Necessity

48

Thank God it isn’t heavy primeval timber. There was a forest fire six years ago in the fall when nobody was in residence; that was during the reign of Bert’s previous wife, Aileen, the one who fell in love with the head-waiter at the Englewood Country Club and eventually married him. She too had been a former model. The house that autumn was scorched but saved by air-dropped firefighters. By the time the fire was contained it had taken out most of the middle-sized trees. What’s left is second growth that has sprouted around the occasional granddaddy tree that survived the blaze.

Mostly she follows game trails through the woods, splashing through puddles left by the hard rain. Where the track squeezes through gaps too narrow for the Jeep she backs up and finds a way around.

It reminds her of treks during hunting season with her father when she was nine or ten or eleven years old and he was trying to teach her to be a boy. He was very serious about knowing how to survive in the wilderness. When they were stationed at Elmendorf he’d been forced down twice by freak weather in the Alaskan wilderness; he came out on foot both times, to the amazement of experts who’d presumed him dead.

Backing up for the third time to find yet another way across a steep-sided creek, she is thinking, I wish I’d paid more attention to what he had to say.

Then she thinks: don’t make a habit of recollecting things like that. You’ll never dare repeat them to anyone.

Not even Ellen?

That’s a question she hasn’t answered: whether it will be safe someday to tell Ellen the truth.

There isn’t much breeze. She’s worried that the sound of the Jeep may be carrying as far as the house-it can’t be much more than three-quarters of a mile off to the left.

Something stirs to her left. It draws her quick alarmed attention. She gets a glimpse of movement-tawny fur bolting into the trees. Doubtless a deer. There are quite a few of them in these woods, trapped on the property by Bert’s brutal fence: they’re born here and they grow up here and they die here, mostly from bullet and shotgun slug wounds inflicted by Bert and his hunting cronies.

It all seems to be taking much longer than it ought to. The boundary fence should have turned up before now. She’s had time to cross the entire property twice over. It’s only 320 acres, for Pete’s sake.

Has she lost her bearings? Running in circles like a fool?

No. She checks tree shadows along the ground; the sun is there-that’s the proper angle; she’s still heading toward the fence. It ought to be right in front of her. She ought to have smashed into it by now.

So where in hell is it?

There. Just up the slope, concealed by brush.

She turns to the left, fighting the wheel, braced against the seat as the tires lurch across rocks and root systems and unexpected holes. The rough pitching flings her against the shoulder belt and at intervals it cuts into the side of her neck; by the end of this ride she’ll have a welt there and a purpling bruise on the side of her elbow where it bangs into the door. Without the belt to hold her down she’d have smashed her skull against the ceiling by now. She feels shaken to pieces.

It isn’t the sort of establishment into which an innocent party would wander by accident. The fence goes all the way around the property. It is nine feet high, a chain link metal barrier topped by an arrowhead pattern of electrified barbed wire strands. Once a week Bert’s man has to walk the length of the fence with a pole cutter to trim back branches and leaves that threaten to drop across the line and short it out.

Be just dandy if he’s making his rounds today …

Now she knows where she is. Anxious about the draining of time she vectors to the left across an open meadow and guns the Jeep to reckless speed.

At the top of the meadow she slaloms amid tree trunks, some of them jagged and blackened. Must be almost there now. Got to be …

Wheels spinning, engine whining, she bursts out of a tangled thicket into the rutted pioneer road. The front wheels plunge down and the Jeep nearly stalls.

Hitting the clutch, gathering breath, she remembers when they bulldozed the road through from the house to the landing strip: a rough pioneer track, unsurfaced, barely graded but sufficient for the Bronco.

Twigs and branches lie askew in the ruts now, some of them crushed. There are a lot of puddles. She sees dark grease stains on the bent weeds that make a spine along the hump of the middle of the track.

It’s been used fairly recently, then.

Of course that doesn’t prove they’re still using the airstrip. It doesn’t prove they haven’t rolled up the steel mesh and taken it away.

If they have-suppose the strip has become boggy from yesterday’s rain: too overgrown for Charlie’s airplane to land?

The worst thing is there’s no time to find out.

She cranks the wheel sharp right and fits the tires into the deep tracks and drives the short distance to the back gate. It is a simple reinforced steel contraption that lacks the formality of the curlicued iron gate at the front entrance but makes up for it in solidity: the gauge of its mesh is such that no wirecutter short of an acetylene torch could breach it.

Holding it shut are two enormous padlocks, top and bottom, their hasps at least half an inch thick.

They gleam in the sunlight-the glint of new metal.

Her keys don’t fit.