Page 73 of The Whisper Place
Jonah shook his head and left our trail, hacking his way through two bushes to get to a giant pine tree heavy with branches that scraped the ground. He pointed to a branch at chest level. Some of the needles were bright red.
“What is it?”
“Spray paint.”
Valerie followed, pulling herself through the tangle of overgrown shrubs. She examined the branch before looking all around, her head on a swivel until she pointed at a spot through a break in the trees. “There! There’s another one.”
“It’s a trail,” Jonah said, touching the paint-coated needles. “Someone’s marking their path in and out.”
“Why?”
Jonah looked into the shadows beyond the next red marker, and shook his head. “I don’t know. But it’s them. I’m sure of that.”
“Kate and Theo?”
“Maybe he’s taking her to his father’s grave.” Jonah rubbed his head, closing his eyes in what looked like pain.
“Why would he do that? How would he even know where it is? If he got control over her again, why not just take her back to the time-out room?”
“Retribution. He wants her to see it,” Jonah said, his eyes still shut. “He wants her to know what it felt like.”
All the blood drained from Valerie’s face. She lifted the cleaver in her hand and took off toward the next marker without another word, racing to get there. By the time we made it to that tree, she was already working her way to the next one, using the knife to hack away at the surrounding brush. It took two more markers before we caught up to her. She stood next to a sprayed bush, looking around frantically.
“I don’t see any more red.”
We all looked, spreading out in the general direction of where it should be. After a minute of fruitless searching we met up in a small dirt clearing.
“Is this the path you took to bury him?” I asked.
Valerie threw her hands wide. “I don’t know. It was night. Everything looked different. All I wanted was to get far enough into the trees to a spot that no one would accidentally find.”
“How long did you walk?”
“At least a half hour, I think. But we were dragging him, too, pulling his body on a sled. Oh god,” she choked out. Her eyes went wide and white, the panic inching in as she spun in circles. “Where is she? It feels like we’re running out of time. That I won’t find her.”
She looked at me. The knife shook in her hand. I wanted to tell her we would find Kate, we would rescue her before she suffered anything else, but the truth was we didn’t always find people in time. It might be a body, and not her daughter anymore.
“When you pulled him, was it more uphill or downhill?”
“Downhill.”
“Did you notice anything at the spot where you buried him? A boulder, a creek. Something that stood out in your mind.”
“The tree. The closest tree was a giant oak, I think. It had a huge gnarled trunk and twisted branches that stretched overhead.”
The woods were mostly flat, with gentle crests and dips. I turned toward a downhill slope. “Okay, we’re heading downhill and we’re looking for an old oak tree.”
Valerie nodded, choked up on the knife, and ran ahead. Jonah and I followed. We hacked through the woods for another ten minutes, bottoming out in empty valleys, running to oak trees with no disturbed ground. No Kate. The woods swallowed every sound. Even the cries of birds seemed muffled and distorted, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Panic was setting in for all of us now. Valerie’s emotions bled into Jonah and their frenetic searchingenergy drove me faster and harder. We stumbled to the bottom of yet another hill, finding nothing but packed earth and skittering animals, when Jonah doubled over, bracing hands on knees.
“You okay?”
He shook his head at the ground. “We’re doing this wrong.”
“What else can we do?” Valerie asked. “I’m not going to sit around waiting for the police, if and when they ever show up.”
Jonah looked up. His face was streaked with dirt and tense with borrowed fear.
“We don’t have to find them. They’ll find us.”
