by May Cobb
Copyright Information
Big Woods © 2018 by May Cobb.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First e-book edition © 2011
E-book ISBN: 9780738759234
Book format by Bob Gaul
Cover design by Shira Atakpu
Editing by Nicole Nugent
Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cobb, May K., author.
Title: Big woods : a novel / by May K. Cobb.
Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Midnight Ink, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017061594 (print) | LCCN 2017056590 (ebook) | ISBN
9780738759234 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738757810 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Missing children—Investigation—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction.
| Widows—Fiction. | Texas—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3603.O225554 (print) | LCC PS3603.O225554 B35 2018
(ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061594
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To my parents, Liz and Charles, for everything.
To my sisters and best friends, Beth, Susie, and Amy.
And to my husband, Chuck, maker of shooting stars.
1
Sylvia
October 1989
Who will save the children? That’s the question I wake up with this morning, the thought that comes barging in without invitation and stays parked there, like the neighbor’s fat cat I can’t seem to shoo away from my garden. I’ll be seventy-five this month, old enough to leave so many thoughts behind, but this one curls its way around the edges of my mind like the ribbons of cream in my afternoon cup of Earl Grey. I rise and do what I have done every day since living alone. I part the yellow ruffled curtains that rim my second-story picture window. I look out the window and beg the sunlight to give me strength enough to start one more day. The sight of the rose bush helps, as does the view of the crumbling red brick wall. Both have always made me feel like I live somewhere enchanted, somewhere far away and storybook, like France, perhaps, or maybe Ireland. Anywhere but here, this greasy-spoon town.
I complete my morning ritual by kneeling next to my bedside table, lighting an amber-scented candle, and saying a simple prayer, the prayer of St. Francis, which I’ve said every morning for as long as I can remember. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.” And so forth. I’m a believer, but I don’t believe in everything that everybody else in this town seems to. Things aren’t so black and white, so fixed, so certain.
I do believe in the message of hope, though, so each morning I pray, rounding out my morning ritual as if by completing these modest tasks my day will hold some shape. A useless hope, as it never does, the day giving way and deflating to the endless quiet of widowhood. I kneel and complete this simple prayer, but this morning, I add another, more urgent one to it: Who will save the children?
It was the latest poster that got to me. There hadn’t been a new one up in a few years and I had hoped that it was finally over. But last Saturday, as I did my usual grocery shopping in the next town over—for the freshest tomatoes and peas—I couldn’t help but see it. Amidst the wall of frayed missing children’s posters, still white but beginning to yellow, their shining, helpless faces calling out to me—a blizzard of despair—there it was. A new one. Bone-white, crisp, and tacked up next to all the others.
Lucy Spencer. Blond Hair. Age 10. Missing since September 29th, 1989.
It was then I knew there was no turning back. I had to find a way to tell someone who would listen. The children wouldn’t be safe until they stopped them. Until they stopped him.
2
Lucy
Friday, September 29th, 1989
One red sock, one orange sock. One red sock, one orange sock. One red sock, one orange sock. This is how she kept time that day walking the short distance to the bus stop. Lucy always had a song or a jingle in her head. It was her dad’s day to dress her, to make sure she ate her breakfast, to make sure she caught the bus, and that’s how she ended up wearing mismatched socks. Her mom would die, but Lucy liked it. It made her feel like Punky Brewster, which made her feel older than she actually was. One red sock, one orange sock. There were just a few more blocks to go, but there was a car driving up real slow behind her and she felt scared, so she put on her Walkman headphones and pushed play. The song was “We Built This City,” and she loved it. Loved the idea of a city built on rock and roll. She’d recorded it from MTV onto her cassette deck, and as she stepped over the cracks in the sidewalk, she wondered if she would ever get to see a city. Dallas maybe, which wasn’t all that far away. Her older sister, Leah, had been there once, with her best friend, Nicolette. They had gone to the Galleria Mall, and she told Lucy how awesome it was and brought her back a pair of fluorescent orange sweatpants. Leah had a lime green pair, and they sometimes wore them to match. Leah Lucy, Lucy Leah.
Lucy kept walking, then started walking faster, and the car zoomed past her—a tiny dark green convertible. She was almost running, not paying attention to the cracks anymore. The bus stop was just around the corner, but the car had turned around and was inching up beside her. One red sock, one orange sock. She now started saying “Christmas, Easter, Happy Times,” the chant Leah had taught her to say over and over again when she would wake up with a nightmare, or was afraid of the dark. “Christmas, Easter, Happy Times, Christmas, Easter, Happy Times—” But he was getting out of the car, the man with the moustache. He was getting out and coming closer and she couldn’t round the corner in time. She couldn’t find her voice to scream and it suddenly felt like she was trying to run through Jell-O.
3
Leah
My sister Lucy went missing when I was fourteen years old. She was ten. Lucinda Rose Spencer. To us, Lucy. Or Lucy Belle, or sometimes, just Lu. The morning she vanished could’ve been considered an ordinary one; that’s what I told the police later that day as I sat between my parents on our orange nubby sofa, m
y eyes trained downwards to a strip of sunlight that slashed through our wooden floor. I watched the shadow of leaves tickle the polished hickory boards as I answered their questions.
It was an early fall morning, but the summer was still hanging on, having baked the sidewalks kiln-like, so that even the mornings were stifling, not crisp and cool just yet. When Dad woke me up, my room already felt stuffy. It was a Friday, and I woke up thinking about the weekend, about seeing Scott, my new boyfriend, about what I should wear to school that day.
The day was ordinary, but I remember this: the smell of Aquanet burning on my curling iron. Me, spending too much time in the bathroom—the peach-tiled one I shared with Lucy—fussing over my bangs, trying to get them just right, a restless primping. If I hadn’t stayed in there so long. If I hadn’t pulled and tugged on my shirt so much—my favorite one, a yellow button-down Guess shirt that I knew Scott liked. If I hadn’t been so vain …
If, if, if.
I remember grabbing my books and the lanyard, chewed up by Lucy, that held my keys, and walking through our breakfast room just off the kitchen, and seeing Lucy’s half-eaten blueberry Pop-Tart (which I considered grabbing but didn’t, having just brushed my teeth) and Dad’s toast—too much of it still there, his tan coffee mug still full and steaming. They must have left in a hurry, I remember thinking, and if they had told me goodbye, I just hadn’t heard it.
I stepped outside and waited on the curb for my carpool ride, fiddling with the worn corners of my paper sack book cover. The last ordinary morning of my life.
When a month would pass and there would be no news of Lucy, I’d watch from my upstairs window as the sheriff coasted up our steep driveway in his big tan Impala (his off-duty car; it was after church on a Sunday). He’d step inside our foyer with his hat in his hand and talk to my mom—my dad was already gone by then. He’d tell her to start preparing for the worst: none of the other children who’d been taken had been found alive.
Later that evening, my mom would click the door shut to Lucy’s room, as if closing off the possibility of Lucy’s return.
And I might’ve started to believe she was gone from us forever, too, if it hadn’t been for the dreams.
The first time Lucy broke through—which is how I had begun to think of it—it wasn’t even nighttime. It was in the middle of a hot, lazy afternoon nap. I’d fallen asleep on the couch in the upstairs playroom—a huge room lined with windows—when I had the first dream. In the dream, Lucy was just outside in our treehouse calling for me to join her. “Lee-yaah!!! Come down! I’m making mud bombs!” I watched Lucy from the second-story window as she hurled little clumps of red clay down at imaginary enemies, her hair wild and curly with sweat and her heart-shaped mouth coated in a string of slobber as she mouthed the sounds of bombs exploding. I raced down the stairs and out into the courtyard, but by the time I reached the edge of the lawn, the sky had suddenly turned a dark violet. I strained to see Lucy, but the lights from the house didn’t reach that far and I was too scared to go any farther. Sweat stung my armpits and I willed myself to inch closer, but by now it was completely dark and no matter how many times I cried out for Lucy, nothing but the sounds of crickets chirping answered me back.
When I woke up, the sun was setting and I had that empty feeling that I always had after a nap—that I’d slept the day away and missed out on something huge. Since Lucy had gone missing, waking up was one more thing I now dreaded. Especially in the morning. Coming out of sleep was like reliving the moment I first heard about Lucy all over again. I’d sink back into the covers and slip into a black despair as the layers of reality settled in around me that my sister had vanished.
It had been over three weeks, and there was still no trace of Lucy.
But then the dream came rushing back, and with it, a warm feeling spread over me and a certainty I couldn’t shake: Lucy is still with us, Lucy is alive.
4
Sylvia
I liked it here. At first. We moved from Des Moines, Iowa, in the spring of ’42. We arrived in the evening on the heels of a rain shower, and what I remember most about our first night in East Texas was the air: how stepping out of the car was like stepping into a warm bath. I inhaled the sugary-sweet air. It was intoxicating. The moon was bright and it made the magnolia blossoms that lined our driveway glow like lanterns, welcoming us. Or so I thought.
I was twenty-eight; John was thirty. We had just gotten married that February, on Valentine’s Day, in a small white chapel with a bright green lawn. John and I were ancient to still be unmarried by our parents’ standards, but it was only because we had met later in life than most couples.
We were both in college. John was finishing up his electrical engineering degree, and I was working part-time as a clerk in the library, my hand growing used to the pleasant, dull rhythm of stamping books for checkout. I took a handful of classes in my spare time, with the idea that I might become a school teacher one day. World history, English literature, and biology were my favorites. But when John graduated and landed the job at the steel plant in Texas, it made sense for me to move on from college.
I had always pictured, or hoped, that we would move to someplace even larger than Des Moines. To California or, closer to home, Chicago. Not to a town of fifty thousand. But it was the best offer John had received and after he visited there by train once, he came home to our tiny walk-up apartment, clasped my face in his broad hands that always smelled sweetly of pipe tobacco, and promised me I would love it there.
Our plan was to start a small family, and my early years in Longview were dreamy. When John was at work, I busied myself with gardening. Small rows of tulips in the side yard, at first, and then roses in every shade I could find. I imagined myself being the sort of woman who would have a cutting garden, who would always have fresh flowers on the table, and for a while, I was that sort of woman.
Our house was the very best part of the move, a caramel-colored stucco, three-storied home with a Spanish-tile roof—the kind of roof that never needs mending. It was in the oldest neighborhood in town, and the streets were as wide as rivers and lined with sheltering oaks. The third story was reached by climbing a long, creaking staircase and the whole floor was a large, light-filled room with dormer windows. It became my sewing room. I spent my mornings in the garden, and when the sun turned into a torch, I would go upstairs and knit baby blankets and booties, and cut out pink hearts from old quilting material of my grandmother’s, which I planned to use as a nursery decoration.
Sometimes during John’s lunch breaks I would drive over to the steel plant and we would have a picnic lunch on their campus, which had a sprawling park, and stroll alongside the pond beneath giant pines, holding hands. I would bring us toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches and a pint jar of lemonade to share.
I made friends with some of the other wives whose husbands worked at the steel plant, and they showed me how to play the domino game Forty-Two, and how to fry a chicken and make sun-brewed iced tea.
On weekends John and I would set off in the car on long, meandering drives over the blacktop roads. The trees—elm, oak, and pine—were so ancient that they were stooped over, their tops weaving together like clasped hands, forming a tunnel over the country lanes. We used to marvel at the majesty of it, imagining that we might be led to some magical place if we drove through the green corridor.
Those same trees feel claustrophobic to me now. Suffocating. And when I think of all they’ve seen and all they’ve witnessed, they seem downright menacing.
5
Leah
Halloween
Tuesday, October 23rd, 1989
Lucy missing 1 month, 2 days
Mom turned the porch lights off early tonight. The police have urged everyone to stay in for Halloween, but she was worried there might be some brave trick-or-treaters, so after dinner, she snapped the shutters closed, killed the lights in the entryway, kissed me on the
forehead, and went upstairs to watch TV.
I’m in Dad’s study—a small nook just off the den.
He hasn’t slept at home in over a week. He can’t bear to be in the house anymore, to look at the walls that are filled with pictures of Lucy, or to eat in the breakfast room—the last place he saw her. Mom doesn’t know this, but while she was fixing dinner, I snuck upstairs to call him at his office where he’s been sleeping.
“Hey baby,” he answered, his voice slurry with alcohol.
“Dad,” I said, cradling the phone to my ear, “can you come home, just for tonight? Please? It’s Halloween. For me?”
He promised he would, so I’m up waiting for him, sitting on his brown leather loveseat, sawing my way through a bag of creamy candy corn that Grandad brought by earlier today.
Dad’s an architect, and his study is a light-filled room with high, rectangular windows running the length of the walls. Through the windows you see a sea of green trees. It’s a calming room. And modern compared to the rest of our old rambling, two-story Colonial.
Lucy and I used to love playing in here. We’d sit at the slate-green drafting table, shoulder to shoulder, and doodle, using Dad’s silver compass to make big, perfect circles. We loved all of his tools and instruments, especially the giant pink eraser, the way it became red-hot as we ran it across the paper and shed its crumbly shavings, which Lucy used to scatter over sheets of construction paper coated with glue.
Just next to the drafting table, perched on top of an ornate, black lacquer desk, is Dad’s computer, a Commodore 64. He’s always been fascinated with electronics, so we were one of the first families in town to own one. Lucy and I really didn’t know how to use it—and we weren’t supposed to mess with it—but we’d pretend we did and would spend Sunday afternoons playing secretary.
Light is streaming through the windows, and though it’s cool outside, the room is warm and toasty as the sun sets, making me feel drowsy. I stare out the window and a breeze combs through our maple tree, shaking the leaves. On the windowsill there is a gold heart-framed picture of me and Lucy taken on our first camping trip at a nearby lake. In the picture, I’m carrying a four-year-old Lucy on my shoulders. She has pulled her grin wide with her index fingers, making a clownish face. We are underneath a feathery pine tree, next to our bright orange tent, and we’re wearing matching tube socks, to ward off chiggers. Our faces are hot-pink from the sun. One of a hundred weekends we spent like this together.
