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even noticed. She did a complete somersault. When she saw the top of the forest rush past, leaves against a pale pink streak of dawn, she forced herself to relax totally. Then she hit with a thud. There was a jagged rock right under the center of her back, but she had managed to loosen up enough so that she flopped over it rather than breaking in two. "I'm good, no problem," she shouted. Then she was on her feet and up the ravine and running to catch them. As he talked Kevin hopped from stone to mossy stone in a little brook. "Listen," Fox said. "I think the water has a message for us. He passed this way. The brook remembers him." Cindy could not keep her mind on the water. She was more interested in her own ragged breathing and the excruciating pain at the back of her left heel, where her boot seemed to be grinding down to bone. She flopped back in a bed of leaves and mushrooms, and stared up through amazingly tall trees. It was now full dawn, and the orange and red leaves were clearly etched against a blue sky. When she listened, the brook did indeed speak to her. She sort of understood what Fox meant, that the water had a message. It wasn't a direction, a piece of information, it was another kind of message, vibrant with obscurely useful meaning. "I tell you one thing," Fox said, "the way this water smells, there's a town upstream." "I don't smell anything. The water's fresh." "You don't know the meaning of fresh water, then," Fox replied. "I've drunk perfectly fresh water. Bathed in it. The more filth you can smell, the farther along you are on the road home. That's the message of this water." "What he's saying, Mama, is that we need to get to the town." Page 115 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html Nonlogical thinking was what they called it. Or was it nonsequential thinking? Cindy sighed and got up. "I hope there really is a town." "Hell, just through those trees is a gigantic condo development. We're in New Jersey, ma'am, one of the most densely populated states in the nation. The only reason we don't see it is that Bob avoided it. This forest is a thin strip of green between armies of housing developments, believe me." Half an hour later they were walking along a road. A mini-mart stood next to an Exxon. Rite-Aid Drugs and Wendy's had occupied the center of town, hard on to the lawn and garden center and the drive-in bank. Kevin picked out an inexpensive Walkman at Rite-Aid and Cindy was elected to listen with one earphone. When they started back to the woods to reconnect with Bob's trail, she found herself walking to the drone of WINS, all news all the time. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was jammed from Grand Central Parkway to the Gowanus Canal, due to a disabled tractor-trailer. It was now 9:14. In sports, the Oakland A's had beaten the Orioles. Torture, torture, torture. Slog through the woods while listening to this drivel. She was bored. She wanted a cup of tea and a good book. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to cuddle Bob up tight and make love to him. "In other news, the escaped wolf has been sighted along the New York-New Jersey border. Waldemar town Supervisor Richland Frye and his daughter were camping at Braemar Park Site 12 when the wolf leaped in the window of their shelter, menaced Mr. Frye, and knocked him unconscious. Young Miss Frye wrapped herself in a sheet and ran the four miles to Waldemar to give the warning. Mr. Frye was treated and released at North Orange Hospital in Waldemar." Cindy was sitting on the ground by the time the story was over, her hands pressed against her ears in order to drown out her son's frantic questions. "It's him, there's been another sighting!" She repeated the story. "Waldemar. My God, your husband's doing damn good. He must be covering more like twenty-five, thirty miles in a day." To make a long story miserably short, it now became necessary to hike all the way back to the car in order to drive to Waldemar. Lying in the backseat, inert with exhaustion, Cindy vowed that she was going to take control of this expedition. Fox wanted to do what he was best at, which was track. But good strategy and good detective work were more important. If only she could anticipate Bob's own thinking, she felt sure she could put herself in his way instead of trying to chase him, which was obviously hopeless. Waldemar. He was now traveling due north. The question was, what did he know about the region he was entering? He would be bound to use that knowledge to his own advantage. Her mind returned to the early seventies, to those ridiculous camping trips. She knew. Just like that, she knew where to intercept him. Sitting up, she told Fox. When Bob got there and he would get there she would be waiting; Chapter Eighteen A huge willow tree gave bob his night. Never, not even as a child, had he felt [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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