The Courage Tree - Diane Chamberlain [106]
“There’s a shack down there,” Lucas said after they’d been flying for close to an hour.
The spiral had grown so wide that Janine was about to suggest they give up and go back to the airport. But now she maneuvered the helicopter so that she could look directly down at the dilapidated log cabin. A small fire ring sat in the clearing in front of the shack, but there was no sign of smoke or embers, and the structure looked as though it hadn’t been lived in for decades. The fire ring was surrounded by large, flat rocks, and the area around a small, dark crevice on one of the rocks glittered, sending a shard of light into Janine’s eyes. Mica, she thought. Or quartz.
She sighed. “I guess we should turn around,” she said, frustrated. “We’re way too far from the creek. A good five miles. She couldn’t possibly have walked all the way out here.”
“Not with a bare foot,” Lucas agreed.
Janine turned the helicopter around, and although she continued to scan the terrain below them, she kept picturing the old cabin. The flat rocks. The glittery shard of light. Why was that stuck in her mind? Maybe because she knew that, if Sophie had seen a shack like that one, surely she would have gone inside it for shelter. But that particular cabin was too far from the road, and she and Lucas spotted no other buildings on their flight.
Still, even as she landed the helicopter back at the airport, the image of that log cabin remained firmly planted in her mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
From her seat on the sofa, Zoe heard the sound. At first she thought it was thunder in the distance, a storm moving in, and she stopped eating her granola to listen. Sophie sat at the other end of the sofa, her own bowl of cereal cradled in her lap, her swollen foot elevated on a crate, and she heard it, too. Her head jerked to attention, and she turned her face to the window. Only Marti, who stood leaning against the door jamb between the shanty’s two rooms, did not seem to notice the sound. She was engrossed in eating cut peaches from the can, having refused Zoe’s offer of the granola because the only milk available was powdered.
It wasn’t thunder, but some sort of aircraft. Zoe had heard a few planes fly overhead while she’d been living in the shanty, but this was different. This plane was close and getting closer. She looked at Marti again, who had stopped a spoonful of peaches halfway to her mouth, her eyes wide now with fear.
“That’s a helicopter!” Sophie practically tossed her cereal bowl on the floor as she jumped to her feet and hobbled toward the door of the shanty.
Instantly, Marti leapt toward her, the can of peaches falling, splattering syrup across the splintery wooden floor. “You can’t go out there!” she said, grabbing Sophie’s arm.
“Ouch!” Sophie yelped.
“That’s her burned arm,” Zoe said, and Marti let go of Sophie’s left arm but quickly grabbed her right instead.
Sophie tried to wriggle free. “My mom knows how to fly a helicopter,” she said. “Maybe that’s her!”
The sound of the helicopter was now loud enough to send a chill up Zoe’s spine. Through the glassless window, she could see the leaves of the trees flapping madly in the helicopter’s wake. Had they left anything outside that would give them away? she wondered. Marti had been right about not having a fire, she thought, and thank God she’d taken the blue tarp off the roof.
“You can’t go out there,” Marti repeated to Sophie, gripping her arm. “Don’t you get it?”
Sophie kicked her hard in the shin with her good right foot.
“Shit!” Marti backed away from the girl, but only momentarily, because Sophie headed for the door once again.
Zoe stood up, ready to stop Sophie herself, but Marti grabbed the girl’s shoulders and spun her around to face her. “You little bitch,” she said. “This is my life you’re