Into the Woods (Anomaly Hunters, Book One) Read online

  “What is it?” Krezchek asked.

  “We, uh, we found something.” Officer Carter held up the bag. His nervous eyes swept over the Crows again.

  “Where?”

  “In some bushes at the edge of that round clearing. You know, the one on Mr. May’s property across the river.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Officer Carter opened the bag. Krezchek peered inside and stiffened.

  “Aw, shit,” he said.

  Brenda and Hannibal craned their heads to look over his shoulder. Hannibal’s face went white. Brenda gave a little cry and sagged against her husband.

  Cynthia edged around Krezchek and looked into the bag.

  At the bottom was a small white tennis shoe with a lightning bolt on the side.

  Chapter 3

  See Emily Play (I)

  1

  Brenda Crow couldn’t keep standing. The moment she saw the shoe—Emily’s shoe, no question about it; Brenda herself had bought those shoes for Emily at the Payless in West River Mall last year—her legs had gone weak and rubbery, and she knew if she didn’t get herself into a chair immediately, she’d sink right down onto her bottom on the hardwood floor. So as Officer Carter delineated their other findings in the clearing—a circle of burned grass about two feet wide, some dried blood, torn-up turf indicative of a struggle—and as each of these findings made her legs weaker and weaker, she staggered into the dining room and collapsed into one of the five chairs that surrounded the dinner table.

  Five chairs. One at either end, for herself and Hannibal. Two on one side for Donovan and Cynthia. And one on the other side for Emily. Brenda had always liked to think of the arrangement as a star. Five points, with Emily—special Emily—as the crown.

  But if Emily was gone, there was no crown. There was no star. There were four points. A square. A box. A dull, commonplace thing.

  She moaned and covered her face with her hands. Her palms quickly overflowed with tears. Horrid rasping sounds were pouring from her throat but she didn’t know how to stop them.

  Hannibal sat down beside her and murmured vague, meaningless phrases of comfort that he clearly didn’t believe himself. Then Donovan and Cynthia appeared, everyone crowding together to comfort her. Or at least everyone from the family: The police had started filing out the front door, speaking in low, inaudible voices. She wanted to follow, to hear what they were saying, but she didn’t have the strength to get up.

  “We’ll find her,” Hannibal murmured as his hand robotically stroked her back. “Don’t worry. Everything’ll be fine.”

  She nodded. Perhaps he was right. Blood didn’t mean she was dead. She might only be injured. Or the blood might not even be hers…

  “It might not be hers,” Brenda exclaimed, rising from her chair so suddenly that Hannibal drew back, startled. She strode toward the cops. “It might not be hers!”

  Chief Krezchek froze midway out the door. “Pardon?”

  “The blood. It could be…” She wasn’t sure of the right term. “Someone else’s. The perpetrator’s. The person responsible’s. Couldn’t it?”

  “Mrs. Crow,” he said, trying to smile consolingly, “it’s far too soon to start hypothesizing about…well, anything. We can’t know anything for sure until we do a proper analysis.”

  “How long will that take?” she cried. She envisioned labs full of white-coated scientists peering stolidly through microscopes and making detailed notes with careful, slow-moving hands while somewhere out in the world Emily was hurt, scared, maybe dying. “We don’t have that kind of time!” She realized her voice had risen to a shriek, but she didn’t care.

  Hannibal’s hands closed on her shoulders, and in a gentle voice he said, “Brenda, come on. Let them do their job. If we keep getting in the way, it’ll take them that much longer.”

  She closed her eyes and heaved a sigh. Sometimes she hated his stuffy rationality, but he was right. Not that rightness or truth could do anything to quiet the tempest of emotions buffeting her soul.

  He led her back to the table and sat her down while the cops vanished outside to confer and plan. The house suddenly seemed far too quiet.

  Hannibal sat beside her again, this time with her right hand in his and his left arm draped over her shoulders. Donovan and Cynthia sat too. Brenda studied the arrangement, frowning. Everyone was in the wrong seat. Hannibal was in Brenda’s usual chair. Cynthia was in Hannibal’s. Donovan in Cynthia’s. And she herself in Donovan’s. Musical chairs. Only Emily’s chair remained untouched, inviolate. Empty.

  Her face crumpled up again. Fresh tears spilled from her eyes. She lowered her head and let the tears drip into her lap while Hannibal caressed her shoulder and squeezed her hand.

  A car door slammed outside. An engine roared to life. Tires crunched away down the gravel drive. The faint voices of the cops became fainter as they headed off, presumably into the woods to examine this horrible new evidence.

  The woods. Of course. It would have to be the woods.

  The woods had always made Brenda uncomfortable. And not just in the usual worried-parent way that foresaw rabid animals and rusty nails and falling branches everywhere. No, this was a deeper, vaguer, more primal discomfort. There was a sense of alienness about the woods, a sense of things not being quite right. Whenever she had to go into them, she found herself remembering the medieval European beliefs about forests being the home of witches and monsters and child-swiping fairies. Of course, back then people were uneducated dunces and the forests were enormous untraveled things that stretched over most of the continent and were full of genuine threats like wolves and bears and disease. So it was no surprise medieval folks felt as they did. It was ludicrous to feel the same way about less than a square mile of woods in modern-day Ohio. And yet…

  Fairies.

  2

  Emily’s obsession with fairies had started when she was five. Brenda had never been able to determine exactly where this interest had come from. She and Hannibal had not yet bought Emily any of the books of fairy tales that now filled two whole shelves in her room. No, the books had followed from the interest, not the other way around. Brenda’s best guess was that since Emily had started nursery school that year, her interest in fairies had been kindled by comments her new schoolmates had made or by stories Miss Rinehart had read to her class.

  And yet the first time the subject came up, it had been in connection with the woods.

  It had been a sunny Saturday afternoon in September. Brenda was in the kitchen chopping parsnips for that night’s dinner when Emily, who had been out in the back yard hosting yet another gathering of her stuffed animals, came bursting through the back door. Emily’s eyes were bright with delight, and her big, round, baby-fat cheeks were flushed with excitement.

  “Mom!” Emily cried. “I saw fairies!”

  “What?” Brenda said. She set down the knife with a baffled frown.

  “Fairies! There were, like, a bunch of ‘em! They were dancing around some big mushums!”

  “Mushrooms.”

  Emily rolled her eyes. “Mushrooms. Sorry.”

  “And what exactly did these fairies look like?” Brenda expected a description that matched butterflies or fireflies rather than traditional fairies.

  Instead Emily said, “They were, like, tiny little people. Little enough to ride a bunny. They had long hair and tiny faces and big colorful wings, and…” She leaned in close and in a gleefully scandalized whisper added, “And they weren’t wearing any clothes.”

  “And where exactly did you see these fairies?” Brenda said.

  “In the woods.”

  “I thought I told you not to go into the woods.”

  Emily clucked her tongue and let her shoulders sag and her arms flop limply in a display of unfairly maligned innocence. “I wasn’t in the woods. I was on the edge. The fairies were right inside.”

  Brenda stared at her daughter for a moment, then said, “Show me.” She figured she had better make sure there were
n’t any nudist hippies camping out somewhere on the property.

  Emily led her across the lawn to the edge of the woods due north of the house, then pointed to a bare circle of dirt amid the greenery a couple of feet inside the tree line. The circle was about a foot in diameter and had a cluster of small white mushrooms in the center.

  “They were in that circle there, dancing around the, uh, the mushrooms.”

  Brenda squatted down to inspect the circle more closely. There were no marks in the dirt, no indications that anything (including Emily) had been physically present within the circle.

  “Hmm,” she said. Her knees cracked as she stood up. “How tall were they exactly?”

  “This tall.” Emily held her hands about four inches apart.

  “I see.” The supposed fairies were probably only some kind of bug after all. Or a product of an overactive imagination, something Emily had proven herself to possess in spades time and time again. “Well, if you see them again, just leave them alone. And don’t go into the woods.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “I’m just reminding you.” She looked at the circle again, then added, “And don’t eat the mushrooms, either.”

  Emily looked appalled at the suggestion. “I would never do that! They’re the fairies’ mushrooms!”

  The incident had an amusing sequel a couple of days later. Brenda had been on her way down to the basement to do some laundry when she glanced out the back door and saw Emily crouched at the edge of the woods. Brenda set down the laundry basket and went outside.

  “Emily?” she called as she crossed the lawn.

  Emily jerked, startled, then looked around and smiled.

  “What?”

  “What are you doing over there?”

  “Nothing.”

  When Brenda reached the edge of the woods she found that Emily was arranging a pile of Sun-Maid raisins next to the mushrooms around which the supposed fairies had been supposedly dancing. Already a few ants were scuttling forward to investigate.

  “What is this?” Brenda asked.

  “It’s for the fairies. I thought they might like ‘em. To eat.”

  “I see.” Brenda figured she had better dissuade Emily from handing out free lunches to bugs. “You know, I don’t think fairies eat people food. I think they have a special fairy diet.”

  Emily’s eyes went big with excitement. “Ooh! Like spiderwebs and moonbeams and stuff, right?”

  “Um, yeah. Something like that.”

  “Cool!” She regarded the heap of raisins on the dirt. “Oh, well. I’ll just leave those for the ants. They should like ‘em.”

  3

  And that had been the start of it. Emily never saw fairies again (or if she did, she never mentioned it to Brenda), but her fascination with them continued unabated to the present day. She stubbornly insisted on their reality. And not just fairies, but all kinds of odd things. Things like magic and monsters. Things Brenda wondered if it wasn’t peculiar for a ten-year-old (almost eleven) to still believe in in this crass modern world of terrorist bombings and reality TV.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a rising jumble of voices outside. It sounded like Chief Krezchek and his men. Were they back already? Brenda glanced at the clock on the wall and was surprised to see that half an hour had passed since the cops departed for the woods.

  The front door opened, and Chief Krezchek came in. His expression was somber and rueful.

  “I, uh, I came back to tell you folks that after seeing the evidence in the clearing we’re officially labeling this an abduction. We went ahead and notified the FBI field office in Kingwood. They’re sending a team over right now.”

  He said something else but Brenda didn’t hear it over the moans that were pouring from her throat.

  Chapter 4

  Calvin and Cynthia

  All day at school Calvin followed the developments in the Emily Crow case with keen interest. For a long time there wasn’t much in the way of hard facts, but early that afternoon the authorities revealed some big news: One of Emily’s friends claimed that Emily had been planning to meet a man in the woods near her house last night, a man who said he could show her fairies in the woods. Emily had talked to this man sometime yesterday, most likely when she was in Indian Hill Park between four and six p.m.

  When school let out, Calvin made it home in record time. He tossed his backpack on his bed, grabbed a quick snack, then set out for Oaks Road, where the Crows lived, where the woods were.

  His route took him down Potts Road, which passed through downtown May. A crowd filled the plaza outside the May Civic Administration Building. News vans lined the curb. Here and there news crews filmed live reports. The parking lot of the May National Bank, where Calvin’s dad worked as the manager, was crammed with cars, few of which were likely to belong to bank customers. Calvin suspected he knew what his dad would be grousing about during dinner tonight.

  Farther down the block Calvin passed Crow Books, the bookstore owned by Cynthia’s dad. Up until a couple of months ago Calvin barely visited the place, preferring to buy his books online where prices were lower. But after his interest in Cynthia had blossomed—and after he learned she sometimes helped out her dad around the store—Calvin found himself visiting the bookstore more often and spending a bigger chunk of his allowance money on books.

  Not surprisingly, the store was closed and dark. He wondered how long before it reopened. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too long. Hopefully this would all be resolved soon. Maybe Calvin would even have a hand in resolving it.

  South of downtown was Indian Hill Park, where Emily was thought to have talked with her abductor yesterday afternoon. The park consisted of a playground, flower beds crisscrossed with walking paths, a gazebo where local bands held concerts in the summer, a baseball diamond, and a few multifunctional fields. The park’s southern boundary was the woods where the Crows and old Robert May lived.

  Calvin took a quick stroll through the park, but there wasn’t much to see. Not even people. At this hour the place was normally packed with romping, screaming children, but parents were keeping their kids at home today and would no doubt do so for many days to come.

  No, the real site of interest was the clearing on Mr. May’s property. The police said they had found evidence that Emily had been in the clearing last night, but they weren’t saying what the evidence consisted of. According to the various stories that had been floating around the high school hallways, the evidence was some or all of Emily’s clothes, puddles of blood, the remains of a campfire, a bloody knife, a ransom note, and/or evidence of a UFO landing.

  Calvin returned to Potts Road and followed it south along the eastern edge of the woods. Soon he came to the Potts Road Bridge, which spanned the Kanseeka River. Calvin paused midway across the bridge and gazed west down the gap in the woods along which the river ran.

  The river came into view half a mile away, where, after having flowed generally northward ever since its origin in Blackwater Swamp, it looped east around the base of Indian Hill, a high, steep mound of shale and clay that marked the northwest corner of the Crow property. From there, the Kanseeka flowed east all the way to Kingwood. Calvin wasn’t entirely sure where it went after that. Probably Lake Erie.

  The bridge shook as a trio of news vans crossed it. No doubt they were on their way to the Crow house. Or at least the street outside it; the house itself was set far back in the woods.

  As Calvin resumed his journey south down Potts, he kept his eyes on the vans. Indeed, they turned right onto Oaks Road. So did a lot of the other traffic. It must be a real circus down there.

  Calvin’s original plan had been to head down Oaks Road to Mr. May’s property, then cut north through the woods to the clearing. But now he changed his mind. He didn’t want to get accosted by reporters and wind up on the ten o’clock news as a concerned neighbor or something. Plus he didn’t want anyone to see him trespassing. He knew he shouldn’t trespass at all, of course, but if he was to have an
y hope of helping Emily (and Cynthia), he needed to get a look at the clearing.

  After glancing around to make sure the traffic had thinned out and no one was looking, he ducked into the woods. The sun vanished behind a thick canopy of red and orange leaves. The sound of the traffic dwindled to a murmur. He made his way west toward the river. The murmur faded to nothing. The only sounds were birds singing and trees rustling softly in the wind and the crack of twigs underfoot.

  Before long the tinkle and gurgle of rushing water grew audible up ahead. The ground began to slope gently downhill. The air became slightly clammy. Then the trees and bushes fell away to reveal the river. At this stage in its course, the Kanseeka was slow and shallow, no more than knee-deep anywhere. The water was green and translucent, and small, water-smoothed stones littered the riverbed.

  As planned, Calvin had emerged from the trees near Spirit Cave, a tunnel in the sandstone riverbank due north of the Crow house. The cave ended after twenty feet in a wall of jagged, broken rock. Calvin had heard somewhere that the cave used to lead to a maze of subterranean tunnels but that someone had sealed it up to keep anyone from getting lost in there. Calvin preferred to imagine more exciting scenarios: Maybe someone had been hiding treasure or bodies, or plugging up the gateway to a blasphemous underworld filled with Lovecraftian slime-monsters. If he had more time, he would have stopped to try to peer through gaps in the rocks at the back of the cave and listen for faint wavering howls and gibbers from deep below. But he had more important things to do today, so instead he made his way southwest along the river to Spirit Falls, a twelve-foot-high waterfall.

  There were three ways to cross to the west side of the Kanseeka in this area: the Old Stone Bridge on Oaks Road (the official way); a line of large stepping stones that had been lain across a narrow spot in the river midway between the Crow and May houses; and here at the waterfall, along an alcove in the rock behind the veil of falling water. The alcove extended all the way across the falls. Its floor was uneven and somewhat slippery, but as long as you were careful it was a convenient and picturesque way to cross the river. It was also the wisest way at the moment. The others entailed getting too close to the Crow house, the cops, and the news crews.