For a long while, Fiona refused to stay the night at the Cantrell house, and Mary was relieved because she never knew what Gillian might try next-her jealousy was so out of control.
When Gillian got to high school she found her own circle of friends, and she and Mary didn't hang around together much unless it was a family function.
Mary lit one of the candles. She didn't pray, but she meditated, willing her mind to empty, allowing herself to drift… She began to sense the comfort Abigail had talked about, and it was with a touch of regret that she finally blew out the candle and left the room.
"You'll come back, won't you?" Abigail asked, downstairs.
"I'll try." Mary retrieved her coat from the back of the kitchen chair. The visit had been cathartic, but she wasn't sure she could do it again. "Would you mind if I walked in the woods behind the house?"
"Oh, my." Abigail put a hand to her throat, horrified. "Why would you want to do that?"
"I think about the woods sometimes. And dream about the tree house. I thought it might be good for me to actually see it again."
"I can't go into those woods. That's one place I haven't been able to go. I hate those woods." Abigail put a hand to her hair, as if to smooth a style that no longer existed. "Developers are always hounding me, wanting me to sell the land. You'd think I'd want to, the way I hate it. It's worth quite a lot, you know. But even though I can't go in there, I can't sell it either. And what do I need money for?"
What, indeed? To buy more gifts for a dead girl who could never open them? "Do you mind?" Mary repeated gently.
Abigail waved her hand, shooing her away, looking irritated now. "Go ahead, then. I just don't know why you'd want to."
"Dark light," her grandmother used to call the weird cast the sun took in the fall. Mary always felt a tug of sorrow whenever she noticed the change. She never knew if it was simply because it signaled the passage of time and the end of summer, or because the sun had been low on the horizon the day she'd come upon Fiona's body, the trees casting long black shadows.
Today was cool, the temperature in the high fifties. Where the sunlight cut through bare trees, it offered no warmth. It had rained the night before, and the fallen leaves had been packed into a soft, damp cushion beneath Mary's feet. The magnificent scent of earth drifted up to her, and for a moment she was a child again, experiencing the woods with the innocence that came before the bad times.
When she was young, the woods had seemed huge and endless-as big as a small country from one end to the other. With the jaded eyes of an adult, Mary could see that the property was not more than four acres.
She deliberately avoided heading toward where she'd found Fiona's body. Instead, she circled around the edge of the woods, following a faint path made by deer and other wild animals, until she finally reached the tree where they'd spent so much time.
It wasn't as big as she remembered either.
The tree house her father had built with the permission of the previous owners was still there, at least the floor and most of the walls. The windows were just a memory, the glass gone, probably shattered and buried by years of fallen leaves. Sometime during their middle school years, she and Gillian had attempted to spend the night in the tree house, announcing themselves brave and independent enough to survive the wilderness alone. Less than two hours into the evening, Gillian had had enough. When Blythe came to check on them, she ended up carrying her frightened, clinging daughter home with Mary trudging behind, disappointed but resigned.
When Fiona arrived in the neighborhood, Mary took her to the tree house, and soon they were spending hours there talking about boys and music. There they fearlessly remained all night long, tucked into sleeping bags. If Blythe came to check on them, they never heard her.
Now that Mary had decided to immerse herself in the past, she wanted to do it totally.
For years she'd avoided even the faintest memory of this place, and here she was, wallowing in it. She was like the people who couldn't stop cutting themselves. The only difference was that they cut themselves as a distraction from reality. She was finally facing what she'd spent years avoiding. It hurt, but it also felt good in a weird way. Because even though she was where bad things had happened, she felt a strange sense of distance. Maybe time did heal. And unlike Fiona's mother, Mary had moved on. She was a functioning adult. Maybe not fully functioning, but functioning all the same.
The ground around the base of the tree was bare- a sign of activity. A new generation of kids probably came there to play. Maybe they could feel the energy of the young girl who had died nearby but interpreted it as something else, as the magic of the woods.
Mary was a practical person, but she'd been in enough places where evil lurked and powerful tragedies had occurred to know that such violent events could leave their imprint on a place-on the ground, in a building, or even in the air.
She wanted to climb into the tree, to look into the house her father had built, but there was no way she could do it without using her injured arm.
It's probably for the best.
But if she wasn't able to get up into the tree house, she was ready to find the spot where Fiona had died.
The leaves were thick under her feet, and the woods had changed since she'd played there. The deeper she walked, the denser the undergrowth. Multiflora rose, the bane of uncontrolled timberland, had taken over, spreading like cancer across the ground, choking out grasses and even small trees, suffocating the wildflow-ers and jack-in-the-pulpits. Sharp thorns caught on Mary's trench coat and snagged her corduroy pants. They caught in her hair and scratched the back of her hands.
Everything was so overgrown that at first she didn't think she'd be able to find the spot. And then she saw it-a white wooden cross stuck into the ground. She approached until she was able to read the lettering.
WE WILL ALWAYS MISS YOU
WE WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU
Mary didn't remember the cross. But then, she didn't remember much of anything that had happened in those weeks after finding Fiona's body. For a time, her brain had simply shut down, her body moving on autopilot.
What struck her as odd now was the condition of the cross. It looked as if it was either fairly new or had recently been repainted.
She stepped closer, standing in the approximate area where Fiona's body had lain. There, at the base of the cross, was a bouquet of dead red roses. Beside it was a small stuffed teddy bear with a delicate gold chain around its neck. Mary crouched down. On the necklace was a charm shaped like a cheerleader.
She straightened and grabbed the top of the cross. She tried to wiggle it. A cross placed there ten years ago would have been rotten at the base. This had been driven firmly and securely into the ground. The bouquet couldn't have been over a week or two old; the stuffed bear looked to have been outside about the same length of time.
Who would be coming here, fighting the tangle of thorn bushes, to decorate the place where Fiona had died? Mrs. Portman would be the logical person, but Abigail said she never came into the woods.
Mary examined the ground, only to find that rain and falling leaves had obliterated any footprints. The sound of a breaking twig made her look up. She squinted through the undergrowth and strained her ears, listening for the sound to repeat.
Nothing.
She felt under her coat for the reassurance of her gun and remembered it was one of the rare occasions when she'd left it at home, not wanting to wear it when visiting Abigail.
She was being ridiculous. A grown woman, an FBI agent, jumping at every sound in the woods. It could very well have been a twig she'd heard, broken by a wild animal.