Once again, the woods closed in around her, though this time it felt different.
Perhaps it was the presence of the moose, which, in some way, calmed her. She felt she could trust the animal, no matter what it was up to or where it was leading her. And she felt certain it wasn’t leading her into danger.
Or perhaps she felt the way she did because she knew this was exactly what she should be doing, at exactly this time. She’d asked all the questions. The answers, she’d known instinctively for a while, were here, hidden in these woods. If she wanted to know what was going on, she would have to unravel its secrets.
And who better to lead her into the secret heart of the woods than a white moose?
There was something almost mythical—and mystical—about it, she decided as she followed the creature, her boots crunching in the hard snow. She stayed a safe distance behind it, though she rarely let it out of her sight. It reminded her of a quest, perhaps one in which a misunderstood princess chased a sacred unicorn into the forbidden woods, beginning an adventure that would change her life.
That sounded strangely pleasant, a little girl’s fantasies. But some fairy tales, Candy knew, had a darker side.
She wondered how this one would turn out.
Several times the moose stopped, turning its head first one way, then another, before proceeding on at its casual yet steady gait. It led her first northwest and then angled almost due west, she noted as she checked the compass. It was heading off toward the far back end of the farm’s acreage and onto adjoining land, some of it belonging to neighboring farms and some set aside for conservation.
As many times as she’d been back here, it always seemed new and unexplored to her. On previous walks through these woods, she’d routinely picked out landmarks to help her determine her whereabouts, but the landmarks always seemed to change each time she passed through.
A great, low-slung pine tree with layers of thick needled branches curving upward, like overturned umbrellas, would grab her eye one time, but try as hard as she might she’d never be able to find that tree again, as if it had moved on her or changed itself to become unrecognizable. Or a ridge would appear to face a different direction than she’d remembered, or a fallen tree trunk, rotted with age, would show up in a place completely unexpected, and she would gaze at it, wondering if it had been there and looked like that the last time she’d come through here.
The icy layers of winter made it worse. Everything seemed to have changed. Everything looked different than before. Every once in a while she would see something she’d vaguely recognize, but she could never be quite sure.
At several points she stopped to look back, wondering whether she’d be able to follow her footprints back out of the woods. For the most part, she thought she could. She knew the general direction of Blueberry Acres, at least during the early part of her journey, but once deep in the woods it was easy to become turned around.
The moose skirted an open, boggy area where tall, dry reeds poked out of the fluffy covering of snow, and angled off along a frozen stream that wound through the trees.
She followed, her body warming as she walked.
On occasion the moose would stop and linger at a particularly leafy bush or a cluster of underbrush sticking out through the snow. At these times Candy waited patiently, doing her best to stay warm, until the moose was ready to move on.
She’d lost track of time, but when she looked at her watch she realized she’d been in the woods fewer than thirty minutes. It seemed like hours, and her legs were beginning to tire.
She squinted up ahead toward the moose. “How much longer?” she asked. But if it heard her, it gave no indication.
She shoved her hands deeper into her pockets and pressed on, following the moose deeper into the woods.
They were passing through an area unfamiliar to her now. It was rockier, with high outcroppings of granite, some encrusted in ice. She felt as if the land was older here, as if it had existed longer, or maybe it was so rarely frequented by humans that it seemed ancient and timeless.
The moose stopped, but Candy continued on a few more paces, watching it and looking into the woods beyond.
“Is something up there?” she asked quietly, gazing ahead through the trees.
As if waiting for a signal, the moose continued on, though more slowly now, following a scent in the air.
A short distance later, Candy smelled it too—the smoke of a fire.
Later, she realized he’d done that on purpose, as a way to guide her—and perhaps the moose as well—to his location. For if she’d been looking for him, she had a strange suspicion she’d never find him, even if she passed him by only a few paces.
The moose climbed a rise, nudged through a thick stand of low trees and around an outcropping of rock, and came to a stop before a high, weathered wall of stone, dark gray and black, except for the places where it was spotted thickly with red, gold, and salmon-colored lichen.
Candy’s gaze instinctively rose to the top of the granite wall, forty or fifty feet high, and then down along its face, her gaze following a ragged black crack. Near the base of the rock wall the crack opened into a cleft wide enough for a man to crawl through.
That’s where the smoke is coming from, she thought. The smoke of a wood fire.
Not inside the cleft, she realized as she got closer, but just outside. In a cleared space framed by rock and woods, someone was tending a fire.
He wore a brown woolen Russian-style winter cap with earflaps fully extended, and had tossed a green military blanket over his shoulders.
The moment he turned to face her, she knew who it was.
Solomon Hatch.