CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The rain and premature darkness turned it into a nightmare forest. Michaela had been running for a while, keeping mostly to the lakeside, when she began to seriously doubt her sanity. She was wet, cold and crazy, she decided. So what if something weird was going on? That didn’t make it any of her business. It was only the merest chance that she was even here.
She slowed, hand planted against the stitch in her side. The rain was heavy and even the thick woolen jersey she wore was no longer any protection. She hoped Trisha was getting the fire burning hot.
She thought she must surely be getting nearer her destination by now. She’d been walking and running what? Half an hour now? That felt about right. She checked her wrist for the time, but her watch was back on the nightstand at the house. And her mobile phone was on the table next to her laptop.
She grimaced and wiped the water from her eyes. On the screen on her laptop was an article about the lodge she was heading right for. An old article, from the local paper of fifty years ago.
Michaela cut back into the trees. She didn’t want to be spotted. She was pretty sure she was heading for a bit of trespassing again. She slithered on the muddy ground and caught herself against a tree. Its bark was unpleasantly thick and rubbery. Like skin, she thought before she could stop herself. She righted herself, got her bearings again and started walking again, more slowly now.
Shivering, she edged her way forward through the forest. A sudden movement startled her but it was only a rabbit bounding away through the underbrush. She heard the blood rushing between her ears and took several deep breaths. It was okay. She just had to go slowly. Make sure no one saw her.
Unless Trisha was right and it was a ghost after all. She thought of the newspaper article on the screen of her laptop back at the cabin. Local Girl Drowns, read the headline. She shivered again, more violently.
There was a flash of pale on her left and she stared hard through the trees. It was the folly, the pool house. This time she shuddered. An evil place.
Amelia Gardiner, aged eight, drowned on Saturday in the pool house on the grounds of her parents lodge at the side of Glimmer Lake.
Why would people even need a pool house when they lived right by a lake? Michaela shook her head and crept past the squat, dirty building. She stopped and listened. Was that laughter? Now she was imagining things. Just because the atmosphere here was bordering on toxic didn’t mean it was haunted.
She made it past. Of course, she did. The tree line was ahead of her now. The other edge of the lawn. And somewhere here there was a ghostly figure of a child standing under a tree. Or had been.
She wasn’t expecting to find anything. It had taken too long to get here, she knew that. But she also had to look. I couldn’t just go back inside without investigating. Her grandmother had used to tease her when she was a girl about being an all or nothing person. Do it and do it properly, or don’t do it at all. She shrugged as she remembered. It was just the way she was.
She could see the lodge now. She crouched down, hidden by shrubby undergrowth and looked the place over. There was a slightly better view from this angle. She couldn’t see inside but she could see lights on in the room with the French doors to the veranda. As she watched, a figure passed in front of the doors and she shrank back. She would have to be quick.
She inched around the bush, unheeding of the mud. Where had the figure been standing? She leaned back until she could see most of the trees along the edge of the lawn. Somewhere over here, she thought. Yes.
But there was nothing there now. The trees stood sentinel in an almost tidy row, spreading their twiggy branches over the darkness that bunched around their trunks. Nothing there now.
Michaela rocked back on her heels. No, she hadn’t expected there would be. She glanced over at the lodge. She couldn’t detect any movement. She hoped Selena was okay. That was quite a tumble she’d taken when she fainted. Hopefully, she hadn’t knocked her head or anything.
Chewing on her lip as she thought, Michaela checked out the tree line again. Where exactly had the figure stood? She tried to play it out in her mind again. That’s it, she thought; from now on I’m carrying binoculars. She rolled her eyes at the thought and moved back into the trees. She’d come up at it the other way.
She scooted around and approached the approximate area from behind, hoping to hell no one was watching from the house. She stopped and listened, but the only sound was the rain, still falling in steady sheets. She crept forward again.
She progressed slowly from one tree to the next, looking as best she could both at the ground and up in the branches. She didn’t know who had said it, but she thought she remembered someone saying how no one ever looked up when they were searching. Well, she wasn’t about to make that mistake.
She hit pay dirt halfway along. Another glance towards the house, still no movement, and she crouched down to have a better look at the ground by the tree.
It was messed up. Someone had stood here fiddling with something. There was one particularly good footprint. Michaela gazed at it, forgetting for a moment the rain and darkness and discomfort. She was right. Didn’t this mean she was right?
So it wasn’t a ghost. It was a person. She was almost disappointed. But hang on, she told herself. Selena’s son would have come out to investigate, wouldn’t have he? When Selena had told him she’d seen someone out here? Yes of course. She nodded to herself, but couldn’t quite convince herself it was that innocent.
The footprints were right under the tree. Not just wandering around but specifically right under this tree. As though someone had stood here, stood here to what? Michaela looked up. A branch hung overhead. If she stood up and stretched she would almost be able to touch it. It would be perfect, she thought. To hang something from. A dummy dressed in children’s clothes, perhaps?
Another sound startled her and she fell backward, scraping her face against the bark of a tree.
‘Shit,’ she said and raised her hand to her face. It was bleeding. The noise was louder now, footsteps on gravel. She rolled away back into the safety of the shadows and crouched under a bush.
It was Selena’s son. Joseph Gardener.
Amelia Gardener is survived by her parents and 6-month-old brother Joseph. Michaela shook her head and watched. Her cheekbone was stinging where she’d scraped it and she was wet through and muddy. A twig poked into her back. Joseph Gardener walked around behind the house and Michaela heard a car door
slam. She looked back at the house, with its lit windows and wondered if she should go in there and check on Selena. Backing out of the bush she stood and decided not to. Not when she was covered in dirt and leaves like this. She brushed pine needles from her sleeves. Trisha would be worrying now. Especially if she’d read the article on the computer. It was time to get back to the cabin.