44. MEGHAN

Cascade, Idaho

She actually brought him a little cup of the damn hot chocolate.

I wasn't sure I could have done it myself. But she did, and he looked grudgingly grateful and didn't try to stop her when she told him that she was going to play out front with the girls to build more "pinecone people."

The three of us followed her into the clearing by the cabin, where the girls always played. Kimmie and Emma, still riding the hot chocolate high, were so engaged in a conversation about whether the pinecone people would eat pine needles or moss that they didn't realize April had led them past the clearing and onto a trail until she took the two girls by the hand and pulled them behind a tall pine with boughs that dipped thick and low enough to obscure the view of the cabin a hundred yards away.

"Mommy!" Kimmie started to argue, her rosebud lips already headed for a frown. This wasn't the right spot.

"Listen to your mama," Skye hissed in her ear, and she went silent before April could hush her.

Kimmie paused mid-word and frowned.

April looked momentarily startled by Kimmie's seeming mind-reading but didn't stop to ask questions. Skye and I looked at each other. "Whoa," I whispered.

April reached out to stroke both girls' cheeks. Her expression was serious, but with a little conspiratorial smile. "You guys know how Daddy has been kind of grumpy and we've all been feeling kind of yucky in our tummies?" She held one finger to her lips to cut short any overly loud replies.

The girls nodded.

"Well, you know how I surprised you with the hot chocolate this morning? I want us to surprise Daddy again."

Everyone leaned closer to April, dying to know the plan.

"Well, we're going to find a whole bunch of berries to bring back to Daddy for dinner."

Emma looked skeptical. "Berries?"

Kimmie, on the other hand, was gleeful. Nobody had eaten anything fresh for way too long now. "Oh, Mommy, good idea," she whispered. "Where are they?"

"They're really far, and we have to be really quiet so we don't give away the surprise," April whispered back.

"Oh shit," Skye said, her voice barely a whisper too. "Yes, girl. Yes. Go now."

Brecia moved to the edge of the tree to look back at the cabin. "He's still inside," she called. "Go! Hurry!"

As if they could hear her, both Kimmie and Emma took April's outstretched hands.

"We don't want Daddy to see us leave, or he'll know we're up to something," April told the girls, showing them how to duck down slightly beneath the brush level along the deer path. Her smile was looking manic to me, but the girls didn't seem to notice. "Step quietly, until we're a little farther away, okay? We won't have to be quiet anymore after a bit."

The girls followed her directions exactly, and the three started moving down the deer path with Skye and me right behind.

Brecia stayed where she was, in view of the cabin. "I'll catch up with you, okay? I know it won't change anything, but I need to know how far behind he is. I'll head downhill until I find you when he realizes something is up."

The sound of birds among the trees had dropped to a quiet chatter. The air felt charged with danger and uncertainty and the barest sliver of hope.

I lagged behind just a little too, taking one last look at the cabin. Be there soon, Bubbie, I thought to myself, feeling for the first time like maybe I'd get to leave this limbo on my own terms. Like maybe I'd be able to finish this business after all. I could just see the top of April's blond ponytail bobbing in the distance above the brushline, when the trail curved around the bend and downward. The sound of snapping twigs was getting fainter, and Brecia's back was still turned as she kept vigil on the cabin. I hurried to catch up with Skye and April.

April was walking the opposite way from the three graves waiting with open mouths farther up the trail. I was glad she wouldn't see them. I knew what it felt like to look into your own grave. And the farther she moved away from them, the better her chances of not ending up in one.

I examined the memory of the drive here as we moved through the forest, scrambling over logs and through brush as the deer trail turned more narrow. I could remember every detail in crystal clarity, but I hadn't looked at the clock on the car after we'd turned onto the main road. It was difficult to tell exactly how fast we'd driven and how far. It had felt like forever at the time. I didn't even know how far the little town of Cascade actually was from the dirt road turnoff. Was it five miles? Ten? Twenty? I felt the flicker of hope start to fade. With two little girls in tow, even my most optimistic estimate was impossibly far.

Skye searched her memory, too, grabbing my hand so I could see. "I looked at the clock in the car when we parked at the cabin," she said. "We got there just before lunch. At 11:58. When was the last time you looked at the car clock?"

I sorted through the memories from before we'd turned off onto the dirt road. "The last time I looked before we made the turn, it was 10:32. We drove another ten minutes, maybe, before we made the turn."

"Hold on, we can figure this out," Skye replied. "He was going the speed limit, because he was worried about cops. It was fifty until we hit the dirt road. So, it would have been about 10:45 when he made the turn. So, about an hour."

We were both silent for a moment, thinking the same thing. It had taken us an hour in the car to travel from the turnoff to the cabin. It was going to take forever on foot, with kids.

Skye kept going. "We were going pretty slow along the road. It was curvy and bumpy. I remember thinking I could run next to the car if I'd wanted to. How fast is that?"

I laughed. "I'm a lot faster now than I was before. Maybe ten or fifteen miles an hour?"

Skye nodded. "That sounds right. So, if it took us forty-five-ish minutes to get to the cabin, that means it was about six miles."

I decided to take Skye's calculation as gospel. In part because it sounded better than what I'd imagined. And in part because math wasn't among the limited powers I seemed to have inherited in death. "Can they make it before it starts to get dark?" I asked, not really expecting an answer.

Skye nodded firmly. "Even if they go really slow, one mile per hour, they'll make it. They just have to keep going."

As she said it, Emma let out a shriek as a hornet landed on her arm. She batted at it hysterically and stumbled over a root in the ground while April frantically turned around to calm her down.

"Shit," I whispered, looking behind us. There was no sign of Brecia. Not yet. But I remembered the way the sound of the shovel had carried from the night before. If we could all hear the thunk of that shovel hitting the ground in the cabin, the sound of a shriek like that was going to carry far enough.

Like she'd done before, Skye reached out to put a hand on Emma's shoulder. "Honey, stop crying," she said over the sound of April's pleading and shushing.

Whether from April's efforts or Skye's, Emma tearfully bit her lip and stopped wailing.

At first, I thought maybe we'd gotten away with it. Maybe he hadn't heard. Maybe we were far enough away. We'd been walking for at least an hour. But it wasn't five minutes later that Brecia caught up with us.

"He's coming," she said simply. "He's in the van."

Skye and I looked at each other helplessly. "He's in the van?" I'd imagined him chasing us down through the trees.

As if on cue, we heard a distant rumbling sound that had to be tires on the dirt road, somewhere through the trees. I'd wondered how close we might be to the road we'd driven in on, but April didn't seem to be in a hurry to find it. Not yet.

"I think he's trying to get ahead of them," Brecia replied. The even kilter of her voice did nothing to make the forest feel like less of a tinderbox.

We all looked at April, who clearly heard the distant sound too. The girls hadn't noticed yet. She scanned the tangle of tree trunks and scattered clearings and then called softly to the girls. "I think the berries are a little farther that way!" She motioned to a fork in the deer path that led farther away from the road and the sound of the vehicle in the distance.

Kimmie and Emma followed her, but I knew it would be just a matter of time until they started to ask about going home for lunchtime. Before someone slipped on the carpet of pine needles or tripped over a fallen branch littering the trail, or before the three of them drifted far enough from the road that April lost her bearings of how to get back to the road at all. She kept squinting up at the sun, trying, I imagine, to stay on track. But between shepherding the girls around obstacles, tracking the ominous sound of the tires on the road, and offering one long pep talk to keep going, it couldn't be easy.

They hadn't even brought water with them. Or jackets. It was pleasant enough outside right now, but it wouldn't be once nightfall fell. I remembered every detail of that first night I'd spent alone in the mountains. The glowing eyes of the coyotes. The sounds of twigs snapping in the darkness. The feeling that I was completely and utterly alone. And I'd been dead. Nothing could touch me anymore. I kept my eyes on the sun too, willing it to stay high in the sky. Willing them onward.

April's smile was already showing the strain of stress. And we still had hours to go before there was any hope of finding our way out. That is, if he didn't find us first.

The sound of the tires got closer, although it was impossible to know just how close with the way sound carried.

Then, suddenly, the sound stopped.

April ushered the girls along yet another branch in the scraggly trail, in the opposite direction of the road.

We weren't making any progress toward town, but suddenly that didn't matter. I could imagine the ugly set of his jaw and the rage in his eyes. I didn't know what he'd thrown into the trunk with him, but I knew that he was moving toward us with single-minded, deadly intent. And he wasn't towing two little girls along with him as he ran.

April closed her eyes and set her jaw. She let the mask fall for a moment as she stared at the little blond heads in front of her, still moving diligently—if slowly—along the path.

There wasn't time. They needed to move faster, somehow.

"Girls," she called to them seriously, and they stopped dead in their tracks and turned around. It was clear, even to me, that April didn't use this voice with them.

"Mommy?" Kimmie started, and April cut her off.

April shook her head. "I need you to do something for me, and we don't have time to be scared. Because that will slow us down."

Both Kimmie and Emma were staring at her with wide, fearful eyes now. Brecia and Skye wore about the same expression as we tried to guess what she was about to tell them.

April took a deep breath. "There's a bear behind us. So we need to run as quickly and as quietly as we can, okay?"

Instinctively, Skye moved beside Kimmie while Brecia stepped next to Emma. "Listen to your mama," Brecia told her, and Skye murmured the same words.

To their credit, neither little girl stopped to cry or ask questions. They knew about bears from the songs they sometimes sang while they played with the pinecone people and the stories April told them in their beds.

So if April said run, they would run.