The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (16 page)

She got up and walked slowly back to the tree where her shelter had been. Although she wanted nothing except to huddle on the pine needles and go to sleep, she set up the fans of branches again, then crawled in behind them. Five minutes later she was dead to the world. As she slept, something came and watched her. It watched for a long time. It was not until light began to line the horizon in the east that it went away . . . and it did not go far.

W
HEN
T
RISHA
woke up, the birds were singing confidently. The light was strong and bright, the way it looked at midmorning. She might have slept even longer, but hunger wouldn't allow it. She roared with a vast emptiness from the top of her throat all the way down to her knees. And in the very middle it hurt, actually
hurt.
It was as if she were being pinched somewhere inside. The feeling frightened her. She had been hungry before, but never hungry enough for it to hurt this way.

She backed out of her shelter, knocking it over again, got to her feet, and hobbled to the stream with her hands planted in the small of her back. She probably looked like Pepsi Robichaud's grandmother, the one who was deaf and had arthritis so bad she had to use a walker. Granny Grunt, Pepsi called her.

Trisha got down on her knees, planted her hands, and drank like a horse at a trough. If the water made her sick again, and it probably would, so be it. She had to put
something
in her stomach.

She got up, looked dully around her, hitched up her jeans (they had been okay when she put them
on, long ago and far away in her Sanford bedroom, but they were loose now), then started downhill along the course of the stream. She no longer had any real hope that it would take her out, but at least she could put some distance between her and Trisha's Pukin' Place; she could do that much.

She had gotten perhaps a hundred paces when the tough tootsie spoke up.
Forgot something, didn't you, sugar?
Today the tough tootsie also sounded like a getting-tired tootsie, but her voice was as cold and ironic as ever. Not to mention correct. Trisha stood where she was for a moment with her head down and her hair hanging, then turned around and labored uphill to her little camp of the night before. She had to stop twice on the way and give her pounding heart a chance to slow down; she was appalled by how little strength she had left.

She filled her water-bottle, stuffed it and the shredded remains of her poncho into her pack, gave a tearful sigh at the pack's weight when she lifted it (the damned thing was all but
empty,
for goodness' sake), and then set off again. She walked slowly, almost plodding now, and although the going was downhill she still had to stop and rest every fifteen minutes or so. Her head throbbed. All the world's colors looked too bright, and when a bluejay called from a branch overhead, the sound seemed to punch into her ears like needles. She pretended Tom Gordon was with her, keeping her company,
and then after awhile she didn't have to pretend anymore. He walked along beside her, and although she knew he was a hallucination, he looked as real by daylight as he had by moonlight.

Around noon, Trisha stumbled over a rock and sprawled full-length in a brambly snarl of bushes. She lay there with the breath knocked out of her and her heart hammering so hard it made white lights in front of her eyes. The first time she attempted to drag herself back to open ground she couldn't do it. She waited, rested, tried for stillness with her eyes half-closed, and then went for it again. This time she pulled herself free, but when she tried to get up, her legs wouldn't support her. No wonder, either, not really. Over the last forty-eight hours she'd had nothing to eat but a hardboiled egg, a tuna sandwich, two Twinkies, and a few fiddleheads. She'd also had diarrhea and vomiting.

“I'm going to die, Tom, aren't I?” she asked. Her voice was calm, lucid.

There was no answer. Trisha raised her head and looked around. Number 36 was gone. Trisha dragged herself over to the stream and had a drink. The water didn't seem to be bothering her stomach and bowels anymore. She didn't know if that meant she was getting used to it or just that her body had given up trying to rid itself of the bad stuff, the impurities.

Trisha sat up, wiped her dripping mouth, and looked northwest, along the course of the stream. The terrain up ahead was moderating, and the old forest seemed to be changing once again, the firs giving way to smaller, younger trees—your basic forest clenches and tangles, in other words, with plenty of underbrush clogging up any easy way through. She didn't know how long she could continue in that direction. And if she tried to walk in the stream, she guessed that the current would bowl her over. There were no helicopters, no barking dogs. She had an idea she could hear those sounds if she wanted to, just as she could see Tom Gordon if she wanted to, so it was best not to think in that direction. If any sounds surprised her, they might be real.

Trisha didn't think any sounds would surprise her.

“I'm going to die in the woods.” Not a question this time.

Her face twisted into an expression of sorrow, but there were no tears. She held out her hands and looked at them. They were trembling. At last she got to her feet and began to walk again. As she made her way slowly downhill, clutching at tree-trunks and branches to keep from falling over, two detectives from the attorney general's office were questioning her mother and brother. Later that afternoon a psychiatrist who worked with the state police would try to hypnotize
them, and with Pete he would succeed. The focus of their questions had to do with pulling into the parking lot on Saturday morning and getting ready to hike. Had they seen a blue van? Had they seen a man with blond hair and eyeglasses?

“Dear Christ,” Quilla said, finally giving in to the tears she had until now largely held off. “Dear Christ, you think my baby was kidnapped, don't you? Snatched from behind us while we were arguing.” At that, Pete also began to cry.

In TR-90, TR-100, and TR-110, the search for Trisha went on, but the perimeter had been tightened, the men and women in the woods instructed to concentrate more fully on the area near where the girl had last been seen. The searchers were now looking more for the girl's effects than for the girl herself: her pack, her poncho, articles of her clothing. Not her panties, though; the A.G.'s men and the state police detectives were pretty sure no one would find those. Guys like Mazzerole usually kept their victims' undergarments, holding onto them long after the bodies had been tossed in ditches or stuffed into culverts.

Trisha McFarland, who had never seen Francis Raymond Mazzerole in her life, was now thirty miles beyond the northwest perimeter of the new, tighter search area. The Maine State Guides and Forest Services game wardens would have found this difficult to believe even without the false tip to
distract them, but it was true. She was no longer in Maine; at around three o'clock that Monday afternoon she crossed over into New Hampshire.

It was an hour or so after that when Trisha saw the bushes near a stand of beech trees not far from the stream. She walked toward them, not daring to believe even when she saw the bright red berries—hadn't she just told herself that she could see things and hear them if she wanted to badly enough?

True . . . but she'd also told herself that if she was surprised, the things she saw and heard might be real. Another four steps convinced her that the bushes
were
real. The bushes . . . and the lush freight of checkerberries hanging all over them like tiny apples.

“Berries ho!” she cried in a cracked, hoarse voice, and any last doubts were removed when two crows which had been feasting on dropped fruit a little farther into the tangle took wing, cawing at her reprovingly.

Trisha meant to walk, but found herself running instead. When she reached the bushes she stopped on her heels, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed in thin lines of color. She reached out with her filthy hands, then pulled them back, still convinced on some level that when she tried to touch, her fingers would go right through. The bushes would shimmer like a special effect in a movie (one of Pete's beloved “morphs”), and then they would show themselves for what they
really were: just more tangles of cruddy brown brambles, ready to drink as much of her blood as they could while it was still warm and flowing.

“No,”
she said, and reached forward. For a moment she still wasn't sure, and then . . . oh, and then—

The checkerberries were small and soft under her fingertips. She squashed the first one she picked; it spurted droplets of red juice onto her skin and made her think of once when she had been watching her father shave and he had nicked himself.

She raised the finger with the droplets on it (and a little scrap of deflated berry-skin) to her mouth and put it between her lips. The taste was tangy-sweet, reminding her not of Teaberry gum but of Cranapple juice, just poured from a bottle kept cold in the refrigerator. The taste made her cry, but she wasn't aware of the tears spilling down her cheeks. She was already reaching for more berries, stripping them from the leaves in sticky bleeding bunches, cramming them into her mouth, hardly chewing, simply swallowing them and groping for more.

Her body opened itself to the berries; basked in their sugary arrival. She felt this happen—was totally
down
with it, as Pepsi might have said. Her thinking self seemed far away, watching it all. She harvested the berries from their branches, closing her hand around whole clumps of them and pulling them off. Her fingers turned red; her palms; so, in very short
order, did her mouth. As she pushed deeper into the bushes, she began to look like a girl who had been in a nasty cutting-scrape and needed a quick patch-up in the nearest emergency room.

She ate some of the leaves as well as the berries, and her mother had been right about them, too—they were good even if you
weren't
a woodchuck. Zippy. The two tastes combined made her think of the jelly Gramma McFarland served with roast chicken.

She might have gone on eating her way south for quite awhile longer, but the berry-patch came to an abrupt end. Trisha emerged from the last clump of bushes and found herself looking into the mild, startled face and dark brown eyes of a good-sized doe. She dropped a double handful of berries and screamed through what now looked like a crazy application of lipstick.

The doe hadn't been bothered by her crackling, munching progress through the checkerberry tangle, and seemed just mildly annoyed by Trisha's scream—it occurred to Trisha later that this was one deer who would be lucky to survive hunting season come fall. The doe merely flicked her ears and took two springy steps—they were more like bounces, actually—back into a clearing which was shafted by conflicting rays of dusky green-gold light.

Beyond her, watching more warily, were two
fawns on gangly legs. The doe took another look over her shoulder at Trisha, then crossed with those light, springing steps to her kids. Watching her, amazed and as delighted as she had been at the sight of the beavers, Trisha thought that the doe moved like a creature with a thin coating of that Flubber stuff on her feet.

The three deer stood in the beech clearing, almost as if posing for a family portrait. Then the doe nudged one of the fawns (or perhaps bit its flank), and the three of them were on their way. Trisha saw the flirt of their white tails going downhill and then she had the clearing to herself.

“Goodbye!” she called. “Thanks for stopping b—”

She stopped, realizing what the deer had been doing here. The forest floor was littered with beechnuts. She knew about these not from her mother but from science class at school. Fifteen minutes ago she had been starving; now she was in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner . . . the vegetarian version, yeah, but so what?

Trisha knelt, picked up one of the nuts, and set the remains of her fingernails in the shell's seam. She didn't expect much, but it opened almost as easily as a peanut. The shell was the size of a knuckle, the nutmeat a little bigger than a sunflower seed. She tried it, a bit dubious, but it was good. In its own way it was as good as the checkerberries,
and her body seemed to want it in a different way.

The worst of her hunger had been satisfied by the berries; she had no idea how many she had already gobbled (not to mention the leaves; her teeth were probably as green as Arthur Rhodes's, that creepy little kid who lived up the street from Pepsi). Besides, her stomach had probably shrunk. What she had to do now was . . .

“Stock up,” she muttered. “Yeah, baby, stock up bigtime.”

She unshouldered her pack, aware of how radically her energy level had rebounded already—it was beyond amazing, actually a little eerie—and unbuckled the flap. She crawled across the clearing, gathering nuts with dirty hands. Her hair hung in her eyes, her filthy shirt flapped, and every now and again she hitched at her jeans, which had been all right when she put them on a thousand years ago but no longer wanted to stay up. As she gathered she sang the auto-glass jingle—1-800-54-GIANT—under her breath. When she had enough beechnuts to weight down the bottom of the pack, she worked her way slowly back through the checkerberry patch, picking berries and dumping them (the ones she didn't just dump into her mouth) in on top of the nuts.