The Autumn Prince

26. The Detritus of Fate

I began to wonder if Miss Gold was trying to lose someone she thought might be following us, or if she'd never driven anywhere in her life and, to her, roads were merely theoretical. She gave directions with supreme confidence despite a lot of obvious backtracking. I didn't entirely mind. Following her instructions gave me something immediate to focus on that didn't burden me with options.

We'd been outside the city limits of Elwin for close to an hour, driving through Redgrove, the sprawling, urban sister to our college town. I'd been to the mall with Katherine, but apart from that I lacked any proper knowledge of the city. Becca's familiarity with it saved us more than once, however, and she provided helpful, if hesitant, comments from the back seat, which Miss Gold took in stride.

I bit back my concern for the two girls and focused on the road. Wherever they were, I couldn't help them. I'd made the decision to trust Miss Gold repeatedly since drinking her tea and while I had plenty of objections to her methods, she'd never intentionally betrayed that trust. She'd also never lied and had assured me both girls were in the best possible care. Right or wrong, it was all I had.

"Here," she said suddenly, pointing across me as we passed an intersection, "down this street."

I had to circle the block to make the turn, but we soon crossed a bridge, long past its prime, spanning a wide, dark river that meandered far below. At one time, its steep banks had been neatly planted with an even row of spruce, but it had long since gone feral with gnarled oaks, wild juniper, red dogwood and what might have been holly, topped off with a barbaric mess of runaway undergrowth. A person could walk through that dense, narrow wood oblivious of the watercourse until they found themselves rapidly sliding down an incline of dead leaves and loose dirt to splash abruptly in its placid flow.

"Turn to your right, Thomas. We are close," Miss Gold said, peering carefully through the foliage. Beyond the bridge, the sights and sounds of downtown Redgrove faded into trees and a service road so cracked and littered with potholes that it couldn't have serviced many vehicles in the past decade. We might as well have been a hundred miles from civilization. We bounced along for another ten minutes, following the river with nothing out the window but more trees and a fox that watched with casual interest as we passed.

"Slow down, Thomas, the road is just ahead," she indicated a turn through a break in the trees where a dirt road sloped downward to meet the shore.

"Are you sure?" I asked cautiously and slowed the Jeep to a crawl, "That doesn't look safe."

"The road is steep and in disrepair, but it was once used for transporting shipments of heavy cargo. I suspect your vehicle will not be the one to end it."

I took a deep breath and turned. The descent wasn't quite as bad as I'd expected and it finally evened out just a few feet above the water line.

"What's that?" Becca asked, leaning forward to peer through the trees at a shadowy building that looked as if it emerged straight out of the water.

"You shall soon see," Miss Gold replied.

We cleared the woods on the lower bank after a few seconds, and the road ended in an open space flanked by a ramshackle cabin and a rickety dock jutting into the river. Before I could protest staying in the derelict shack, I noticed that the other end of the "dock" was attached to a small, dead looking island twenty yards from the shore. The huge building that sat upon it loomed darkly over tall, dry grass with a corrugated, tiered roof sitting atop long rows of broken windows, rusted metal beams, and crumbling gray stone. By comparison, the shack looked like a luxury.

"We're staying there?" I asked, feeling even less comfortable with the island than the driveway that got us there, "that warehouse must have been abandoned before I was even born."