“Is your phone working?” I ask hastily, even though I’m certain that if mine isn’t working, neither is his.
He eyes me and I know I must look panicked, my jaw clenched so tightly that a headache stabs at my temples. “Still nothing,” he answers.
I scratch my fingers up my arms and watch the flames chew apart the logs inside the stove. A soothing sight. Familiar. If you have a fire, then you have something, Grandma would say.
“Why do you need a phone? Did something happen?” Mr. Perkins’s gray eyebrows flatten.
I’ve come because I don’t know where else to go. But with Mr. Perkins looking at me with concern in his eyes, waiting for me to explain why I’m here, the reasons feel too jumbled up. My thoughts too scattered.
“I found a boy in the woods,” I say, rubbing my palms together over the flames even though sweat gathers along my spine.
His gaze narrows and he leans forward in his chair. “Which wood?”
The air feels too thick, the scent of woodsmoke sticking to the walls and in my hair. I let my gaze sway around the room, to a row of handmade picture frames along one wall—each filled with a different species of fern or wildflower or insect, the scientific name for each handwritten at the bottom. “The Wicker Woods,” I tell him.
“You found him alive?” he asks, tapping his slippered foot against the floor. Mr. Perkins has never been inside the Wicker Woods—he knows better.
“He was hypothermic,” I say, “but alive.”
He stops tapping his foot. “How long was he out there?”
“A couple weeks, I think.”
“Ah.” He nods with the slow cadence of a man with all the time in the world—to sit and ponder, to assess the strangeness of my discovery. “Perhaps the woods grew fond of him. Decided not to devour him after all.” His eyes shimmer like he’s making a joke. But I don’t laugh.
“And there’s something else,” I say, pushing my hands back into my coat pockets, watching the fire toss sparks out onto the rug, expecting one of them to ignite—to catch on the curtains and torch the whole tinderbox in seconds. “I think a boy has died.”
His jaw makes a circular motion, but he doesn’t speak.
“I found his pocket watch,” I continue, pulling out the watch and holding it by the broken chain, letting it hang in the air for Mr. Perkins to see. He squints but doesn’t make a move to touch it, to reach out for it. “Maybe he went into the woods,” I suggest. “Maybe both boys did, and only one returned.” Maybe Oliver and Max went into the Wicker Woods that night and something happened, something Oliver would like to forget. “Maybe—” I begin again, “one of them is to blame for the other’s death.”
My fingers tremble, and I worry I might drop the watch, so I place it back in my pocket. My head thuds and my vision darkens, making it hard to focus, to see anything clearly—to be sure of what I know from what I don’t.
“You found the watch in the woods?” Mr. Perkins asks. I can tell he’s starting to worry, the creases deepening along his jaw, around his weary, tired eyes.
“I found a boy,” I clarify. “And he had the watch hidden in his pocket.”
“And you think he did something to the boy who died?”
I pull my lips in, not wanting to answer.
Mr. Perkins leans forward, his hands quivering in his lap, arthritis in the joints. “Many miners died in these mountains over the years,” he says, facing the flames. “A felled tree once crushed a miner’s tent, flattened him where he slept. Some miners broke through the ice on the river and drowned, some got lost in those woods and froze to death, their bodies recovered in spring. But mostly, the men killed one another over gold claims and theft. Those woods up there are dangerous,” he says, nodding up at me, knowing that I understand, “but not as dangerous as the men themselves.”
I know what he’s saying: There is more to fear in men’s hearts than in those trees.
He leans back in the chair, his eyes clouding over, like he’s drifting into a dream or a memory. “Some say they still wander the lake and the forest, lost, not realizing they’re dead.”
I feel cold suddenly, even though sweat drips from my temples. I think of the boys at the bonfire, how they said they heard voices, something in their cabin, in the trees. Not the voices of miners, but maybe something else. Someone else.
Max.
“Those early settlers were superstitious,” he adds, circling around a point he’s trying to make but not quite getting there. “They would make offerings to the trees, to the mountains.” He taps a finger against the chair, his expression turned serious. “They thought it would appease the darkness that lived in the Wicker Woods. They dropped their most precious items into the lake, letting the water swallow them up. They believed the lake was the center of everything, the beating heart of the wilderness.”
“Did it work?” I ask, feeling like a little girl asking about a bedtime story, a fairytale that was never real. “Did it calm the woods?”
His eyes squint nearly closed, mulling over the question. “Perhaps. Who’s to say where a bottomless lake might end.” He pushes up from the rocking chair and walks to one of the front windows, looking out at the frozen lake, a cluster of empty summer homes, and a boys’ camp across the way. “But you can’t always blame the Wicker Woods,” he adds, “for the bad things that happen.”
I push my hands into my pockets and look past him through the window, at an ocean of spiky green trees for as far as I can see. And beyond, the snow capped mountains poking up into the dark clouds. A place that is rugged and wild. Where bad things happen.
A boy goes missing.
A boy dies.
Who’s to blame?
The morning sun breaks through the clouds, and for a brief moment it passes through every window in Mr. Perkins’s home—illuminating every dark corner, every dust mote tumbling across the wood floor, the stacks of books lining the walls, the old picture frames hanging from bent nails, the cobwebs sagging between the rafters like silky ribbons.
I had hoped for something in coming here, but I’m not sure what. Answers to the wrong questions, answers that Mr. Perkins doesn’t have. If my grandmother was alive, I would go to her and she would draw me into her broad arms and hum a melody only she knew until I drifted off to sleep. And in my dreams, she would whisper answers to all the things I needed to know. When I woke, my heart would feel clear and raw and new, a feeling like being untethered. A dizziness that made you want to laugh.
But she is gone and my mom is not here and all I have is Mr. Perkins.
I am alone.
“Thanks,” I tell him, my voice solemn. I walk through clouds of heat to the front door and pull it open. I feel weighted and worthless and adrift. A Walker who doesn’t know what she should do next. Who to trust.
Before I can escape out into the cold, Mr. Perkins clears his throat, now standing behind me. “A moth follows you,” he says.
My eyes lift to see a white bone moth skimming along the porch roof.