Deadwood (14 page)

Hannah and Martin shook their heads.

“State and national arbor societies keep a registry of the biggest trees of each species. This one's got to be over a hundred feet tall. That's knocking on the record books, so this tree might be worth saving.”

“Then you will cure it?” Hannah asked again, impatient for her to get to the point.

“Slow down. I don't know for sure that it's a record holder, and I don't know for sure that it's suffering from beech bark disease. It could just be old—at least two hundred fifty years, from the looks of it. Nothing lives forever—not even a tree.” She glanced around. “This whole woodland looks stressed, to tell the truth. There's a lot less undergrowth than I'd expect, so anything could be wrong—invasive insects, factory runoff. This isn't exactly a thriving ecosystem. I'll take some samples, talk to my colleagues, and we'll find out.” She pulled out a kit from her backpack and began to collect—twigs neatly lined with ridged leaves, a sample of silvery bark from a few carvings. To Hannah, it looked like she was working in slow motion.

“When will you know?” she asked, unable to hold it in. “We don't have that much time.”

Jenna patted her hand. “Maybe not, but the tree can wait. Trees don't live forever, but they don't die overnight, either. Trees don't care if you hurry.”

Hannah thought of the text message the Spirit Tree had sent saying just the opposite, and shook her head.

Martin pulled her off to one side and whispered to her, “So, we agree there's no way Jenna cursed the tree?”

She nodded. “She's a scientist. She wouldn't even believe in curses,” she said, remembering that she had felt the same way a few weeks earlier. “But she can help heal the tree if it can be fixed with some kind of antifungal spray or something.” If the beech was suffering from an ordinary disease, they could heal it. But what if the problem really was magic? Hannah wasn't sure a spray would work.

Jenna had stepped closer to the tree and was examining the bark at close range.

“Do you recognize any of the messages written in the carvings?” Hannah asked, waving her hand near the carving of the six Es in the hope that Jenna would notice it.

“Hmm? No. If I had known this graffiti was happening back when I was in high school, I would have brought the whole environmental club out here with pickets and chained myself to the trunk.”

“What was the name of your club?” said Hannah, watching for signs of guilt.

Jenna laughed a little. “Let's see, Environmental Economy, Ecological Enterprise, Energy Efficiency… something like that. I made sure it had six Es because I thought that would be snappy. It was just a mouthful.”

“Six Es? You mean like those Es there?” Hannah pointed to the carving overtly now.

“Environment, Ecology, and Energy Efficiency for an Enlightened Earth—that's it!” Jenna said, snapping her fingers.

“So, is that what those Es are for?” Hannah tried to focus Jenna's attention.

Jenna finally noticed the letters in the bark. “I doubt it. Nobody from my club would have carved it. Besides, they're not Es.” Jenna pointed to the jagged line in the middle of each. “They're sigmas.”

Hannah and Martin both looked closer. They had just thought they were chiseled crudely, but now the intent was clear. They weren't letters—they were symbols.

“What's a sigma?” she said.

“It's a Greek letter,” Martin answered. “Like fraternities use.”

“Scientists use them, too,” Jenna said. “Sigma represents the rate of change. Although I don't think a scientist would carve it on the tree—looks more like a fraternity prank to me.”

Hannah realized they'd shown up at Jenna's door because of a clue that they'd figured completely wrong. But it didn't matter if they'd come to Jenna for the wrong reasons. She was turning out to be just the help they needed.

21

The Conversation

W
hen Jenna was gone, Martin turned to Hannah. He could hardly get the words out fast enough. “We should have known the curse was some stupid frat ritual. Brainless high-school jocks grow up into brainless college frat boys. First they carve the tree, then they dress up in hooded robes and pour sacrificial blood on the roots.”

“Martin, please,” Hannah said. “It's not like Lower Brynwood has packs of frat brothers roaming the streets. Where would they go to college, anyway? A.J. took a semester of classes at the community college, and if there had been fraternities, he wouldn't have dropped out so fast.”

Martin sniffed, deliberately missing the point. “Not like the love of learning and knowledge could have kept him.”

“A.J. is smart, Martin, even if he doesn't know it. If he had felt more connected, he might have stayed.”

Martin felt a twinge—A.J. actually seemed all right. But he couldn't help railing against the frat boys of the world, although he hadn't actually met any of them. “If you're a strong enough person, you don't need to join clubs to buy yourself friends.”

“You mean clubs like Junior JET?” Hannah said, raising an eyebrow. “How seriously can you take a club that sounds like one of Thomas the Tank Engine's buddies?”

“I'm not taking it seriously,” Martin said, feeling his ears turning red. He hoped she wouldn't notice. “And they're not my friends.”

“Really? That's not how Libby acted.” Hannah crossed her arms.

“You didn't care what Libby did yesterday. Why should you care now?” Martin's whole face burned. She couldn't be jealous, could she?

“Enough. We know we've been barking up the wrong tree.” Hannah paused, glaring at Martin as if to warn him not to laugh at her accidental pun. He wouldn't dare. “So it looks like Jenna's off the hook. But we still don't know what Sigma Sigma Sigma Sigma, uh…” She looked at her fingers, counting silently, “…Sigma Sigma is. And this time I know who to ask.”

“You're the town expert. Who?”

“Ever heard of Professor Google? Does that iPod of yours show any Wi-Fi in range?”

Martin's hand flew to the pocket that held the gadget. “No,” he said. “At least, there's no way I'm going to get a signal out here in the woods.”

An electronic hum broke the silence, coming right from Martin's pocket. Impossible, but he felt it leap to life under his hand.

“Aren't you going to answer that? I think you have a call,” Hannah asked.

“I told you, it's not a phone. It's just an old iPod.”

The tone buzzed again, more insistent this time.

“Then you have an instant message,” Hannah said. “If you don't want to answer, at least shut it off.”

She wasn't going to give up. He pulled it out gently.

“Your iPod!” Hannah said, looking distressed. “It's broken—the curse again.”

He bit his lip, but shook his head no. “It dropped out of my pocket and I rode the bike over it. I didn't want you to know. But it doesn't matter. It was already broken.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “So that's why you haven't been wearing it lately.”

“You don't understand,” he said, fitting the case back together with a sense of desperation. “It never worked. My mom gave it to me when she left for Afghanistan, but I broke it.” He had accidentally dropped it in a toilet, but he wouldn't tell Hannah that.

“But you always wear it.”

He shrugged. “I didn't want anyone to talk to me.”
I didn't want anyone to notice that no one wanted to talk to me
, he thought. He didn't like the way Hannah was looking at him now—as if she was sorry for him. That's just what he didn't want when he moved to this stupid town. He'd been the new kid often enough in his life.

The iPod buzzed again, the noise rattling through the broken case. The screen glowed with golden light.

Hannah looked triumphant. “If your iPod is broken, what is it doing?”

“I don't know.”

“It's the tree again!” she said.

A message filled the screen. Martin held it so Hannah could read, too.

I
'M
HOLDING
ON
. D
ON'T
LET
ME
DOWN
.

The Spirit Tree
, he thought.
It really is the tree
. He put his hand back to the bark and looked at the spokes of branches above.

“O mighty tree…” Martin said. He expected Hannah to mock him, but her eyes were wide. She laid her cheek against the rough bark.

“O mighty tree,” she said, softly, “we won't let you down. Who did this? How do we stop it?”

Martin looked at the phone expectantly, then shook it. It hummed to life with a yellow blaze.

H
UMANS ALL LOOK THE SAME
.

Martin frowned. Yeah, he and Chase were dead ringers all right.

B
UT
YOU
EACH
FEEL
DIFFERENT
. I
SENSE
YOU
AND
THE
BOY
WHEREVER
YOU
ARE
.

“I knew it,” Martin said. “The tree has been spying on us.” He should have been amazed to be communicating with an inanimate object, but instead he felt vindicated. He had known the tree was watching. Waiting. Like in his bedroom that first night, and whenever he set foot in the forest. The Spirit Tree knew he was coming.

“Can you sense who did this to you?” Hannah asked, her voice as gentle as if she were talking to a child. She kept one hand on the tree but her eyes on the bright screen.

Martin didn't have the patience for this tree-whispering act. “Who? When?” he asked. “Where is he now?”

I
T
HURTS
TO
SENSE
THE
BAD
ONE
.

“Don't try,” said Hannah, patting the bark. “We're getting close. This will be over soon.”

The golden glow faded. The cracks in the iPod spidered outward, the plastic shell shattered. Only Martin's grip held it together now. The device was destroyed, and it looked as if it would never work again.

“So, that's that,” Martin said, then smiled.

“What are you smiling about?” Hannah asked, sounding curious, not accusing.

“The tree really spoke. It really texted us.” Anything was possible—the boundaries of what was real and what was fantasy were strangely porous. Martin was a ranger for real.

22

The Sentence

B
eing a seventh-grade ranger had drawbacks. The whole town teetered on the whim of some evil curseworker, but Martin and Hannah had to sit in school all day like good little schoolchildren.

Martin couldn't even talk to Hannah alone. That Junior JET thing managed to ruin not just the four hours a week that he spent there, but every other free moment during the school day. Libby flagged him down in the hallway. She perched on the edge of his desk in social studies. She plopped down next to him in the lunchroom—always with Waverly in tow.

He tried to ditch Libby, but answering in monosyllables didn't work. He tried snarky comebacks, but she thought he was hilarious. At least Hannah laughed at his jokes, too, so it wasn't a total waste. She wasn't much like Gord or Zach, but she was cool.

But on Wednesday Hannah had soccer practice, and Martin was sure she wouldn't skip it for anything, not even the tree. He ran out to the Spirit Tree by himself, probably his best mile pace ever, but it wasn't the same. When he got to the top of the hill, he touched the bark with his hand and spoke aloud. “O mighty tree.”

Nothing. Martin didn't have his iPod to tune into messages, and more importantly, he didn't have Hannah. When she was beside him, the air crackled with electricity—the tree hummed on a frequency so strong he could almost hear it. But when she wasn't there, it felt like just another ordinary tree—an old, battle-scarred tree ready to fall down in the slightest breeze.

On Thursday Hannah told him to meet at her locker after school instead of the west exit. He couldn't wait to get back to work, and he couldn't help being pleased that now she didn't mind being seen with him in front of everyone. At least Martin had that.

When they got to Aunt Michelle's house, a big-headed man leaned against a massive SUV parked in the stamped-concrete driveway. He balanced a clipboard against the beginning of a paunch, flexing meaty biceps as he wrote. Martin didn't like the look of him, and not just because he stood in the way of their entry.

“Oh great,” Hannah said, the corners of her mouth tightening.

“You know that guy?” It figured.

“It's A.J.'s boss, Jake Laughlin. I asked him to take a look at the tree, remember? Kind of a jerk, but if he knows his trees, maybe he can help.”

“I'd be surprised if he knew his ABCs.”

“Well, he says he's a tree surgeon. Anyway, the more we know about how to heal the tree, the better. Plus, he's one of the football coaches and he used to play, so he probably knows the history of the Spirit Tree ceremony. And now's as good a time as any to ask him,” she said, then called out, in a sunny voice that seemed to convey delighted surprise, “Mr. Laughlin! What are you doing here?”

He crunched a mint between his teeth and said, “Hi there, uh, little Vaughan. Just a courtesy call on my best customer. What brings you here?”

“I do,” Martin said, stepping between them. “I live here.”

Jake looked him over suspiciously, and Martin felt color rising to the roots of his curly hair. “You couldn't be Michelle's son.” As if he suspected Martin of running a junior burglary ring.

“I'm just her second cousin. But I'm living here for a while.”

“Lucky kid. She's a very special woman,” Jake said, then popped another mint in his mouth without offering the tin. Martin couldn't think of any response, since agreement was out of the question.