“Where. Would she. Go.” His words sounded like they were being swallowed. Caught in the light, his face shocked me. It was so swollen that his eyes had disappeared, like lines drawn in marker on a misshapen balloon. “Where. Think.”

I shook my head. Not the Bouchers’. I wasn’t there. She wouldn’t go to a neighbor’s house. And then I remembered that there was one place I hadn’t thought of.

“I know,” I said. “I think I know.” I turned to Thomas. “If she ran, I know where she would go.”

25

It was my dad who told me that horses and pack animals weren’t native to North America. They were brought by European settlers. These types of details about America interested him most. No horses or mules meant that the natives had traveled mostly by foot, and while they sometimes used their bark or dugout canoes and had dogs to carry packs, for thousands of years they walked. Making paths. He loved this—how they’d felt and listened to the woods, how they must have watched the deer and foxes and shadowed their tracks through the undergrowth, how they’d always found the driest and most direct routes. He said that their footfall still marked the landscape and that those traces spoke something about man’s potential relationship with the surface of the earth—quiet, instinctive, respectful.

I thought about how, all of our lives, the paths we followed had been started by the first people here; almost every road had first been a trail. Dad would say that being “on the warpath” wasn’t just a figure of speech—it referred to an actual trail, a real place. Maybe it was a path that gave warriors an advantage when confronting an enemy, and they had learned this from their elders, how to travel to fight.

I led Officer Day and another cop, who said he was Officer Schuster, down the trail toward the Kingdom—probably a Lenape path before it was a horse and hiking trail. He pointed a flashlight at the ground, and his partner angled a high-powered beam straight ahead, casting the trees and path in phantom white, like in a horror film. Thomas and I walked ahead, out of their beams, several times, and they asked us to slow down.

The crooked tree was ahead of us, visible even before the policemen’s lights hit it. Looking at its bend, its pointing arm, it felt as if something living in this place was directing us toward Ellen, and I prayed to whatever it was that she would be there.

“This way,” I said, leading them off the Horseshoe Trail to circle into the Kingdom from behind. We ducked under branches and pushed through mountain laurel into the canopied clearing.

“What is this place?” asked Thomas.

“The Kingdom. It’s mine and Sage’s. Ellen knows about it. She’s been here before.”