Deadwood (13 page)

A glistening pink earthworm dripped from a lid of earth. Martin realized the trees must have just fallen, although their bark was so ghostly they looked long dead.

Martin ran. His heart pounded, but not because he was afraid. He climbed the path that followed Mill Creek, bridged now by dozens of fallen trunks crisscrossed at mad angles that reminded Martin of the junction of superhighways.

The Spirit Tree still stood at the highest point of the hill—Martin's destination. The beech's moss-flocked branches nearly obscured the moon, which had risen directly behind it.

Martin ran to the tree, his hand stretched out to touch the trunk as always. He felt only air. As he reached for it, the bark moved away faster than he was running. The tree was falling.

The earth heaved beneath his feet, levering him into midair. Martin scrambled backwards off the ledge of soil. He fell hard to the ground, a twelve-foot drop. The wrenching, shrieking sound of splitting wood filled Martin's ears and brain. The ground shook with an impact, and then there was silence—not a bird, not a cricket, not the whoosh of a car on the highway just over the hill.

Martin stood, testing his bruised limbs, and surveyed the littered moonscape around him.

The last tree had fallen. The woods were gone.

Martin woke to the screeching of chairs. His head jerked up, but for a moment he didn't know where he was, surrounded by a bunch of kids dressed up like it was a funeral. Then Libby grabbed his arm and leaned towards him. Oh, yeah, Junior JET.

“Wasn't that great?” she said. “I'll see you tomorrow at school, Martin.”

Martin nodded blankly and wiped a trickle of drool out of the corner of his mouth that he hoped she hadn't noticed.

Libby followed the flow of chattering kids out the door, but Martin took his time gathering his things. His head was thick with fog, and he had a feeling Aunt Michelle was going to make him wait.

20

Wide Reach

H
annah did a double take when she walked into the cafeteria. Martin was squeezed in between Waverly and Libby, who seemed to be talking at once while he stared straight ahead. Hannah hadn't spoken to Wave the day before. Her old friend gave her a tentative smile, but Libby flashed a million-dollar grin, white teeth behind clear braces.

“You've been holding out on us, Hannah,” Libby said, grasping Martin's ropy forearm and giving it a squeeze. “Martin's pretty cool. We're both Junior JET. Did you know his aunt is in charge of the whole thing?”

Martin shrugged, but she didn't release him, holding on to his arm as if she owned him. “She made me go,” he mumbled. “It's some kind of future business leaders thing.”

“Junior Junior Executives of Tomorrow. I've been begging Waverly to join, too.”

“My dad says I can't add new extra-curriculars until I get my grades up,” said Waverly, shifting uncomfortably. “Maybe next quarter.”

“What about you, Hannah?” asked Libby. “You want to join us? Martin must have mentioned it.”

“No, he didn't. But I can't. I have soccer.” Hannah felt wary.

“Oh, yeah,” said Martin, looking eager to change the subject. Probably eager to eat his lunch, too. He pulled his arm from Libby and picked up a fork. “How was the game?”

“They won. Hannah scored two goals,” Waverly answered, her eyes flicking away when Hannah smiled. “What? I saw it online.”

She looked it up! She can't be mad anymore
, Hannah thought.

“Awesome. Well, when the season's over, think about joining,” Libby said. “Martin and I could use someone like you.”

Martin and Libby?
Hannah thought. Yesterday Libby had sneered at him like he was gum on her shoe, and today she was hanging on his arm like they had just won a dating-show trip to Puerto Vallarta. If there were two people with less in common, she didn't know them. Then again, maybe she didn't know Martin at all. She had thought he was different from everyone else in Lo-B, but maybe he was just waiting for his chance to prove he was the same.

Hannah didn't listen to what Libby was saying, but Waverly laughed hysterically and Martin set his mouth in a grim line, even while chewing. Hannah breathed a sigh of relief to know that sitting here made him miserable. That was the Martin she knew.

He raked a hand through his hair, making it even wilder. Hannah noticed the tiny, tight curls along his hairline—they looked almost fuzzy, and she had a strange impulse to touch them. Martin caught her looking at him and rolled his eyes at whatever Libby had been saying. Yep, that was her Martin.

She smiled, and then she laughed along with Waverly, without knowing the joke. If the four of them could sit together, that sure would make life easier.

She was already on the trail of a tree killer, and she didn't need any other enemies, especially not one as formidable as Libby Cho-Johnson. And especially not one she knew and loved as well as Waverly, no matter how different they were.

The school day couldn't end soon enough, but as soon as it did, Hannah found herself longing for soccer practice instead of another afternoon with Martin. Soccer was easy, at least for her. There were rules. She could predict what was about to happen before it did—where the ball was going, which direction the goalie would leap. Easy.

Ever since she met Martin, the rules in her real life didn't make sense. Trees could talk. Libby hung out with nerds. And Hannah didn't have a best friend. For the first time in a long time, she didn't know what to do, but somehow she ended up mixed up with Martin.

As they bounded up the trail through the park after school, Hannah finally worked up the guts to ask what she'd been wondering all day. “So, how did you end up buddies with Libby?”

“Beats me. She sat next to me at that dumb junior middle-manager event, and it was all over. I guess it's like having the Good Housekeeping seal stamped on my forehead.”

“What was the meeting like?”

“Boring. Creepy. But so is everything around here.”

Hannah was about to defend her hometown, but she decided to let it drop for once.

The leaf cover overhead had thinned slightly, letting sunshine stream through where the path had been shadowed the week before. Poison ivy blazed brilliant red, licking up tree trunks like flames. The woods were noisier, too. Leaves crunched on the path, and the sound of the creek was louder without the brush cover. The drier leaves rustled like wind chimes in the breeze. Hannah remembered her dream and hoped the woods weren't really dying like the Spirit Tree, not to mention those Bradford pears and every lawn in town. She always thought trees seemed more alive during autumn—storing up food, closing up shop for the winter, throwing a bon voyage party until spring.

Not the Spirit Tree. She could feel it fading, and from a distance it looked oddly indistinct. The air shimmered around it like a heat mirage as they approached. Hannah's heart lifted when she realized the tree had company.

It wasn't hard to spot Jenna through the brush. She glowed in a hideous neon green and orange unitard and a molded helmet—at least she wouldn't have to worry about illegal hunters mistaking her for a deer. Hannah noticed a trail bike on the ground and realized Jenna's Cirque du Soleil get-up was a bike outfit.

“She's here!” Hannah said, quickening her steps. “I knew she couldn't resist helping the tree when we told her what we were doing.”

“That's only because she doesn't know what we're really up to,” Martin said, trailing behind.

“Well, we don't want her thinking we're the kind of lunatics who talk to trees.”

“Except we are.”

“Only when they talk to us first,” Hannah said. She wouldn't have believed it if it hadn't happened to her, but she couldn't ignore her own senses.

Please don't let Jenna be the bad one
, thought Hannah as she headed toward Jenna and the tree. Hannah had always wanted to be a scientist, but she hadn't even understood what they did. Jenna was the first one she'd really met, except her teachers and Dr. Wiggins, if optometrists counted as scientists. Once Libby told her behind Waverly's back that he didn't even count as a real doctor, but Hannah didn't believe her.

“Hey, Dr. Blitzer!” Hannah called out. “So, you're going to help?”

“I guess you captured my interest,” Jenna said, grinning back. “I wanted to see this tree myself.”

When Hannah and Martin came closer, Jenna inspected him for signs of bee stings. He looked like he was trying very hard not to squirm away from her grip.

“So, what do you think of the Spirit Tree?” Hannah asked.

“It's breathtaking,” Jenna said. She let go of Martin's arm and gestured toward the tree's crown. Hannah couldn't help checking to make sure nothing was about to crash down on them. Halfway up, the broad, fluted trunk split into five trunks, each as wide and tall as any of the neighboring trees. Its leaves were mostly green, but gilded where the tree touched the sky.

“It's really old, isn't it?” Martin asked, scratching a welt on his arm that he hadn't seemed to notice before Jenna reminded him of it.

She nodded. “This magnificent old tree is an American beech,
Fagus grandifolia
. It's a tough tree to cut down, so loggers often left them standing even when they mowed down everything else.”

“So sad—poor trees,” said Hannah. She couldn't help thinking of trees as sentient now.

“The settlers didn't see it that way,” said Jenna. “You know, Hannah, the relationship between plants and the human environment is what we landscape ecologists study. My job with the university extension office is promoting sustainable land use, so I can understand why the settlers cleared the forest. They needed sunny farmland for crops and timber for homes and fuel.”

“So this used to be farmland, Dr. Blitzer?” Martin asked. “I don't know how anybody got a plow up this hill.”

“They probably didn't,” Jenna said. She began circling the tree in her funny-looking bike shoes. “This land is too steep. There was a mill on the creek below where the farmers ground their wheat into flour and Thomas Brynwood made his fortune. This hillside may have been cleared for timber for the mill or surrounding homes. It may have been burned for fuel. But the Spirit Tree stood when the mill fell.”

“So you do remember the beech being called that?” Hannah said, jumping on her word choice. “Being called the Spirit Tree, I mean.”

“No, but I remember coming to these woods with my high-school environmental club and admiring it. It wasn't carved then. We just wanted to see it—bear witness to a tree that had borne witness. There aren't too many old trees around anymore. And if I'm right about this one, it could be more unusual than you think.”

I doubt that very much
, Hannah thought to herself.

“These are called arborglyphs—tree writing,” she said, tracing a carved line with her blunt fingernail.

“It's mutilation,” Martin said, stripping off his backpack and tossing it to the ground harder than he needed to.

“Some historians consider arborglyphs a form of artwork,” Jenna said. Her blue eyes had been bright, but now the line between them deepened. “American Indians made them, and Basque immigrant sheepherders marked the aspen forests out west as a living record of their presence. I know plant ecologists who study culturally modified trees to gain insight into North American culture and human relationships with the environment. Some carvings are quite beautiful.”

“Not these,” said Martin.

“I agree. This is graffiti,” Jenna said, placing a palm on the tree. “Poor hapless beeches attract vandals because of the smooth bark. Then cuts in the surface make them vulnerable to beech scale insects and then beech bark disease, a fungal infection that can kill the tree.”

“Is there a cure?” Hanna said.

“It's hard to control,” Jenna said. “The chemicals are risky, only worthwhile for high-value trees. But this tree might be worth it. Have you ever heard of a Champion Tree?”