The Little Woods

by McCormick Templeman

  “Oh,” she whispered. “I’ve got something for you.”

  “You do?”

  “Mmm-hmmm. Now let me see here. Where is that?” She rummaged around beneath her desk and extracted a bulky manila envelope.

  “This is for me?” I asked.

  “Yes, dear. They said to give it to you. Said you’d understand what it meant. There was a Post-it note on top with your name on it. Oh, where is that?”

  “Who left it for me?” I asked, my heart suddenly surging. Alex? Had Alex left it for me?

  Ms. Sjursen squinted her eyes, and her cheeks flushed. “I don’t remember, dear.”

  I didn’t want to push her too hard, but I needed to know. “Was he tall and African American?”

  She stared at me, her smile dropping, that devastating windowless gaze sinking back into her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head, her voice filled with shame. I didn’t want to upset her, so I took the package and smiled brightly.

  “Thanks for the package, Ms. Sjursen.”

  She smiled again and changed the setting on her glue gun. I walked out into the cold afternoon, staring at the package, a lump in my throat.

  I ripped it open and shook out a small present wrapped in thick pink paper. Unwrapping it, I found a wooden box, sculpted from lush mahogany and riddled with carvings. The top was composed of eight delicately engraved tiles, though there were clearly meant to be nine, and where the missing tile ought to have been, there was a flat, hollow space.

  Examining the sides of the box, I saw that they had been crosshatched with intricate detail. My fingers searched the lines for an opening, but I could find no hinge, no apparent aperture. Turning it over, I found that the bottom was a cubist mélange of geometric shapes and patterns. At the bottom left corner, two small circles stood side by side, each containing two letters, an upside-down Y and an O, and a backward E and an I respectively. They were separated by a T. It looked almost like a factory logo, one I felt I’d seen somewhere before, and yet I was fairly certain the box was handmade. Gingerly, I shook it, and a faint rattling replied from within. There was something inside.

  My eyes scanned the top. The tiles were smooth and stood in contrast to the rest of the box. Each tile contained a different symbol: a flower floating on water, a chalice, a skull, a whirlpool, a musical note, a lock, an eye. And then one of the pieces contained a disturbing scene: twelve female bodies strung up by their necks. It was a gruesome image, one I vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. I wondered what symbol the missing tile might have held. I wondered why it had been removed.

  It didn’t seem right. I was missing something. Despite my supposed academic prowess, I was about as mechanically inclined as a pile of dead mice. I needed Sophie. I’d heard that Alvarado had canceled softball practice despite Harrison’s mandate, so I headed over to Prexy to see if she was in her room.

  I’d yet to be invited to Sophie’s room. We usually spent time with Jack, which mostly necessitated hanging out in open spaces. I also got the sense that Sophie’s room was an intensely private space, and when I knocked on her door, I noticed that I was slightly nervous about doing so. It was the ideal of a girl’s room. Her pale yellow comforter was feminine but not cloyingly so. A Georgia O’Keeffe print hung above the head of her bed, and a light perfume lingered in the air. The only thing out of the ordinary was a quote from Linus Pauling that she’d tacked up on her wooden door. She sat on her soft yellow rug, reading Lolita. She gave me a sad smile.

  “Aren’t you glad you transferred here?”

  I sat down on the floor opposite her.

  “So I guess you were right,” I sighed. “About her being murdered, I mean.”

  “I feel terrible about saying that now,” she said, closing her book. “I was just trying to be dramatic, trying to make life less dull. But Jesus, the poor girl. How awful.”

  “What was she like?” I asked.

  Sophie sighed. “I wasn’t really in her field of vision. I mean, she was into art and fashion. She wore designer clothes and paraded around claiming she was going to be a model. Not really my thing, you know? But she was good at math and physics, so we ended up together sometimes because she and Freddy and I would be the only girls sent to the Math Bowl or whatever. She seemed nice enough, but we didn’t have much to talk about, and she didn’t seem interested in being friends. I only ever really saw her with boys.”

  “Her poor parents,” I said, unable to suppress the image of a man and woman just biting into their morning toast, staring in horror as the phone rang. “Is this what it was like when the police were here in October?”

  “Not even remotely. They talked to some of the kids who knew her best, but God, it was nothing like this. I can’t believe she was out there all this time. But the little woods are scary as hell. That’s why they make such a fuss about us not wandering in there. A few years back they found this guy living out there, and it turned out he’d murdered an entire family in their beds over in Sonoma. He’d taken their prescription drugs and nothing else. Just murdered them, and was hiding out here, back in those woods.”

  “God.” I shivered. “I had no idea.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly the kind of thing they put in the viewbook. Yeesh. I’m getting creeped out. You want to go for a walk?”

  “Actually, I was wondering if you could help me with something,” I said, pulling the manila envelope out of my backpack. I shook out the box and handed it to Sophie. “I can’t get this open, and I’ve got a suspicion I’m missing something.”

  She examined it and a silly grin spread over her face. “Oh man. This is awesome. It’s a puzzle box.”

  “A what?”

  “A puzzle box. Like, to open it is a puzzle. I love these. But this one’s handmade. Look at the tiles. Cool.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look at all these tiles on the top. See the empty space?”

  “Yeah. One of the tiles is missing.”

  “It’s not missing. It was never there. This is a classic slide puzzle. We need to arrange the pieces into a specific order, and that’s the free space so we can maneuver them.” She slid the flower tile over into the empty space and then pulled the skeleton down into the space the flower had previously occupied. “Now we just need to arrange them into sequential order, and we’ll see what happens.”

  “How do we know what the sequence is?”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the theme. Look at the images again. Look at them closely. What do you see?”

  I leaned in, my mind straining for a moment, and then I saw it.

  “Oh God,” I said, smiling. “It’s The Odyssey, isn’t it?” I scanned the tiles again, realizing that each represented a different station on Odysseus’s journey. It was the grotesque image of the twelve hanging women that had clenched it for me. They were Odysseus’s supposedly disloyal maids who were hanged upon his return. I shivered when I thought about it. Then there was the whirlpool. That had to represent the Charybdis; the eye represented the Cyclops, and the lock represented Odysseus’s imprisonment by Calypso; the musical note stood in for the Sirens; the skeleton meant the Land of the Dead; the flower represented the Lotus Eaters. That left us with only the chalice.

  “I’m not getting the chalice,” I said. “What does it represent?”

  “Circe,” Sophie said, rolling her eyes. “The Enchantress. Remember, she offered Odysseus wine laced with magical herbs. Whoever drank it was trapped with her.”

  “Oh right. With the pigs and all that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “God,” I said, feeling proud. “I’m glad I just read it.…”

  “We all just read it, Cally. It’s on the syllabus.”

  “Whatever,” I said, pointing to the box. “Let’s put them in sequence. First we’d have Odysseus imprisoned by Calypso, that’s the lock. It needs to be moved to the top left space. Then going across, we have the Lotus Eaters, then the Cyclops
. On the next row we need to have Circe, followed by the Land of the Dead, followed by the Sirens. The last line should be the Charybdis, and finally the hanging of the maids.”

  Sophie nodded, her hands slipping quietly over the pieces, sliding them into place. When she slid the final tile into position, it seemed to trigger something. We heard a click, and the top opened. Inside was a folded white piece of paper.

  “Oh my God,” I gasped, stunned that it had actually worked.

  “Maybe it’s a treasure map.” She giggled and started to open it but then handed it to me. “Where did you get this, anyway?”

  “Someone left it with Ms. Sjursen for me. I guess I have a secret admirer.”

  “Well, open it. Let’s see who it is.”

  When I hesitated, she understood and slapped my knee. “You shit. You’re not going to read it in front of me, are you?”

  “Not right now, okay?” I said, gripping the paper tightly in my fist. “And don’t tell Jack.”

  “Get out of here,” she said, laughing. “Go read your stupid secret love letter.”

  Outside Sophie’s dorm, I sat between two poplar trees to read what I hoped was going to be a fantastic love letter. I was sorely disappointed by what I found.

  15 36 9 2 3 22 24, 5 12 7 4 17 36 30 128 77 46 44 18 39 31 23 40 75 54 87 95 82 43 99 84 25 72 42 104 74? 127 105 1 42 124 134 100 45 70 153 141 49 J 133 147 53 54 55 56 57 173 171 174 5 106 175 140 172 107 48 143 165 32 7 111 190. 64 122 133 174 145 184 86 128 80 158 39 94 173 47 42 138 103 69 131 189 140 155 48 82 117 75 99 178 190 153 170 169 121 135 186 189 188 82 43 146. 107 126 151 141 71 86 138 13 133 129 182 124 147 149 113 162 22 8 174 137 15, 173 83 175 92.

  I had no idea what to make of it. Unzipping my backpack, I pulled out the manila envelope and examined the blank cover. I reached inside and pulled out the pink wrapping paper. And that was when I saw it. Lurching across the inside of the wrapping in manic black Sharpie scrawl were the words THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY OUT.

  I leaned against a tree and tried to swallow, but something was blocking my throat. Okay, what the hell was that supposed to mean? If there had been any doubt before then, I was now certain that it wasn’t from Alex. I had no idea whom it could be from or what it could possibly mean, but I didn’t like it.

  I shoved the note into my pocket, hid the box in my room, and headed down to Ms. Sjursen, determined to see what she could remember. I found her underneath her desk, cursing at an outlet. I bent down and shoved the plug in for her. She smiled up at me, then looked triumphantly at her glue gun.

  “Oh, thank you, dear. This thing can be a real bastard sometimes.”

  “Ms. Sjursen, do you think you could try to remember who left that package for me?”

  “What package, dear?”

  “It was a manila envelope with a Post-it note on top with my name on it. Can you remember anything about the person who left it?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “I can’t say that I remember any package. You say I gave it to you? When?”

  I stared at her a moment. If she didn’t remember giving me the package, there was no way she would remember who had given it to her. This was a lost cause. She looked worried, so I did my best to redirect her attention back to her crafts. After she showed me how to glue a button onto a piece of cardboard, I ducked out and started on my walk.

  The air was crisp, and walking did wonders to clear my head, though the heaviness of Iris and Clare held fast to my heart. When I was confident I was out of view of the lacrosse field, I pulled the note from my pocket and examined it again. It looked like a series of random numbers, but maybe it was something. Maybe it was a kind of code.

  I leaned against a tree and did my best to understand what I had in my hands. Reading “The Gold-Bug” in ninth grade had led me into a super-geeky cryptanalysis phase. I’d gotten Danny into it too. We used to leave notes in cipher for each other. We still did if it was something we didn’t want Kim to understand. My heart sank when I thought about him. Kim hadn’t returned any of my calls. I knew she was having a hard time, but it didn’t seem fair for her not to at least let me know he was okay.

  I tried to focus on the note and fight back the sadness. I’d had enough emotions for one day.

  “The Gold-Bug” dealt with a specific type of cryptanalysis called frequency analysis—a system based on the idea that within a given piece of text, certain letters in the English language were bound to come up more often than others. By analyzing the frequency at which each letter appeared and then consulting a table, one could plug letters in based on the percentage rates at which each given symbol appeared in the cipher text. I had been hoping that if the note was indeed an encryption, it would be one that I could solve using frequency analysis, but I could already see that whatever this was, I didn’t know how to solve it. An encryption that could be solved using frequency analysis wouldn’t contain any numbers greater than twenty-six, and there would necessarily be repetitions, but the numbers in my note went all the way up to 190, and there were way too few repetitions.

  Another oddity was the run of consecutive numbers: 53, 54, 55, 56, 57. I hadn’t seen anything like it during my (admittedly brief) foray into cryptanalysis. I couldn’t help thinking that it might be important, but I had no idea how. And then there was the inclusion of the letter J, which made no sense at all. Why shove a letter in there?

  Crumpling the note, I shoved it into my pocket and started walking back to campus. Maybe it was just a random string of nonsense. There is only one way out. Maybe that was the real message. It didn’t sound like code, though. It sounded like plain English. It sounded like a threat.

  I headed over to the dining hall to get a drink, the verdant splendor of the campus rising before me. Scenic view or not, I couldn’t help wishing I had somewhere else to go. I missed my dad, and I wanted to be somewhere like home. I wanted to go somewhere safe—to feel warm and loved. But home was not that. Home was my mom, and the constant fear that the worst possible thing could happen at any second without the slightest warning. Now, with Iris, it looked like school was heading in the same direction, but, I told myself, no matter how bad St. Bede’s was, there was no way it could hurt the same way home did.

  Just as I was climbing the steps up to the dining hall, I saw that Alex was leaving. He smiled at me, and suddenly I remembered everything that had happened at Helen’s.

  “Hey, you,” he said. “Drink machines are off if that’s where you’re headed.”

  “Damn it,” I said, and kicked a step.

  “That was a little dramatic, Wood. You know there are vending machines out behind the kitchen, right?”

  “No.”

  “Come on,” he said, gently taking my hand. “I’ll show you.”

  We wandered through the dining hall, then out the french doors and into the back patio courtyard. Soon we were behind the dining hall at the soda machine. He put seventy-five cents into the machine, then looked down at me.

  “Orange or peach?”

  “Peach.” I smiled.

  “Me too,” he said.

  “So this is all crazy, right?” he said, his voice crackly and kind. He handed me my drink. I took a sip, then set it down on the wall.

  “It’s really sad,” I said.

  “Yeah. I just can’t believe she’d go out into the woods like that by herself.”

  I squinted at him. “Maybe she didn’t.”

  “What?” he said, then took a swig of his drink. “What do you mean?”

  “What if she didn’t go out there by herself? What if someone took her out there, or, like, lured her out there?”

  He shook his head. “No, they’re saying she went out there to do drugs or something, and some sick vagrant found her and killed her. I heard she was raped.”

  “Really?” I choked. “God. That’s horrible.”

  “I know. It makes me sick. I heard there was this weird painting up on the wall of the cave where she was found. They’re calling the bastard the Dragon Killer.�
��

  “God,” I groaned. “So what’s going to happen now? Do you think school will keep going on like normal, or do we all go home?”

  “It’s tricky,” he said. “I talked to Dr. Harrison, and he told me that all the parents are being called, and he’s telling everyone not to worry. Some people might leave, though. You never know. Nothing like this has ever happened before. There was a suicide back when I was a freshman, and school just went on as normal. I think that’s best. Not to dwell. This is different, though.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my head starting to hurt.

  “But I wanted to talk to you,” he said, setting down his soda, gently taking my hands in his. “So I know this is weird to talk about right now, but what did you think about last night? About what happened?”

  It was a swift change of subject, but I decided to go with it. The last thing I wanted to do was think about that poor girl getting raped. He put his arm around me.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asked. “Do you want to, like, be together?”

  A tingling warmth rushed through me. Maybe he could be a kind of home, I thought, but I couldn’t say something like that, so I just nodded.

  He bent down and kissed me softly on the cheek, but then he pulled back. “Crap,” he said. “I forgot. I have to catch Brody before dinner. Do you want to hang out with us after study hours?”

  “Sure.” I smiled. “You get to stay out during study hours because you’re a cool senior, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, laughing.

  “So what do you guys do when we’re in our rooms studying?”

  “Honestly? The truth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We go to the library and study.”

  I laughed and he touched the back of his hand to my cheek.

  “Come by my dorm later?” he asked.

  I nodded and took a breath. He kissed me, slowly sliding his hand around my waist.

  After saying goodbye to Alex, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I tried to block out the image of Iris, this girl I’d never even known, being brutalized out there in the woods. What must her last moments have been like? How much had she understood about what was happening to her? How terrified she must have been.