The Courage Tree

CHAPTER SEVEN

Darkness gave the Ayr Creek estate an otherworldly feel, and on this night, with the half-moon masked by the trees, Janine felt as though she were slipping into a dream as she drove up the long driveway. The broad, meandering gardens slept, and beyond the boxwood, the willow trees drooped low to the ground in their lacy, moon-speckled shrouds. The forest surrounding the house and gardens on three sides was so thick and deep, that the moonlight could not penetrate it. Only where the trees parted to make room for her little cottage at the rear of the property would the light truly fall, the play of moonglow and shadow making the building look as though it had been lifted straight out of a spooky fairy tale.

Friends often asked her if she was afraid out here at night, hidden away in the woods in a cottage which, according to historians with the most vibrant imaginations, was still haunted by the spirits of those slaves who once lived within its walls. Janine rarely thought of Ayr Creek as foreboding, but tonight the estate, the entire world, seemed malevolent.

In the daylight, the gardens of the Ayr Creek estate held none of their nighttime mystery. They were meticulously cared for, and several acres of the plants, trees and flowers were dedicated to reflecting historical accuracy. That was the reason Lucas had been hired to oversee the grounds and the gardeners at Ayr Creek. He had excellent references, having worked at historic Monticello, making sure that nothing was planted that would not have grown in the time of Thomas Jefferson. He never would have been hired at Ayr Creek if Janine’s parents had had their way, however, the decision had not been up to them.

Her father had been the one to take Lucas on his initial tour of the grounds. He’d reported that the gardener had seemed disinterested and distracted until Frank mentioned that Janine and her little girl, Sophie, lived in the cottage on the property. Lucas had brightened at that fact. He’d asked questions about Sophie, raising Frank’s suspicions about his intent. Frank had reported his concerns to the Ayr Creek Foundation, but the Foundation was thrilled by the opportunity to have a former Monticello gardener work at Ayr Creek, and they were the ones to make the final decision. Frank and Donna’s concerns were disregarded. They had warned Janine to keep an eye on Sophie when Lucas was around and never to leave her alone with him. In the beginning, Janine had heeded their warning. Now she knew they had misinterpreted any interest Lucas might have shown in her daughter.

As she neared the rear of the mansion, she saw that Joe’s car was parked in front of the freestanding, three-car garage, which had at one time served as the stable for the estate. She pulled her car next to his, her mouth set in a grim line. She was about to face the formidable Anti-Jan Triad. That’s what Lucas called her parents and Joe. He’d tell her to put on her suit of armor. But tonight she had no armor, and despite Lucas’s words of encouragement, she felt as though she didn’t deserve to possess any.

Bracing herself, Janine walked in the unlocked side door of the mansion, passed through the mudroom and into the kitchen.

All three of them were there. Her mother sat at the mahogany table, while Joe and her father leaned against the counters, and they all turned to look at her when she walked in.

“Janine!” Her mother jumped to her feet. “Where on earth have you been? We don’t need you disappearing, too. Joe said you should have been here by now.” Her face was red from crying, and her blond hair, which she usually wore tied back, hung loose around her face. She was a worrier under the best of circumstances, but tonight, the lines in her tanned face looked as if they’d been carved there with a cleaver.

Janine set her purse down on the table. “I stayed a little while at the parking lot,” she lied, glancing at Joe. He looked tired. His dark hair was askew, and he rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“Any news?” Her father walked toward her and gave her shoulder the slightest of squeezes, his awkward way of comforting her, or, she supposed, the kindest gesture he could manage while being furious at her. And he was furious. All three of them were. That she knew for certain. The air of the kitchen was filled with blame.

“Nothing,” she said, taking a seat at the table. She looked again at Joe. “You haven’t heard anything, either?”

He shook his head.

“Joe said the woman Sophie was riding with was very young and irresponsible,” her mother said. “Why you would ever let her go away with someone like that, I just don’t know.”

“She’s not irresponsible, Mom,” she said, annoyed with Joe. “Just young. Plus there was another leader with them.” If only Gloria had been the one to drive her home.

“Why did you send her to camp?” her mother asked. “Didn’t I tell you she’s just too young? Even a healthy eight-year-old has no business going two hours away for an overnight in the woods.”

“Mom,” Joe said. “What’s done is done. It’s not going to help to go over that argument again.”

Janine was surprised and gratified by his sudden support.

“I just…” Her mother shook her head. “I’m just appalled, that’s all.” She sat down at the table again, facing away from Janine as though she couldn’t bear to look at her. “Has anybody thought that maybe Lucas Trowell has something to do with this?” she asked the men, who leaned against the counter on opposite sides of the refrigerator, like bookends. “You know how he’s always got his eye on Sophie. They should go see if he’s up in his tree house or if he’s somehow gotten hold of Sophie and the other little girl.” She turned to Janine. “Did you mention to him that she was going to Girl Scout camp this weekend?” she asked. “I hate how you’re always talking to him.”

“Lucas had nothing to do with this,” Janine said.

“How can you know that?” her mother asked. “He’s just the sort you’d suspect of something like this. You know how you always hear about those men after the fact. They were quiet. A little odd. Kept to themselves. That fits Lucas to a tee. The only time you see a glimmer in his eye is when you mention Sophie to him.”

Janine didn’t bother to respond. She had seen a glimmer in Lucas’s eyes any number of times.

“I asked the police to go by the tree house and make sure Lucas was there,” Joe said.

So, it had been Joe who’d instigated the visit from the police. He certainly knew how to win her parents’ favor.

Joe took his cell phone from his back pocket. “I’ll give them a call to make sure they did,” he said.

“The police already interviewed him,” she said, surprising herself with the admission, and the three of them turned to look at her.

“How do you know?” Joe said.

She drew in a long breath and folded her hands on the table in front of her. “Because I was just there,” she said. “At his tree house. The police were there hours ago.”

“You went to his house alone?” her mother asked. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Why did you go there, hon?” her father asked. “Did you think you’d find Sophie there?”

“No, Dad, I never suspected Lucas. I just stopped by to tell him what happened.”

“Why?” Her mother’s blue eyes were wild with disbelief. “What possible business is it of his?”

“It was foolish to go there alone, Janine,” her father said. “What if—”

“Please stop!” Janine rose to her feet, sending her chair thumping against the wall. “Please stop all this crazy paranoid talk about Lucas.”

They stared at her.

“He had nothing to do with this whole mess,” she said. “He cares about Sophie.”

“He has you fooled,” her mother said. “Don’t you see—”

“No, I don’t see any such thing.” Janine walked around the table toward the door. She considered escape, but turned instead and leaned against the door frame, her arms folded across her chest. “I may have made some mistakes in my life,” she said, “but my judgment is not so screwed up that I couldn’t tell if Lucas was the type to hurt Sophie. I would never put Sophie in danger.”

Her mother let out a cynical laugh. “Do you hear yourself, Janine?” she asked. “You have put Sophie in danger. Repeatedly. What do you call this weekend away? What do you call putting Sophie in a harebrained study to use herbs to cure—” she used her hands to put quotes around the word cure “—end stage kidney disease? You’ve gone out of your way to put Sophie in danger.”

“Mom,” Joe said. “Maybe that’s going too far.”

Maybe? Janine’s eyes burned from the assault.

“It’s insane that you stopped doing her nightly dialysis.” Her mother wasn’t quite finished.

“She doesn’t need it every night anymore,” Janine said.

“Your mother might be exaggerating a bit,” her father said, in his even, controlled voice, “but we do need to talk about this. About what’s been going on the past few months.”

“What do you mean?” She tightened her arms across her chest. How much did they know?

“We’ve been talking with Joe about what to do when Sophie gets back,” her father continued. He was tall and gangly and always looked like a little kid whose body had grown too quickly for him to handle with grace. “We really think Joe should have custody of her,” he said. “I mean, you could still have her live with you much of the time, the way you do now, but when it comes to making the medical decisions and…decisions like this one, about the Scout camp and all, we think Joe should be the one to make them.” Her father’s calm disappointment in her cut even deeper than her mother’s shrill accusations.

Joe moved next to her, touching her hand where it gripped her elbow.

“Let’s not talk about it now,” he said to her parents. “Don’t even think about it tonight, Janine. Right now, let’s just focus on getting Sophie back.”

He was the voice of reason, and his kindness seemed genuine, but she knew better than to trust him. Behind her back, he was conspiring with her parents. She took a step away from him to pick up her purse from the table. “I’m going to the cottage,” she said, heading for the door.

“What?” her mother said. “We need to stay right here until we hear some news.”

“I can be reached just as easily in the cottage,” she said.

Joe rested his hand on her shoulder. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

She shook her head without looking at him, then walked through the mudroom and out to the driveway.

Walking through the darkness toward her cottage, she bristled from the encounter with her family, and she was glad Joe hadn’t tried to follow her. Having Joe with her was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t need to hear any more about his plans to assume custody of Sophie. She didn’t need any more blame. It had been this way her entire adult life: her parents and Joe against her. Over the years, their disapproval of her had crystallized into something hard and unmovable. Even now, when they should be pulling together with her, fighting on the same side of this war, she felt like their enemy.

Once in the cottage, though, she would call Lucas. That’s where she would find her advocate. That’s where she would find her strength.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Zoe held a match to the kindling at the bottom of the fire and watched as the wood began to flame. She was getting good at this. Very good, actually. For someone who had never built a fire in her life—in spite of having had four fireplaces in her Malibu house and six on Max’s dream ranch in Montana—she could now call herself an expert.

Resting near her on the ground was a pot filled with water, uncooked rice and chunks of the rabbit she’d killed that morning. She moved the pot to the small grill she’d laid over the fire pit and sat down on one of the flat rocks to wait for the water to boil.

She could not yet claim to be comfortable with the whole meat preparation process, but she was getting there. As of today, she had killed six animals: two rabbits, three squirrels and, amazingly, a porcupine. She had shot at many more, and she felt worse about those she’d merely terrorized with her bullets than those she had killed with one clean, quick shot. Still, this slaughtering and eating did not come easily to someone who had been a vegetarian for a dozen years. She’d been such a champion of animal rights that she’d refused to wear leather shoes, and she’d even been arrested for protesting in front of stores that sold fur. Ah, yes, if only PETA could see her now, she thought, boiling a rabbit she had killed, skinned and gutted herself.

She’d left the lid to the pot inside—the tiny, rundown cabin she had quickly come to think of as her home, so she got to her feet and walked inside. When she returned to the small clearing carrying the lid, she spotted a large dog standing a couple of yards from the fire, and she froze. It was the dirty yellow dog this time, as opposed to the huge black bear of a dog who had visited her a few days earlier. Both of them had temperaments as nasty as their matted and unkempt coats. When she’d first seen the dogs, she’d feared they belonged to someone living nearby and that she was not alone in these West Virginia woods. But their hungry, neglected appearance made her think they were probably wild.

The yellow dog looked in her direction, silently baring his teeth.

“Scram!” she shouted at him. “Get lost!” She banged the lid against the flat rock, and that seemed to work. The dog turned around and trotted off into the woods.

It was her fault the dogs hung around the shanty. She’d made a tactical error with them in her early days out here. She had killed her first animal, another rabbit, and she’d had to force herself to go through the motions of preparing it to eat. Following the instructions in one of the wilderness survival books she’d brought with her, she told herself she had no choice: she would need protein to be able to live out here. Despite the fact that she’d fashioned an impressive spit above the fire and that the aroma of the cooked rabbit had actually made her mouth water, she had not been able to make herself chew and swallow the meat. Instead, she’d tossed it into the woods. That night, she’d lain awake, weeping quietly over the life she’d taken for no good reason, and listened to animals—wild dogs, she knew now—fighting over the carcass in the darkness.

The next time, though, she was hungrier and more determined. Marti was a meat eater, and Zoe knew she would have to be able to kill and cook meat to feed her. On that day, she killed and ate her first squirrel. She’d also caught a small, dark-scaled fish in a net she’d brought with her, and she’d managed to get that down despite the fact that it bore no resemblance to any other fish she’d ever eaten and could have been poisonous for all she knew.

The water was boiling, and she leaned forward to stir the stew before covering it with the lid. The fire pit was in the exact center of the small clearing, just a few yards in front of her shanty. That was what she called the dilapidated cabin, finding shanty a far prettier word than hovel or shack, which would have been a more accurate description of the building. Her little shanty was hidden so deeply in the forest that Zoe was certain no one would find it unless they actually knew it was there.

She herself had found the structure through a painstaking search of these wooded West Virginia mountains back in early April, when she and Marti first agreed on their plan. She’d actually discovered several abandoned cabins, but this one had appealed to her most, both practically and aesthetically. On the practical side, it was far from the nearest road, a good five miles, and even that road was barely paved and rarely traveled. The nearest main road was a couple of miles beyond that one. This cabin was as far from civilization as Zoe had ever been, and she was frankly thrilled by the distance between her and the rest of the world. That world thought she was dead. It held nothing for her any longer.

Her shanty would never appear in Better Homes and Gardens, but it was still more appealing than some of the other shacks she’d seen. Some of them were little more than decrepit piles of rotting wood, while this one had a little character. It was a log cabin and looked as old as the mountains themselves. The logs were separated by a mortar that had once been white, but was now green with moss on two adjacent sides of the house, dirty and crumbling on the others. The roof was rotting, and she’d initially covered the decaying wood and scraps of tin with the tarp she’d brought along with her. But then she realized that, if anyone should find his way to her little clearing, the bright-blue tarp would give away the fact that someone was living in the shanty, so she took it down. Now, when it rained, she put a couple of buckets beneath the worst spots in the roof and let it go at that.

Inside the front door of the shanty was, what she called for want of a better term, the living room, which ran the width of the building. Behind that, an identical room served as a bedroom. And that was it. A two-room log cabin, both rooms together nearly equaling the size of her Malibu bathroom.

But the shanty had what she was coming to think of as amenities. Remarkably clear water ran from a rusty old pump in the overgrown yard. A wood-burning stove in surprisingly good shape sat on the floor in the main room, its chimney pipe winding its way through a leaking hole in her roof. The pipe was round, the hole square, and that about summed up the care that had been taken by whomever constructed this place. She’d used the stove only once to cook on, but it heated the entire shanty, and she knew she would have to do her cooking outside until the cooler months. At least she and Marti would not freeze here in the winter.

There was a sofa in the living room, and once she’d gotten over the revolting, disintegrating fabric and protruding tufts of stuffing, she was grateful for a place to sit. She’d brought a dozen or so sheets with her, and she threw a cream-colored one over the sofa and thought that it looked like it came straight out of some campy catalogue—as long as no one noticed the splintery wooden floor beneath it and the lack of glass in the window behind it.