He hesitates, gears turning somewhere behind his eyes; then he reaches out to touch her chin, nodding solemnly. “You have a lot going on right now, Jake. I can understand that. We’ll do some more research. And when we’re done, we’ll decide on a proper course of action.”
After this is agreed, they sit on the loveseat and visit for a while longer. But their conversation is stilted, and Knut’s mind is elsewhere. Oddly, he hugs her a second time before he leaves, which is something he never does.
The next day, over lunch, she learns from the housekeepers that immediately after Knut left her cabin last night he snuck over to the Maintenance Shed where he forced the door, triggering the alarm. From the shed he took a long, tree-felling chainsaw and marched out with it into the dark forest like some knight off to vanquish a dragon. But a squad of Rangers rushed him before he even reached the old-growth. As they dragged him past the Pilgrims’ Villas, Knut unleashed his greatest jeremiad, a scathing critique of the Cathedral and its inherent absurdity and perversion, all while referring to himself as a “Tree Barista,” an incident that two Pilgrims recorded on their phones and posted widely.
Davidoff’s justice was swift and severe. The wharf workers say that Knut wept and tore at his hair when he was informed of his banishment. The Rangers dumped him along with all the recycling and compost bins on the very next Mainland-bound supply barge. They wouldn’t even let him take his collection of paperbooks, including his beloved first editions of Linnaeus and Muir, which Jake narrowly managed to rescue from his cabin before they were confiscated and burned along with the rest of his belongings.
Now it’s early Monday morning, and as she lies awake, listening to the groggy pre-dawn chatter of red crossbills and juncos, she fights to halt her alarm clock’s advancing digits with her mind. She isn’t sure she can stand another numbing day of Forest Guiding—especially now that she’s facing a possible pregnancy, and all the Cathedral’s trees are quite likely dying, and her only friend is gone.
When her alarm sounds, Jake rises and shuffles sluggishly to the locker where she keeps her uniform. Inside, she finds a note taped to the interior of the door. Knut must have put it there the night of his visit, while she went to the bathroom to check yet again if she’d got her period:
They stand. They reach. They climb. They thirst. They drop their leaves. They fall. You see, Jake? We make them human. With our verbs. But really, we shouldn’t. Because they’re our betters. Our kings and queens. (We gave them crowns, didn’t we?) And they are the closest things we have to gods.
You, however, Jacinda Greenwood, are their equal. – Knut
CONSANGUINITY
FOUR DAYS LATER, Jake hears from one of the maintenance guys that “her lawyer friend” has returned to the Cathedral. Silas invites her for drinks that evening at Villa Twelve, the very same Villa where she’d spent the night with Corbyn Gallant. Again, Jake dons her Pilgrim disguise and sneaks to the Villas through the cover of the trees.
Silas greets her at the door wearing an untucked dress shirt and a wide smile. “I forgot to mention last time that your great-grandfather Harris Greenwood built this cabin,” he says, leading her inside. “It was the first permanent dwelling ever constructed on Greenwood Island. Some claim he built it as a retreat for himself and his lover, a man in his employ named Feeney—though all of this remains unconfirmed by my researchers. The cabin has been redone since, of course, a remodel performed by Holtcorp, which I’m told involved extracting numerous high-calibre bullets from the priceless timber beams.”
Though the name Harris Greenwood remains foreign to her ear, Jake allows herself a twinge of pride as she again examines the fineness of the cabin’s woodwork, with its beautiful, honey-coloured fir beams, its great shelf of paperbooks, and its sense of oneness with the forest.
“Sorry I didn’t book you for another private this time,” Silas says. “But I figured it would be better if we spoke without the wonders of nature to distract us.”
He pours her some wine as thick as blackberry juice at the kitchen island, then brings it over to the coffee table. She can almost feel a magnetic pull between the edge of the glass and her lips, but leaves it untouched. Instead she sits on the sofa and extracts the battered journal from her pack and sets it on the coffee table.
“So you did manage to have a look at it?” Silas asks.
“I read it,” she says, nodding her head noncommittally, reluctant to let on how much the book has already come to mean to her, the depth to which it has taken root. “But I doubt you have. Because it definitely wasn’t written by my grandmother.”
Silas gives a wriggling smile, and she’s reminded of how he always hated to be told he’d made a mistake. “I never made any such claim!” he declares, joking unconvincingly. “Though now that you’ve familiarized yourself with it, I’ll tell you how the journal came to us. My firm specializes in intestate litigation—unresolved estates and unclaimed inheritances that have languished in trust accounts for years. For this purpose, we routinely acquire rare paperbooks from private collections: journals, ledgers, diaries, that kind of thing. This particular one came to us in the sixties—way before my time—from a rare book collector in North Dakota, who bought it from a farmer who claimed he found it one day out in his wheat field. Apparently, the book was discovered spread open in the dirt, just lying there, as though some fieldworker had been reading it and set it down for a moment. In fact, the collector who initially acquired it considered the journal a lost work of fiction—a precursor to The Bell Jar. After my firm purchased it, the journal sat in our collection for decades. Even though it was digitized in the 2000s, the phonetic spelling of your grandmother’s name inside the front cover didn’t trigger any of our search algorithms, which are primed for names of interest like Greenwood or Holt. It wasn’t until last year that an articling student of mine, who was conducting an inventory of our holdings, discovered this reference to your grandmother. Although the inscription was clearly added after the journal was completed, a deeper analysis of the text gave us good indication that the entries were made in Saint John, New Brunswick, which led us to speculate that the “RJ” named in the paperbook could in fact be R.J. Holt, the founder of Holtcorp. Our investigation stalled there, however, without concrete evidence to tie the file to any living person.
“That is, until the book was united with this,” he says, reaching into a carbon-fibre briefcase that looks bombproof and producing a slim, clothbound box, open on one side, into which he snugly slides the journal. “And then things got interesting.”
He holds up its spine for Jake to see:
THE SECRET & PRIVATE THINKINGS & DOINGS OF EUPHEMIA BAXTER
Jake feels a galloping thrill at finally learning the woman’s name.
“This slipcase is the missing piece of the puzzle that I spoke about last time,” he continues. “We succeeded in borrowing it from an amateur researcher named Harvey Lomax III, who for years has been trying to track down information about his grandfather, Harvey Lomax Sr., a man who was once employed as R.J. Holt’s driver until he inexplicably went missing sometime in 1935. Harvey III made it his life’s project to locate his grandfather, a search which eventually led him to an archivist who’d collected artifacts from the Vancouver skid row hotels that were being bought up and gentrified during the great condo boom of the early 2000s.”