Big Woods Read online

  I stare at the photo, and reach out to touch Lucy’s face. “I won’t give up,” I say out loud. The room grows stuffy and orange with the setting sun, so I stretch out on the loveseat and drift off to sleep.

  The house is dark. The only light in the study comes from the Commodore, the blinking orange cursor. The cursor starts to move; my name is being spelled out:

  L E A H.

  I grab the keyboard and start typing: Lucy! Is that you?

  My heart thrums in my chest. The cursor blinks.

  Y E S.

  I can tell that it’s Lucy, that she’s typing with just her pointer finger, the only way she knows how. And the caps lock must be pressed down.

  I MISS U. I MISS MOM AND DAD.

  I quickly type: We miss you so much! We love you! Where are you?

  I have so much to say but I’m afraid to type any more in case she’s trying to write me back. But the cursor just keeps blinking, blinking at me, a teasing, winking eye.

  My breath is thin and my hands hover over the keys, but then the cursor starts moving again:

  UNDERGROUND.

  BY THE WOODS.

  My fingers grow cold over the keyboard. I’m just about to ask more but the screen goes blank and the computer zaps off. I try to power it back up, but it won’t come on.

  When I wake up, the study is dark with just a slice of moonlight turning the walls silver. My heartbeat is ragged and is pounding in my temples. The computer is on. I try to remember (but can’t) if it had been on before I fell asleep. I walk over to it and try to type to Lucy, but she doesn’t answer back.

  6

  Sylvia

  Sunday, October 15th, 1989

  Today after lunch, I clear the table and shake the breadcrumbs from the tablecloth. I wash the dishes by hand, the warm, lapping water putting me in a daze. I do some more tidying up and work a crossword puzzle, but then I set it aside and do what I’ve been putting off doing since I saw Lucy’s poster.

  I walk across the room to John’s old roll-top desk and fish out the key from the back of a drawer. I climb the narrow stairs leading to the third-story sewing room. I don’t come up here very much anymore, unless I need to do some mending.

  I reach the top of the landing and open the door. The room smells closed-up and musty, so I throw open the windows and let the room suck in the cool autumn air.

  In the corner, behind bolts of dusty fabric, I find the rusty metal file box—the box I promised myself I’d never reopen—and with the key clasped in my hand, I turn the lock. My fingers brush against the file I know to be Delia’s—I can feel the weathered, hand-made map to the cemetery she drew for me late one night—but I don’t let myself look at her file just yet.

  I put on my glasses and search for the file marked “CHILDREN” and pull it out, fanning the contents across my work table: newspaper clippings, photographs, and, of course, my own handwritten notes. I begin to read and allow myself to remember.

  The first child to go missing was Eleanor Jackson, age six. Blond hair, blue eyes. From the small community of Starrville, like all the other children who disappeared would be. Until Lucy. In the picture that the family selected for the poster—the same one that would be flashed on the nightly news and in the newspaper—Eleanor’s eyes were almost gray, the blue was so deep, and her lopsided grin revealed a recently lost tooth.

  She was taken right from her own backyard one summer afternoon, August 7th, 1980, while her father was away at work. Her mother, Helen, had just stepped inside to make Eleanor a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She was watching Eleanor run through the sprinklers from the kitchen window. She turned to open the fridge and grabbed the jar of Welch’s grape jam. She slid the knife through the jam and spread it across the bread, and when she turned back, Eleanor was gone.

  That winter, in Big Woods, when the leaves from all the trees had thinned, the police would find what was left of her: a row of teeth and a tiny gold cross, a gift from her grandma.

  The following summer, three more children went missing. Their remains would all be discovered, too, in Big Woods, in a small clearing, all next to the same markings spray-painted in white: the inverted pentagram, an upside-down cross, the numbers 666, and some other wretched symbols I would learn about; we all would.

  My breath catches; I have to stop reading. I close the file and put it away. I don’t know if I can go on with this. The room is too cold now—I don’t know how long I’ve been up here, the leaves are starting to turn gold from the sinking sun—and I sit there holding myself, rocking back and forth, working my own gold cross necklace between my fingers as if it’s a talisman, as if it can ward off the evil that’s sure to come.

  7

  Leah

  Friday, September 29th, 1989

  Lucy missing 3 hours

  When I first heard about Lucy, when my parents suddenly appeared together just outside my third period classroom door and led me out into the hallway to tell me, I didn’t believe that something horrible had happened to my sister. The possibility crossed my mind for a second, but I shoved it away, wanting to believe another version. Wanting to pick another reality, like Lucy was always doing when she read her Choose Your Own Adventure books. If the story ended too quickly, Lucy would cheat and flick ahead to see the correct route to take to reach the end. That’s what I was doing in my mind as my parents were telling me, and my mind fixed on what I believed could be the better version.

  “Lucy ran away from home,” I said.

  “Why on earth would she do that, honey?” my mom asked, her eyes suddenly filling with hope.

  “Maybe she’s just trying to get attention,” I said. But as soon as the words left my mouth I could hear how lame they sounded. Attention was all we Spencer girls ever got. We were the complete and total center of our parents’ lives. I decided not to confess that Lucy and I had planned to run away one day this past summer. It was only out of boredom that we did it, and we were back home within the hour, scorched from the August sun and quenching our thirst with icy popsicles while watching The Price Is Right.

  I kept this tidbit to myself, but I did tell them about our secret hideout, and soon I was leading my parents and the police to the empty lot a dozen houses up the street from ours. It was two lots, really, perched atop of one of the highest hills in town.

  Lucy and I used to pedal our ten-speeds up the hill and collapse in the field. There is a cluster of overgrown honeysuckle vines in a far corner, and we’d huddle underneath the twisted branches and pretend it was a cottage for the muses from our favorite movie, Xanadu. Sometimes, we’d leave tiny bits of candy bar or half-finished bottles of Orange Crush to try and summon the muses home.

  When we arrived at the spot, there was no sign of Lucy. I showed them the tangled dome of honeysuckle—our own private Narnia—and remembered the first time I taught Lucy how to drink the honeysuckle’s nectar. I had plucked a creamy-white blossom off the vine, showing her how to tug gently at the green tip, pulling the stem slowly through the flower until it came through the bottom and yielded a drop of sugary nectar. Our fingers were threaded together and I remember the look on Lucy’s little cherub face that day—one of trust and rapt amazement at my trick. I’d felt all-powerful that afternoon as the guide and protector of my sister’s tiny universe.

  The memory of it and the thought that I may never see Lucy again sent me into convulsions, and I wailed and cried a cry that sounded animal-like, a howl that surely couldn’t have been my own.

  8

  Sylvia

  After my third miscarriage, we stopped trying. Something in me had shifted. I could no longer deal with the heartbreak or the lost look in John’s eyes, which was as much a look of utter sadness for us both as it was a look of failure over how he could comfort his new, broken wife.

  We lost the first baby just after I had tested positive at the doctor’s office; we didn’
t even have time to pick out a name. I was pregnant just three months later, though. Getting pregnant wasn’t a problem for me, but staying pregnant was. I bought a yellow baby quilt the color of lemon chiffon and embroidered it with the initials “JP” in a pastel green near the top, next to a baby elephant. Josephine if she was a girl, or Joseph for a boy.

  I carried the baby nineteen weeks. We had just started to tell our friends and family when, one morning while doing the dishes, I felt a twinge in my stomach and then a warmth spread between my legs. John was at work. I drove myself to the doctor’s and he performed a D&C. I was shaking afterwards, and the nurse called John to come and pick me up.

  “We’ll just keep trying, Sylvie,” John said on the way home, his voice steady and sure. The doctor suggested we wait a little longer before trying again, and we did.

  By summer, I was pregnant again. It was a boy, I just knew it, and we named him Peter. We would call him Pete for short, and, as if we were both trying to will him into existence, we began readying the house for his arrival. I began monogramming everything I could find—pillowcases, sheets, baby towels—and John went to the hardware store for sky blue paint and painted his nursery. I wanted to decorate it in blue and white, to match the gingham wicker rocker that had been my grandmother’s.

  I was nearly five months along when we lost Peter. One night a pain shot through my back like a drill and I couldn’t walk. John and I rode in the ambulance to the hospital, a fervent prayer hissed through my clenched teeth: Please let him live.

  I had a rapid-spreading kidney infection, and by morning, Peter was gone. A boy, just like I had thought.

  I cannot describe that day. The way the medication held me hostage between sleeping and waking—a drug-induced purgatory. A chaplain stopped by, but it was of little comfort; people came from our church, but John turned them away at the door. After a few days I was released and we went home. John closed the door to the nursery, packed up all of Peter’s little things, and dropped them off at our church for donation.

  For a long time, I couldn’t eat or sleep. Grief riddled my body and if John hadn’t forced me to take small sips of chicken soup, I probably wouldn’t have survived. It was December, and winter was already unnecessarily harsh, making it easy for us to both shut in and turn away from the world. We didn’t put up the tree that season, and I was grateful for a friend who brought us plates of Christmas dinner leftovers, the only way we marked the holiday that year.

  Then spring came, and I began to garden again with a gusto that surprised me. I drove to all the surrounding towns and visited their nurseries, looking for inspiration. I planted a stand of pink crepe myrtles along the back fence and filled in a bare patch with as many gardenias as would fit. I rimmed our towering oak with layering rings of hostas and orange cannas. I planted a rainbow of lantana in front of our stone fence, preferring perennials to annuals—things that will return, as opposed to the things that leave us forever.

  I enjoyed picking out the plants, having small exchanges with the nursery owners, learning tips about the native species and such, but in the process of driving to and fro I also discovered my newest love: transplanting. I would spy an old, creaking homestead from the road, park the station wagon in the shade, and carry my trowel and sack through the field. I never failed to find a long-abandoned patch of bulbs—tulips, irises, or daylilies—and would gently dig them from the earth, nestling them safely in my brown paper sack. I didn’t think of it as stealing at all; to me, it was rescuing.

  The rhythm of planting, of turning the warm soil over in my hands soothed me. Dare I say it healed me, even. And on one day in mid-April, the 11th—what would’ve been Peter’s due date—I found myself driving on a back country road to clear my mind when I came across a dilapidated rust-colored barn. The remnants of a farmhouse stood nearby—just a brick chimney and an old washtub remained—but right out front where a walkway used to be I was greeted by the most glorious plot of paper whites, their tops so bright they looked like a cluster of stars.

  When I returned home, I dug a special row and planted them in Peter’s memory, tamping down the soil, saying a special prayer for him and saying goodbye to the life we would never have.

  9

  Leah

  Friday, September 29th, 1989

  Lucy missing 4 hours

  We walked down the hill toward home. My face was hot with tears and I clutched my stomach. Dad wrapped his arm around my back; Mom walked up ahead with the officers, the heels of her tan work pumps striking frantic notes along the pavement.

  Neighbors were beginning to stream out of their homes to join the search party. We passed by the Holts’ house—an elderly couple—and they were standing in their yard being interviewed by the police. Mrs. Holt used to babysit us and she craned her neck around to look at me, but I avoided her gaze and looked straight ahead instead, trying to hold onto the image in my mind of Lucy standing in our driveway waiting for us, safe.

  When we reached our driveway there was no Lucy, just more police.

  We all sat in the living room—my parents and me on our sofa, directly across from the two lead officers on the case, Sheriff Greene and Officer Watts.

  Sheriff Tommy Greene had gone to high school with Mom and Dad. He had been a football star and was a friendly acquaintance, somebody my parents would wave to in the grocery store.

  “Leah,” he said, his voice calm and steady, “can you tell us what you remember about this morning? About Lucy? Was there anything unusual that you can think of?”

  He had kind eyes and hair the color of pennies, and there was something about him that I trusted. I bit my lip and looked down. When I spoke, my voice came out reedy and thin, but I told him every detail that I could remember about the morning, which wasn’t much. He gave me a conciliatory smile and nod. Officer Watts just stared at me openly, with something like disapproval on his face, his mouth curled in a snarl. He was fat and balding and seemed like a jerk. He kept his radio up so we heard every beep and blip—it was jarring—and at one point he got up and stood by the front door as if we were just wasting his time.

  Earlier that morning on the drive home from school in our cramped navy blue Honda Accord, my parents told me what had happened as I picked at the peeling window tint.

  Dad had showered while Lucy and I were both still asleep. Mom was just leaving for work when he stepped out of the shower; they kissed goodbye. Dad woke us up and while I was getting ready in the bathroom, Dad and Lucy sat around our scarred wooden table, eating breakfast together. Halfway through breakfast, Dad grabbed the newspaper and went upstairs to use the restroom. By the time he came back down, Lucy was gone. He raced outside calling out to her, then started running to the bus stop. By the time he got there, he saw the back of the bus pulling away and figured she was on it safely, on her way to school.

  “We thought she might’ve fallen asleep on the bus again,” Mom said. Dad was being quiet. I thought I could hear him crying.

  It had happened before. One day last spring, Lucy’s school had phoned Mom to let her know that Lucy had been late to school that morning because she had fallen asleep on the bus. The bus driver had noticed her in the mirror once he was several blocks away from the school. She was curled up on one of the back seats, sucking her thumb with her headphones on, her Walkman playing softly. The driver patted her gently with his large hands, careful not to frighten her.

  When Dad called Mom at work this morning to let her know, they agreed to first meet at the bus barn. I could imagine Mom gearing up for a fight with the bus driver. As the principal of All Saints’, a private all-girls’ high school, she was used to issuing harsh words when need be. But when they got there, there was no sign of Lucy.

  They went straight to the police station and then immediately to get me.

  Anger flashed through me. I was mad at Dad for not catching up to her, mad at Lucy for always darting off, mad at myself
for staying in that damn bathroom.

  “So you didn’t actually see her get on the bus?” I asked, my voice shrill. As soon as the words came out I wished I could’ve snatched them back.

  “No, honey,” he said. He was sobbing. I saw his hand fly up, motioning for Mom to pull over. She did and he climbed out of the car and down on all fours and vomited into a strip of bleached grass.

  “You know how she was always begging us to let her make the walk alone, Leah, insisting that she was old enough,” Mom said, her voice pinched with alarm.

  Now Dad was up from the couch, pacing the living room and pulling at his thick, black, wavy hair.

  “As I explained to your parents earlier, these first twenty-four hours are the most important,” Sheriff Greene said while jotting down notes in his notepad.

  “Well then DO something, Goddammit!” my dad said, his voice cracking with pain. He pounded his fist on the coffee table, making the ashtray jump and scatter ash over the glass top.

  “Carl,” my mom said, a warning.

  Sheriff Greene didn’t flinch, he just nodded. “Believe me, Carl, we’re doing everything we can to bring Lucy home. There’s still the possibility that there’s been no foul play. That she just went exploring and will be back. From what you all have told me, Lucy is adventurous. But we’re treating this very seriously.”