Ludwig took a deep breath. He was a fool for doing all of this, he knew. Trespassing on someone's land on a cool autumn day just might get him an ass cheek full of buckshot or a couple of blackened eyes. And even if he avoided those pitfalls and found the location where The Pioneer Club met, what would he do with that information? He could only do what he had always done in the past—write a paper. But who would want to publish it? The National Enquirer? Would the headline read: "Bizarre Cult Once Operated in the Woods"?
His hunger gnawed at him. He had never fully appreciated that expression until today when it felt as though a small, furry rat resided in his belly and nibbled on his insides with sharp, pointed teeth. He really needed to eat, and it would be so easy just to cross this stop off the list without even looking. After all, no one was waiting for his report. No one cared if he found the location or not. For all intents and purposes, he was a scholarly tree falling in an empty forest. If he didn't achieve his goals, no one in the greater world would care.
So what's it going to be, Nate old boy?
The wind picked up. It rustled the tall weeds at the roadside, as well as the faded ribbons on the memorial shrine for Jacqueline Foley. She was dead. He knew it. Everybody knew it. People didn't disappear for weeks at a time and then show up alive. And that thought made him feel very, very lonely, like he was the only man left in the world, the lone occupant of a spinning planet that occupied a cold and empty corner of the universe. Not far from the truth, he thought. In so many ways, not far from the truth at all. And something about the loneliness, the sense of being a man on a pointless crusade, an eternal tilter at windmills, appealed to the iconoclastic renegade inside of him. He liked that role, relished it even.
So why turn back now?
*
He left his car on Connors Bend Road, a north-south stretch with barely enough room for two cars to pass at the same time. A farmer—Ludwig didn't know who—had a long, narrow rectangular field plowed next to the road but beyond the field began a thick stand of trees which he figured—based on the county records—to be the beginning of the vast acreage still owned by the Donahues. Somewhere in there, if he was right, might just be the place he was looking for.
The farmer's field had an irrigation ditch down the middle, a narrow strip of unplowed land that Ludwig felt comfortable walking through. He hoped the farmer, whoever he was, intended to stay away and work a different area that afternoon. This late in the season, with almost everything harvested and put away, chances were good he'd be left to his own devices. He didn't imagine any farmer in the county, men who were naturally suspicious of the activities that went on at the college, would take kindly to an eggheaded professor who had never worked with his hands wandering through his field.
When he reached the tree line, he stopped. He had hoped—the foolish hope of the uninitiated—that there would be a path, a simple clearing through the trees and brush that he could follow like a Cub Scout in pursuit of a starter badge. But there wasn't any such thing. Fortunately, given the time of year, much of the undergrowth had died or been thinned out by the cooler temperatures, and after examining the land that stretched out before him, he decided that it wouldn't be as challenging as he thought to walk through this section of the woods.
It wasn't too late to walk back to the car. His hunger pangs had subsided for the moment, but he knew they'd come back soon, probably when he was at his farthest point out in the woods, farthest from the car and what passed for civilization in a small, Midwestern college town.
"In for a dime, in for a dollar," he said and entered the trees.
*