In the Woods

by Tana French

He strikes me as a psychopath, and they lie easier than they tell the truth.”

I took it for granted, at the time, that she dreamed this guy followed through on his threat. Now I think I was wrong. I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child’s drawing. Possibly those earnestly efficient man-made woods are in fact like that; I wouldn’t know. Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collective gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgment.

I suppose I’ve always had a yearning, in spite of the fact that I am temperamentally unsuited to the role in every possible way, to be a hero out of myth, golden and reckless, galloping bareback to meet my fate on a wild horse no other man could ride.

Music, or a voice; or just some trick of the river on stones, the breeze in the hollow oak? The wood had a million voices, changing with every season and every day; you could never know them all.

We lay very still. I could feel the air around us changing, blooming and shimmering like the air over a scorching road. My heart was speeding, or hers was banging against my chest, I’m not sure. I turned Cassie in my arms and kissed her, and after a moment she kissed me back. I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.

Every sunny familiar spot in our shared landscape had become a dark minefield, fraught with treacherous nuances and implications.

Through everything, this much of the old alliance remained: the shared, animal instinct to keep its dying private. In some ways this is the most heartbreaking thing of all: always, always, right up until the end, the old connection was there when it was needed.

If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn’t forgive her for being hurt.

She was smiling at me, an intimate little smile with a dare lurking in the corners.

And then, too, I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.

She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god’s most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.

I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or the most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives know each other’s every thought as surely as lifelong ballet partners in a pas de deux.

I never knew and never will whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.

Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack, but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible.

I could no longer picture Rosalind in my mind’s eye; the tender vision of the girl in white had been blown to pieces as if by a nuclear bomb. This was something unimaginable, something hollow as the yellowed husks that insects leave behind in dry grass, blowing with cold alien winds and a fine corrosive dust that shredded everything it touched.

And there it was: all we needed. The breath went out of me with a strange, painful little sound.

Believe’ doesn’t exist for her. Things aren’t true or false; they either suit her or they don’t. Nothing else means anything to her. You could give her a polygraph and she’d pass with flying colors.”

But before you decide to despise me too thoroughly, consider this: she fooled you, too. You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie.

I had broken every vow myself and steered every boat to shipwreck with my own hand.

She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones.

I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once.

Although I knew that quite possibly this would have made no difference to anything at all, in the long run, I couldn’t help thinking of all the casualties that silence had left behind, all the wreckage in its wake.

After a few dates, though, and before the relationship had really progressed enough to merit the name, she dumped me. She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. “You should go for younger women,” she advised me. “They can’t always tell.”

I had, of course, sworn never to let the place cross my mind again; but human beings can’t help being curious, I suppose, as long as the knowledge doesn’t come at too high a price.

They no longer seemed to belong to me, and I couldn’t shake the dark, implacable sense that this was because I had forfeited my right to them, once and for all.

The summer came to life. It burst from gray to fierce blue and gold in the blink of an eye; the air pealed with grasshoppers and lawnmowers, swirled with branches and bees and dandelion seeds, it was soft and sweet as whipped cream, and over the wall the wood was calling us in the loudest of silent voices, it was shaking out all its best treasures to welcome us home.

Summer tossed out a fountain of ivy tendrils, caught us straight under the breastbones and tugged; summer, redeemed and unfurling in front of us, a million years long.

This memory, alone of all my hoard, did not dissolve into smoke and slide away through my fingers. It remained—still remains—sharp-edged and warm and mine, a single bright coin left in my hand. I suppose that, if the wood was going to leave me only one moment, that was a kind one to choose.

The victim is the one person you never know; she had been only a cluster of translucent, conflicting images refracted through other people’s words, crucial not in herself but for her death and the urgent firework trail of consequences it left behind.

I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe.

I had become so used to thinking of the wood as the invincible and stalking enemy, the shadow over every secret corner of my mind; I had completely forgotten that, for much of my life, it had been our easy playground and our best-loved refuge. It hadn’t really occurred to me, until I saw them cutting it down, that it had been beautiful.