Malarkey by Sheila Simonson

There the
lane shrank to the status of a path and dead-ended at a low stone
wall. I found a stile, climbed over it, and entered the Stanyon
woods.
    It was a plantation, not a natural copse. Stately oaks, lesser
trees I didn't recognize, laurels, two giant hollies, male and female,
and assorted bushes that looked as if they were about to bloom
formed a screen to hide the fiduciary heart of the grove.
    Beyond the screen, long before the Steins bought the estate,
some tree accountant had set out rows of conifers with spacing
appropriate to moderate growth. In the not distant future, the trees
would be harvested like wheat. The current accountant would see to
that. Perhaps Slade Wheeler would have seen to it when he tired of
his war games.
    The trees looked tall and spindly in the gray light, and their
uniformity depressed me. Someone had mowed the undergrowth
that spring. I felt as if I were walking through a field of living
telephone poles. In a hundred years the great evergreen forests of
the Pacific Northwest were going to resemble Stanyon. Hundreds of
square miles of telephone poles.
    Some of the conifers, I think they were Scotch pine, sported
red blazes as if a displaced timber cruiser had marked them for
cutting. It took me a few minutes to realize the marks were left over
from Wheeler's wargames.
    When I stepped onto the mat of fallen needles I made no
sound. I walked without haste, trying to imagine what it would be
like to stalk and be stalked in this tame wilderness. The land sloped
upward, and a few bushes here and there had survived to provide
lurking places. Ferns sprouted like feather dusters over the mown
areas. Foreign birds sang. I couldn't decipher their song. It sounded
like a lament. A light wind brushed my cheek.
    I was beginning to spook myself. In a lifetime of reading I
had encountered enough enchanted forests to know that Stanyon
Woods was too dull for magic. It wasn't even haunted. Slade
Wheeler's ghost, if it lingered at all, hugged the ground like a patch of
stale smog.
    I made myself look for signs of a police search. The Gardai
had to have searched the woods for the site of the murder, if, as
Kayla said, they were assuming her brother was killed by one of the
game players. Once I put my mind to it, I spotted broken branches,
trampled ferns, scuffed needles. The cops had been there all
right.
    I hiked upward, shoving branches aside when I had to. I
wasn't lost because I knew the woods were not a forest. If I walked a
quarter mile farther, I'd come to a cow pasture or a potato field
plowed and ready for seeding. When I stopped and looked around
me, though, I saw only the stiff rows of conifers. Watery gray light
sifted through the needles. I might as well have been lost.
    As the thought formed, I caught motion at the edge of my
visual field. I whirled and stared. Nothing—a trembling of leaves that
might have been caused by the wind. I took another few steps and
stopped again, the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling. Somebody
or something was watching me.
    I stood very still, though my berserker impulse was to run,
screeching, directly at the spot where I had sensed the intruder. Or
perhaps I was the intruder.
    I breathed in, out. Finally, I started walking toward the
trembling bush. Slowly. With dignity. So what if there were game
players hiding in the woods? I thought of Grace Flynn's "protector."
He was shorter than I was and no heavier. I could handle Artie.
    I parted the offending bush and entered a tiny glade.
Nothing. I said, "Okay, who's here?" Nobody answered. Then, on the
far side of the clearing, I saw the stone.
    It was huge, a boulder of dolmen dimensions scabbed with
lichen, and it was splotched with red paint. As I walked over to it, I
caught what might have been the blur of someone else's passage in
the calf-high ferns. The trail, if it was a trail and not a trick of light,
led up the slope and into the trees.
    I approached the stone warily. Nothing. A faint sound from
the woods