Trisha McFarland, who had never seen Francis Raymond Mazzerole in her life, was now thirty miles beyond the northwest perimeter of the new, tighter search area. The Maine State Guides and Forest Services game wardens would have found this difficult to believe even without the false tip to distract them, but it was true. She was no longer in Maine; at around three o'clock that Monday afternoon she crossed over into New Hampshire.
It was an hour or so after that when Trisha saw the bushes near a stand of beech trees not far from the stream. She walked toward them, not daring to believe even when she saw the bright red berries - hadn't she just told herself that she could see things and hear them if she wanted to badly enough?
True... but she'd also told herself that if she was sur-prised, the things she saw and heard might be real. Another four steps convinced her that the bushes were real. The bushes... and the lush freight of checkerberries hanging all over them like tiny apples.
CHAPTER 10
"Berries ho!" she cried in a cracked, hoarse voice, and any last doubts were removed when two crows which had been feasting on dropped fruit a little farther into the tangle took wing, cawing at her reprovingly.
Trisha meant to walk, but found herself running instead.
When she reached the bushes she stopped on her heels, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed in thin lines of color. She reached out with her filthy hands, then pulled them back, still convinced on some level that when she tried to touch, her fingers would go right through. The bushes would shim-mer like a special effect in a movie (one of Pete's beloved "morphs"), and then they would show themselves for what they really were: just more tangles of cruddy brown bram-bles, ready to drink as much of her blood as they could while it was still warm and flowing.
"No," she said, and reached forward. For a moment she still wasn't sure, and then... oh, and then - The checkerberries were small and soft under her finger-tips.
She squashed the first one she picked; it spurted droplets of red juice onto her skin and made her think of once when she had been watching her father shave and he had nicked himself.
She raised the finger with the droplets on it (and a little scrap of deflated berry-skin) to her mouth and put it between her lips. The taste was tangy-sweet, reminding her not of Teaberry gum but of Cranapple juice, just poured from a bot-tle kept cold in the refrigerator. The taste made her cry, but she wasn't aware of the tears spilling down her cheeks. She was already reaching for more berries, stripping them from the leaves in sticky bleeding bunches, cramming them into her mouth, hardly chewing, simply swallowing them and groping for more.
Her body opened itself to the berries; basked in their sugary arrival. She felt this happen - was totally down with it, as Pepsi might have said. Her thinking self seemed far away, watching it all. She harvested the berries from their branches, closing her hand around whole clumps of them and pulling them off. Her fingers turned red; her palms; so, in very short order, did her mouth. As she pushed deeper into the bushes, she began to look like a girl who had been in a nasty cutting-scrape and needed a quick patch-up in the nearest emergency room.
She ate some of the leaves as well as the berries, and her mother had been right about them, too - they were good even if you weren't a woodchuck. Zippy. The two tastes com-bined made her think of the jelly Gramma McFarland served with roast chicken.
She might have gone on eating her way south for quite awhile longer, but the berry-patch came to an abrupt end.
Trisha emerged from the last clump of bushes and found herself looking into the mild, startled face and dark brown eyes of a good-sized doe. She dropped a double handful of berries and screamed through what now looked like a crazy application of lipstick.
The doe hadn't been bothered by her crackling, munch-ing progress through the checkerberry tangle, and seemed just mildly annoyed by Trisha's scream - it occurred to Trisha later that this was one deer who would be lucky to survive hunting season come fall. The doe merely flicked her ears and took two springy steps - they were more like bounces, actually - back into a clearing which was shafted by conflicting rays of dusky green-gold light.
Beyond her, watching more warily, were two fawns on gangly legs. The doe took another look over her shoulder at Trisha, then crossed with those light, springing steps to her kids. Watching her, amazed and as delighted as she had been at the sight of the beavers, Trisha thought that the doe moved like a creature with a thin coating of that Flubber stuff on her feet.
The three deer stood in the beech clearing, almost as if posing for a family portrait. Then the doe nudged one of the fawns (or perhaps bit its flank), and the three of them were on their way. Trisha saw the flirt of their white tails going downhill and then she had the clearing to herself.
"Goodbye!" she called. "Thanks for stopping b - "