Page 146 of Save the Date
She sat in the shade, uncapped her water bottle, and devoured one of her protein bars while reading the dozens of names and dates that had been carved into the wooden bench, leaving barely an inch of ungraffitied space. The earliest one she found was from 1972, inside a crude heart with the names “John+Marsha.” The most recent entry was from 2013.
Cara leaned back on her elbows and sighed. The first year they’d moved into their house in Savannah, Leo had carved a heart with their initials into the trunk of a tall, spindly pine tree in their front yard. Less than a month later, the tree came crashing to the ground during a violent lightning storm, leaving a huge dent on the hood of Cara’s car, and an ugly uneven stump, which, as far as Cara knew, was still there. Had that been an omen of things to come?
She was contemplating omens and their meanings and staring at the Loblolly home site when the sun caught a gleam of metal nearly hidden in the canopy of another live oak close to the house site. She took another swallow of water and walked closer to take another look.
A tree house! It had been built on and around the tree’s thick main trunk, and the glint of metal she’d seen was a bit of its tin roof. As a child, Cara had always longed for a tree house, but of course, they’d lived in base housing in those days, and the Air Force didn’t consider playhouses for little girls as standard issue.
She was almost directly under the plank floor of the house when she noticed the foot ladder nailed to the oak’s trunk. And at the base of the trunk, she spied a pair of expensive-looking Jack Rogers sandals. Cara had seen a pair of sandals like those not so many days ago. She tilted her head as far back as it could go.
“Brooke?”
There followed an almost imperceptible rustling of branches, but the tree’s foliage was so dense, she could see little besides brown branches and green leaves. Cara pulled herself onto the first rung of the foot ladder, holding on to the step above it. She climbed another step, and then the next. Finally, when she was nearly six feet off the ground, she saw the hatch that had been cut into the floor. Two more steps and she poked her head through that hatch.
Brooke Trapnell sat in the corner of the wooden house, her legs folded beneath her Indian style.
“Olly-olly-oxen-free,” Cara said.
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Brooke smiled wanly. “I saw you come riding up on your bike. I was hoping you wouldn’t see me. What were you digging for over there? Buried treasure?”
Cara hoisted herself up and onto the floor of the tree house. The floor platform was a little larger than a king-size bed. The side walls were actually three foot railings, and the roof was held up by four-by-four posts. This must be what a rich kid’s tree house looked like.
“When I was kicking the sand I felt something solid under my shoe. I guess it was the old threshold for your family’s house.”
That perked her up. “The one that said Loblolly?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe you found that. It must be the one thing the fucking Park Service didn’t destroy.”
“You didn’t know they’d torn the house down?”
“No! I had no idea. When I got down to St. Marys on Saturday, I’d already missed the ferry. I should have just gotten a motel room and come the next morning, but in the frame of mind I was in, all I could think of was getting over here to Loblolly. I went to the marina and took a charter boat to the Sea Camp dock. By the time I’d hiked down here, it was almost sunset. For a minute there, I thought maybe I’d somehow gotten turned around and gone the wrong way. Which made no sense. I mean, Dungeness is right over there.”
Her finger stabbed the still, humid air, in the direction of the brick-and-stucco ruins. “So where was our house? I mean, how could it have just disappeared? Then, I saw the pile of bricks, and of course, you can still sort of see the outline of where the house was. I kind of went a little crazy. Okay, I was already halfway there, but the house being gone, that pushed me over the edge.”
“What did you do?” Cara asked.
“You mean after I cried and carried on and stood over there on the bluff and screamed so loud I scared the feral horses and nearly gave a hiker a heart attack because he thought I’d been bit by a rattlesnake?”
“Yes. What did you do after that?”
“I turned around and started to walk back to Sea Camp. But then I realized there wouldn’t be a ferry back to the mainland until the next morning. I had my overnight bag, but no tent or sleeping bag—and it was getting dark. I didn’t know what else to do, so I called Pete.”
“Your ranger friend?”
She nodded. “That day after we ran into him at lunch and I gave him my business card? He texted me after I got back to the office. I texted back, just to say how glad I was to have seen him, and that was it. He asked me to meet him for a drink, even suggested I should bring Harris, but I said no. I never intended to see Pete again.”
“Then why come over here to Cumberland?” Cara asked. “You knew he’d be here, right?”
“I knew Loblolly would be here.” She laughed ruefully. “Anyway, that’s what I told myself. But with Loblolly gone, what else was I going to do? I had Pete’s number in my phone, so I called him and told him where I was, and he came and got me, no questions asked.”
Cara looked around again at the tree house. “I’m guessing you didn’t stay up here.”
“God, no. Pete has one of the little ranger cabins, so I stayed with him. The mosquitoes would have carried me away up here. Anyway, I’d forgotten all about the tree house until I came back over here yesterday, to see if there was anything left of the house that I could salvage. You know, a doorknob, anything at all. The Park Service was very efficient about obliterating every trace of Loblolly.”
“And you really didn’t know the house was going to be torn down? When was the last time you were here?”
