“What do you mean?”
“Look in the trees. On the ground. Fairy handkerchiefs, it looks like to me, but, well, it’s also sticky. Tacky. Thick, too. Fairy handkerchiefs aren’t like that.”
“No,” Lila said. She had no idea what he was talking about. “Of course they’re not. Listen, Willy, we’ve got someone in custody for the murders—”
“Yep, yep, heard it on my scanner. Hard to believe a woman could’ve killed those men and torn up that trailer like she did, but the women are getting stronger, that’s my opinion. Stronger and stronger. Just look at that Ronda Rousey, for instance.”
Lila had no idea who Ronda Rousey was, either. The only unusually physically strong woman she knew from these parts was Vanessa Lampley, who supplemented her income at the prison with competitive arm-wrestling. “You know these parts . . .”
“Well, not like the back of my hand, but I know em a-country fair,” he agreed, tamping the fresh load in his pipe with a nicotine-yellowed thumb.
“That woman had to get here somehow, and I doubt if she walked. Can you think of anyplace she might have parked a car? Somewhere off the road?”
Willy set a match to his pipe and considered. “Well, you know what? The Appalachian Power Company lines go through about half a mile yonder.” He pointed up the hill in the direction of the meth shed. “Run all the way to Bridger County. Someone with a four-wheel drive might could get into that cut from Pennyworth Lane, though I wouldn’t try it in any vehicle I’d paid for myself.” He glanced up at the sun. “Time for me to roll. If I hurry back to the station, I’ll be in time for Dr. Phil.”
2
There was nothing to see in the trailer that Terry Coombs and Roger Elway would not have already photographed, and nothing which might have helped to place Evie Black at the scene. No purse, no wallet.
Lila wandered through the wreckage until she heard the sound of Willy’s pickup rattling down to the main highway. Then she crossed the relic-laden gravel in front of the trailer, ducked under the yellow tape, and walked back to the meth shed.
Half a mile yonder, Willy had said, and although the overgrowth was too thick for Lila to see the power pylons from where she was standing (and wishing for an air mask; the reek of chemicals was still strong), she could hear the steady bzzz they made as they carried their high-voltage load to the homes and businesses of this little corner of the Tri-Counties. People who lived near those pylons claimed they caused cancer, and from what Lila had read in the papers there was some convincing evidence. What about the sludge from the strip mines and the holding ponds that had polluted the ground water, though? Maybe one of those was the culprit. Or was it a kind of poison casserole, the various man-made spices combining into various flavorful illnesses, cancers, lung diseases, and chronic headaches?
And now a new illness, she thought. What had brought this one about? Not coal effluent, if it was happening all over the world.
She started toward the bzzz sound, and hadn’t gone half a dozen steps before she saw the first of the fairy handkerchiefs, and understood what Willy had been talking about. You saw them in the morning, mostly, spiderwebs jeweled with dew. She dropped to one knee, reached for the patch of filmy whiteness, then thought better of it. She picked up a twig and poked it with that, instead. Thin strands stuck to the end of the twig and seemed to either evaporate or melt into the wood. Which was impossible, of course. A trick of her tired eyes. There could be no other explanation.
She thought about the cocoons that were growing on women who fell asleep, and wondered if this could possibly be the same stuff. One thing seemed obvious, even to a woman as exhausted as she was: it looked like a footprint.
“At least it does to me,” she said out loud. She took her phone from her belt and photographed it.
There was another beyond the first, then another and another. No doubt about it now. They were tracks, and the person who’d made them had been walking toward the meth shed and the trailer. White webbing also clung to a couple of tree trunks, each forming the vague outline of a hand, as if someone had either touched them going by or leaned against them to rest or to listen. What, exactly, was this shit? If Evie Black had left webwork tracks and handprints out here in the woods, how come there was no sign of the stuff in Lila’s cruiser?
Lila followed the tracks up a rise, then down into the sort of narrow dip that country fellows like Willy Burke called a brake or a holler, then up another hill. Here the trees were thicker—scrub pines fighting for space and sunlight. The webby stuff hung from some of the branches. She took a few more pictures with her phone and pushed on toward the power pylons and the bright sunlight ahead. She ducked under a low-hanging branch, stepped into the clearing, and just stared. For a moment all her tiredness was swept away by amazement.
I am not seeing this, she thought. I’ve fallen asleep, maybe in my cruiser, maybe in the late Truman Mayweather’s trailer, and I’m dreaming it. I must be, because nothing like this exists in the Tri-Counties, or east of the Rockies. Nothing like this exists anywhere, actually, not on earth, not in this epoch.
Lila stood frozen at the edge of the clearing, her neck craned, staring upward. Flocks of moths fluttered around her, brown in the shade, seeming to turn an iridescent gold in the late afternoon sunshine.
She had read somewhere that the tallest tree on earth—a redwood—was just under four hundred feet high. The tree in the center of the clearing looked taller than that, and it was no redwood. It was like no tree she’d ever seen. The closest she could come to a comparison were the banyan trees she and Clint had seen in Puerto Rico on their honeymoon. This . . . thing . . . stood on a great gnarled podium of roots, the largest of them looking twenty or thirty feet thick. The trunk was comprised of dozens of intertwined boles, rising into huge branches with fern-like leaves. The tree seemed to glow with its own light, a surrounding aura. That was probably an illusion caused by the way the westering sun flashed through the gaps in the twisting sections of the trunk, but . . .
But the whole thing was an illusion, wasn’t it? Trees did not grow to a height of five hundred feet, and even if this one had—supposing it was real—she would have seen it from Mayweather’s trailer. Terry and Roger would have seen it. Willy Burke would have seen it.