She almost snapped at Martha to come help her look, but that wasn’t ignoring and Martha’s help was unlikely to be worth much. there had to be an ice scraper somewhere. Abby turned back to the car, ignored Martha and tried to think. She wouldn’t have time to dig deep, but Mom wouldn’t have either.īut Mom would have had a shovel. The horsefly closed in on the back of her neck, and she smacked it, not hard enough to kill but at least it was stunned and tumbled away. Directly in her sight line, a tree that had been struck by lightning despite being shorter than the others all around it. The lone oak she would have put to her left hand, and … yes. But she saw from here what Mom would have seen. It would be a lot easier if Martha would quit curling into a pill bug in the passenger seat and come help her. Black flies swarmed around, and somewhere nearby she heard the drone of a horsefly.īug spray. It was walkable, though the sedge was almost up to her knees. Normally it would all be swamp here, but it had been a dry summer.

She stepped out of the car, left the door hanging open behind her, not looking at Martha.

There was no shoulder really, but there was a place where they could pull off far enough that they probably wouldn’t get hit if someone came down the road, assuming that someone was more or less sober and traveling in the general vicinity of the speed limit. And there was a feeling that she hadn’t felt in years, half-memory and half a living thing. Although it did look like the right sort of place lonely, boggy, the trees half-drowned and burdened with wild grape and poison ivy. Abby turned her head all the way and surveyed the roadside with renewed attention. “What’s wrong?” She looked right at Martha, long enough to make sure that she wasn’t going to try to lie. And the worried glance after to see if she’d noticed would have tipped her off anyway. She choked it off immediately, but Abby couldn’t have missed it if she’d tried. The whole place was a crack, and the best thing to do was just slip on through as fast as they could.īut then Martha sat up straighter and made a little noise of distress. No one bothered to do ground-breaking stories about children slipping through the cracks out here. It wasn’t a direction that had anything interesting in it, not until you got well beyond the boundaries of the local news even when people shot their lovers and exploded their meth labs in this neighborhood, it only merited a few minutes of coverage. Soon they’d moved from the area that Abby knew like the back of her hand to the area she knew more like … well, the back of her shoulder, not as well as she should, not from direct observation.

A Hawk in the Woods by Carrie Laben