Trisha sat up, wiped her dripping mouth, and looked northwest, along the course of the stream. The terrain up ahead was moderating, and the old forest seemed to be changing once again, the firs giving way to smaller, younger trees - your basic forest clenches and tangles, in other words, with plenty of underbrush clogging up any easy way through. She didn't know how long she could continue in that direction. And if she tried to walk in the stream, she guessed that the current would bowl her over. There were no helicopters, no barking dogs. She had an idea she could hear those sounds if she wanted to, just as she could see Tom Gordon if she wanted to, so it was best not to think in that direction. If any sounds surprised her, they might be real.
Trisha didn't think any sounds would surprise her.
"I'm going to die in the woods." Not a question this time.
Her face twisted into an expression of sorrow, but there were no tears. She held out her hands and looked at them.
They were trembling. At last she got to her feet and began to walk again. As she made her way slowly downhill, clutching at tree-trunks and branches to keep from falling over, two detectives from the attorney general's office were questioning her mother and brother. Later that afternoon a psychiatrist who worked with the state police would try to hypnotize them, and with Pete he would succeed. The focus of their questions had to do with pulling into the parking lot on Sat-urday morning and getting ready to hike. Had they seen a blue van? Had they seen a man with blond hair and eye-glasses?
"Dear Christ," Quilla said, finally giving in to the tears she had until now largely held off. "Dear Christ, you think my baby was kidnapped, don't you? Snatched from behind us while we were arguing." At that, Pete also began to cry.
In TR-90, TR-100, and TR-110, the search for Trisha went on, but the perimeter had been tightened, the men and women in the woods instructed to concentrate more fully on the area near where the girl had last been seen. The searchers were now looking more for the girl's effects than for the girl herself: her pack, her poncho, articles of her clothing. Not her panties, though; the A. G. 's men and the state police detectives were pretty sure no one would find those. Guys like Mazzerole usually kept their victims' undergarments, holding onto them long after the bodies had been tossed in ditches or stuffed into culverts.
Trisha McFarland, who had never seen Francis Raymond Mazzerole in her life, was now thirty miles beyond the northwest perimeter of the new, tighter search area. The Maine State Guides and Forest Services game wardens would have found this difficult to believe even without the false tip to distract them, but it was true. She was no longer in Maine; at around three o'clock that Monday afternoon she crossed over into New Hampshire.
It was an hour or so after that when Trisha saw the bushes near a stand of beech trees not far from the stream. She walked toward them, not daring to believe even when she saw the bright red berries - hadn't she just told herself that she could see things and hear them if she wanted to badly enough?
True... but she'd also told herself that if she was sur-prised, the things she saw and heard might be real. Another four steps convinced her that the bushes were real. The bushes... and the lush freight of checkerberries hanging all over them like tiny apples.
CHAPTER 10
"Berries ho!" she cried in a cracked, hoarse voice, and any last doubts were removed when two crows which had been feasting on dropped fruit a little farther into the tangle took wing, cawing at her reprovingly.
Trisha meant to walk, but found herself running instead.
When she reached the bushes she stopped on her heels, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed in thin lines of color. She reached out with her filthy hands, then pulled them back, still convinced on some level that when she tried to touch, her fingers would go right through. The bushes would shim-mer like a special effect in a movie (one of Pete's beloved "morphs"), and then they would show themselves for what they really were: just more tangles of cruddy brown bram-bles, ready to drink as much of her blood as they could while it was still warm and flowing.
"No," she said, and reached forward. For a moment she still wasn't sure, and then... oh, and then - The checkerberries were small and soft under her finger-tips.
She squashed the first one she picked; it spurted droplets of red juice onto her skin and made her think of once when she had been watching her father shave and he had nicked himself.
She raised the finger with the droplets on it (and a little scrap of deflated berry-skin) to her mouth and put it between her lips. The taste was tangy-sweet, reminding her not of Teaberry gum but of Cranapple juice, just poured from a bot-tle kept cold in the refrigerator. The taste made her cry, but she wasn't aware of the tears spilling down her cheeks. She was already reaching for more berries, stripping them from the leaves in sticky bleeding bunches, cramming them into her mouth, hardly chewing, simply swallowing them and groping for more.
Her body opened itself to the berries; basked in their sugary arrival. She felt this happen - was totally down with it, as Pepsi might have said. Her thinking self seemed far away, watching it all. She harvested the berries from their branches, closing her hand around whole clumps of them and pulling them off. Her fingers turned red; her palms; so, in very short order, did her mouth. As she pushed deeper into the bushes, she began to look like a girl who had been in a nasty cutting-scrape and needed a quick patch-up in the nearest emergency room.
She ate some of the leaves as well as the berries, and her mother had been right about them, too - they were good even if you weren't a woodchuck. Zippy. The two tastes com-bined made her think of the jelly Gramma McFarland served with roast chicken.
She might have gone on eating her way south for quite awhile longer, but the berry-patch came to an abrupt end.
Trisha emerged from the last clump of bushes and found herself looking into the mild, startled face and dark brown eyes of a good-sized doe. She dropped a double handful of berries and screamed through what now looked like a crazy application of lipstick.
The doe hadn't been bothered by her crackling, munch-ing progress through the checkerberry tangle, and seemed just mildly annoyed by Trisha's scream - it occurred to Trisha later that this was one deer who would be lucky to survive hunting season come fall. The doe merely flicked her ears and took two springy steps - they were more like bounces, actually - back into a clearing which was shafted by conflicting rays of dusky green-gold light.
Beyond her, watching more warily, were two fawns on gangly legs. The doe took another look over her shoulder at Trisha, then crossed with those light, springing steps to her kids. Watching her, amazed and as delighted as she had been at the sight of the beavers, Trisha thought that the doe moved like a creature with a thin coating of that Flubber stuff on her feet.
The three deer stood in the beech clearing, almost as if posing for a family portrait. Then the doe nudged one of the fawns (or perhaps bit its flank), and the three of them were on their way. Trisha saw the flirt of their white tails going downhill and then she had the clearing to herself.
"Goodbye!" she called. "Thanks for stopping b - "
She stopped, realizing what the deer had been doing here. The forest floor was littered with beechnuts. She knew about these not from her mother but from science class at school. Fifteen minutes ago she had been starving; now she was in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner... the vegetarian version, yeah, but so what?
Trisha knelt, picked up one of the nuts, and set the remains of her fingernails in the shell's seam. She didn't expect much, but it opened almost as easily as a peanut.
The shell was the size of a knuckle, the nutmeat a little bigger than a sunflower seed. She tried it, a bit dubious, but it was good. In its own way it was as good as the checkerberries, and her body seemed to want it in a differ-ent way.
The worst of her hunger had been satisfied by the berries; she had no idea how many she had already gobbled (not to mention the leaves; her teeth were probably as green as Arthur Rhodes's, that creepy little kid who lived up the street from Pepsi). Besides, her stomach had probably shrunk. What she had to do now was...
"Stock up," she muttered. "Yeah, baby, stock up bigtime."
She unshouldered her pack, aware of how radically her energy level had rebounded already - it was beyond amaz-ing, actually a little eerie - and unbuckled the flap. She crawled across the clearing, gathering nuts with dirty hands.
Her hair hung in her eyes, her filthy shirt flapped, and every now and again she hitched at her jeans, which had been all right when she put them on a thousand years ago but no longer wanted to stay up. As she gathered she sang the auto-glass jingle - 1-800-54-GIANT - under her breath.
When she had enough beechnuts to weight down the bot-tom of the pack, she worked her way slowly back through the checkerberry patch, picking berries and dumping them (the ones she didn't just dump into her mouth) in on top of the nuts.
When she reached the place where she had stood earlier, trying to muster up enough courage to reach out and touch what she saw, she felt almost herself again. Not entirely, but still pretty good. Whole was the word that occurred to her, and she liked it so well she said it out loud, not once but twice.
She trudged to the brook, dragging the pack beside her, then sat down under a tree. In the water, like a happy omen, she saw a small speckled fish shoot by in the direction of the flow: a baby trout, perhaps.
Trisha sat where she was for a moment, turning her face up to the sun and closing her eyes. Then she dragged her pack into her lap and put her hand inside, mixing the berries and nuts together. Doing this made her think of Uncle Scrooge McDuck playing around in his money-vault, and she laughed delightedly. The image was absurd and perfect at the same time.
She hulled a dozen or so of the beechnuts, mixed them with a like number of berries (this time using her madder-stained fingers to remove the stems with ladylike care), and tossed the result into her mouth in three measured hand-fuls: dessert. The taste was heavenly - like one of those trailmix breakfast cereals her mother always ate - and when Trisha had finished the last handful, she realized she wasn't just full but gorged. She didn't know how long the feeling would last - probably nuts and berries were like Chinese food, they filled you up and an hour later you were hungry again - but right now her midsection felt like an overloaded Christmas stocking. It was wonderful to be full. She had lived nine years without knowing that, and she hoped she would never forget: it was wonderful to be full.
Trisha leaned back against the tree and looked into her knapsack with deep happiness and gratitude. If she hadn't been so full (too stuffed to jump, she thought), she would have stuck her head in like a mare sticking her head into an oat-sack, just to fill her nose with the delicious combined smell of the checkerberries and beechnuts.
"Saved my life, you guys," she said. "Saved my goshdarn life."
On the far side of the rushing stream there was a little clearing carpeted with pine needles. Sunlight fell into it in bright yellow bars filled with slow-dancing pollen and woods dust. Butterflies also played in this light, dipping and swoop-ing.
Trisha crossed her hands on her belly, where the roaring was now still, and watched the butterflies. In that moment she did not miss her mother, father, brother, or best friend. In that moment she did not even want to go home, although she ached all over and her butt stung and itched and chafed when she walked. In that moment she was at peace, and more than at peace. She was experiencing her life's greatest contentment. If I get out of this I'll never be able to tell them, she thought. She watched the butterflies on the other side of the stream, her eyelids drooping. There were two white ones; the third was velvety-dark, brown or maybe black.
Tell them what, sugar? It was the tough tootsie, but for once she didn't sound cold, only curious.
What there really is. How simple. Just to eat... why, just to have something to eat and then to be full afterward...
"The Subaudible," Trisha said. She watched the butterflies.
Two white and one dark, all three dipping and darting in the afternoon sun. She thought of Little Black Sambo up in the tree, the tigers running around down below and wearing his fine new clothes, running and running until they melted and turned into butter. Into what her Dad called ghee.
Her right hand came unlaced from her left, rolled over, and thumped palm-up to the ground. It seemed like too much work to put it back and so Trisha let it stay where it was.
The Subaudible what, sugar? What about it?
"Well," Trisha said in a slow, sleepy, considering voice.
"It's not like that's nothing... is it?"
The tough tootsie didn't reply. Trisha was glad. She felt so sleepy, so full, so wonderful. She didn't sleep, though; even later, when she knew she must have slept, it didn't seem as if she had. She remembered thinking about her Dad's back yard behind the newer, smaller house, how the grass needed cutting and the lawn-dwarves looked sly - as if they knew something you didn't - and about how Dad had started to look sad and old to her, with that smell of beer always com-ing out of his pores. Life could be very sad, it seemed to her, and mostly it was what it could be. People made believe that it wasn't, and they lied to their kids (no movie or television program she had ever seen had prepared her for losing her balance and plopping back into her own crap, for instance) so as not to scare them or bum them out, but yeah, it could be sad. The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. She knew that now. She was only nine, but she knew it, and she thought she could accept it. She was almost ten, after all, and big for her age.
I don't know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong!
That was the last thing she had heard Pete say, and now Trisha thought she knew the answer. It was a tough answer but probably a true one: just because. And if you didn't like it, take a ticket and get in line.
Trisha guessed that in a lot of ways she was older than Pete now.
She looked downstream and saw that another stream came pouring into hers about forty yards from where she was sitting; it came over the bank in a spraying little water-fall.
Good deal. This was the way it was supposed to work.
This second stream she had found would get bigger and big-ger, this one would lead her to people. It - She shifted her eyes back to the little clearing on the other side of the stream and three people were standing there, looking at her. At least she assumed they were look-ing at her; Trisha couldn't see their faces. Their feet, either.
They wore long robes like the priests in those movies about days of old. ("In days of old when knights were bold and ladies showed their fan-nies," Pepsi Robichaud sometimes sang when she jumped rope.) The hems of these robes pud-dled on the clearing's carpet of needles. Their hoods were up, hiding the faces within. Trisha looked across the stream at them, a little startled but not really afraid, not then. Two of the robes were white. The one worn by the figure in the middle was black.