“Hurry…” an officer by the door said. Thank God all their glasses were on again. Thank God she didn’t have to try to make sense of what she’d seen in The Hedges.

Margot walked slowly to the bathroom. On the way, she saw the visitors’ log on the ground. She took it with her, wrote Mommy a note, and left it where she’d found it on her way out.

“Where are we going?” she asked the officer waiting for her.

She knew from the radio call that they were going to the North Woods. But she wanted to hear him say it.

He didn’t say it. Instead he grabbed her by the wrist so hard that she thought the skin there had somehow melted, been squished, fallen in. But when she looked at her wrist she saw that it was his fingers that had morphed, not hers.

Margot tried to pull away but the Goblin officer dragged her down the porch steps to a waiting cruiser.

Margot didn’t want to go to the North Woods. It took a lot to scare her, a girl capable of solving The Hedges on her own, but the legend of the witch in the North Woods had always gotten to her.

“She has no teeth,” Margot said as she was shoved into the car. “And so when she whispers, she spits on you. And then you’re infected, then you’ve got the bad stuff in you, too.”

But the officer didn’t respond. And looking out the window, Margot realized that the car was moving faster than any car she’d ever been inside of.

Speeding.

Dangerously speeding.

Toward a witch with no teeth.

18

Wayne still had a good lead when he reached the northwest entrance. He parked the truck and left all Molly’s things inside.

“Sorry,” he said, genuinely wanting to carry it all with him.

But he carried only the key.

And he believed he had an advantage on the police in here; he had a history with mazelike trails. As long as they didn’t bring that little girl with them.

When the first cruiser pulled into the open grassy area where Wayne’s car still ran, Wayne was deep in the woods, well past the place he and Molly exchanged vows so long ago.

The key to the city banged against his heart in his chest pocket.

19

Margot asked, “What are you going to do to him if you catch him?”

The officer looked to the rearview mirror and Margot was sure, absolutely sure that his face was about to change, that it was all going to drip from his skull, showing her what the Goblin Police really looked like under all that putty.

It didn’t happen, but Margot was as scared as if it had.

20

Wayne couldn’t help but compare the North Woods to The Hedges. The likeness was remarkable. Distantly, far from the immediacy of running through the woods, he wondered if there was a connection there, as a Gobliner, having tried but failed to create an impenetrable maze of his own.