Free The Edge of Recall by Kristen Heitzmann Page A

looked.
    But she would scream. Scream and shield herself. Run.
    Better just to look. No! Better not to look. Not to want. She was one of them, not for him. No one for him. He clutched his head and slunk down, down low under the dark trees where the sun didn’t reach. Needles and leaves crunched under his side, under his cheek. He wanted his place but couldn’t get there, not with her where she was, where she shouldn’t be, where she took the dirt off the place she should not be.
    This one had been there so early he couldn’t get back. A moan that was more like a growl deep in his throat made a chipmunk scurry, but he didn’t snatch it. He curled up and let the moans come. What could he do, how could he make them leave? He knew so many things, but not that, never that, because he hadn’t needed to.
    Not since he’d been hidden, since she had made the screamers go away. But she was not there anymore. So long, so long since she had been there. And he was alone. And he had to make them go. And he didn’t know how.

CHAPTER
    8
    Tessa had spent a good portion of every day over the month she’d been there on a different part of the property with her sketchbook and pencil, reading the land, watching what it told her about the play of light, the fall of shade, the flow of moisture. She sat down now, cross-legged, listening to the call of an oriole. Somewhere farther a squirrel chirped its way up a tree. Crickets and grasshoppers sang in the grasses as the fall sunshine warmed her head. With her design nearly complete, her excitement had grown, though nothing compared to her plans for the labyrinth.
    She closed her eyes and drew a seed pattern of a Greek cross, four dots and two inverted half circles at the top, then two sidefacing at the bottom. Eyes still closed, she added curving lines that yielded a seven-circuit design, not caring that some of the connections were off. The blind approximation calmed her racing thoughts and triggered creativity, while sharpening her analytical processes.
    Feeling the cooling sweep of a shadow, she opened her eyes to Bair leaning over. “You drew that with your eyes closed.”
    She smiled. “It opens kinesthetic channels when sight is removed from the connection between thought and hand.”
    “Looks like a different pattern.”
    “It’s the classic design. Not my personal favorite, but I’ve styled quite a few from turf, dwarf shrubs, and other ground covers. It lends itself well to landscape.”
    “What’s this one?”
    “I’m pretty sure it’s the medieval design, like the floor of Chartres Cathedral. Possibly Roman, since both have four quadrants, but the Roman is traveled sequentially, and this path appears to run back and forth through the structure as a whole.”
    “You can tell all that from what’s here?” He looked over the uneven ground.
    “If you know what you’re looking at.”
    She picked up her pencil and drew the design, then held it up for Bair to see.
    He looked from the drawing to the field. “Yes, quite. Still, I’m surprised Smith recognized it.”
    She was too. Although she had drawn enough of them in his company. He had admired her doodling until she decided to make them reality.
    “It’s going to be big.”
    “Yeah.” Translating the intricate and exact proportions to a topiary path would be her greatest challenge yet. If she intended the hedge to grow an assumed height of six feet, she would need a width of two feet for stability, path width two and a half. “Let’s see. Twenty-two circuits, four and a half feet wide, plus the center, which equals one quarter of the total . . .” She did the math. “I’ll be working with a diameter of a hundred thirty-two feet, or fortyfour yards across.”
    “No small task.”
    Walking it, she’d been aware of its size, but now she consciously considered the job before her. “I’m pretty certain the original designer followed the straight-angled Chartres script without the decorative elements of the