Free Ghosts of Bergen County by Dana Cann Page B

sensed before, flooded every radiant organ and tissue of his body.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Mary Beth watched the girl run across the field at the School on the Ridge, away from the playground, toward the woods that led down to County Park, with its duck pond and bicycle trails. At the field’s edge, she slowed to a walk. She was a young girl, perhaps one of the kindergartners who’d performed the songs of spring. Mary Beth waited for an adult—a parent or friend—to see the girl and chase her down, but no one other than Mary Beth appeared to notice. Then the girl looked back (was it at Mary Beth?).
    Mary Beth approached the two nearest women, who’d been talking to each other since she’d arrived. “Excuse me,” she said, and the mothers turned. But as they did, the girl slipped into the woods and was gone.
    Mary Beth flattened her mouth. “There was a girl here,” she said, “with pigtails. Light brown pigtails. Just a minute ago. Did you see her?”
    The women wore blank faces.
    â€œShe ran that way.” Mary Beth pointed to the place in the woods where the girl had disappeared.
    The women followed Mary Beth’s arm through the empty field. They shook their heads.
    â€œWhat’s the girl’s name?” asked one.
    â€œThat’s just it. I don’t know.”
    â€œI didn’t see her.”
    â€œI didn’t, either.”
    Mary Beth began walking in the direction the girl had run. She walked faster. Then she ran, all the time concentrating on the seam in the trees where the girl had entered the woods. When Mary Beth reached it, she saw there was no trail, that the woods were thick. Vines with leaves shaped like arrows choked the trunks and limbs of the smaller trees.
    She moved some brush only to find more brush. There was poison ivy, she supposed, growing on the ground. She wore open-toed sandals, poor for hiking and worse for bushwhacking.
    â€œLittle girl,” she called, at first too softly, then louder: “Little girl!” She walked along the edge of the woods, peering in. She glanced back toward the playground, but no one was coming. Twenty feet off she saw the worn dirt of a trailhead. She entered, and inside the brush was thinner and she could see for some distance on either side.
    â€œHello,” she called. The dirt path was marked by tire treads. There was mud in the low spots from recent rain. She walked farther, where the path sloped to a swale, and a wash that held standing water and mud. Kids had piled dirt and packed it to make a bicycle jump. She stepped over it, and walked up a rise. The path narrowed, then steepened. She stood on the lip before the descent and called out again, “Hello.”
    â€œHi.” The girl stood on a fallen tree at the bottom, a hundred feet below, off the narrow path another fifty feet.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Mary Beth asked.
    â€œPlaying.”
    â€œWhy down there?”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œWhere’s your mom?” Mary Beth asked, but the girl didn’t answer. Instead, she skipped across the fallen tree. She jumped like a gymnast on a balance beam. “Is she at the school?”
    â€œI told you, I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
    â€œI’m just trying to help.”
    â€œI don’t need your help.”
    â€œWhere do you live?”
    â€œIn this tree.” The girl stopped jumping. She stood, toes pointed out.
    â€œWhat street do you live on?”
    â€œTree Lane.” The girl giggled.
    Mary Beth folded her arms. “I’m sorry your house fell over.”
    â€œIt didn’t fall . This is how we built it.”
    â€œWho’s w e ?” Mary Beth tried.
    â€œDid you find Catherine?”
    Mary Beth could almost close her eyes and pretend: here was one of Catherine’s friends.
    â€œWe built this house,” the girl said. “Me and Catherine.”
    â€œOh, reall y ?”
    â€œDid you find