Chapter 25

June 29, 1997 · Gone Three Days

LUCE COULD ALMOST SEE HOW THE PIECES FIT,where the borders aligned. Just a few edges that didn't quite meet. And this biggest piece of all: the story of the sisters was different from the story she had always been taught, and her mother had transcribed the story from Gem. Which meant Gem knew this story—how? Because she had one foot here, one foot with the dead of the Red Grove? Luce could hear Gloria's voice saying it, as if she were right here, whispering about the holiest of states, an everdream, for the ability to let the pulsing network of roots belowground communicate to both places at once.

The locket, still in her hand. Ines's locket.

Ines, a woman murdered in the Red Grove. Luce let that sentence play in her head once, twice, and then tucked it away. She was not quite ready to let it grow. How could she even be sure that it was real, was true? This is just the scribblings of a madwoman, someone might say—but even thinking that, she knew. She felt it. Flies in the gut, the sureness of the cow-skull woman, the roots and fungi knitting everything together around her, beneath her, holding them up right this moment, sparking in response to her question, yes, yes.

Slowly, shakily, Luce returned to the office. Roo was lying on the floor, his legs splayed, arms out in a T, as if talking on the phone had zapped all the energy out of him. Luce nudged him with her toe. "You okay?" He shrugged. "Did you already know what this says?" Luce asked, holding up the papers. He nodded, eyes closed. "You knew because someone on the phone told you?" He nodded again. "Who?" He put his thumb in his mouth, began to suck. She could see the tiny cage of his chest rising and falling. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he seemed to have shadows under his eyes, like he was suddenly old, exhausted. She laid her own body down on the floor beside him. Closed her eyes.

She was holding her mind at the surface of thinking, like the water skeeters so delicately standing on top of the water in the creek; one more second there, where the world's foundational truths remained intact: north is north, sun is hot, the Red Grove is divinely protected.

She imagined her mother in here, in the velvet chair, these pages in hand. Gloria had always been skeptical of the Red Grove, apparently for no reason. Turned out she had reason. This was the real story of the Red Grove: Tamsen Nightingale and the women had condoned violence. Enacted it. Not just to outsiders to keep themselves safe, but to each other. A woman had been killed on this land. By one of their own.

All the women here in the Red Grove, believing they were safe. There was no magic.

If her mother knew this, and was going to tell someone, the danger was not from an outsider. Bobby Dalton was happy enough with his payoff. The danger was right here.

"Roo, I need you to stay." He opened his mouth to protest, but she held up a hand. "It's the most important job, buddy. Please. You gotta stay here with Gem. And Moose."

"Bullshit," Roo said, thumb still deep in his mouth.

"I need to know you're safe."

"Wherever you're going, I want to come," Roo said, his cheek pressed to the rug, looking at Luce.

"You have that special connection, right? What if the phone rings again and you find out something important?" He considered this, blinking at her, and then nodded just a little bit and stuck his plastic stegosaur's tail into his mouth.

"I'm scared," Roo said. She wished she had the strength to lie to him, tell him there was no reason to be, no problem, or to be a person who he trusted would make everything okay. But he had probably started putting all these little pieces together, like she'd been doing. She noticed, just barely, a shiver in his body that didn't stop. She folded him into her. His little bird-wing arms, his shelf of hair—had she told him to wash it lately? Had she combed it? There was an oak leaf matted in the back, so no, she hadn't. She rested her cheek on top of his head.

"Don't worry," she whispered, squeezing him tighter. "I've got a plan." She pulled him away so she could look him in the eyes. His little chin was puckered, quivering. "I need your help, though, okay?" Two huge drops ran down his cheeks, but he nodded. A little clear snot trail leaked from his nose. He didn't wipe it.

"What's the next step?" he said.

"Secret," she whispered, and then raised her eyebrows and winked. Roo nodded again, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, nodding some more. Luce kissed the top of his stinky head, brambled, knotted.

She would walk out onto the deck. She would move on to what was required next. It was the movement she'd practiced over and over when she first learned about what to do in case she encountered a mountain lion up in the hills. Become your biggest self, a monster. It doesn't matter who you really are, deep inside. It doesn't matter how small you feel, how chipped away. Pick up sticks and hold them on top of your head as if the beast you are won't stop growing.

She kept her bike off the main road, following the trail beside the creek and through the trees. Damp and molding leaves in the trickle of water, dried, crushed stalks and crumbling dirt along the banks. The shimmer of mica in the smoothed creek rocks, insisting that every living thing had something precious inside, and didn't they, wasn't that the whole point? Around her neck was the locket, and tucked into her back pocket was the carved bone.

Luce knocked on the door of one of the trailers used for transitional housing. It was near the creek that had flooded twice the last winter and pulled the weight of the trailer a little farther down each time, now half sunk into the ground. The curtained window beside the door rustled as a sliver of a face peered out, then disappeared. Muffled voices inside, a light turning on. Finally Luce heard a lock turn and the door click open, and out slid Sam, pulling the door shut behind her. She had a loose, thin flannel shirt that she pulled tight around her chest.

"Sorry to bust in on you like this," Luce said. She started to lean toward Sam to give her a hug, but Sam flinched. "I'll make it quick. You stayed in Heartwood's apartment when you first got here, right?" Sam nodded. "I know this is a weird question, but did my mom come talk to you while you were there?"

Sam cocked her head, wiped her nose. Said she'd only met her mom at the reenactments, briefly. Luce pressed on. "I don't really know how to ask this, but was there anything, like, weird that happened in the apartment in Heartwood? Anything unusual?"

Sam glanced back to the trailer's window, and Luce followed her gaze. The curtain moved back into place—Sam's mom was watching them. "No," Sam said. "It was chill."

Luce hooked her arm through Sam's elbow, an echo of a movement of her mother's—where are you, whose elbow are you hooking?—and guided Sam away from the trailer, deeper into the trees. They stepped over a small gathering of mushrooms, gooey and browning. Luce spoke quietly, in a rush. "Please, anything you can tell me about your time there would be helpful. I can't totally explain why yet, but I think it might help me figure out where my mom is." Sam glanced back again to the trailer, unhooked her arm from Luce's, and stretched.

"Ever heard of zombie wasps?" Sam asked. Luce played along, said she hadn't. "They sting a cockroach twice, first to half paralyze it and then in this really special part of its brain that gets rid of natural fleeing instincts. So it no longer wants to escape. Then the wasp uses the roach's antenna like a leash and pulls it into a hole it's dug for a den. The wasp lays its eggs in the den, and when they hatch, they eat the cockroach, who is still alive, from the inside. And then they crawl out and begin that whole nightmare process again."

"What the—"

"I know, it's repulsive and amazing. Like real-life biological mind control."

"I'm not sure what that has to do with—"

"Hear me out for a second," Sam said, leading them even a little deeper into the trees. "I know you really love Una, and I can see she's a good person. She's trying to be a good person. But I think she might be a little bit like those wasps. Everyone here follows what she says because they're so relieved to be safe. And, like, being safe is a big deal, don't get me wrong. But it's like they forget to see that they might be in another den. Not a terrible den, but a den. Nothing weird happened while I was in the apartment—she's not, like, a pedophile or something, before you ask. But there was this one thing. Some inspector or something came out while I was there. I heard them talking in the office. What they were saying didn't really make sense. Una told her she had another one, and yes, she was blessed to have so many, and yes, the transition was going okay, a little bumpy of course. I had no idea what they were talking about, and honestly, I wasn't even paying attention at first, but after a few minutes I heard them coming, so I went back to the apartment and Una brought the inspector by to see me. She didn't say much, just hi, how's the transition, and I told her it was fine. Once they left, I peeked my head out into the hallway again and heard something that, at the time, I wrote off. But maybe it means something. The inspector said, not all foster kids get so lucky."

"Wait—as if you were a foster kid?"

"I guess? I don't know. My mom said to go along with whatever Una said, because she was doing us such a big favor to let us stay here for free and give us food and stuff until my mom can find a new job. I don't know how it all works, but I had a friend at my old school who was a foster kid, and she always talked about how her foster parents did it for the money."

Edges of the puzzle felt like they were close to clicking together. If the list of names were all kids who had stayed in Heartwood's apartment, had they all been claimed as foster children? For the money? Luce wouldn't believe it. Una devoted all her time, every second of it, to the Red Grove. She was not the kind of person who would be stealing money for herself—though it turned out that Luce didn't know Una as well as she thought, and then, revising that, she maybe didn't know her at all.

Sam glanced back at the trailer, scratched at her arm with her fingernail. Luce asked why she was worried about her mom hearing them. Sam tightened her ponytail, wrapped her flannel a little tighter. Then, in a low whisper, "She wants to be sure I don't get involved in anything that might possibly get us kicked out. We've got nowhere else. So—leave me out of it. Okay?" Luce nodded. Then, Sam's regular voice again, "Sorry, I gotta go. See you soon, okay?" She turned and walked away. Luce heard the trailer door lock behind her.

Back on her bike, whizzing toward Heartwood. As she came closer, her legs slowed until she wasn't pedaling at all. She jumped off her bike and walked it, staying in the cover of trees. Panic rising. She couldn't just go there. She needed a plan. She required a strategy, she—something hit her shoulder. She held still. Listening. Again, something bouncing against her elbow. She looked down, and a few shelled peanuts lay in the dirt. She spun in the direction they'd come from, and another was barreling right past her face. She squinted her eyes then, toward the dark, small window that opened into Gramms's bathroom, and one more peanut came flying out through the open crack, coming right at her chest.

"Bingo!" she heard Gramms yell. Luce batted the peanut away and saw Gramms's hand extended out the small crack in the window, beckoning her.

"I can't right now," Luce called out, still making her way toward Heartwood.

But Gramms's hand kept waving, and so Luce, unsure whether Gramms had heard her at all, set down her bike and walked to the high, rectangular window. Gramms's hand disappeared inside. It was dim in her little apartment, and once Luce was close to the window, she could smell the familiar must and smoke and then, appearing in the six-inch opening, the cherry ember of a lit cigarette.

"Can I stop by later?" Luce asked into the open window, impatient. "I'm in kind of a hurry—" but Gramms cut her off. She pushed her face to the opening, which was not quite as wide as the width of her head, her face taking up the entire space, teeth dark and yellow, skin folded and dry.

"Goose, listen," Gramms said. "I was out for a cruise in the cart earlier and saw one of the Lost Mom flyers on a telephone poll. I'm guessing that's Roo's handiwork, good little penguin. Anyway, there was something written on it at the bottom. I don't know whose handwriting it is, and I have no idea if this is true, but it said ‘Gloria's car was at Heartwood while everyone was watching the mountain lion cubs.'"

Luce's limbs felt warm and elastic. Watching the mountain lion cubs had been the last time she'd seen Gloria.

"I called your house but didn't want to tell this to Roo. Don't want to worry him any more than is needed. Goose, I don't know if it holds any water," Gramms said, something else in her voice, worry maybe. "But it's something." She brought her face back from the window's opening for a moment to drag on her cigarette.

"Gramms, are you standing on the toilet?" Luce asked.

"Let's gather an angry mob and storm Heartwood."

"Get off the toilet. You're going fall and hurt yourself."

"Oh, leave it be. I've got my good sneakers on." She took another drag and looked hard at Luce, one eye squinting. Luce trusted Gramms. She always had. "Whatever you're doing, I'm helping," Gramms said.

"Can I come in and use your phone?" Luce asked. "I have an idea."

"Of course."

"Also I'm going to help you get off your toilet."

"You little asshole. I love you. Get in here."