CHAPTER 43
We stood at the edge of a forest and gazed numbly into a thicket of trees. What secret was hidden here? What did Uretsky want us to find, or worse—to do? The Middlesex Fells Reservation covers over twenty-five hundred acres and is a welcome retreat for city folk seeking a day of hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding, or rock climbing. The hilly tracts of rocky land should have been a picturesque sight, but we had a different sort of picture troubling our thoughts—that of a woman at a playground, pushing her son on a swing.
I listened to the enveloping stillness and heard the forest come alive—the chirping of chickadees and other birds, the rustling of leaves in a light wind. A squirrel scampered up the side of a tall tree, its clawed feet clicking as it climbed out of my sight. The late afternoon, usually pleasing against my face, felt like nothing at all. The dampness of the bark and the moss would have normally brightened my spirits. This was a place of true scenic beauty, great for picnics and exploring. Horrible things weren’t supposed to happen here.
Maybe Ruby was right. Maybe Uretsky wanted us to commit another crime right here, right now. Maybe it involved Tinesha, but I doubted it. The only thing I believed continued to weigh heavy on my conscience. Tinesha, however we knew her, would become Uretsky’s next victim, unless we intervened.
At first Ruby had balked about coming here.
“It’s probably a trap,” she had said.
I had texted Uretsky after we figured out his clue, and he promptly texted back.
Go there and see for yourself.
He didn’t credit me with a job well done. No virtual pats on the back, Johnny old boy. Just a tersely worded “Go there and see for yourself.” I reminded Ruby that we had saved Dr. Adams’s life by robbing Giovanni’s Liquors but had helped to end Rhonda Jennings’s by our own inaction.
Ruby fell silent. Obviously, she agreed. Still, she couldn’t ignore her gut instinct about what to do next. “We should tell the police,” she said. “They should come with us.”
“He doesn’t want to hurt us, and he wants us to go alone,” I said.
Ruby’s arms folded, a look of indignation crossing her face. “You can’t know that for sure.”
I thought. “We’re too much fun for him,” I said. “I just know that he wants to keep playing with us, not hurt us. But if we take a chance and bring the police along, I don’t think Tinesha is going to live to see morning.”
Instead of responding, Ruby reached for her sun hat and put her jacket on.
“Let’s go,” she said.
It was close to five o’clock in the afternoon by the time we pulled into a parking area just off South Border Road. We locked the car and walked across the street. That’s when we stood at the edge of a forest and gazed numbly into the trees. I held in my hand a pocket GPS from Garmin, procured back in my climbing days. Once I had a good satellite signal, I brought up the Mark Waypoint screen and scrolled up to select CURRENT COORDINATES. This produced an entry field that allowed me to key in the exact coordinates cryptically relayed to us through Uretsky:
N42 26 12 W71 06 57.
I showed Ruby the route we had to take. There was no path to follow.
“Do we just start trekking through the woods?” she asked.
“It is called an eTrek,” I said, flashing her the GPS.
“I didn’t bring bug repellent.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll check you over for ticks,” I said.
Ruby gave me a look—that look—and started off ahead of me.
Something made her stop. She turned to face me. “What’s out here? What the hell are we going to find?” She knew I couldn’t answer the question, but she did look a little less bothered.
Initially, bushwhacking through the forest was easy enough, but the underbrush quickly grew thicker, and the mass of vegetation underfoot tripped one of us up every few steps. I used a stick to clear away some branches, but our trek was like a boxing match; we’d duck one tree, only to get thwacked in the face, neck, and arms by another. Every hundred yards or so, I checked my GPS for course corrections.
The route took us through one steep trough that required us to inch our way down. I could hear Ruby’s labored breathing behind me. The hike would have been moderately challenging without her cancer. At some point she stopped and, resting against a tree, took a long drink of water from the camel pack. The scrub provided excellent shelter for chipmunks and other woodland critters seeking a hideout. I wondered what else the land could be hiding. Had Uretsky put something here that he wanted us to find? If so, what could it be? How would it give us an advantage?
Ruby slumped to the forest floor, breathing hard. “I need to rest a bit,” she said.
I looked up. We still had plenty of sunlight.
After a few minutes we continued, walking west, swatting flies and branches in equal measure until we came to a sudden stop at a steep cliff face. My breath caught when I looked down at the jagged rocks jutting out from the clay-colored surface. As my eyes focused on the depth, the ground below began to swirl, the brown of dead leaves revolving until all color slipped into black. I felt the horizon pitch and roll, as if it had come unfurled from the earth.
I staggered backward and felt Ruby’s hands grip my shoulder to steady me. Seeing the height of the cliff, without any warning, with no time to prepare, hit me hard—instantaneously, I became light-headed, dizzy, and nauseated. I took ten steps in retreat before I found my bearings once again.
“We’ll take . . . the long . . . way down,” I said to Ruby between breaths.
The unsettling sensations lingered but eventually quieted down.
Ruby looked very troubled. “Is it getting worse, John?”
“You mean my acrophobia?”
A branch I had cleared catapulted backward and nearly knocked Ruby off of her feet. “Hey!” she said, surprised. “I’m your wife, remember!”
“You’re my everything,” I said, apologizing with a kiss on her cheek. “And to answer your question, yes, I think it’s getting worse, but hasn’t Uretsky made every facet of our lives worse?”
We marched on, with Ruby keeping close behind me. On my GPS display, the little triangle that represented “us” continued to close in on the x that represented our destination. A hundred yards to go . . .
What would we find?
Fifty yards . . .
I looked back and saw Ruby valiantly battle through a thicket of branches. Was her heart beating as fast as mine? Was her pulse racing, too? She knew we were getting closer.
Twenty yards . . .
I pushed my way between two pine trees—the forest version of a car wash. That’s when I had this thought about paths, the ones we take and the ones we don’t. I’d tried my best to live free from regret, but at that moment, I regretted becoming Elliot Uretsky so profoundly that I knew I’d never forgive myself. No matter what the outcome, I had an incurable disease called regret. Life, I thought, was full of paths, like the one Ruby and I were forging through this forest. There are paths made for us, and paths that we make. Sometimes we stumble upon a route we think about taking but, for some reason, don’t. Or worse, we walk one way and look back wistfully at the way we had left behind.
Ten yards . . .
I looked back at Ruby—pale, her pert nose blackened by dirt. A herd of flies roamed about her head like a haphazard halo. I wondered what path I took that led me to her. What made her apply to the same school as me? Why did we take the same class? Was it a series of choices, or was it all somehow predestined?
Ruby came toward me, her body trembling with exhaustion. Behind me was one final coppice to clear before we’d reach our destination.
“I love you,” I said, holding her tight. “No matter what we find. I love you.”
I pushed my way through the trees, with Ruby following.
We emerged into a small clearing with trees all around us. In the center of the clearing I saw loose-packed dirt, as though it had been dug up recently. No plants were growing in that patch of dirt, but set upon the barren oval was a large X composed entirely of stones. X marks the spot.
Ruby shrieked when she looked to her left. I cried out, too, after I looked. Leaning up against a nearby tree, I saw two shovels. Long wood handles, hard steel spades. I went over to the shovels, and I saw that each had a tag on it with a note written in neat printed lettering.
One tag read Ruby’s.
The other tag read John ’s.