Deadwood (20 page)

“But not the Spirit Tree.”

“No. Martin, what are we going to do? We've been chasing another dead end.” She picked up a pen and doodled on a crumpled piece of paper on the counter.

“One thing I learned from
Dragon Era
is that when you realize you're in a blind alley, the best thing to do is turn around and retrace your steps,” said Martin. “Go back to where you started.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn't you say once we had a trunk full of clues? There are dozens of other carvings. It's time we started analyzing them all.”

“I don't know.” She scribbled six sigmas, then crossed them out. They'd gotten her nowhere. “It's too late for you to come over, and I'm too worn out to think straight.”

“I didn't mean, like, right now. Tomorrow will be fine.”

“Oh,” Hannah said. She was even more tired than she thought. “Okay, I'll meet you at your house after church—say, 1:30?”

She hung up the phone and thought about what Martin had said.

Go back to where you started
.

She looked at the crumpled paper in her hand. It was a street map of Lower Brynwood, marked up with little Xs in different colors. Stamped in the corner: Compliments of Laughlin Landscaping and Tree Care.

“Hey, A.J., is this map yours?” she called to her brother, flopped in front of the TV.

“It was. It's pretty well done for at this point,” he said, keeping his eyes on the sports highlights. “So am I.”

“I can see that. What do these Xs mean?”

“Locations of fallen trees I had to clean up this week—trees don't have street addresses, so I marked up the map to plan my route. You can keep it—I used a different color each day, but I'm out of colors. I'll pick up a new map tomorrow when I get new marching orders from the boss.”

Climbing the steps to her room, Hannah smoothed the map out as best she could.
Go back to where you started
. Hannah turned Martin's words over in her head. As soon as she had fixated on Jake, she'd thrown all the other clues out the window. And now they had to throw out the idea of Jake as a suspect. But what if he
was
part of it? When the tree was cursed in 1989, Jake had suffered as much as anyone. But now that it was dying, he was benefiting. He was the head of the fundraising committee. He had gotten the head-coach job, at least for now. His company was in line for a high-profile job executing and butchering the Spirit Tree, and Hannah didn't doubt that he'd bid on the landscaping for the new stadium.

There was some connection they were missing, and they'd figure it out. She located Brynwood Park and drew a little picture of the Spirit Tree right about where it would be located—where it all started.

She pulled out her phone. Another two messages from Waverly. She sighed. She had to respond. Without reading the messages, she typed her own: N
ICK
OK. T
ALK
2
MORROW
.

Phone tag complete. Now Waverly's it
, she thought. She had to admit that her BFF was right about one thing—sending a text was easier than talking sometimes.

Other times it was the only way.

Hannah sent another text, closing her eyes to try to feel the radio emanations beaming through the ether. A message to the Spirit Tree.

S
TILL
TRYING
. H
ANG
ON
A
LITTLE
LONGER
.

She waited, hoping for a response, or at least a scratch on the wall relayed by the hemlock outside her room. Nothing. Vincent Vaughan Gogh poked his lopsided head up the steps. Scooping up the cat, she walked to the cracked dormer window. The hemlock branches that had once scraped the house lay scattered on the ground beneath the window. Dead wood. This old hemlock tree was dying, catching up to everything else in Lower Brynwood. Lower Deadwood, as Martin called it. Now the sky showed through its bare branches, and a harvest moon hung low in the red glow of the nearby city. Amid the blaze of the corner streetlights, Lower Brynwood at night was nearly as bright as a stormy day. A cloud passed before the moon. In the half-darkness, Hannah saw was she was looking for.

There, just about where the Spirit Tree would be, a faint column of light projected onto the dome of sky. It could have been a searchlight, advertising the opening of a distant supermarket opening or car dealership, but Hannah knew it wasn't.

The beam came from the tree, energy streaming up and disappearing into the clouds. It wavered for a moment, and Hannah couldn't tell if it grew brighter or dimmer, or even if it was flashing, signaling in a code she couldn't understand. But the light was real. It was there.

Then the cloud moved, and the column of brightness seemed to disappear, camouflaged once again in the glare of light pollution.

28

Back Where They Started

H
annah showed up on the doorstep wearing running shorts and sneakers.

“You wore that to church?” Martin asked. If his mom were there she'd never let him get away with that outfit at Sunday Mass. But she wasn't, so he was dressed almost exactly like Hannah, except that he wasn't wearing a sports bra. He reddened at the thought.

“No church. Nick got discharged from the hospital an hour ago,” she said, grinning.

“Awesome. He's okay?”

“Okay enough to come home and order us around. Okay enough to play? I don't know. He has a minor concussion.”

“Brain injuries are no joke,” Martin said, thinking of some of his mom's friends who had come back from tours of duty with headaches, memory loss, or just plain different.

“I have to be back in time for the evening church service, though. We have to give thanks and all.” She bent to retie her sneakers, and Martin averted his eyes from her red tank. “You and I'd better get going.”

“Get going? Where?” he asked. She was confusing him more than usual.

“You said last night we should go back to where we started,” Hannah said, standing with a shrug and adjusting a frayed backpack on her shoulders. “We started at the tree.”

He looked around. “So, where's your bike?”

“Since your mom's not here and your iPod is one hundred percent broken, I figured you needed a real training partner. I'll run.”

“If you can keep up.” Martin sprinted off, and she caught him quickly. He slowed to a normal pace, maybe a touch faster than normal. She was taller than he was, but their strides matched well. He found himself more conscious of his own breathing with her exhaling beside him. They didn't talk, and he didn't mind. When they moved through the trail in the woods, Hannah swiveled her head around, looking over her shoulder.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

“What?”

“I don't know—footsteps. Like someone is running with is.”

He listened, and he heard it, too. The noise wasn't on the ground—it flew through the trees, a rustle in the yellowing underbrush, a crackle in the treetops, a snap of twigs, a sound as if a team of very large squirrels were running along the branches in step with them. But he saw nothing. The noise came from the woods themselves, a signal relayed by the trees. Martin had heard that sound before.

“The Spirit Tree knows we're coming,” he said.

“Of course. I told it we'd be here. But I guess that wasn't really necessary.”

The two slowed to a walk as they approached the Spirit Tree. Martin reached out his hand to touch the trunk; so did Hannah. “We're here,” she said.

Damp tendrils had escaped her ponytail, and Martin could see her pulse trembling in the hollow between her neck and her collarbone.

“What did you want to do here?” Martin asked, flapping his wet T-shirt to cool down. She had seemed so sure of their mission that he had followed without asking. “Didn't we already copy everything down from the bark?”

She nodded. “We're just visiting. We can't forget what this is about.” Then she said more softly, “Did you signal me last night?”

Confused, Martin answered, “You mean, after I called you?”

“I wasn't talking to you, Martin. I was talking to the Spirit Tree.”

The tree crackled like a burning log. A light flared up in the bark—the Y in Brynwood, then an E, after a pause. Then an S.

Hannah's brows knitted together. “I saw a light in the woods—I knew it was you.”

The spark flowed from one letter to another, slowly now, as if it were painful. S, T, O, then the light faded out.

“Would it be easier to text on the phone?” Martin asked, not quite sure if he was talking to Hannah or the tree. His blood still hammered in his temples, but he shivered in the fall air as the sweat evaporated from his T-shirt.

Hannah's phone buzzed, vibrating in the side pocket of her bag. Martin smiled as she dug it out. The tree had heard.

S
TOLEN
. T
HE
BAD
ONE
IS
STEALING
IT
ALL
. E
NERGY
. L
IFE
.

“Is that what the curse does?” Hannah asked.

S
TOLEN
FROM
ME
. S
TOLEN
THROUGH
ME
.

“But what do we do?”

Y
OU
MUST
STOP
IT
.

Then the trunk of the tree blazed almost as brightly as the first night they saw it, when they thought the wood was burning from the inside.

H
EAL
ME
. H
EAL
ALL
.

“We're trying,” Hannah said. “We have maybe two weeks until…” She broke off, and Martin knew she was thinking of Jake's chainsaw. The tree was dying. It probably already knew about the plan to cut it down.

“We're hurrying,” Martin said.

H
URRY
FASTER
.

Martin rolled his eyes. Bossy thing. He was surrounded by them.

Hannah just gave the scarred, silvery bark a pat. “We will,” she said, turning to Martin. “Let's go.”

His heart rate hadn't even had time to calm down and they were off. He guessed this could be considered interval training, and hoped it would make him faster. “Where are we going now?”

“We need a 1990 yearbook—Dr. Wiggins's is the wrong year,” she said. “We have to cross-reference all those names on the trunk, including Jake's. We need to know who's on there, and what might have happened to them, good or bad. We should have done this two weeks ago.”

Martin snapped back, “You're not blaming me for that.”

“I'm not,” she said, a line between her eyes. Martin found it hard to read her expression as she concentrated on breathing. They had run about two miles by that point. He was just getting warmed up, but she looked tired.

“Who has a yearbook? Don't tell me we're going to borrow Jake's.”

“Nope. Time to pay a visit to our friendly neighborhood witch,” Hannah said, panting a little.

“Jenna? I thought you didn't believe she was a witch.”

“I don't,” she said. “At this point, I wish she was. Extra magic on our side wouldn't hurt.” She gave him a playful push on the shoulder, and Martin almost stumbled off the running path. He regained his footing and grinned. It really was magic if Hannah had come around to his way of thinking.

Jenna didn't look surprised to see them. She opened the oak door before Martin's knuckles hit it for a second rap.

“Did you see us coming in your crystal ball?” Hannah asked.

“What?” Jenna peered at them from beneath a broad-brimmed straw hat, looking like a pioneer woman except for her rainbow-colored rubber clogs.

“Nothing—just a joke,” Martin said, nudging Hannah with the toe of his sneaker.

“Actually, I wasn't expecting you. I did wonder how things were going on your quest, but I didn't know how to contact you. I'm not even sure of your last names.”

“Vaughan.”

“Cruz.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Jenna said, pronouncing each letter clearly in that funny formal diction she used. “And I want to thank you for introducing me to the Spirit Tree—I'm confident it'll qualify as a Champion Tree. I'm not sure if we can keep it alive, but at least we'll get the chance to try. Join me in the garden—fall cleanup won't wait.”

She walked out between them, pulling on a pair of green gloves. Martin and Hannah fell into step behind her.

“How do you get your garden so lush?” Hannah asked. “My mom tries to grow flowers, but everything else around here seems to be dying.”

“You call it lush. Others call it overgrown. In fact, someone has been hacking away at some of my shrubs when I'm gone, and I have a feeling it's the president of the local community association. She's never been my biggest admirer,” Jenna said, kneeling down to hack at a weed with a well-used hand trowel.

Martin shifted uncomfortably, thinking of the bag of used garden tools in Aunt Michelle's car. Aha. That's what they were for—vigilante gardening in the name of Brynwood Estates Community Association. She always said the power was in her hands, but he never thought she meant a power saw. Fortunately, Jenna had no idea that he was related to Michelle Medina.

He inhaled deeply, and smelled something sweet and dense in the air. He realized for the first time that the air fresheners Aunt Michelle sprayed constantly were supposed to imitate actual flowers, not just something invented in a factory. This scent was somehow simpler and more complex at the same time, and beneath the perfume he sensed something dark—musty earth, decaying leaves. Jenna's garden was real and old in a way that Aunt Michelle would never tolerate. He remembered that Hannah had told him the cottage was a gatehouse once.