scale of the map, was the last recognizable landmark they'd passed.
"We're right about here," Elliott said, running the beam of the penlight over a printed area that represented two square miles.
"There aren't any lines there," Carolyn pointed out.
"Sure. But we were headed east, remember? The sun was sinking behind us."
Actually, Carolyn recalled only vague glimpses of the sun once they'd left the relatively familiar flatness of the pavement. What bits of scattered light did break through the gnarled and scaly branches seemed to originate from a different position with each new slope or fork. When the sun had settled on the rim of the mountains, the entire sky had taken on the shade of a bruised plum, and Carolyn was thinking by then that even a trail of bread crumbs out of "Hansel and Gretel" wouldn't have led them home before midnight.
"Can the bike roll?" she asked.
"Sure, honey." Elliott lifted the bike by its handlebars and spun the wheel with one hand. The wheel made three revolutions, the rubber sloughing erratically against the tines, before it came to a complete stop. "Well, it can work in an emergency."
"At what point does this become an emergency?"
'Take it easy, Carolyn. We can walk out of here in no time. Once we find the river, we'll be home free."
"Do you know where the river is?"
"Sure, honey." He took the map from her, and fixed the penlight on the place he'd decided as their present location. With the beam, he traced a line to Blackburn River on the map, which was conveniently marked with a sinuous swath of blue. "We're here and the river's there. A half-hour's hike, tops."