“If you’re not coming up, why’d you come at all?” Lila asked. “You’re not that pregnant.”
“I was hoping you’d give me some of your Tic Tacs, ringer. And I’m plenty pregnant enough, believe me.” Lila had won H-O-R-S-E and the mints.
“Here.” She tossed the box to Tiffany, and climbed up the ladder.
The Pine Hills show house had, ironically, proved to be better constructed than almost every other structure on Tremaine, including Lila’s own. Although dim—small windows smudged by the passage of seasons—the attic was dry. Lila paced the space, her footfalls drawing puffs of dust from the floor. Mary had said that this was the one where she and Lila and Mrs. Ransom were, back there, wherever back there was. She wanted to feel herself, to feel her son.
She didn’t feel anything.
At one end of the attic, a moth was batting against one of the dirty windows. Lila walked over to release it. The window was stuck. Lila heard creaking as, behind her, Tiffany climbed the ladder. She moved Lila aside, took out a pocket knife, worked the point around the edges, and the window went up. The moth escaped and flew away.
Below, there was snow on the overgrown lawns, on the busted-up street, on her dead cruiser in Mrs. Ransom’s driveway. Tiffany’s horses were poking their noses around, nickering about whatever it was that horses nickered about, switching their tails. Lila could see past her own house, past the pool that she had never wanted and that Anton had tended, and past the elm tree that he had left her the note about. An orange animal trotted from the shadowy edge of the pine woods that backed the neighborhood. It was a fox. Even at this distance the luster of its winter coat was evident. How had it got to be winter so soon?
Tiffany stood in the middle of the attic. It was dry, but also cold, especially with the window open. She held out the box of Tic Tacs for Lila to take back. “I wanted to eat them all, but it would’ve been wrong. I’ve given up my life of crime.”
Lila smiled and put them back in her own pocket. “I declare you rehabilitated.”
The women stood about a foot apart, looking at each other, breathing steam. Tiffany pulled off her hat and dropped it on the floor.
“If you think that’s a joke, it’s not. I don’t wanna take anything from you, Lila. I don’t wanna take anything from anybody.”
“What do you want?” asked Lila.
“My very own life. Baby and a place and stuff. People that love me.”
Lila closed her eyes. She’d had all those things. She couldn’t feel Jared, couldn’t feel Clint, but she could remember them, could remember her very own life. It hurt, those memories. They made shapes in the snow, like the angels they’d made as children, but those shapes became fuzzier every day. God, she was lonesome.
“That’s not so much,” Lila said, and reopened her eyes.
“It seems like a lot to me.” Tiffany reached out and drew Lila’s face to hers.
6
The fox trotted away from the Pine Hills development, across Tremaine Street, and into the thick stands of winter wheat that had grown up on the far side. He was hunting for the smell of hibernating ground squirrels. The fox loved ground squirrels—Crunchy! Juicy!—and on this side of the Tree, unbothered for so long by human habitation, they had grown careless.
After a half hour’s search he discovered a little family of them in a dug-out chamber. They never awoke, even as he was crushing them between his teeth. “So tasty!” he said to himself.
The fox went on, entering the deep woods, making for the Tree. He paused briefly to explore an abandoned house. He pissed on a pile of books scattered on the floor and nosed fruitlessly around in a closet full of rotting linens. In the kitchen of the house there was food in the refrigerator that smelled deliciously spoiled, but his attempts to bump the door ajar accomplished nothing.
“Let me in there,” the fox demanded of the fridge, just in case it was only pretending to be a dead thing.
The fridge loomed, unresponsive.
A copperhead slid out from under the woodstove on the far side of the kitchen. “Why are you glowing?” it asked the fox. Other animals had commented on this phenomenon and were wary of it. The fox saw it himself when he looked into still water and saw his reflection. A gold light clung to him. It was Her mark.
“I’ve had some good fortune,” the fox said.
The copperhead wriggled its tongue at him. “Come here. Let me bite you.”
The fox ran from the cabin. Various birds heckled him as he loped beneath the canopy of gnarled and tangled bare branches, but their petty jibes meant nothing to the fox, whose belly was full and whose coat was thick as a bear’s.
When he emerged into the clearing, the Tree was there, the centerpiece of a leafy, steaming oasis in the fields of snow. His paws crossed over from the cold ground to the rich, warm summer loam that was the Tree’s forever bed. The Tree’s branches were layered and blended in countless greens and beside the passage in the bole, the white tiger, flicking its great tail, watched him approach with sleepy eyes.
“Don’t mind me,” said the fox, “just passing through.” He darted by, into the black hole, and out the opposite side.
CHAPTER 7
1
Don Peters and Eric Blass had yet to be relieved at the West Lavin roadblock when a banged-up Mercedes SL600 came trundling toward them from the prison. Don was standing in the weeds, shaking off after a leak. He zipped up in a hurry and returned to the pickup that served as their cruiser. Eric was standing in the road with his gun drawn.
“Stow the cannon, Junior,” Don said, and Eric holstered his Glock.
The driver of the Mercedes, a curly-haired man with a florid face, pulled to an obedient stop when Don raised his hand. Sitting beside him was a good-looking woman. Make that astoundingly good-looking, especially after all the zombie chicks he and Eric had seen the last few days. Also, she was familiar.
“License and registration,” Don said. He had no orders to look at drivers’ IDs, but it was what cops said when they made a stop. Watch this, Junior, he thought. See how a man does it.
The driver handed over his license; the woman rooted around in the glove compartment and found the registration. The man was Garth Flickinger, MD. From Dooling, with a listed residence in the town’s fanciest neighborhood, over on Briar.
“Mind telling me what you were doing up at the prison?”
“That was my idea, Officer,” the woman said. God, she was good-looking. No bags under this bitch’s eyes. Don wondered what she’d been taking to keep her so bushy-tailed. “I’m Michaela Morgan. From NewsAmerica?”
Eric exclaimed, “I knew I recognized you!”
It meant jack shit to Don, who didn’t watch network news, let alone the blah-blah crap they put out 24/7 on the cable, but he remembered where he’d seen her. “Right! The Squeaky Wheel. You were drinking there!”