“What are you doing?” Billy was losing his patience. “Are we anywhere near the car? Because there’s no way I’m going through that piece of woods again.”
“I think we’re on one of these lumbering roads.” Chuck pointed out a dotted red line on the map. “If we go downhill”-he pointed right-“we’ll come to Route 117. Could be whoever yelled for help is along here someplace. I don’t think we woulda heard it so well if it was on the next access road marked.” He pointed to another dotted red line farther west.
“If whoever yelled is still here-and that’s a big if-he better be downhill. ’Cause I’m damned if I’m hiking uphill for some flatlander.” Billy took off without waiting to see if Chuck followed him. He didn’t have to. He had their car keys.
“We ought to go uphill first.” Chuck ran to catch up with him. “What if we don’t find him downslope?”
“Chuck, I hate to burst your balloon and all, but I gotta tell you this, as a friend. I’ve seen you lose keys and coats and your glasses, and once at the Washington County Fair you lost your kid.”
“I found her again!”
“She turned herself in at the office. What I’m trying to say is, and don’t take this the wrong way, you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”
That was when they rounded the bend and saw the girl sprawled in the road. Billy was frozen in place by the surprise for several seconds while Chuck pelted forward, laid down his rifle, and knelt beside her. He turned toward Billy. “C’mere, dammit. You’re the one who took the Red Cross course.”
That broke the spell. Billy ran downslope and skidded to a stop next to them. The girl’s head was bloody; her hand, when he took it into his own, cold. He pinched his fingers over her wrist.
“Is she…?” Chuck looked like he was going to puke.
Billy shook his head. “Get down to the road, see if you can raise some help. She’s alive.”
Sitting felt good. Too good. The tiny, enclosed area inside her Shelby made Clare forcefully aware that she had stepped in and splattered through some unpleasantly decayed substances and that, in her haste to make it out to the search zone on time, she had forgotten to apply her deodorant before she dressed. She stank.
She unrolled her window, then glanced toward Lisa. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.” Wonderful. Her passenger could smell her, too. She threw the car into gear, said a brief prayer that nothing would break or fall off on the Haudenosaunee drive, and left the great camp behind.
“Where do you live?”
“You go left on Highway 53, then cross Muddy Brook Road, and it’s down Route 127 a ways.” She looked sideways at Clare. “So, I gotta ask, what was in those papers you were reading?”
Clare, startled, took her eyes off the road. That was when she heard it. Two shotgun blasts, one right after another, the sound so close through her open window that she instinctively flinched in her seat.
“What the hell?” Lisa whipped her head around, looking for the source of the shots.
“That’s an alarm signal.” Clare glanced in the rearview mirror. “For hunters. If there’s trouble, they fire twice.” The road was empty in both directions. She stepped on her brakes. She leaned out into the cool air. “Hallo the alarm!” she yelled. “Where are you?”
A garble of voices resolved into a single “Here!” Close.
Lisa pointed down the road. “There’s a dirt road that leads onto the Haudenosaunee land down thataway.”
Clare shifted the car into neutral and let it coast down the county road’s gentle incline. “Keep yelling!” she shouted.
A sound like an underpopulated pep rally swelled up from the woods in front of her. In front and to the left. It grew louder and louder as she rolled down the two-lane highway, until she reached another barely-there dirt road.
“That’s it,” Lisa said. “The lumbering company my husband works for kept its machines there over the summer. Jeez, I hope it wasn’t some kids fooling around got hurt.”
A lone hunter stood at the entrance of the road. He waved his gun in the air and hotfooted it out of the way as Clare turned off of the surfaced road.
“Thank God you heard us,” the hunter said. “There’s a girl unconscious about a half mile up the road. My buddy Billy’s staying with her. We didn’t want to move her. There’s lots of blood, and I think she’s hurt bad.”
Clare and Lisa looked at one another. “A girl?” Clare asked. “A little girl? Or a woman?”
“What does she look like?” Lisa asked, leaning past Clare toward the open window.
The man frowned. “She’s-I dunno, a young woman. Younger ’n you.” he nodded at Clare. “She’s got long blond hair. That’s about all we could tell. I didn’t want to move her any in case she’s hurt her back.”
“Do you think…?” Clare asked Lisa.
The housekeeper nodded. “It sounds like her.”
“Who?” The hunter shifted his gun into his other hand and wiped his face.
“A young woman’s been missing from the van der Ho-even estate. There’s a search team out for her now.” She glanced over at Lisa. “You did say this is Haudenosaunee land, right?” Lisa nodded.
The hunter looked back up the dirt road. “I can tell you at this point, the girl doesn’t need a search team, she needs an ambulance. Do you have a phone? A cell phone?”
Of course. She was an idiot. She reached into her minuscule backseat, tugged her knapsack into her lap, and reached inside for her phone. She turned it on and was greeted by a blank “no signal.” She hissed in frustration. Typical of the mountains. “Look,” she said to the man, “we’ll drive back to Haudenosaunee and use the phone there. That way, we can tell the young woman’s brother she’s been found. Will you stay here to meet the ambulance?”
“Course I will. Hurry,” the hunter said, unnecessarily.
“Hang on,” Clare told Lisa. She reversed the Shelby and tromped on the gas pedal, fishtailing out of the dirt access road. She zoomed back up the mountain highway. Swinging past the stone pillars marking Haudenosaunee’s entrance, she accelerated up the dirt road, her small car jouncing and shuddering. She roared into the gravel drive, skidding to a stop in a shower of small stones and clearly alarming Eugene van der Hoeven, who was crossing from the house to the pathway that led into the woods. He had on a coat, with a small day pack slung over his shoulder. Joining the searchers after the tumultuous events of the morning.
“Reverend Fergusson?” He strode across the drive.
“Some hunters have found your sister,” she said, tumbling out of the Shelby. “I need to use your phone.”
“What?” He paled, his scarred face half-twisting in concern. “Is she…?”
She shook her head, her hair flying out of its knot at the back of her head. “She’s not dead, but she’s been hurt. The hunters who found her are afraid to move her. We need to get an ambulance.”
Eugene stared at her. “Where was she? How did they find her?”
“She’s on one of the access roads, not far from here.” She jerked her thumb to where Lisa was sitting white-faced in the car. “Your housekeeper says it’s where her husband’s timber company keeps its machines.”
“Good God.” Van der Hoeven turned to look at the trail-head that opened between the house and the garage. He turned back to Clare. “Is she… conscious?”
“The phone?”
He shook himself. “Of course. God, what am I thinking?” He bounded toward the porch, took the steps two at a time, and threw open the door. He pointed toward the den. “Will you call it in? Since you know exactly where she is?”
Clare dialed 911 and described the location and what little she had heard of the young woman’s injuries. She hung up, turned, and nearly collided with van der Hoeven.