In Strange Woods - Claire Cray Page 0,9

tell him what to do. No surprise, the way he grew up. Hell, his mom…now there’s a wanted woman.”

“What for?” James asked curiously, since Officer Brady seemed to enjoy gossiping so much.

“Eco-terrorist,” Brady said brightly. “Blew up a fleet of log trucks about fifteen years ago. No one’s seen her since. Anyway, what brings you here, if you’re not trackin’ down your long-lost twin?”

“I just…heard it was a good place to be depressed.”

“Drifter mode, huh?” Brady produced a business card and handed it over. “Well, if you see your double around, give me a call. Take care, Mr. Worthington Crane.”

James watched him go and then turned to stare at the boat in a daze. He sat down on the bench again, stupefied.

What the hell was going on? Did Grace have family out here? How?

She’d never said much about her past. Born in some middle-of-nowhere place in upstate New York, she said. Ran away to the city at seventeen, moved into a tiny apartment in Queens, and quickly found out she was pregnant. Didn’t know who the father was, as she told James when he was old enough to ask. “I was a bit of a wild child,” she told him sheepishly. She raised him on her own for the first four years of his life, counting on another family in the building to babysit while she was out waiting tables for caterers in the city.

She was serving drinks at a fundraiser when an old-money philanthropist named Bryce Worthington Crane spilled his Negroni down her shirt. “She just gave me this look,” Bryce recalled, his face glowing no matter how many times he told the story. “Like she knew me already. I was in love before I knew her name.”

Bryce was eighteen years her senior, six years a widower, and had a ten-year-old son, Robin. Grace was a young single mom with no family or assets to speak of. But the Worthington Cranes took pride in a certain degree of bohemianism, and somehow it worked. They were engaged within three months and married by the end of the year. As a wedding gift and to encourage her creative side, Bryce bought her a gallery in SoHo that quickly became a magnet for outsider artists and eccentrics.

By the time James came of age, Grace Worthington Crane was a downtown institution. But what about Grace Woodstock? What had her life been, before James was born? Why hadn’t he asked more questions when he had the chance?

* * *

James drove down around the harbor and headed up Bay Road, following the water as it curved away from the coast between two steep hills of evergreen. As the tides of Brooks Bay gradually gave way to the freshwater of Broken River, the houses thinned out and the trees around the road grew bigger and taller. This was the biggest river in the county, but there wasn’t much going on around it.

After about fifteen minutes the woods opened up and revealed a tiny, flat town called Spruce, population 696. It was an old-fashioned, blue-collar kind of place, no signs of wealth except the occasional glossy, tricked-out pick-up truck. The few main establishments were plopped right along the main road where he’d first come in, and not a single building or sign looked less than fifty years old. If Brooks had been left behind sometime in the past couple of decades, it must have been twice as long since the world last checked in on Spruce.

James parked at the general store, a simple log building named Spruce Market. It was right at the junction of River Road, which would presumably lead him upriver to wherever Camp Five was. But before he ventured onward, he needed more caffeine and a decent map.

An elderly man was hanging out by the cash register, chatting with the slightly less elderly woman behind it. She was well into her seventies, with large half-tinted bifocals and a Golden Girls perm. He was feebler, stooped with one hand braced on the counter and the other on a four-legged cane, dressed in an old hunting cap and well-worn corduroy coat. Both had a strong whiff of the past about them. And both stopped talking when James walked in, their faces awash with surprise.

“Hello,” James said, eyes landing on the coffee station against the wall, near a whiteboard covered in fishing reports. There were no cups in sight. “Where would I find a coffee cup?”

The old folks exchanged a bewildered look and stood there gawking at