Zoe cursed Jonah under her breath the minute she got outdoors and started hunting for him and the dogs. She couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of her or walk more than a few steps without stopping to catch her breath. The wind, the snow: it was like being punched in the stomach.
The light, meanwhile, was dying fast. The coffin lid over Montana was getting ready to snap shut.
Zoe felt inside her pockets, and had a surprise bit of good luck. She found a flashlight—and it actually worked.
It took her five minutes just to zigzag down to the river where she’d seen Jonah playing. There was no sign of him or the dogs, except for a snow angel already partly filled in by the storm and two weird, blurry indentations nearby, where Jonah had apparently tried to get Spock and Uhura to make dog snow angels.
She screamed Jonah’s name but her voice didn’t travel. The wind pushed it right back to her.
For the first time, she felt dread crawl up into her throat. She imagined telling her mom that she’d lost Jonah, and she pictured her mother’s heart blasting apart, like the Death Star in Star Wars. If something happened to that kid, her mother would never recover. Zoe tried to push that thought down, too. But the box at the back of her brain could only hold so much, and everything began seeping out.
Zoe finally found Jonah’s footprints and followed them around the house. It was slow going because she had to bend down low to the ground, like a hunchback, to see the trail. Branches were breaking off trees and blowing across the yard. Every step exhausted her. Sweat was trickling down her back even though she was freezing. She knew that sweating in the frigid cold was bad news. Her body heat was evaporating. She had to pick up the pace, find Jonah, and get inside. But if she moved any quicker, she’d sweat even more and freeze even faster.
Another thought the box didn’t have room for.
Maybe Jonah was back in the house already. Yes. He definitely was. Zoe pictured him, his face and hands all puffy and pink as he spilled cocoa powder across the kitchen floor. She told herself that all this was for nothing. She followed his tracks, sure they’d lead right to their door.
But ten feet from the front steps, they veered down the hill and got swallowed up by the woods.
Zoe took a few cautious steps into the trees and shouted, but she knew it was pointless. She’d have to go in after Jonah and the Labs. Her cheeks and ears stung like they were sunburned. Her hands, even in gloves, were frozen into little sculptures of fists.
She used to worship the forest. She’d grown up running through the trees, sunlight splashing down around her feet. The trees led to the lake, where Bert and Betty Wallace had lived. They’d been like grandparents to Zoe and Jonah. They’d been there for them even when their dad was off on one of his mysterious trips, and they were a continual source of kindness when he died. But Bert and Betty had been going senile for years. This past fall, Zoe had kept Bert company as he cut photographs of animals out of the newspaper and barked random stuff like, “Gimme a break, I’m just a crazy old codger!” (When she asked him what a “codger” was, he rolled his eyes and said, “Gimme a break, same thing as a coot!”) Jonah had sat crisscross-applesauce on the floor and knitted with Betty. She’d taught him how, and it turned out to be one of the few things, besides chewing his fingernails, that eased his ADHD and stopped his brain from whirring like an out-of-control blender. Toward the end, though, Betty couldn’t keep her hands from shaking, and she’d forgotten everything she knew about knitting. Now Jonah had to teach her how.
Then, last month, the Wallaces had disappeared. Betty, the less senile of the pair, apparently got away from the intruder for a moment and rushed Bert into their truck. That was the police’s theory, based on the blood on the steering wheel. The truck was found smashed into a tree a hundred yards from the house. Its engine was still running. Its doors were flung open and there was no sign of the Wallaces, except for more blood. Imagining the confused look on Bert and Betty’s faces as someone scowled murderously down at them hurt Zoe’s heart so much she could hardly breathe.
The Wallaces’ house was left just the way it was, lonely as a museum, while their lawyers looked for the most recent version of their will. Zoe had promised herself that she’d never go near it again. It was too painful. The lake outside Bert and Betty’s house was frozen over with cloudy gray ice now. Even the forest seemed scary—dense and forbidding, like somewhere your evil stepmother takes you in a fairy tale.
Yet here she was on the edge of the trees, being pulled down toward the Wallaces’ place. Jonah knew better than to walk through the trees in a storm. If the dogs had gone into the forest, though, he’d have followed them. Spock and Uhura had lived with Zoe’s family for a month, but they used to belong to Bert and Betty. They might have plunged into the icy trees, thinking they were going home.