Survival Clause, стр. 69
“I’d rather we went back together. You said it yourself. It could take them a while to get out here.”
“So what do you suggest?” Grimaldi asked.
“That we take this blanket—” It was Carrie’s and it was bright yellow, “and hang it from a handy tree branch. It’s big enough and bright enough that anyone who comes this way should be able to spot it. And then, if we go straight east from here, we may be able to mark the spot in the road where we come out, and maybe some of the path, too.”
“Path?” Grimaldi said, eyeing it. I gave her a look, and she shook her head. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. Give me the blanket. I’ll climb this handy-dandy tree and hang the flag.”
She suited action to words: hauled herself ten or fifteen feet up into the air and onto the branch of a scraggly pine tree.
“Is that branch strong enough to hold you?” I wanted to know, watching it bow under her weight.
“Are you calling me fat?” She was inching out, one careful step at a time.
“Of course not.” Only someone severely nearsighted would. She was tall and lean and well-muscled. And probably weighed quite a few pounds less than I did. “I just don’t want you to fall.”
“I’m not going to fall.” She draped the blanket carefully over the next branch up, and tugged it into place. “There. Hopefully that’ll stay there long enough to be a good signal.”
It was eye-catching, anyway. Nice and bright against the dark green of the pines and the lighter green of the fresh spring leaves around us.
Grimaldi skinned down the trunk and came toward me. “Got anything we can use to mark the way?”
“If she were a little older, we could have used teething biscuits or Cheerios.” I patted my pockets. “I don’t think I do.”
Grimaldi nodded. “Guess we’ll just do the best we can. I’ll film the walk.”
“I’ll walk behind you,” I said, since I didn’t want my too-big derriere in the shot, and since I’d rather she get us through the woods than me.
Nineteen
Grimaldi must have had a better sense of direction than me, because after about five minutes, the trees started to thin out as we approached the edge of the woods. Grimaldi, who had been breaking twigs as we’d been walking along, in an effort to mark the path, stopped just shy of the road and began to undress.
“What are you doing?” I inquired.
She glanced at me over the top of her T-shirt before she continued to pull it over her head. “What does it look like?”
The question was muffled inside the blue cotton.
“It looks like you’re stripping.”
“I want to leave this here to mark the spot.” She draped it over a branch before shrugging back into her overshirt and buttoning it up. That done, she proceeded to tie the navy T-shirt around the trunk of a sapling on the edge of the vegetation. “Come on.”
She scrambled into the ditch and up the other side. I slid down, more carefully—the last thing I wanted was to fall and crush Carrie—and while I did, Grimaldi gathered a bunch of little stones and formed them into a small cairn on the gravel edge of the blacktop. “Just in case the T-shirt blows away.”
There wasn’t much chance of that, from what I could see. The sun was high, the sky was cloudless, and the breeze was practically non-existent.
On the other hand, Mullinax’s back forty consisted of a lot of trees, and if we lost our spot, it could take a lot of time and effort to find the bones again. It was mostly just luck that we’d found them the first time.
“Let’s go,” Grimaldi said, hauling me up the last few feet to the road. “You all right?”
“Just winded. The car’s this way, right?”
Grimaldi nodded. “I can run ahead and come back for you, if you want.”
She was obviously raring to go, and not discomfited at all by the hike through the wood.
In my own defense, I’d like to say that I was still carrying a little baby weight, not to mention the weight of the baby herself, and that I’d never been in the kind of condition Grimaldi was. “Sure. If you want.”
She was practically twitching with eagerness, so it didn’t surprise me when she took off like a rocket down the road. I bent my arms and picked up my speed, power-walking, while I watched her disappear into the distance, and then around the nearest bend in the road.
It was a lot easier to walk along the road than through the trees, and took a lot less time, too. I’ll be honest, I figured I’d see Grimaldi’s SUV come toward me pretty quickly, because I had a feeling we hadn’t covered all that much distance back there in the woods.
But that didn’t happen. Eventually, though, I got to the spot in the road—or on the side of the road—where I was pretty sure we’d parked. The car wasn’t there. Nor was Grimaldi.
I looked around. It looked like the right spot, but one set of trees looks very much like another, so maybe I’d been mistaken. I kept walking.
A few minutes passed, and then I heard the car engine. A few seconds later, the SUV rounded the curve in the road and pulled to a stop beside me. The passenger window rolled down. “Get in,” Grimaldi said.”
I peered into the back seat. “Where’s Yung?”
“Not here,” Grimaldi said.
“Didn’t we park back there?” I gestured with my thumb over my shoulder.
She nodded. “She wasn’t by the car when I got there, so I drove up the road looking for her.”
“Maybe she got lost?” I opened the back door and prepared to transfer Carrie from the sling to her seat.
“Don’t worry about that,” Grimaldi told me. “Just put the seatbelt around both of you. I want to get going.”
Sure thing. I