“Why don’t we go in the morning,” I said. “All together?”
“I have to go now.”
I recognized the compulsion in her voice. It was pointless to fight it.
“Fine,” I said. “And then what?”
“I want to get as far away from here as possible.”
For once, we were on the same wavelength.
The kids were hiding inside a tree, a hollow oak with a bed of soft leaves. They wanted it to be our new home, even though they all had to stand up to fit inside. We let them play to give us a moment to consult the scribbled-up map.
“Here’s the wood. I went all around here last night.” Joni traced a large green patch, crisscrossed by blue waterways and surrounded by gray square symbols. “They must be someplace else.”
“We’ll widen the search area,” I said in a tone that would steady a horse. I started marking each gray square building with a number in a route that brought us in a large circle back to where we stood now, at the foot of the Bury Ditches.
Buried witches.
“We can get round these wooded areas and all the buildings in a day,” I said. But it had already cost us half the morning getting the small people mobilized. And then we had wasted time at Moton Hall, checking out the icehouse that the hermit had mentioned in such loving detail. We found nothing but buzz. Now we were finally at the Hoar Wood; it would make most sense to split up, but Joni had been out all night. The last thing we needed was another crash.
“Maybe we should ask the hermit guy to show us exactly where he saw her?” Joni was looking over the wooded knoll that rose 365 meters, the map told me, like a man’s hairy beer gut. The search area did seem big. I was trying to formulate an answer when the kids all rushed out of the tree and started shouting.
Mummy! Mrs. Greene! Mummy!
“What now—”
“Can’t you hear it?” Charlie shouted. They all shouted. I looked at Joni. She shrugged. The kids turned round and round, looking up into the sky, their mouths moving, like they were dancing to some celestial music.
“What is it?” I said.
“Wait!” said Joni, holding up a hand. “I can hear it.”
“What?”
“Chunka-chunka,” said Charlie, shouting right into my face, his mouth wide with joy. “Chunka-chunka!”
And then I could hear it too. The thudding of a helicopter. I closed my eyes until the sound stepped out from the crowd of wind and leaf noise. Its rhythm throbbed steadier than my heartbeat. The volume swelled, and then a machine burst over the wooded knoll in a blizzard of leaves and noise. We instinctively cowered. Billy sprang into my arms, and the others clung to my thighs as though they might be swept away by the tide. The helicopter powered over our heads and then turned in a steep circle, dipping toward us like a giant turning its gaze on an ant.
“What kind is it?” yelled Joni.
“A big one,” I shouted back. It wasn’t a police chopper, and it wasn’t military green. “It’s like one of those sea-rescue things.”
“Rescue! We’re rescued!” Peter and Charlie leapt up and down, screaming for the machine’s attention. Billy buried his face in my chest, and I put my hands over his ears. As the kids streamed away across the field, the helicopter completed its loop, dipped its nose, and thwacked off toward the hills. We watched it leave us. Somewhere over the Long Mynd it turned into just another pixel that made up the sky.
The trouble with the Wikipedia generation is that they cannot tolerate ignorance.
“I know fuck all about helicopters,” I pointed out for the umpteenth time. “I don’t know what type it was. I don’t know who was flying it. I don’t know what it was doing. I just don’t know.” With one hand on the steering wheel, I punctuated that final statement with jabs in the air.
Joni shushed me under her breath. I sucked in a lot of air and braked hard, because I had nearly missed the turn into a farm driveway.
“What fuck-all color was it?” asked Billy.
I pulled up outside a house with a wide stackyard, strewn with vehicles, and several long outhouses. I switched off the engine, and it tutted in the silence.
“Stay in the car.”
“But, Mum!” Charlie said. “You said Peter and I could help.”
“Charlie . . .”
“Please!”
The kids would fight if I left them alone in the car.
“All right, but you little ones stay here.”
Maggie set up howling.
“Maggie?” I laid a hand on her knee, and she stopped. “Can you please be in charge of Billy and the Lost Boy? It’s important that they stay in the car.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I think you should lock the doors, Mummy,” she said, “and leave my window open a bit so I can shout if they try to escape.”
“Good idea,” I said.
Joni headed off to circle the house. Charlie, Peter, and I turned the other way toward the barns.
“If you hear a kind of buzzing, back away, do you hear? There could be bodies.”
“We don’t look, we definitely don’t touch,” Charlie parroted the rules back to me.
“Right. And no climbing, Peter.”
“Yes, Mrs. Greene.”
“Just look for signs of life: empty drink cans or rubbish or sleeping bags. A quick look and we move on, okay?”
“Okay.”
We stopped beside the towering doors of a shed. It reeked of diesel fumes that must have built up over the past few days, so I pulled aside the doors to let it air for a moment. Beside the shed was a low concrete building. It looked as though some kind of animal stalls, an old dairy perhaps, had been converted into a squat row of lockup-style garages.
“Just check down there,” I told the boys before the lure of tractors and combine harvesters could tempt their immature lungs into the noxious shed. They trotted off toward the garages, and I held my sleeve over my nose and mouth and entered. The fumes made my head woozy, but the shed was otherwise immaculate. The concrete floor squeaked under my rubber boots. The blades of a plough glinted like razors in the light. I heard Charlie calling me from outside, and I scanned quickly under the vehicles, but there was no sign of a hideout. I slid the doors closed behind me.
Charlie ran out from the garages. “Mummy, see this.” He held an empty canister. It was white with a nozzle hanging from a piece of dirty string, its spout stained yellow. Charlie wrinkled his nose against the smell. From inside the garages, I heard the fingernails-down-a-blackboard friction of metal on metal as one of the shutters rolled up. Peter’s footsteps stumbled about inside. I took the petrol can from Charlie’s hand.
“There are loads more, Mummy.” He wiped at his eyes, which were pink and weeping from the pent-up vapors. “And gas bottles, like Daddy uses for the barbecue. Come and see.”
He turned back toward the outbuilding. My hand missed his collar and grasped air as Charlie sprang into his stride away from me.
No!