Tempe was furious although he didn’t let it show until he got back into his truck leaving the city, hotel and lawyer’s office behind. He drove like a maniac until a State Trooper pulled him over even after he showed his badge.
“Man, you were doing 105!” the trooper said. “You going to a fire or what? You’re kinda far from your home town.”
“Bad news,” Tempe said grudgingly. He had let his anger transfer to his lead foot.
“Yeah. Like what?”
“Like I just found out that my son is ‘John Doe’ and I can’t touch his Trust Fund.”
“John Doe? The kid from the bus accident John Doe? 150-million-dollar John Doe?” the trooper’s mouth dropped.
Tempe nodded. “Thought I won the lottery and was an instant millionaire.”
“Bummer. Take it slower, okay? Won’t do either of you any good if we have to peel you off a guardrail. I heard he woke up from his coma. Normal, too. They’re saying it was a miracle. Your name’s Tempe Neige? From Pine Bayeux, Louisiana? How did your kid get to upstate New York?”
“He and his Mom were visiting his Granpere,” Tempe said. “I’m headed up there to bring him home with me. The lawyers warned me that I might have a fight on my hands over custody. There’s a lot of money involved in whoever has him. I’m pissed.”
“Just take it down a notch. Won’t give you a ticket but if one of us catches you going over 85 again –”
“Thanks,” Neige said as the trooper got back in his brand-new SUV and pulled out onto the highway. As if to mock him, the trooper did a flat sixty in five seconds and was up to seventy-five before he was a quarter mile away.
“Connard,” he muttered, using the French word for asshole. He picked up his cell phone and dialed the main number of the school, taken off the paperwork from the law office. He told the woman on the other end who he was and that he was on the way there to pick up his son.
The woman hemmed and hawed until finally, she admitted that they had lost the child the day before. The police had been called and a search of the school, grounds and surrounding woods and neighborhood was underway at that very moment.
Tempe lost it. Screamed verbal abuse at her in both English and Cajun French at the woman, the school and threatened lawsuits. Told her that he was contacting the lawyers and the police who would be there soon after he arrived. He hung up in the middle of her apologies and then called Perry’s office.
When the lawyer heard his news, he too, flew off the handle and promised that they would be at the school that afternoon. He did not mention that they were also investigating Neige’s background.
I sat on the trunk and read the first few chapters. He had written them as chapters, not as days of the week or monthly inserts. Some of the chapters were dated in years. From 1832 to 1840.
While I was reading about their entry into St. Louis, I heard voices. Male voices, and quite clearly. As if they were in the room with me, yet, I was alone. Curious, I laid the journal down on the nearest desk and walked over to the high side of the room where the words sounded the loudest.
On the wall behind some of the trunks were round vents covered with brass plates that were ornately decorated in cutouts. There was a dozen or more of them, extending the length of the wall beyond what I could see.
The voices came from one nearest the back of the room. They were clear enough so that I could recognize who was speaking. It was Mr. Hooper and he was talking to a man he called Jordan. He spoke with fawning servility, as if this Jordan was his boss. What he said made me dig my nails into my palms in terror. I knelt so I could listen closer, my ear to the cold brass plate.
“Our Christopher Lacey aka John Doe is neither. His name is Cris Snow and he’s the son of a Deputy Sheriff called Tempe Neige. He’s on his way up here to pick up his son and take him home. Thanks to that nitwit, Rose, he knows that the boy is missing. He’s bringing his lawyer with him,” Mr. Hooper said.
“Have your people looked everywhere? Inside and out? Do any of the other students have any idea where he is?”
Hooper said, “he was seen talking to the Sandford boy. Charles interrogated him, and he knows nothing. He’s too frightened to keep any secrets from us.”
“When is he coming?”
“He’ll be here around 6 pm.”
“Perhaps, Jonathon, you should search the school again. He can’t have got very far without money or transportation. We’re rather far out for him to have been picked up hitchhiking and the outside cameras would have caught him no matter what door or window he could have slipped through,” Jordan said.
“I’ve checked all the tapes. He’s seen entering but not leaving,” Hooper said. “The fourth floor is locked off, no one has a key anymore. He can’t have gone that way. We’ve checked every room from the third floor to the basement. He’s nowhere. We’ve even scoured the library. The only curious thing that we found was a Persian Lamb coat hanging on the back of a stool that Mrs. Scintilla says was hanging in the coat closet. But she’s going senile. Time to retire her, not much need for a librarian anymore.”
“Good God,” Jordan said. “Is she still alive? She was ancient when I was a kid.”
“Sometimes I wonder if she’s an animated mummy,” he laughed. “Let’s see if we can scare up the boy one last time. Too bad we can’t pass another brat off as ‘John Doe’.”
“Maybe we could,” Jordan mused slowly. “His father hasn’t seen the boy in over a year. He had plastic surgery to fix injuries to his face. It wouldn’t be so strange that the father doesn’t recognize the boy or that the boy doesn’t remember his father.”
“Who would you use?” Hooper asked curiously. “And what would we get out of it? Once he leaves here, we lose the fees for his schooling and special needs care.”
“Don’t you have a boy around his age that is developmentally challenged?”
“We do. But his hair and eye color don’t match. No, our best bet is to find the boy and convince him that it’s in his best interest to stay here. I’m sure we can talk the father into keeping him in school. Single parent and all that. Plus, we might be able to kick back some of the school fees to convince him.”
I sat back when they had finished speaking. Somehow, my Dad had found out about me and was coming up here to take me back to Louisiana. Whether I wanted to go or not. And if I fought him, he’d be sure to reinforce his wishes with his fist.
We had run away from him, mom and me. Mom had died taking me from harm’s way. There was no way that I was sticking around for him to drag me back.
I dug through more trunks, found clothes that would fit and weren’t too out of style to blend in. A backpack was in another suitcase, made of leather that was still soft and supple. I folded the clothes neatly and placed them in the pack leaving the journal for last, so it would be easily reachable. I found a space blanket, shiny aluminum folded into a square no larger than a book jacket. That was a rare find. I took it, along with the folding knife that was tucked into an old pair of sneakers.
There were coats in nearly every trunk and I chose the down-filled parka with the fur trim around the hood and real metal zippers. It was fox, red with white tips, a little large but I could wear extra sweaters under it. I stroked the fur, remembering the fox I had caught in a snare and released because he was too beautiful to kill.
While I was searching for cash in the pockets of coats, I found another door on the interior wall. It was barely tall enough for me to walk through without ducking and the only reason I had seen it was because a trunk had fallen over into it and knocked off one of the hidden hinges. It was hard to open, and I had to be careful with the candle that I didn’t set anything on fire. The candle had burned down to the halfway mark. Luckily, I had found four of them in the library desk.
More stairs. So dark that I couldn’t see past the fifth step. No pull string or windows to let in any light. I pulled the backpack onto my shoulders and slowly descended the stairs, cupping my hand around the flame so it didn’t blow out. The stairs went down in a spiral, the railing a solid wall of wood.
Made of hardwood, these too had been constructed soundly; not one gave off a groan or a squeak as my feet proceeded down them.
I hated the dark, but I hated the idea of being found and dragged home by my Dad worse. I counted steps and by the 35th, I figured that I was nearly to the level of the library. But it surprised me when I kept on, passing number 49. So clearly, these stairs were going deeper than the library.
The air grew chiller. Damper. The walls just beyond the staircase were stone and brick; in places the moisture seeped from the wall. It smelled musty and the scent of mold was dampened somewhat by the warm smell of melting wax.
When I finally saw the last step, I was so glad that I nearly fell stepping off onto a dirt floor. I was in a basement. With hand-hewn stones laid neatly without the benefit of mortar. The floor was packed dirt. There were a series of rooms leading from one to the other, like boxes. There wasn’t anything stacked or stored in them, they were totally empty.
As I stood there, I watched as the flame flickered and leaned to the right as if something was pulling it that way. So, I followed the flame’s course, keeping the slight breeze in my face.
The walls narrowed until I was surrounded on three sides by rock with the floor being dirt. No longer was I in a basement. Now, I was deep in a tunnel and prayed that it didn’t stop at a dead end or had collapsed or brought me out in the school’s front yard. Although, from my guesses, I had to have walked three times as far as the school’s perimeter. I wondered if the tunnel was part of the Underground Railroad which I knew went all the way to Canada.
I walked until I got tired. Sat on the cold ground and rested, watching the third candle burn down to the nub. I didn’t know what I would do if it burned out before I could light the last one. Or if I kept walking past the last candle’s time. Each candle had lasted a little bit more than an hour, I’d used one and a half in the trunk room and another whole one in the tunnel. I was almost done with the last of the third one. Figured that was close to two hours walking so far. In the woods, I could do five to six miles an hour. Four if I had to climb any distance.
Louisiana didn’t have any mountains. Didn’t even have any hills. What it did have were swamps and forests so thick that even natives could get lost in them. Like the Atchafalaya Swamp, home of the infamous Swamp Monster. I didn’t believe in it, but I knew monsters were real – only, they came in the guise of people like my Dad or Mr. Calibrisi. Anyway, I figured that I must have walked at least four miles in the tunnel.
I lit the last candle, but I had barely used it when I started to see a lightness in front of me. As I ran on weary legs, it grew lighter and lighter until I was standing in bright sunshine at the mouth of a small cave just big enough for me to squeeze through. Vines and small trees hid the entrance from view and the fact that it came out on a ledge, sixty feet up from the forest floor had kept its presence hidden.
I slipped through the hole and sat on the ledge which widened to become a trail I thought I might be able to scramble down. Looking around, all I could see were trees, mountains, valleys and ridges. Clouds forming mists in the valleys. What I did not see were houses, roads, chimney smoke or human occupation.
Pinching the candle out, I tucked it into my coat pocket. Those candles had served me well and I wasn’t sure if and when I might need one again.
I watched for the sun to come out from behind a cloud and judged from its position that it was nearly two in the afternoon. Which meant that I had spent nearly twelve hours in the library, trunk room and tunnel, not the four I had imagined.
I was looking for north and from the sun’s position, I could determine which way was east and west. From there, it was easy to pick out north and South, north was on my left. I had to check to make sure I picked the correct way, looking at my dominant hand. Yup. Right one. I mean left. I looked that way – a long ridge split the valley and ran roughly northeast most of the way. To get to it, I had to cross the valley and climb a smaller ridge before tackling the higher one. Of course, I had to make it down from the cave first.
I kept the backpack on; if I needed to fall backward to stop me from sliding, I could use it to cushion my fall. Crawling down on my butt, palms and feet, I crab-walked, using my feet to balance and slow my progress. There were a couple of spots where gravel covered the slope and I slid without any control until I hit a big rock that stopped me with a jerk. From there, it wasn’t much of a problem, the trail turned to one where I could walk normally but I wished I had a stout walking stick to help in the rough spots. Without gloves, I scraped and tore my hands on the gravel and rocks. Almost to the end of the path, the trail widened and leveled off so that I could walk faster.
There were scrubby pines growing in dirt-filled cracks, blueberry bushes with shiny green leaves turning red and thick sticker bushes. I wondered what creature had made the trail to the cave – something used it enough to have worn a path through the brush and dirt.
I saw deer tracks. Coyotes. Turkey. A pile of poop that was from a bear. Probably black bear. It wasn’t fresh. If there was one thing in the woods that I was afraid of meeting, it was black bear.
I kept a wary eye out and when I found a dead-fall, I spent time looking for a stout branch that would make a good walking stick and a club. I didn’t have a knife, but I found pieces of slate all around me. They were sharp enough to use as a scraping, cutting tool. Whittling one end of the stick into a sharp point, I smoothed the rest of the pole so that my hands wouldn’t pick up any splinters. Plus, if I came across any roosting turkeys, I could knock one out of a tree, in the head and roast it over a fire. As long as I had matches and the slate, I had enough tools to survive until I could reach a town.
I followed deer trails for the most part, heading in a northerly direction. There were deep ravines that were hard to cross and once past them, swampy areas that I avoided. Getting wet in this weather and area was a dangerous thing. I could get hypothermia and die.
I decided that I would walk only as far as I could by 4 o’clock, leaving me enough daylight to make camp, find something to eat and to drink.
It was too late in the autumn for berries but maybe I’d be lucky enough to come across apple trees. There might still be fruit on the branches although I didn’t expect to see any drops left on the ground. Deer and turkey loved the fruit and were usually first to suck them up.
I knew the names of all the trees around me. White barked sycamores which grew around water. Hemlock and white pine, evergreens. Sugar and hardwood maples. Red oak. Ash. Cherry and a few white birches. There used to be horse chestnut trees and elms in abundance, but those trees had fallen victim to bugs and diseases brought in by imports and loads of firewood from other parts of the country. Ash and blue spruce were the newest species to be in jeopardy with the ash borer and an unknown virus killing the spruce trees.
I walked slowly, minding my feet. To fall out here and turn an ankle would be a sure death threat. No one knew where I was, including me. I made it as far as the first ridge off the valley and didn’t need to go any further. I found a logging road that told me the county I was in and the name of the road.
Onadauga County, Bitter-root Road. Closed from Nov 15 to April 15, as it was a seasonal road. I was in the South Hill State Forest, 25,000 acres of primitive wilderness. There was a map on the State Forest sign telling me of the local flora and fauna. In a plastic sleeve on the sign were folded maps naming the trails, how long they were and best of all, directions from the major cities on how to reach the park.
I was 45 miles from Albany, 200 miles from New York City and only fifteen from a small town called Unadilla. Fifteen miles didn’t seem like much, unless you were only eleven-years-old and only a few days out of a year-long coma, hungry, thirsty and tired.
I walked only far enough to find shelter which turned out to be a primitive campsite. That was good enough for me.