In the Woods by Tana French Read Free Book Online Page B

little arts and negotiations of adulthood. It steadied me somehow, the image of two Murder detectives with their practiced faces giving away nothing, walking shoulder to shoulder and in step towards this dead child. She was lying curled on her left side, as though she had fallen asleep on the sofa under the peaceful murmurs of adult conversation. Her left arm was flung out over the edge of the rock; her right fell across her chest, the hand bent under at an awkward angle. She was wearing smoke-blue combats, the kind with tags and zippers in peculiar places, and a white T-shirt with a line of stylized cornflowers printed on the front, and white runners. Cassie was right, she had taken trouble: the thick plait trailing across her cheek was secured with a blue silk cornflower. She was small and very slight, but her calf showed taut and muscular where one leg of the combats was rucked up. Ten to thirteen sounded about right: her breasts were just beginning, barely denting the folds of the T-shirt. Blood was caked on her nose and mouth and the tips of her front teeth. The breeze whirled the soft, curling fronds at her hairline. Her hands were covered in clear plastic bags, tied at the wrists. “Looks like she fought,” Sophie said. “A couple of nails were broken off. I wouldn’t bet on finding DNA under the others—they look pretty clean—but we should get fibers and trace off her clothes.”
    For a moment I was dizzied by the impulse to leave her there: shove the techs’ hands away, shout at the hovering morgue men to get the hell out. We had taken enough toll on her. All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. I wanted to wrap her up in soft blankets, stroke back her clotted hair, pull up a duvet of falling leaves and little animals’ rustles. Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground 30
    Tana French
    river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head. She had tried so hard to live.
    “I have that same T-shirt,” Cassie said quietly, at my shoulder. “Penney’s kids’ department.” I had seen it on her before, but I knew she wouldn’t wear it again. Violated, that innocence was too vast and final to allow any tongue-in-cheek claim of kinship.
    “Here’s what I wanted to show you,” said Sophie briskly. She doesn’t approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps. She pointed to the edge of the stone. “Want gloves?”
    “I won’t touch anything,” I said, and crouched in the grass. From this angle I could see that one of the girl’s eyes was a slit open, as if she was only pretending to be asleep, waiting for her moment to jump up and yell, Boo!
    Fooled you! A shiny black beetle ticked a methodical path over her forearm. A groove about a finger wide had been carved around the top of the stone, an inch or two from the edge. Time and weather had worn it smooth, almost glossy, but in one place the maker’s handmade chisel had slipped, gouging a chunk out of the side of the groove and leaving a tiny, jagged overhang. A smear of something dark, almost black, clung to the underside.
    “Helen here spotted it,” Sophie said. The girl tech glanced up and gave me a shy proud smile. “We’ve swabbed, and it’s blood—I’ll let you know if it’s human. I doubt it has anything to do with our body; her blood had dried by the time she was brought here, and anyway I’d bet this is years old. It could be animal, or it could be from some teenage scrap or whatever, but still, it’s interesting.”
    I thought of the delicate hollow by Jamie’s wrist bone, the brown back of Peter’s neck bordered by white after a haircut. I could feel Cassie not looking at me. “I don’t see how it could be connected,” I said. I stood up—it was getting hard to balance