Page 153 of Mazywood

And Sharise was getting help. She wasn’t lost or hurt. He had to believe that. As he traversed the dark caverns with Imani, he imagined Sharise in her UCLA blue climbing up the ridge steps to the lodge. He imagined her starting the Jeep’s engine, the Jeep purring with ease.

Sand sifted next to Johnny’s ear, sliding from the wall. He laid his hand across the stone to make sure it wasn’t trembling. “How much farther?” he asked Imani.

The answer came in Tasha’s hidden voice, only slightly raised: “Johnny? Imani?”

In this narrower passageway, her voice didn’t bounce as much. The final glow stick lying close to the wall showed them how close they were.

“Here!” Imani said, and she ran ahead, forgetting that she carried the strongest light.

He rounded the corner… and there Tasha sat, as if in a spotlight from Imani’s powerful glare. She looked like a bird atop a nest in this compact nook, sitting on a mattress of twigs, brush, and fabrics. She stared, her face slack as if she could not believe the sight of them.

And he didn’t blame her.

How was it possible? Johnny had experienced her death twice today—once on the road, and once when they heard her shrieks inside the tree. He could barely believe the sight of her either. Her hair was slightly mussed and she was wearing a ragged green scrap over Mazelle’s robe to keep warm, but just like Imani, she didn’t look like she’d been snatched away by that monster. She looked like it was a regular day. Except for the new lines near her eyes—her pain.

Tasha outstretched her arms, ready to receive them as they both raced to hug her.

Johnny kissed her dry lips and massaged her scalp through her hair, savoring every living piece of her he had thought was gone. He inhaled the scent of her.

“What happened?” Tasha whispered. “Where’s Sharise?”

“She’s fine. She went to get help,” Johnny said.

“But what about—”

“It’s dead, Tasha. I shot it.”

Johnny couldn’t help the pride that quavered his voice. The skinny kid who hadn’t wanted to shoot a rabbit—and had chickened out when he might have shot the creature when it was small—had felled the giant by remembering Uncle Ricky’s lessons. And he’d killed it in one shot, no less. He had not failed his family, either the living or the ancestors.

Tasha sank against him, sighing with gratitude. Then she reached for Imani’s hand and held on tight. Johnny heard her whisper to their daughter, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.”

The anguish still carved on Imani’s face made Johnny’s mouth go dry. He had assumed she was in shock when she stood so close to that creature before he shot it, but now it was obvious that she had been trying to save its life, a version of Stockholm syndrome. Or was it more?

Again, the wall seemed to whisper its distress. He might have imagined it, but today had taught him not to ignore anything, even if it didn’t seem real. “We need to get out,” he said. “That shot was loud, and this place might collapse…”

With Johnny on one side and Imani on the other, Tasha brought herself to her feet. He was worried about the injury to her foot, but he would have time to tend to her outside.

“Wait,” Tasha said after her first hops over the debris bed. “Imani, grab that pile of newspapers.”

“For your book?” Imani asked while she picked up the stack of laminated pages. Aside from a few clipped responses to her father, this was the most Imani had spoken since the bone room.

“It’s history,” Tasha said.

“What history?” Johnny asked.

Tasha showed him one of the shiny newspaper sheets: a story about his grandmother and her dog. The lamination had held up, but the page itself was yellowed and withered from time, dated from 1928. A hundred years old, he marveled. And it was here, of all places.

Johnny felt a smile lift his cheeks. Well, damn. Her pet must have figured out how to smuggle some of her belongings out of the lodge. He felt a jolt of sadness that he had been forced to take that creature’s life. It had been capable of memorializing—both here and in the bone room. That wasn’t normal animal behavior.

It had been a monster, yes, but also so much more. Johnny hadn’t heard everything Imani said before he pulled the trigger—not with his heart clamoring in his ears and echoes flying like sonic missiles—and most of what he’d heard hadn’t made sense. But the plastic water bottles he’d last seen on the kitchen counter at the lodge were now right in front of him on this creature’s nest, which made him remember Imani’s exact words: It brought us water.

Johnny felt goose bumps across his back that finally had nothing to do with fear or cold. Hollman had mentioned that small things at the lodge might have gone missing—he was particularly saddened by the loss of a custom green evening gown Mazelle Washington had worn the day she met the great Lena Horne. He’d remembered Mazelle showing it off to him as a boy.

That was one of the few happy stories about Mazelle Washington that Mom had told him, and now he felt certain that same gown was draped over Tasha, grimy and tattered, with only a faint green glimmer across the beaded low collar to signal its iconic past.

Johnny’s eyes stung with his wish that he could have loved his pioneering grandmother and her remarkable creature instead of being forced to see them as monsters.

“History,” he agreed, his voice breaking.