The Forest Read online

  In the window, an old woman stood, only her head visible above the sign. She was in her seventies, probably, with the hard eyes and weathered skin of someone used to struggling. Tough as jerky, cunning as a fox – that was the impression Alex got of her. Other than that, he couldn’t see much: she was standing mostly behind the lawnmower/shovel handles sign, and her hair was obscured by a large straw hat.

  Again, that seemed funny for some reason. Alex giggled. Tried to stop it, but it came again.

  Trish laughed as well – louder than him. “So people do live here,” she said.

  “Yes. A sheriff, a diner owner, a few folks who like to stare at strangers, and – don’t forget! –”

  “The new guy,” Trish finished.

  Both of them dissolved into laughter.

  It wasn’t really that funny, Alex knew. Nothing about today had been particularly funny. But sometimes you had to laugh because if you didn’t you’d cry and if you started crying you might just keep crying until the day you died.

  He and Trish were holding their stomachs, hiccuping and coughing they were laughing so hard. They only stopped when Trish weaved a bit. Alex grabbed her shoulders, worried she’d fall.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Just a bit dizzy.”

  “Let’s get you sitting down,” said Alex.

  “Good idea.”

  He put her arm over his shoulder. The rest of the short walk to the sheriff’s station she leaned on him. Her weight on his shoulders and back was comforting, in a way. She was leaning on him again, and she hadn’t done that in a long time, either.

  Maybe Coleman had been right about them coming here.

  Still haven’t actually gone there, though. Not to where we have to go if we really want to look at the spot where we lost a day, then lost everything.

  They arrived at the doors to the sheriff’s station. They entered the place, and an electronic bell – the same one as at Tina Louise’s Diner – buzzed its dry tone.

  They entered, and Alex looked around for some kind of seating. He could have found a single grain of sand in this place, given how small and clean everything was, so finding the pale blue plastic chairs that lined one wall was easy.

  He sat Trish down. “You –”

  She waved him off. “I’m fine. Not even dizzy anymore.”

  “Let me check.”

  She leaned forward a bit. He felt her head. “Goose egg back there.”

  “That’s all?” She winced. “Feels more like an elephant egg.”

  “Elephants don’t lay eggs.”

  “Then one sat on my head. Close enough.”

  He chuckled. So did she. Like her leaning on him, it felt good. Shades of better yesterdays. Perhaps the hopes of better tomorrows.

  He looked around. The front office was bisected by a railing with a gate in the middle, the kind you would see in black-and-white TV shows from a time where every cop was good, every crime solved, and everyone who went to jail was truly guilty.

  Behind the gate sat a single desk. A cowboy hat with an honest-to-goodness star on it rested on the desk, beside a rotary phone that was probably installed by Ma Bell herself, back before she got swallowed by cell towers and roaming charges.

  “It’s like the sheriff’s station that time forgot.”

  “Clean, though,” said Trish.

  “Sparkling,” he said, consciously one-upping her.

  She rose to the bait: “Like it’s cleaned every five minutes.”

  “Like it’s never been used.”

  “You could eat off the floor.”

  “You could do surgery on the floor.”

  “You could…” She shook her head. “You win.” Then she said, in a tone that said she wasn’t hopeful of winning this impromptu contest, “Make love on the floor?”

  “Maybe we should try it. For science.”

  He was worried his response would fall flat. Intimacy had been a problem in the last months, as well. He wanted to sometimes, and could tell she did, too. But it was more a physical release than the act of closeness and caring it had always been. And that knowledge stopped anything from happening. He didn’t just want her body, he wanted her, and wasn’t going to be satisfied with just the shell of his wife.

  Trish laughed delightfully. She waggled her eyes. “Maybe after the elephant gets off my head.”

  “It’s a date.”

  Her voice grew soft and strangely plaintive. “Is it?”

  Alex was saved from having to figure out how to answer that by the sheriff, who came through a door in the back of the tiny room. “You here? Good. Come on.”

  She waved and then disappeared back through the door.

  Alex looked at Trish, who shrugged. This is the weirdest day ever, said the motion.

  He nodded. He shrugged back. His said, Weird is okay. We can handle weird.

  She reached out her hand.

  He took it.

  He didn’t need to support her as they walked into the back of the office, but she kept holding his hand. He squeezed it. She squeezed his back, then switched her grip so her fingers twined through his.

  That made Alex smile, and he was still grinning as he stepped through the back door and into what he saw was a tiny holding area. Two cells, each with a cot and a metal toilet. Two iron doors. Two keyholes.

  Two people trying to kill each other.

  The sheriff and the homeless man who had attacked them – still handcuffed, but looking decidedly more lively than he had when walking to the station – were struggling over the gun they both tried to control.

  Alex took a lurching step toward them, something in the back of his mind screaming that he should help. He took an equally jerky step back, something in the front of his mind screaming that he had to get Trish out of here, get her away from this, get her safe and –

  BOOM!

  The gun went off.

  Trish shouted in pain.

  “Trish!” Alex shouted, though he heard nothing more than an echoing explosion followed by a high-pitched ringing. The gunshot had been deafening in the small space with nothing but hard surfaces that ricocheted sound so intensely the blast of the gun was amplified over and over.

  Alex shouted again, and the word came out similarly muffled. Trish must have heard it, even so. She waved to show she was all right, the other hand clapped to one of her ears. But though she heard him shout, she wasn’t seeing him. She was looking past him.

  Alex turned and saw where the bullet had gone. The homeless man who attacked them had stiffened, but only for a moment. He slid to the floor, which was really the only option when a person’s brains had been blown out.

  Sheriff Azakh stood over the body, the gun still smoking in her hand. The body on the floor twitched once, violently and with a suddenness that made everyone watching it flinch almost as violently. Then it was still.

  The sheriff put her gun back in its holster. Alex noted through vision that had collapsed into a tunnel that her hand didn’t shake. She leaned down and put two fingers against the dead man’s throat, but it was a cursory movement. She sighed, straightened, and said, to no one in particular, “He just went for my gun out of nowhere.”

  Then she turned and walked toward Trish and Alex. They glanced at one another, then parted to let the sheriff pass, through the door and into the reception area/lounge/waiting room in the sterile chamber beyond.

  The sheriff picked up the old rotary phone. Dialed a number. The wheel spun after each number – z-z-z-z, click-tic-tic, z-z-z-z-z-z, click-tic-tic-tic – with agonizing slowness.

  “Why doesn’t she have a real phone?” asked Trish. Alex was relieved that he could hear her better than he expected. Both the dull roar and the high-pitched whistle had started to fade, though he suspected the next time either of them had their ears checked would reveal some hearing loss.

  Alex knew Trish’s question was as much one of shock and avoidance as curiosity. They were both focused on Sheriff Azakh –

  (z-z, click-tic)
/>
  – in order to avoid focusing on what had just happened. Turned away from the partially-headless corpse behind them, staring at what passed for the image of authority and the sense of normalcy it pretended to provide.

  But that meant they had their backs to the dead man, and thinking of what lay on the floor behind them made Alex’s neck prickle. The hairs on his neck and arms stood at attention, and a cold sweat burst from his pores. For a moment he was convinced the man behind them was not dead. Or, if dead, was still moving just the same. Alex could picture the body hoisting itself up, leaning against the blood-and-brain-spattered wall behind it for support. Steadying itself, then lurching forward with hands outstretched, blanched and bloodless fingers clutching.

  Alex almost looked back. Forced himself not to.

  It’s not real. Don’t look back or –

  (or you’ll make it real just like the whispers just like the man in the tree they’re not real either unless you look unless you try to see)

  The sheriff spoke on the phone. “Doc, it’s Julie. Better get down here.” She glanced at Trish and Alex, evidently listening to whatever “Doc” was saying before responding with a, “Yeah.” Her voice was absolutely calm, and Alex had the mad impulse to ask her how many people she shot on a daily basis.

  Sheriff Azakh hung up and turned to Trish and Alex. “I’ll need to take your statements. Better take a seat.”

  Alex felt suddenly numb. He and Trish walked to the seats in the front of the room. He felt like he was in a hospital – or, no, that was wrong. He felt like he was back in the room where they had brought him and Trish after the accident. The place where he finally woke, and found out his son was gone.

  He didn’t know how long he sat there. How long it was before “Doc” arrived. Not long. Sundown was a small place – even smaller than Sunrise., Pop. 1985 – so getting someplace quickly wouldn’t be a problem.

  “Where you find yourself at home,” he murmured as the man Sheriff Azakh had phoned entered the station.

  Beside him, Trish gasped and shook her head. He didn’t look right away, but he knew what she was seeing – what they had both been dreading seeing since Sheriff Azakh made her call: a ghost. A thing from the past, long-dead but still moving. The hair on Alex’s neck lifted again, and gooseflesh rolled over his arms in waves.

  The doctor didn’t glance around, didn’t even seem to notice Trish and Alex. He just asked the question he had to ask, the obvious question – and the same one he had asked nine years ago:

  “Where’s the body?”

  13

  (When Tricia Had Grown)

  Tricia didn’t want to cry, but couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the pain in her head, or the nausea that kept twisting her stomach. It was the man who walked through the door.

  For a moment she saw his face – nearly a decade younger, but already deeply lined, with gray hair so light it was approaching white. Still a full head of hair, though, and that made it look like he was an angel when she first saw him leaning over her.

  “Alex?” she had murmured almost a decade ago. “Sammy?”

  The doctor – Brown, he had called himself, Doc Brown like the character from the Back to the Future series that Alex liked – leaned over her and looked like an angel and then whispered words that clearly demonstrated that if he was an angel, he was the fallen variety. The kind that always made trouble in Heaven, just like he had made trouble then.

  Would he bring trouble again, walking through the doors to the sheriff’s station as though no time had passed and nothing had changed in his life?

  He’s even wearing the same shirt. How can it be him? Shouldn’t he be dead by now?

  Almost ten years ago she woke to his face and he told her: “Alex is fine. He’ll be okay.” Then he told her about Sammy. Not fine. Not okay.

  And now here he was again. His hair was now pure white, and his scalp was showing through in a few places, the livid pink skin that some people develop there as they age.

  He barely glanced at Alex. His eyes caught Tricia’s, though, and she could tell he recognized her, too. But he said nothing.

  Doc Brown was dressed in blue jeans and cowboy boots. A beige button-up shirt made him look oddly like the sheriff, like he was an undercover cop who had skipped out on Basic Costuming 101. He even wore a thick black belt – though where Sheriff Azakh’s belt had a gun and pouches for ammo, mace, cuffs, and whatever else she carted around, Doc Brown’s belt was empty save a knife sheath big enough to hold a Bowie knife with enough room left over to hide the Hope Diamond.

  He stared at Tricia for a moment, then put down a large black bag he held and pulled out a white packet. He wrung it between his hands, then put it on the back of her head. The packet grew cold as he held it there. “It’ll help the swelling,” he said, then turned to the sheriff. “In the back?”

  “How’d you know?” said the sheriff. Both of them spoke in the tones of friendly acquaintances making obligatory small talk when they ran into each other at the grocery store.

  “Place is too small for it to be anywhere else,” said the doctor.

  Doc Brown and Sheriff Azakh disappeared into the back room. A moment later the sheriff returned. She went to her desk and opened one of the drawers. Tricia saw her leaf through file folders until she came to the right one. She pulled out a pad, then a pen from another drawer.

  She walked through the gate that separated the front room of the station, then sat on the last chair that remained in the waiting area. She clicked the top of her pen, a sound that in that moment made Tricia think of someone snapping the neck of a small animal.

  Sheriff Azakh flipped over the top page of the pad, and Tricia saw that it wasn’t just lined paper, it was some kind of form. “Now,” said the sheriff. “What happened?”

  Tricia felt her mouth drop open. Beside her, Alex said, “Are you kidding?”

  The sheriff shook her head. “Nope.”

  “You were there,” said Alex. “You saw it all.”

  Sheriff Azakh nodded. “Which is why I’ll be filling out my own form later on.”

  Alex touched the back of Tricia’s head. He adjusted the ice pack. “Better?” he said.

  She nodded. And it was. Alex knew her so well, even with the walls of grief and guilt that had wedged between them. “Yeah.” She turned to the sheriff. “Shouldn’t someone else be taking our statements? Someone not… involved?”

  Oddly, the sheriff looked as though Tricia had said something genuinely funny. Stifling a laugh, she said, “Well, there’s my husband, who has the same job I do, but we don’t get along and generally try to avoid being in the same room with one another. So for the time being, you’re stuck with me, and I with you.”

  Alex shook his head in obvious confusion, as Tricia thought, What is wrong with this woman?

  Not just the woman, though: the whole thing was wrong. Everything seemed like it was happening in a play, to someone else. Tricia knew that was probably a dissociative effect of shock, but knowing the truth didn’t necessarily alter its power over you.

  She needed to step back. She needed to have Alex step back so they could breathe and so they could figure out exactly what was happening here.

  “Look, my wife’s injured,” said Alex. “We just saw a man get his head shot off –”

  The sheriff finally showed some emotion. She blanched and said, “I know. I was there, remember? And I bet I liked it just as much as you – maybe less, since I’ve had to do it before.”

  “Before?” demanded Alex. “This has happened be –”

  “No, not like that,” said the sheriff. “We don’t have crazies come in and assault people left and right. But I’m the sheriff, and when something bad happens, for some reason I’m usually the one who gets to deal with it.” She shrugged. “And in this job, one bad thing sometimes leads to other, much worse things happening.”

  “And what happened back there?” asked Tricia, nodding toward the holding area. “What happened with that man?
”

  Sheriff Azakh sighed. “He grabbed my gun. I tried to get it away from him. It went off.” She looked slowly from Alex to Tricia, then let her eyes rove over each of them once more before saying, “I’m just grateful it didn’t hit either of you.”

  Her eyes lingered on Tricia for a moment.

  The sheriff clicked her pen again – ch-click, one more tiny creature dead – then said, “Okay, let’s start with the beginning.”

  She asked them questions. She wrote down their answers, flipping over the paper every so often. One of the times, Alex leaned forward and asked, “What’s that?”

  “What?” asked the sheriff. Following Alex’s gaze, she showed him the page she’d been writing on, and now Tricia could see that it wasn’t covered with words, but with strange sweeps and dots. “This? It’s shorthand.” She grimaced and said, “Not much in the way of stenographers around here, so I had to learn to do it this way.”

  Before Tricia could ask the obvious – why not just record statements and then have them sent out for transcription if necessary? – the sheriff continued her questions.

  The sheriff flipped the page over to a blank one, and started asking questions again. But not before a thought flickered into Tricia’s mind:

  She’s just drawing random shapes. She doesn’t really care. She’s just… doodling.

  (“It’s a doodle.”)

  She wondered where she had heard that last bit, which was more an echo of a thought than anything else. She didn’t remember… which meant it had to be related to the lost time of the forest, but how? What did that word mean?

  The sheriff stood, went to her desk, and rummaged around in one of its drawers. She produced three Snicker bars and three bottled waters, which she passed out to all of them. “Thanks,” said Alex. He tore open the candy bar and took a bite, and Tricia followed suit.

  It had been hours already, and Doc Brown had come and gone and come again more than once. No sirens, no hubbub. He just left the back, then came back shortly after, then left again.