The Madrona Heroes Register: Echoes of the Past by Hillel Cooperman Page B

theories – she picked up her pace and headed
straight for the entrance to the woods, as the dog’s barking
faded.

    §

    Caleb looked up slightly, taking note
of Binny winding her way through the path into the woods. Binny
storming past him wasn’t exactly a new sight. Caleb was used to
giving people their privacy, and Caleb knew very well that Binny
liked hers. He kept working, never missing a stroke in digging out
a root that was threatening to upturn one of his raised wooden
paths.
    Binny’s parents used to take walks in
the woods with all three kids when they were younger. On
particularly lazy days the Jordans would pause their walk and chat
with Caleb. Binny’s mother Julie, would try and talk baseball with
Caleb sometimes. Periodically he would bounce Cassie on his knee,
gently reciting nursery rhymes they hadn’t heard of before. When
the family continued on their trek, Caleb would return to his
seemingly never ending list of horticultural tasks.

    §

    It wasn’t that Binny didn’t like
Caleb. She did. Everyone did. But Binny didn’t come to the woods
for companionship. Especially not today, when the whole world
seemed to be against her.
    People didn’t listen. And they didn’t
do what they should. And the people that were supposed to tell them
to follow the rules weren’t doing their job either. Who did you
call when the people in charge weren’t being in charge
properly?
    Binny’s accelerated pace took her
quickly past the spot where Caleb was working. He hadn’t seemed to
notice her, lost in some task of his. There were multiple paths
through the Madrona woods. Despite how windy and confusing they
could be, Binny knew them all. Binny liked how the woods could
swallow you up. As she branched off a couple of times onto lesser
and lesser known tracks, the branches of nearby trees seemed to
intertwine and create a sort of canopy for her, almost a tunnel.
Binny could still make out the shimmer of the lake through the
trees to the east, but the sights and sounds of the houses past the
edges of the woods were now gone. She’d arrived at her
destination.
    To the casual observer, usually an
adult observer, Binny had arrived at an old rusted out shell of a
car. In fact, some adults might see this as less a car than a
guaranteed trip to the hospital with its numerous rusty pieces of
metal sticking out at various spots. But to Binny, this 1946
Chevrolet was a treasure – a secret hideout.
    The path Binny used to get here had
petered out to the point where it was probably only her footsteps
that kept it from completely disappearing into the forest floor.
And the car itself was not much more visible. The vegetation was
thick here and had enveloped one entire side of the car. A tree had
grown inside it, coming up through the floor and growing through
the window behind where the driver had sat. The forest had claimed
the car just as Binny claimed this part of the forest.
    The car’s front seats were gone, as
was the windshield and all the glass for that matter. The radio,
the steering wheel, the mirrors – all gone. Anything that could be
removed, had been. The back seat remained in place but pretty much
all the fabric had been removed or destroyed by the elements many
years earlier. What remained was really a car-shaped shell with a
rusty roof.
    How the car got here Binny didn’t
know, but she was pretty sure Caleb hadn’t made it too far in this
direction yet or he would have cleaned it up. Maybe not the car
itself, but certainly the pieces of junk Binny had dragged over to
complete her sanctuary. She had laid two wooden boards across the
springs of the back seat, making it a reasonable place to sit. An
old tire made for a good place to rest Binny’s feet or lay her
skateboard on when she had it with her.
    It was at this point that Binny would
usually take a long sweeping look around her to make sure that she
hadn’t been followed. What was the point of having a secret place
if someone else found out where