HUNTING MYSELF

Day 18 of 100

There is a particular silence in the Vermont woods after a spring snow, and Mara had forgotten it.

The storm had come in the night, a wet heavy fall out of season, late April's last joke, and by morning the whole east shore of Lake Merrow was laid under a blanket three inches deep. It clung to the hemlocks in clots. It bowed the young birches until their tips touched the ground. Every branch dripped, softly, steadily, with a sound like a hundred slow clocks; and between the drips, nothing. No wind. No birds. The air smelled of resin and wet stone and cold.

She walked behind the Captain with her hands in her sleeves and her eyes on his boots, and thought: I am hunting myself.

It would have been funny, in a book.

…

She had not slept.

The morning after the Saturday, she had gone to Tanner's Row in the gray before dawn, with her collar up and her spectacles in her pocket, and knocked on the green door of Number Nine. Ruth Pellam had opened it in a nightcap with a candle in one hand and the cat Ptolemy winding about her ankles, and had looked at the white face on her step and said, "Well. In you come," without another word.

They had sat in the kitchen. Mara had told her as much as she dared. A woman in the village had her face and had ordered a gown in her name. The Captain would come. Ruth had listened with her hands folded on her apron and her wise old eyes steady, and when it was finished she had said, "A lady in a veil."

"Ruth—"

"A lady in a heavy veil, with a Boston voice. Came on the Tuesday, paid in notes, wouldn't give her name, and went off in a hired gig toward the Falls road." The old woman's mouth had creased. "I'm sixty-eight, child. I've been lied to by better liars than the Bureau, and I've told a few good ones myself. I shall be extremely stupid and extremely clear."

She had been. On Monday morning Captain Rooke had gone to Tanner's Row with Mara trailing at his heel, her notebook open, and Ruth had given him tea and seed cake and a description of a veiled Boston lady so convincing that Mara herself, writing it down, had half believed it. The cat had sat on the Captain's knee. He had gone away looking at his boots.

One door closed, thought Mara. Now the next.

The next was this.

…

"Here," said Rooke.

He had stopped in a clearing among the hemlocks. Before them the ground fell away to the water, gray and still beneath a low lid of cloud, with a long finger of shingle running out into it. A stack of old stones stood to one side, half-buried in brambles: the remains of a charcoal burner's hut, empty these thirty years. The snow in front of it was trampled.

"Footprints," said Rooke.

"Yes, Captain."

"Woman's boots. Small. Heeled." He crouched. His gloved fingers hovered above the nearest print, not touching, as though he were afraid of waking it. "Three, four sets, I think. She's been here more than once. Going and coming from the north."

"Toward the Academy."

"Toward the Academy." He looked up. "How did you find the place?"

"The porter at East Court," said Mara. "He said the lamp-girl had seen a woman go along the shore path on Thursday with a lantern, and come back at dawn. I asked at the boathouse. Mr. Dunne said the charcoal hut had been disturbed. So I came and looked."

All of it was true, in a manner of speaking. The lamp-girl had said so, for a quarter and a promise of discretion; and Mr. Dunne had grumbled about "folks messing in the hut," when what she had actually asked was whether he'd seen any strange tracks, and had paid for the answer with a long listen to a story about a dog.

What she had not told the Captain was that she had come out the night before, with a bootmaker's last borrowed from Ruth, and walked the shore path on her knees in the dark, making the prints herself.

Small heeled boots, not mine. Her own were flat as boards. Three sets, in and out, the toes turned a little in, as a nervous woman walks. She had crouched here for an hour in the snow with a lantern shuttered to a slit, pressing the old last into the white, over and over, until her fingers were dead and her knees were wet through. She had walked it backward, too, in a loop, to make the line of the track.

She had never done anything so cold-blooded in her life.

It's a lie, said a small stubborn voice. Every bit of this is a lie, and he will find it out, and what will he think of you?

He will think I am his clerk, she told it. Which I am. And I am buying Ruth time, and myself a week.

She pushed the voice down. She had gotten good at that.

"There," said Rooke softly. "You see how the stride shortens at the hut? She stopped to listen." He rose. His face in the pale light was keen and absorbed. "She was afraid of being followed. Look, she cut back along the water's edge to hide the track. It's the act of a woman who's used to being watched." He stopped. "Or of a woman who's very clever."

"Yes, Captain."

"You're very quiet, Miss Fenwick."

"I'm thinking."

"What of?"

That you are standing in a lie I built for you, and are looking at it with such honest pleasure.

"Of how tired she must have been," said Mara.

He turned his head and looked at her. It was only a glance. But it lingered; and she felt it go over her face as one feels sunlight through a window, and she lowered her eyes, and the snow dripped from the hemlocks like a slow clock.

…

They followed the trail for two hours.

It led, as she had designed it to, along the shore and up through the hemlocks, in a long meandering loop that came out, at last, a mile north of the Academy at a lightning-split oak the whole town called the Gossip Tree. It stood alone at the edge of a pasture, huge and black and hollow, with a cavity at the height of a man's chest in which generations of Thornwick girls had left notes for one another, caramels, or declarations of love. She had been seventeen the last time. Josie Tull had written, in a round desperate hand, I think Tobias Marsh is going to ask me to the Founders' Ball, and Mara had written back, He is, and you will say yes, and he will tread on your feet. She had been right on all three counts.

She stopped under the oak, and looked up at the dark hollow, and her heart gave a great hard bump.

"The trail ends here," said Rooke.

"The prints go on into the pasture. They're lost in the sheep-tracks." She was amazed at the steadiness of her voice. "Captain, I'd like to look at the tree."

"The tree?"

"It's hollow. A woman who wants to leave a message, or hide something—" She shrugged. "It's what I'd do."

He gave her a long look, and nodded, and stepped away to examine the pasture fence. She heard his boots go crunching off along the wall. She counted four paces, five, six. Then she reached into the hollow with her gloved hand.

There was a ball of old caramel wrappers. A sheaf of damp paper. A dead mouse. She pushed them aside and her fingers found a ledge, and she drew from inside her sleeve the folded square she'd carried since dawn, sealed with a thumb of candle-wax, and thrust it far back into the dark.

Josie, the paper said, inside, in the hand that had sent Mother is ill, come home and Happy birthday, you dreadful girl and a thousand other notes to the same name. Her mouth was dry as she thought of it. She had written it six times and burned five.

You will think I am mad. I'm not. Whoever is at your side is not me. Ask her what we did on the fourth of July when we were eleven. Ask her what I said when you cut your hair. Ask her to show you the inside of her left wrist. —M.

If you believe me, put a white ribbon in the oak.

She withdrew her hand. She straightened her sleeve. She turned, and found the Captain not forty feet away, watching her.

He had not moved from the fence. He stood with one boot on the lowest rail and his arms folded on the post, a tall gray shape against the white field, and his eyes on her face. She could not tell what he had seen. The oak was between them. The hollow was above his eye-line; she'd been careful.

"Anything?" he called.

"A mouse," said Mara.

"I'm sorry."

"It was already dead."

He did smile at that, a quick surprised thing. She came away from the tree, and for the first time since the Ascension she felt her heart go quiet.

I am a very bad person, she thought. And I did not mind at all.

…

It began to snow again at half past one.

It came on in great soft flakes, slowly, out of a sky gone the color of pewter, and the Captain looked at it with a frown. They had a mile and a half to the Post. He turned back along the ridge, and she followed, and for a time neither of them spoke. The snow muffled the world. It fell on his shoulders and she watched it settle, and melt, and settle again. It fell in his dark hair. It made the whole forest very intimate, like a room with the curtains drawn.

She did not remember who spoke first.

"You've no people," said Rooke. "In the Concord house. No brother?"

"No."

"Your father is dead."

"Eight years."

"And your mother?"

"Longer." She hesitated. "She died when I was young."

He said nothing for a moment. Then: "Mine, too."

She did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the path, where the snow was filling his footprints as fast as he made them.

"I was nine. Typhoid. It went through the north shore in the autumn of '74. Half the cottages on the spit lost someone." His voice was even. "I remember the smell of the camphor. And that the clock in the kitchen stopped, and no one wound it for a year."

"I'm sorry."

"It's an old wound. Old ones heal clean." A pause. "It was my father, afterwards."

She waited.

"He kept the lake," said Rooke. "Lake Merrow had a keeper, in those days, a man the Academy paid to look after the lights and the moorings and the boats. He wasn't a Soul-Seer or anything of the sort; he had no gift at all, only a good ear for weather. He taught me the names of the winds. He taught me to row." He stopped, to duck a bough. "I was ten when the man from the Bureau came to the cottage. With a paper."

"What sort of paper?"

"A summons. My father had been named in a complaint about a drowning. Nothing to it. A student from the Academy had taken a skiff out in a squall, against orders, and the family wished to blame the keeper. The man took him away to Burlington to be examined." He walked on a few paces. "He was gone six weeks. When they sent him home, he sat down on the dock and looked at the water, and did not stop."

"Did not stop?"

"Looking. He did not speak. He did not eat unless I put the food in his hand. He knew me, I think. At times he knew me. But the thing that had been him—" He lifted one gloved hand and let it fall. "It was as if they had taken something out and sewn the skin up neatly. There was no scar. He lived eleven years in that condition. I fed him with a spoon."

Mara's throat closed.

"They never said what they did. The Bureau never says. I have the examination report, it's in my trunk, I've read it perhaps two hundred times. 'Subject examined under standard procedures. Subject released.' I applied for a place in the Wardens at nineteen." A short hard laugh. "I thought I'd find out. I thought I could look at the thing from inside. I was a very young man."

Nineteen, thought Mara. The year I was fourteen.

She did not know why she thought it. It crossed her mind and was gone, like a fish turning under a dock.

"And did you?" she asked. "Find out?"

"No."

"But you stayed."

"I'm good at it." He said it flatly, as a man names a defect. "I can see what the Bureau cannot. I thought if I stayed, I might do some small good at the edges. Put the right name on the right paper. Stand between a family and a summons." He glanced at her, quickly, and away. "It isn't enough."

"It's a great deal."

"It's a ledger," said Rooke, "and I have never once seen it balance."

…

She walked beside him in the falling snow and watched him from the corner of her eye, and a thing came clear to her that she'd half known for days.

He was punishing himself.

It was in every particular. It was in the cot in the loft, hard as a plank, in a room with a good stove he never lit. It was in the coat, a decade old, with the cuff mended three times, though the Bureau paid a Captain well. It was in the way he ate what Okafor left and never sat down to a meal. In the daybook that he carried against his ribs like a stone. In the single shirt-sleeve of tenderness he permitted himself, a lamp, a tray of tea, and the fierce bright shame with which he retreated afterward.

Whatever he did, she thought, whatever he thinks he did, he has been paying for it for ten years.

She did not know what it was. She only knew the look of it. She had worn it herself, in the black dress, at fourteen. A person who has been made to believe that the world's wrongness is his own.

She wanted, abruptly and quite violently, to put her hand on his arm.

She didn't.

"It's steep here," said Rooke. He had stopped at the foot of the ridge, where the path climbed over a shoulder of rock and a stand of birch. The slope was slick with new snow. "Let me go first. I'll take the weight."

"I can manage."

"I'm sure you can." The corner of his mouth moved. "Humor me."

He went up. She followed, with her skirts hitched in one fist, and her breath going up before her face in white plumes. It was harder than it looked. The rock was wet, the footing treacherous, and twice she slipped; and at the top, where the path turned around a boulder, her boot went out from under her altogether, and she flung out her hand to catch at the ledge.

He caught her.

He had been standing above her with his back to the drop. He turned, in one quick motion, and his hand closed around hers.

It was a gloved hand. So was her own. It made no difference. She felt the whole grip of it go through the wool and the leather to the bone: warm, hard, entirely steady, with a thumb that settled over her knuckles. He drew her up. She came to her feet on the ledge, with the snow falling and the pines black behind him, and found herself an arm's length from his chest.

Neither of them let go.

She did not remember deciding to look up. His eyes were very near. They were gray, like the lake in winter, with a darker ring around the iris and a shock of something in them that she'd not seen before; a stillness, a held breath. His lips were parted. A flake of snow lay in his lashes. She saw his throat move.

Cal, she thought, and bit down on the word like a bit.

The snow fell between them. The hemlocks dripped. Somewhere far down the slope a branch let go its load with a long soft sigh, and the sound died, and there was nothing, nothing at all but the pulse of his thumb against the back of her hand.

She could not breathe.

Neither, she realized, could he.