They had a head start on her. But how much? And there was no way the police were going to take Margot into the woods. That was as silly as suggesting, say, that the key to the city was found.

Nobody went into the North Woods. Nobody. And if someone was planning on dragging a little girl into those woods, why…why…

“Why, she’d have to sneak a note to Mom to tell her.”

Margot!

17

Wayne was heading to the North Woods. The officer with the glass in his putty face radioed it in. Margot heard the call. The wounded officer had been following Sherman through town. Thought he might be heading to the woods. Something about Sherman and mazes.

He said that Sherman was in serious…fucking…trouble.

Margot heard that, too.

The other officers, gathered in the living room of the little yellow house, moved fast to the door.

“I have to use the bathroom,” Margot said.

She couldn’t shake the image of the officer’s eyes when he’d taken off his glasses in The Hedges. They looked like cartoon eyes to her. As if they’d been drawn on his putty flesh. Like there was no way they could blink. Big with black irises. Staring down at her like a drawing hanging in a bad place.

“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.