Part 55 (1/2)
”Andrea!” Chief Bradley calls, blundering through the brush not far behind them. ”Andrea, stop!
Andrea, I see you --”
-- and there is a flat crack!, like a big branch breaking -- -- and Mouse and Andrew stand with their backs up against the bole of a tree. Andrew has a hand over Mouse's mouth to keep her from squeaking, which is a good thing, because Chief Bradley is directly in front of them, almost close enough to reach out and touch. He stands with his back to them, poised, listening; to Mouse, the sound of her own breath in her nostrils seems suddenly as loud as a jet engine.
Chief Bradley looks left, then right, then left again. It's full dark now, but this close, if he turns all the way around, he can't help but see them.
He doesn't turn around. He takes a step backwards. This brings him within arm's length, and Mouse feels Andrew tense up, preparing to push her aside and grapple the chief from behind.
Then something else moves, out in the dark; some animal. Chief Bradley fixes on the sound, starts moving towards it. The animal, whatever it is, hears him coming and bounds away; Chief Bradley gives chase. He vanishes in the gloom.
Andrew relaxes again. He removes his hand from Mouse's mouth.
Mouse slumps -- -- and she is crouching in a thicket of weeds alongside a footpath that is just barely visible in the moonlight. She can hear water somewhere close by; the lake, maybe, although it sounds more like the burbling of a river or a brook. Farther off, in the opposite direction, something is cras.h.i.+ng around in the brush again. Chief Bradley, Mouse guesses, still chasing after wildlife; he's making a lot of noise but he doesn't seem to be getting any closer.
But where is Andrew? Keeping her voice below a whisper, Mouse speaks his name. A shadow on the other side of the footpath responds with a soft ”Shhhh . . .”
Andrew crawls over to her. Cupping a hand to her ear, he murmurs, ”Are you hurt?”
Actually, Mouse realizes, what he said was, ”Are you hit?” as in shot.
”I don't think so,” she murmurs back.
”Good,” Andrew says, and raises his head for a moment. ”I think Chief Bradley's far enough away now. We're going to go along this path -- stay low until it turns by the side of the brook, then stand up and start running.”
”Where does the path go?” Mouse starts to ask, but Andrew puts a finger to her lips. The sound of cras.h.i.+ng underbrush has suddenly gotten louder again.
”Move fast,” Andrew whispers, and -- -- Mouse runs.
There was a moment's sting as I dipped my hand into Hansen's Brook. Then the cold water went to work, rinsing out and anesthetizing the cuts. I knelt at an angle on the edge of the bank, gripping a branch with my other hand so that I wouldn't fall in.
We'd come about a mile up the path. It probably wasn't smart to stop here, but Penny was out of breath, and I was starting to feel dangerously lightheaded; my hand was throbbing in time with my heartbeat, and I was worried I might be losing too much blood. Before kneeling beside the brook I'd listened carefully for sounds of pursuit, and because his hearing is better than mine, I'd called Seferis back out and had him listen too. Neither of us had heard anything.
After a couple of minutes I pulled my hand out of the water. I tried to examine it, but it was too dark to make out much detail; in starlight, blood and shadow are the same color. s.h.i.+vering a little, I wrapped my hand up tight again in the dishcloth.
Penny was s.h.i.+vering too. She hugged herself, twisting back and forth in an attempt to stay warm.
”Hey,” I said softly, ”how are you doing?”
”Cold,” came her answer. ”Scared.”
”Me too,” I told her. ”But I think we'll be all right. . .”
”All right?” Penny said, and had to struggle to keep her voice low. ”Andrew, the chief of police is after us. You hit him -- I'm glad you hit him, but now if he doesn't just kill us, he'll probably put us in jail.”
”No,” I objected. ”It isn't going to happen that way. He's the one who did wrong, not us!”
”That doesn't matter. He's the chief of police. He can do wrong, if he wants to.”
”He confessed. To both of us! If we tell people --”
”They won't believe us. It's true, what he said: you're officially crazy in the state of Michigan, and I, I'm traveling with you. Both our words together won't measure up to his.”
”Officer Cahill will believe us. Or at least he'll want to give me the benefit of the doubt. And when Mrs. Winslow gets here. . .”
”Mrs. Winslow?”
”Yes,” I said, ”she's coming here. Chief Bradley spoke to her this morning. She could be here already.”
”Well even if that's helpful,” Penny said, ”how is she going to find us?”
”Well. . .” I had to think about that for a moment. ”Well, this path we're on, it goes all the way to Quarry Lake, and from there, you know, we can get up to the cottage, and then. . .”
”Oh G.o.d,” said Penny, making it clear that that was the last place she wanted to go back to.
”I know,” I said, ”I don't want to go there either, but. . . what else can we do? I mean you're right, if we stay out here Mrs. Winslow will never find us. What we really need to do is sneak back into town, and from the cottage I think we have some choices how to go.”
”But won't Chief Bradley find us, if we go to the cottage? He must know where this path leads to.” As the thought took hold, she looked away fearfully up the path in the direction of Quarry Lake, as if expecting the chief to already have outflanked us.
She had a point: Chief Bradley was sure to be familiar with the hiking trails in the area, especially one that led up the back way to a house he coveted. But Adam, chiming in from the pulpit, argued that the chief didn't necessarily know we'd gone this way, and that even if he suspected, he would resist the conclusion as long as possible. ”He wants to find us by the lake,” Adam said, ”so even if he guesses we aren't there anymore, he'll keep beating the bushes a while anyway, hoping he's wrong.”
”But why. . .?”
”Chief Bradley doesn't want to shoot us. He wants us to have an accident -- something that even he can think of as an accident. The cottage doesn't have a swimming pool.”
”Quarry Lake,” I pointed out.
”He can't roll his car into Quarry Lake. . . Look, I'm not saying he won't go to the cottage, but we've probably got some time before he does. Don't waste it.”
Penny, following her own internal discussion, had come to a similar conclusion. Saying, ”Oh G.o.d, let's just get it over with,” she started walking again. I went with her.
I thought of Xavier, coming along this same path six years ago. Gideon had left him a map and written instructions specifying that he was to sneak up on the cottage from behind, slip through the back gate around sunset, and bang on the kitchen door after first making sure that there were no visitors in the house. The rest of the plan, which involved threatening to expose Horace Rollins as a child molester unless he wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars, struck me as improbable on a number of levels, but the stepfather never got a chance to laugh in Xavier's face. Reaching Quarry Lake at dusk, Xavier had missed the path to the cottage and gone up the Mount Idyll trail instead. By the time he realized his error -- by the time Gideon got him turned around -- the sun had set completely, and if not for the almost-full moon that night, he might never have found the right way. And then it was too late: coming through the gate at last, he heard shouts from inside the cottage. . .
I stopped short; the brookside path had just come to an abrupt end, and Quarry Lake was before us. Caught by surprise, I turned to look back the way we'd come.
”What is it?” Penny whispered, misinterpreting the gesture. ”Do you hear something?”
”No,” I said. ”It's just. . .” Hadn't there been a forest of brambles here, only this morning? No, I thought, that was twenty years ago. . . and the evil conjurer was dead now, having met up with the wrong prince. ”It's nothing,” I told her, shaking my head. ”Ghosts.”
”Come on,” Penny said. She took my hand, and led me along the lake-bank to the start of the cottage path. Then, huddling close together, we stepped into the woods.
It's pitch-black beneath the trees. They climb slowly, stopping often to make sure they have not left the path. They listen for suspicious sounds ahead, and the woods oblige them with all manner of strange noises: at one point they hear a weird sc.r.a.ping that reminds Mouse of a manhole cover being dragged open. They wait to see if the sc.r.a.ping will be repeated, but it isn't, and so they continue on.