The Courage Tree - Diane Chamberlain [84]
“We can get a laptop somewhere,” she offered.
Lucas shook his head. “All my material is in the tree house,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to go back. And I thought it would be good if you went with me—”
“I can’t leave here.” There was anger in her voice, and he hesitated before speaking again.
“There’s so little you can do here, sweetheart,” he said finally. “The search will go on without you, and my idea was that you could go to Dr. Schaefer’s office and get some of the herb stuff…Herbalina…so that if…when they find Sophie, it could be immediately administered to her. Also, I’ll have to rent a car to go back to Virginia. I can drop it off in Vienna, then we could bring my car…or your car…back. That way, we’d have a car here.”
He’d lost her with all the talk about cars. She was still thinking about having Herbalina here, with her, ready for one of the paramedics to infuse into Sophie. She kissed Lucas’s cheek. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For believing that Sophie will be found alive. I felt like I was the only person who still thought that was possible. And for believing in Herbalina.”
“I’ve seen with my own eyes the change it made in her.”
“So has Joe,” she said. “So have my parents. But that doesn’t make any difference to them.”
“So,” Lucas said. “Will you go with me?”
“Yes,” she said, and she pulled herself closer to him, shutting her eyes. She would try to sleep, praying that sleep would be interrupted sometime during the night with the good news she longed to hear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Zoe opened her eyes as soon as the birds started singing their tribute to the morning. Light was only beginning to filter into the room, and from her sleeping palette she could see a cardinal in the tree outside the screened window. When she’d first arrived at the shanty, she’d found some old screening half buried in the ground near the outhouse and had nailed it up to the two windows in the bedroom to try to keep the mosquitoes out. Probably pointless, since the other windows in the house had no screens, but it made her feel good to be able to give Marti some space in the house that would be free of insects.
It was a moment before Zoe remembered she was not alone. The memory of the little girl crept so slowly into her mind that when she lifted her head to look at the sleeping palette across the room from hers, she almost expected to see it empty and the child gone, as if she’d imagined her. But there she was, her body so small it barely elevated the lavender sheet above the bed. The little girl was turned on her side, away from Zoe, and her hair lay in red waves on her pillow.
Zoe rested her head on her own pillow again and shut her eyes. What was she going to do with this child? And just how sick was she? When she’d gotten up from her long nap the day before, Sophie had managed to keep her eyes open only long enough for Zoe to wash and bandage her cut—and possibly infected—foot before tumbling back in bed again. She’d slept through dinner, through the evening, through the night, as though making up for the three nights she’d suffered in the woods alone.
She was a sweet girl, a smart girl, and all she wanted was to go home. But Zoe was not sure how to make that happen without putting herself and her own daughter in the gravest jeopardy.
Sometime during the night, she’d come up with a plan: she and Sophie would walk the five miles through the forest to the road, leaving a note for Marti, in case she arrived while Zoe was gone. She would have to fashion some sort of shoe for Sophie’s left foot. Even so, that foot was so bruised and damaged by her three days alone, that Zoe wasn’t sure how the little girl would manage one mile on the rough forest floor, much less five. But never mind. That was the least of their problems. She would carry the girl if she had to.
So, she would take the girl to the road. It was a little used road, and they might have to wait awhile for someone to come along. As soon as they saw a car, Zoe would hide, and Sophie could wave it