The Woods

Bang, there they were.

I rifled through them. I found the online charges, the monthly ones, and then I grabbed the phone and called Muse’s number. She answered on the first ring.

“What’s up?”

“When you were in college,” I asked, “how often did you pull all-nighters?”

“Twice a week minimum.”

“How did you keep yourself awake?”

“M&Ms. Lots of them. The oranges are amphetamines, I swear.”

“Buy as many as you need. You can even expense them.”

“I like the tone of your voice, Cope.”

“I have an idea, but I don’t know if we have the time.”

“Don’t worry about the time. What’s the idea concerning?”

“It concerns,” I said, “our old buddies Cal and Jim.”

CHAPTER 17

I GOT COLOGNE LAWYER FOLEY’S HOME NUMBER AND WOKE him up.

“Don’t sign those papers until the afternoon,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because if you do, I will make sure my office comes down on you and your clients as hard as they can. I will let it be known that we don’t cut deals with Horace Foley, that we always make sure the client serves the maximum time.”

“You can’t do that.”

I said nothing.

“I have an obligation to my client.”

“Tell her I asked for the extra time. Tell her it’s in her best interest.”

“And what do I say to the other side?”

“I don’t know, Foley, find something wrong with the paperwork maybe, whatever. Just stall until the afternoon.”

“And how is that in my client’s best interest?”

“If I get lucky and hurt them, you can renegotiate. More moola in your pockets.”

He paused. Then: “Hey, Cope?”

“What?”

“She’s a strange kid. Chamique, I mean.”

“How so?”

“Most of them would have taken the money right away. I’ve had to push her because, frankly, taking the money early is her best move. We both know that. But she wouldn’t hear of it until they sandbagged her with that Jim/James thing yesterday. See, before that, despite what she said in court, she was more interested in them going to jail than the financial payoff. She really wanted justice.”

“And that surprises you?”

“You’re new on this job. Me, I’ve been doing this for twenty-seven years. You grow cynical. So yeah, she surprised the hell out of me.”

“Is there a point to your telling me all this?”

“Yeah, there is. Me, you know what I’m all about. Getting my one-third of the settlement. But Chamique is different. This is life-changing money for her. So whatever you’re up to, Mr. Prosecutor, don’t screw it up for her.”

Lucy drank alone.

It was night. Lucy lived on campus in faculty housing. The place was beyond depressing. Most professors worked hard and long and saved money in the hopes that they could move the hell out of faculty housing. Lucy had lived here for a year now. Before her, an English-lit professor named Amanda Simon had spent three decades of spinsterhood in this very unit. Lung cancer cut her down at the age of fifty-eight. Her remnants remained in the smoky smell left behind. Despite ripping up the wall-to-wall carpeting and repainting the entire place, the cigarette stench remained. It was a little like living in an ashtray.

Lucy was a vodka girl. She looked out the window. In the distance, she heard music. This was a college campus. There was always music playing. She checked her watch. Midnight.

She flipped on her own tinny-speaker iPod stereo and set it on a playlist she called “Mellow.” Each song was not only slow but a total heart ripper. So she would drink her vodka and sit in her depressing apartment and smell the smoke from a dead woman and listen to aching songs of loss and want and devastation. Pitiful, but sometimes it was enough to feel. It didn’t matter if it hurt or not. Just to feel.

Right now, Joseph Arthur was singing “Honey and the Moon.” He sang to his true love that if she weren’t real, he would make her up. Wow, what a thing. Lucy tried to imagine a man, a worthy man, saying that to her. It made her shake her head in wonder.

She closed her eyes and tried to put the pieces together. Nothing fit. The past was rising up again. Lucy had spent her entire adult life running away from those damn woods at her father’s camp. She had fled across the country, all the way to California, and she had fled all the way back again. She had changed her name and hair color. But the past always followed. Sometimes it would let her gain a comfortable lead—lulled her into thinking that she had put enough distance between that night and the present day—but the dead always closed the gap.

In the end that awful night always found her.

But this time…how? Those journal entries…how could they exist? Sylvia Potter had barely been born when the Summer Slasher struck Camp PLUS (Peace Love Understanding Summer). What could she know about it? Of course, like Lonnie, she might have gone online, done some research, figured out that Lucy had a past. Or maybe someone, someone older and wiser, had told her something.

But still. How would she know? For that matter, how would anyone know? Only one person knew that Lucy had lied about what happened that night.

And, of course, Paul wouldn’t say anything.

She stared through the clear liquid in her glass. Paul. Paul Copeland. She could still see him with those gangly arms and legs, that lean torso, that long hair, that knock-a-girl-back smile. Interestingly enough, they had met through their fathers. Paul’s old man, an obgyn in his old country, had escaped repression in the Soviet Union only to find plenty of it here in the good ol’ USA. Ira, Lucy’s bleeding-heart father, could never resist a tale of woe like that. So Ira hired Vladimir Copeland to be camp doctor. Gave his family a chance to escape Newark in the summer.

Lucy could still see it—their car, a broken-down Oldsmobile Ciera, kicking up the dirt road, coming to a stop, the four doors opening seemingly at the same time, the family of four stepping out as one. At that moment, when Lucy first saw Paul and their eyes met, it was boom, crack, thunderbolt. And she could see that he felt the same. There are those rare moments in life—when you feel that jolt and it feels great and it hurts like hell, but you’re feeling, really feeling, and suddenly colors seem brighter and sounds have more clarity and foods taste better and you never, not even for a minute, stop thinking about him and you know, just know, that he is feeling exactly the same way about you.