Page 90 of Ringer
“Picked ’em up ten minutes ago trying to hitch a ride,” Reinhardt said easily, before the trooper could ask. “Must have come from Saperstein’s JDC—they won’t say where they’ve been, got no ID on them.”
Wordlessly, the trooper backed up and waved them through the line, shouting for another trooper to move the sawhorses out of the way.
After that it was easy enough; they pulled over and Reinhardt nosed his car into a thick entanglement of growth, so it was partly concealed. As they climbed out of the car, Lyra could hear the distant whirring of the helicopters, and felt the hairs rise on her neck.
Reinhardt had gotten a copy of the map the search teams were using to organize their efforts. He had marked the approximate location of each of Gemma’s sandals, which had been located several miles apart with a piece of fabric that might have come off her clothing.
Caelum immediately pointed to several shaded-insquares a fingernail’s distance away from where a search crew had turned up her second sandal.
“What’s that?” he asked Reinhardt.
“Those are farmhouses, turn-of-the-century settlement. I’m talking turn of thelastcentury. Three cabins, totally run-down. But the police checked the cabins early this morning,” he added. “I heard it over the radio. Apparently some kid from one of the Amish farms rang up to tip them off about the cabins—he’d walked seven miles just to find a pay phone.” Reinhardt smiled. “He was scared his parents would find out. I guess the place is popular with teenagers around here when they want to be alone. Some things are the same from Lancaster to Miami, huh?”
“She couldn’t have gone far without any shoes,” Lyra said.
Reinhardt looked at her. “She made it more than two miles with onlyoneshoe,” he pointed out. “Besides, the police were already there. They cleared the cabins.”
“Maybe she hid,” Lyra said. “She wouldn’t know she could trust them. She might think they were coming to get her for what happened on the farm.”
“I thought you said she didn’t do it,” Reinhardt said. “That it was one of the other—the others.” He still couldn’t sayreplica.
“She didn’t,” Lyra said. “But she wouldn’t know thattheyknew that.” That was what people did when they escaped: they found a place to hide. Caelum had hidden successfully on the island for several days when he was 72, even though there was an armed military guard on the perimeter, even though there must have been fifty people looking for him. It was because he’d stayed on the island, exactly in the middle of where he was supposed to have escaped, that no one had found him.
Besides, places had feelings to them, just like objects did: they whispered things, absorbed secrets and quietly pulsed them back. But most people didn’t hear. They didn’t know how to listen.
Lyra listened, and she heard a whisper even in the lines on the page. A lost and abandoned place, for lost and abandoned people.
“She could have planted the shoes,” Detective Reinhardt said. “She might have wanted to throw people off her trail.”
“Why would she plant them so far apart?” Lyra shook her head. “She might be underground. She might be in a basement or—or hiding under a bed.”
She could tell that Reinhardt didn’t think so. But he folded up the map. “Someone’s going to find her. They’ll stay at it until they do. The dogs will get a scent.”
“The dogs look for dead bodies,” Lyra said. She remembered how the soldiers had brought dogs onto themarshes after the explosion to scent the trails of blood. She didn’t hate dogs, though: she knew it was just their training. “Besides, it rained.” She and Caelum had slid into the water to avoid being caught, and Cassiopeia had been located instead—located, and then permitted to die, flagged for collection later.
Reinhardt said nothing.
“There,” she said, and pointed again to the ghost-silhouettes of the long-abandoned settlements. The paper dimpled beneath her finger, and hissed the smallest of words.Yes.
It was still raining when they set off into the woods, using a compass Reinhardt had on his phone. If they kept straight north from where they had parked, they would eventually hit the old settlement.
It was harder going than Lyra had expected, and she had to stop frequently to rest, overwhelmed by sudden tides of vertigo.
She was falling more. It was like there was a wall up between her brain and her body, and only some of the messages made it through. This was, like the holes, a symptom of the disease as it progressed: she’d seen it at Haven, even, though at the time she hadn’t known what it was, and had believed it was just a problem in the process going wrong. Replicas got sick. They forgot theirnumbers and then how to use the bathroom and then how to walk and swallow.
She was glad neither Reinhardt nor Caelum asked her if she wanted to go back, though. Caelum just helped her up, every time, without saying a word. And Detective Reinhardt went ahead, scouting the easiest routes, and trying to break apart the growth where it was thickest to make it easier for her to pass through.
It took several hours, but at last they saw, through the tangle of natural growth, the hard sloping angle of a roof and a little stone cottage. The settlement had been made in a literal natural clearing, although growth had reclaimed the area, and one house was little more than rubble, punctured by the hardy fists of oak trees that had grown straight up through a collapsed portion of the roof.
As soon as Lyra saw the place, her stomach sank. It was obvious that Gemma wasn’t here. It took only a few minutes to check the two standing houses: they were each a single room. Inside was a litter of cigarette butts and empty soda cans. But no Gemma. She was glad, too, that Reinhardt didn’t gloat about it, or say he’d told them so.
Instead, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“I thought she’d be here,” Lyra said. Her stomach felt like it had coiled itself around her throat. “I really did.”
“She’ll turn up,” Reinhardt said. “I promise.”
Lyra just shook her head. She knew he was trying tomake her feel better, but she knew, too, that it was a promise he had no ability to keep. In the distance, she heard a faint hollow clacking—the noise of a woodpecker, or maybe a squirrel, cracking two stones together. An empty sound.
