be?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “And if you’re planning to ask me next whether I’m sure they’re human…”
“I wasn’t.” I could hear the smirk in his voice. “I figure you can tell the difference between a human and a deer. Where are you?”
“I told you. In the woods. We’re trying to come up with some way to mark the spot. If not, one of us will have to stay behind.”
“I’ll let Bob know that we need the warrant to include the rest of the property. Hang tight.”
He hung up before I could say anything else. I stuffed the phone into my back pocket and told Grimaldi, “They’re working on it. Why can’t we both stay?”
“One of us has to go tell Yung,” Grimaldi said. “She’s not picking up. And it could take hours for them to persuade a judge to get the warrant and get the personnel and equipment together and back here. We can’t let her sit there by the car until they do. She doesn’t even have the key to open the door.”
“Oops.” Guess we should have thought of that before we let her go off on her own.
“Let’s just find some way of marking the spot,” I said. “I don’t suppose you have a helium balloon in your pocket?”
“No,” Grimaldi said. “Do you?”
She went on without waiting for my answer. “If you want to go back to the car, I don’t mind waiting here.”
“I’d rather we went back together. You said it yourself. It could take them a while to get out here.”
“So what do you suggest?” Grimaldi asked.
“That we take this blanket—” It was Carrie’s and it was bright yellow, “and hang it from a handy tree branch. It’s big enough and bright enough that anyone who comes this way should be able to spot it. And then, if we go straight east from here, we may be able to mark the spot in the road where we come out, and maybe some of the path, too.”
“Path?” Grimaldi said, eyeing it. I gave her a look, and she shook her head. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. Give me the blanket. I’ll climb this handy-dandy tree and hang the flag.”
She suited action to words: hauled herself ten or fifteen feet up into the air and onto the branch of a scraggly pine tree.
“Is that branch strong enough to hold you?” I wanted to know, watching it bow under her weight.
“Are you calling me fat?” She was inching out, one careful step at a time.
“Of course not.” Only someone severely nearsighted would. She was tall and lean and well-muscled. And probably weighed quite a few pounds less than I did. “I just don’t want you to fall.”
“I’m not going to fall.” She draped the blanket carefully over the next branch up, and tugged it into place. “There. Hopefully that’ll stay there long enough to be a good signal.”
It was eye-catching, anyway. Nice and bright against the dark green of the pines and the lighter green of the fresh spring leaves around us.
Grimaldi skinned down the trunk and came toward me. “Got anything we can use to mark the way?”
“If she were a little older, we could have used teething biscuits or Cheerios.” I patted my pockets. “I don’t think I do.”
Grimaldi nodded. “Guess we’ll just do the best we can. I’ll film the walk.”
“I’ll walk behind you,” I said, since I didn’t want my too-big derriere in the shot, and since I’d rather she get us through the woods than me.
Nineteen
Grimaldi must have had a better sense of direction than me, because after about five minutes, the trees started to thin out as we approached the edge of the woods. Grimaldi, who had been breaking twigs as we’d been walking along, in an effort to mark the path, stopped just shy of the road and began to undress.
“What are you doing?” I inquired.
She glanced at me over the top of her T-shirt before she continued to pull it over her head. “What does it look like?”
The question was muffled inside the blue cotton.
“It looks like you’re stripping.”
“I want to leave this here to mark the spot.” She draped it over a branch before shrugging back into her overshirt and buttoning it up. That done, she proceeded to tie the navy T-shirt around the trunk of a sapling on the edge of the vegetation. “Come on.”
She scrambled into the ditch and up the other side. I slid down, more carefully—the last thing I wanted was