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Woods
    W hen they followed the path around to the back of the building, they found nothing there except creaking pines and old oaks. The late sun revealed a forest floor buried in deep drifts of brown leaves and tangled bushes, rolling away under endless trees.
    Travis felt foolish. He’d half-expected to spot the black triangle on the horizon, and when he met Lexie’s eyes he could tell she’d expected the same thing. Without saying a word, they turned to the forest and fell in together.
    The roar of traffic faded and died out as they left the city behind. Travis listened for any sign the strange woman might be following them, the snap of a twig, the sound of heavy footfalls, but the quiet only deepened, except for Burke, who trudged behind them, complaining. The consultant’s suit and tie, so impressive in Union Station, made him look out of place in the woods, as if he’d stumbled off the sidewalk and gotten lost.
    “You’re out of your minds,” Burke fumed to the back of their jackets. “It gets dark in a few hours and I have fifteen thousand things to do. How long are you planning to go on with this nonsense?”
    They kept climbing and didn’t answer him.
    A minute later he said, “You know, this is also stupid and dangerous. I can’t make a phone call in the park.”
    “I just want to see what’s over this hill,” Travis said over his shoulder.
    “And that’s the second time you’ve said that,” Burke told him.
    The creek had shown up in the photos, so they followed the path that ran along it. The sullen ribbon of water they’d first stepped over grew into a broad, meandering stream. Dying goldenrod and brown grass bent over the widening banks, and leaves swirled on the restless surface. The current quickened. Soon the water splashed and gurgled as it rushed over the stony creek bed, heading deeper into the woods.
    Burke fell out of earshot. Travis turned to Lexie, stared at her long hair unraveling from her braid, and caught her looking back at him.
    “Why a career in history?” he asked.
    She looked thoughtful. “Because I’m interested in the past and why we keep making the same mistakes. Why literature?”
    “Because I’m a lazy bastard and I like to lie around and read books.”
    She broke into a smile.
    “What do you think about the photos?” he asked. “You think they’re real?”
    Her face grew serious again. “I don’t know what to think, to be honest with you. My father saw a UFO once. He didn’t come out and call it a UFO , but that’s what it was.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    She turned her collar up against the cold. “He told us he saw it when he was in the army, stationed in Germany. They were on maneuvers in the woods about ten o’clock at night. He said they were in sleeping bags in a clearing, talking and looking up at every star ever made, when one of the stars moved.”
    “One of the stars moved.”
    She nodded. “That’s what he said. He said it was way up there, really high up. It moved, and it stopped, and it went off at a right angle—in other words, like a big L. And then it stopped and started again until it disappeared among all the other stars.”
    “That’s incredible,” he said.
    “The soldier next to him saw it, too. My father asked him, ‘Did you see that?’ and the other soldier said, ‘I’m looking at it right now,’ when it moved again. My father said that what amazed him was that it didn’t go in a straight line. It wasn’t anything spectacular. It just crept along and shot off in another direction.”
    “It might have been a satellite,” Travis said.
    She shook her head. “Satellites don’t stop and go off at right angles.”
    “What about the giant and what happened back there?”
    “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I guess she could be from a carnival, but I don’t know. Look, a deer!”
    A doe on the other side of the gorge lifted her head at the sound of their voices and bounded up the far hill, white tail flashing.