Chapter 26

June 29, 1997 · Gone Three Days

THE EVENING WAS FALLING BLUE,the air chilling. Luce, in the shadows of the trees outside Heartwood, gnawing her thumb. It did not take much thought to know where and how to lean into the bark to remain unseen, unheard—this is what she has been practicing for years, as she led the women into the darkness, as she followed the women without being seen. This is what she was made for. She listened. She waited. She watched. She knew there were other creatures out here in the forest that she couldn't see, their eyes trained on her the way her eyes were trained on Una.

Una was walking in and out of Heartwood's back door onto the deck. She watered two tubs of flowers, geraniums that can't drink the air like the redwoods can. Once twilight had fallen enough that Una turned the lights on inside, Luce watched her putter around the kitchen. A fly circled, then landed on Luce's hand pressed against the redwood bark. "Hello," she whispered to it, feeling ridiculous, feeling insane, but saying it nonetheless. "Hello. I'm paying attention. I'm listening."

Finally Una wandered out of the kitchen, back into the hallway where she could no longer be seen, and so, Luce hoped, it was time. She made a run for the pay phone at the edge of Heartwood's playground. Black marker graffiti across the metal sides, gunk on the numbers, a faint stink on the receiver. There was one dim light near the phone that illuminated it, so she must accept the loss of darkness, this gamble. She dialed.

"I wanted to let you know the amazing news," Luce said as soon as Una picked up. She'd hoped Una was walking back through Heartwood into the office, and she had been right. "My mom came back. She's home."

Listening with every ounce of her concentration, Luce heard, yes, what she was listening for. The slightest moment of hesitation in Una's voice. "Oh, that's fabulous news," Una said. And that's it. Una was shocked. Or she didn't believe Luce. Because Una knew that Gloria was not home.

"We're so relieved," Luce said. "And she's fine. The calling man didn't hurt her, it was a big misunderstanding."

"Well," Una said. And again, Luce waited to see if Una would reveal the truth, tell Luce that she, in fact, had talked to the calling man herself, knew he had nothing to do with it. "Well," Una said again. "That is the best news I've heard in a long, long time. So where was she, exactly?"

"Oh shoot, gotta run," Luce said. "Just wanted to share the great news." And she clunked the phone back onto its holder. A moth dipped into her face, fled. Even up until this moment, even with everything she had learned, a sliver of Luce's heart held on to all the years she'd believed in Una's goodness. She'd given her this one last chance. And now the sliver was gone.

Luce must move quickly. She checked to make sure she couldn't see anyone and then backed into the dark cover of trees. What happened next is what she could have predicted the least.

She waited. She watched. There was no movement inside Heartwood, no new lights flicking on that she could see. Una was, as far as Luce could tell, still back in the office. Doing what? She waited five minutes, then ten. Maybe she needed to creep closer, to see if, somehow, she could peer past the blinds covering the office window to see inside, listen in—but then, there. Lights going off, on in a new room. Una was on the move.

Luce crept back farther into the trees, quickly, as Una walked with purpose out onto the deck. This was it, the moment. What her plan was hinging upon. Una moved quickly, and Luce stepped farther back, wanted to be completely unseeable in the darkness here, moving quickly, and then, oh no, oh shit. She was falling. Normally she was so careful, impossibly quiet, but she was nervous, she was trying to keep her eye on Una and she had not seen the dead branch behind her, which snapped under her weight and she was falling, hard, halfway into a rhododendron bush. It was not quiet.

Una, on the deck, froze. She had been walking quickly, but now she was still. She turned her head to look right at Luce, right at where she had made a careless mistake. Beyond careless. Idiotic. Devastating. Maybe ruining everything. From the ground, Luce lifted her head enough, carefully, to see Una, but not enough to create more noise. She did not sit up. There were branches and leaves and darkness between them, but Una was practiced in walking through the forest, too.

"Hello," Una called out. "Is anyone there?" Luce did not answer, her heart echoing through her ears and off the trees and hills and sky. Maybe Una would chalk the sound up to a deer, so plentiful out in these woods, a squirrel, some other brush creature. Why would it be anything else?

But then Una walked toward her. Down the steps of the deck, past the first big tree and then the next, into the edge of the forest. She moved slowly, with caution, an animal on alert. Una had lived among the trees of the Red Grove a long time, true, but she did not navigate the night as Luce did, and here, in this one way, Luce had the advantage. Still, Una stepped closer. This was Luce's only plan. She couldn't be found.

Una came closer again, and as she did, another feeling washed over Luce. She was cowering. She'd lied to Una with this phone call, she'd betrayed her with this deceit, she was afraid of Una seeing her because of the potential of Una's fury. But that was bullshit. Una was the liar.

A burning sensation on Luce's chest, the locket's metal suddenly so cold against her skin, scalding. Una was the liar, and the fact of that was its own fire. Una's steps were loud in the quiet dark, and Luce was close, splayed out on the ground. Una was looking right at her, and shitohshit the plan will not work. Una will deny, deny, deny, and will have the upper hand, she will tell the story she wants to tell. And so Luce squeezed her eyes. Wished for a fly, for the clicks, brought to mind the cow-skull woman, the face in the locket, the carved bone burning in her back pocket, all the underground filaments of root and fungi that connected Gem to this place, that connected all of them. She collected all of the forest's will and pleaded with it to remain hidden.

Una was ten feet from her, and Luce, only a fraction of her obscured by the bush she had fallen into, was looking right at her. Eye to eye. But she did not call Luce by name. Una's eyes kept moving, kept searching. She turned and stepped, noisily, back through the forest and then probably back up the steps of the deck, into Heartwood, where Luce would have to find a way to follow and listen, but that's not where Una went. Una walked to the far side of the deck and then down the steps to the path Luce had led the women on a few days back, through the old-growth forest.

Once Una had gone far enough that Luce was confident she wouldn't be heard, she untangled herself from the brush. She must keep her eyes on Una. It was her time to do what she knew how to do in the forest.

There was high wind swishing branches and an owl's call that sounded like an electric shaver. The trees creaked. How many animals were watching her even then, right then, as she walked through the trees adjacent to the path Una had taken, up through the grove of trees on the other side of Heartwood. How many layers of life and death had happened in each exact spot where she stepped—all stacked on top of one another, here and here and here.

She was walking toward something dark and heavy. She knew that, felt it more certainly with each step. Felt, too, that she was not ready for it. Closing her eyes, she leaned back against the scratchy heft of a redwood, a pause to catch her breath for one moment before she came into whatever truth she'd learn next. Did there ever come a moment when you were ready to learn the worst things? Let her palm rough the tree's ridges. Let her breathe in the cool waft of moist air, even in this drought.

A buzz made her open her eyes. There were two flies circling each other. Landing on her arm, her head. And then, as if she'd asked them a question, the flies darted away, following the path Una had taken into the grove.

The trail wasn't long, and Una was taking it fast. Something dark ahead. Good that Roo wasn't here. Whatever Luce would find there, whatever needed doing, it needed to be done alone. She'd started looking for her mother alone, and she would find her alone.

Deeper into the trees. Feet moving themselves along the dirt trail, tendrils of sword ferns brushing her ankles, azalea to the left, salmonberry growing low and wide on the shadow-dappled ground. She had so many of the pieces. Her mother was going to meet with Ruby Wells. She had materials that revised the history the Red Grove purported was true, as well as a list of names of kids who'd stayed in the apartment. And Una, who'd lied about talking to the calling man again and again. Luce could think like Ruby, cross-reference the encyclopedia of harm she'd been building in her mind all these years, and every time she did, she came back to what she'd learned in the dozens of books on serial killers and from Juan's science lessons on human aggression and all the stories the women had shared: it was men who enacted violence. It was not women, and it was not the person she thought she knew best of all. But she walked on because, of course, it was.

She walked past the fern and sorrel, and there she was. Una, bent low over the new redwood saplings that'd been planted in the small clearing where the bamboo had been ripped out. She was holding a watering can, releasing a gentle shower onto the thin plants. This had been Luce's plan: to panic Una into confusion, hope she made a mistake, that she slipped up and said something or went somewhere that would reveal the truth. And so here they were. But her mother was nowhere in sight. Only—as Roo had pointed out days ago—the redwood saplings on top of the newly filled-in dirt.

And the dirt was moving the smallest bit, a shimmering in the shape of the tendrils below.

What is buried must be uncovered. The hole, buried.

Una looked over, smiled tiredly, and did not seem surprised to see Luce. "Did I ever tell you about the ghost redwoods?" she asked. Luce didn't answer, didn't know where to begin. Tried to quiet the pounding in her ears. "They're extremely rare. It's a kind of albinism in the trees. One will sprout that is totally white, as white as milk, and without the chlorophyll that makes it green, it can't feed itself. A plant needs chlorophyll to convert sunlight to sugars, of course. So the ghost tree stays connected to the parent tree its whole life. Gets everything it needs from the parent. Remains a ghost."

Luce kept her hand on a trunk, steadying herself. She could not get the words out.

"I've never seen a ghost redwood, but I want to," Una said. "Imagine it—a redwood tree, pure white. Surviving only, only, because of its community." She shook out the last of the water from the can, set it down. "You're here, which means you've figured some things out. I'm glad, Goose. These have been a torturous few days. I want to promise you that I'm going to be completely honest."

"Why have you been lying?" Luce asked, wanting to sound like a lion, sounding, instead, like a scared little lamb.

Una's shoulders clenched and rose, her eyes blinking quickly. "I love Gloria, I always have. Even though we've had our differences, she's a sister."

"Did my mom tell you the real history of the Red Grove?"

Una set down the watering can, straightened up, and gestured at the trees around her. "I trust what I experience, not someone else's version of life in the Red Grove. My experience here has been one of pure safety and protection. Has yours?"

"That's not the question."

"But has it?"

"Of course it has." The twilight made Una's eyes flare, the dirt all around her blue-silver. It was time to go further; Luce needed answers. She took a big breath, steadied herself against a tree. Did not want to give away the devastation of her betrayal. "I know you've been claiming kids here—me—as your foster kids to get money, and—"

Una let out a burst of laughter. "That's what you think I'm up to? The foster system is way too complicated for that." Luce said that she'd found the list of names, that she knew it meant something, and Una cut her off. "Darling, you know these community meals you eat every week? The medical help we provide for those who arrive injured? The free housing until people get on their feet? The community closet—darling, how do you think we could afford anything without money coming in? I am not ashamed to tell you that I have an arrangement with someone who works for social services—I won't tell you who, but I'll tell you that you'd know her, she was out here for a while—and that we get a little bit of extra funding. Welfare, food stamps, that kind of thing. She signs off on it because she gets it, she just has to come out here from time to time. I wish to hell there was an easier way to support everyone who needs it, but I make the best of what I have. And what I have are a lot of people who need extra help."

Luce was startled. How quickly Una had admitted to this wrongdoing. "But it's lying."

"Oh, for fuck's sake, who cares," Una said, throwing up her hand. Her careful voice was gone. "The government is a bunch of corrupt rapists and abusers, and they cheat us all the time, so why not even it out a hair." Una picked up a trowel, knelt down to the dirt beside a plastic tray that held a few more redwood saplings, but she didn't yet dig. She held the trowel in front of her, the pointed tip darkened with mud.

"My mom knew you were cheating, though. She was going to turn you in."

"I don't know if she was or not." Una stabbed the trowel into the ground, began making a new hole.

"Bullshit. You knew. You had her come meet you at Heartwood so you could convince her to keep quiet. I know all that. But then what happened? Where did she go?"

Something in Una shifted, a rigidity in her spine softening as she dug. Luce thought this was the point at which Una should crumple completely with exhaustion, tearfully apologize, and hand over the address or phone number where her mother had been forced to hide out for a while. What she wanted to say over and over again, what she meant most of all, was How could you?

Una paused her digging and sat back on her heels. She set the trowel across her thighs. "Okay, my girl. I didn't want you to have to find out like this, and for that, I'm so sorry. But your mother was last seen with Bobby, the man who wouldn't stop calling." Luce froze, some childlike impulse still so desperately wanting to trust Una and believe this thing she was saying, as frightening as it was, because it was less frightening than the possibility that Una was lying to her. And there were countless stories of psychopaths passing lie detector tests, tricking the police because they did not possess the kind of empathy that jangled their nerves. Bobby sounded so relaxed on the phone, and if he was one of the true psychopaths, it might make sense.

But—and here she let go of that safe tether to what she'd believed—Una had lied. Everything Luce learned kept pointing back to her.

A fury rose in her, molten. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out the carved bone she'd found beneath her house, one of Tamsen Nightingale's sisters' bones. The bone that had killed Ines, a woman murdered right here in the Red Grove. That was the truth, and she knew it in her own bones. She clenched it in her fist. Eyed the trowel on Una's lap. Luce held the bone up at Una like a knife.

"You. Are. Lying. I know you called Bobby off. Paid him to leave us alone. Tell me what happened," Luce said. Una was shaking her head, but even from a distance Luce could see tears building in her eyes. She needed something to convince Una that she was serious, that she needed the truth. She spun, starting on the path back to Heartwood. "I'm going to call 911. I will tell them what's happening. The cops will come, fast. And then whatever it is you're hiding won't be hidden anymore. That, and—" She didn't have to say more words, gestured around her at the valley of the Red Grove, all the houses, the gardens, the people.

Una was shaking her head, wiping at tears. "I'm so sorry," she said, so quiet Luce could barely hear. She turned to look. "My girl," Una said, dropping to her knees, palms up in supplication. The trowel had fallen away, into the shadows. There were two dark trails of makeup pooling and riveting down her cheeks. "You're right. I am lying."