John Mellon liked the caboose on this one. The new nurse bent in front of the plastic and aluminum bed that sat near the north window of his bedroom, the modern hospital piece out of place with the carved mahogany woodwork of the family home. The Mellon House, a three-story Victorian built by lumberman John Mellon II in 1893, seemed to have grown amongst the thick elm, dogwood, and hickory trees that separated the estate from the nearby town. Trees. In this world of steel girders, space stations and iPhones, people still needed wood. John smiled. Not because his great-grandfather conquered this patch of forest, creating a lumber empire that was slowly dying with him, but because Debbie, or Deidra, or whatever the hell her name was, had dropped a bottle of butt ointment, and her rump was about three feet from his gray-stubbled face. 

The grin faded. John knew she didn’t bend over right there to give him a peek. She’d never do that. He was just another piece of furniture, one she gave a sponge bath every couple of days. He wasn’t a man any more. She might as well dust me.

Deidra, no, no, Dawn. Her name was Dawn Harris. Dawn stood slowly. For her tight, lithe body every movement was smooth, effortless. That’s because she’s not 75, you old fart, John thought, turning his eyes to the ceiling. For some reason he didn’t want this one to see him staring at her like he still remembered what a woman looked like.

Dawn sat the tube of ointment on John’s bedside table, and picked up his lunch tray, the ham and cheese sandwich half-eaten, the applesauce untouched. “Are you sure you’re finished with this?” she asked. 

John waved her off with a skeletal hand; liver spots decorated the saggy skin in sad brown splotches. “I’m through.” His voice came out in a croak. Damn you for being old, Johnny boy. You sound like a frog. He motioned her closer. “Help me up. I’m going for a walk.”

Dawn stood tall, fists on her hips. “Now Mr. Mellon,” she said like he was a boy, a little boy, “the last time you went for a walk you were gone a whole hour, and scared the staff half to death.”

A flush grew over John’s face, and his jaw tensed.

“Listen,” he started, then stopped. This is my house, and this is my life you blond trollop had worked its way toward his shaking lips, but he stopped the words. John thought of the other one, the Nurse Lady from Alcatraz. Caroline, was it? She had a body of a dancer, but the temperament of a war criminal. Some people could make your life hell, even if you did pay their salary. He didn’t want to get on this one’s bad side.

He took a deep breath. In twenty minutes this would be all over, at least as long as he could stand it. Twenty minutes. In twenty minutes John knew he could make his way through the thick trees to his place in the woods. The Circle. That ridiculous aluminum walker be damned. 

A yellow smile grew across his gaunt face. “I know,” John said. “I just lost track of time.” She’s prettier than the Nurse Lady from Alcatraz, he thought. Nicer, too. Maybe she’s the one. He held up his right wrist, a loose fitting watch slid down to almost mid forearm. “That’s not going to happen again. Now help me up.” He paused, his smile drifted into a grin. “Please.”

Dawn nodded with a look of what? Compassion? Sorrow? Understanding? Pity? That will change soon.

“Okay, Mr. Mellon,” she said, unconsciously biting her lower lip. “Just be back before my shift’s over. I have a date tonight. I don’t want to be late.” Dawn pulled back the crisp white sheets on the hospital bed, and lifted him upright. He swung his legs over the side, and she helped him stand. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to handle this?”

John nodded as he took hold of his walker. I’m not goddamned helpless. “I’m fine, Dawn,” he said. “Now scoot. I have a date, too. The trees are calling.”

***

The elevator Grandma Tully insisted be installed in the 1940s slid to a smooth halt on the ground floor, the doors of the metal cage swung open soundlessly. The Mellons had taken good care of this house, the first private residence in Ray County with running water. John groaned as he pushed off with the walker, the aluminum monstrosity that kept him upright. His muscles would loosen up about halfway to the Circle. They always felt better after a little work. But getting there was the hard part; getting back home was like dancing, and sometimes he did. 

Footsteps, Italian loafers against tile, padded toward John as he stood at the window, looking out onto the back garden. Donnelly. “What is it, Karl?” John hissed to the man behind him.

Karl Donnelly, a short, squat man with nervous eyes stopped short of John, a leather notebook unfolded in his hands. “Just a few signatures, sir,” he said, his voice belaying much more confidence than his eyes, which shifted back and forth like a cheap doll’s. “Purchase orders on equipment, and a thank you letter for Mrs. Peterson.”

Peterson? “Peterson? Thank you for what?”

Donnelly coughed slightly, and held the notebook open before John, a Montblanc rested atop the first form. Donnelly liked nice things. “Twenty years with the company.”

John grunted, and scribbled his name on three papers, the signature lines indicated with bright yellow Post-its. “She’s loyal,” he said, laying the pen back on the notebook, and turning away from the accountant. “Give her a bonus. A raise, or more vacation, or that damn pen of yours.” 

The leather book closed with a snap, and Donnelly nodded. “I’ll get her something.” He turned in a tight movement, and walked toward the door, passing Dawn in the doorway. “If you have anything in that medical bag for being a grumpy old fart, you should probably use it on him,” Donnelly said to her, too low for John to hear. But John heard it. He heard more than people knew.

***

An old stone fountain with cherubs spat cold, clear water as John shuffled down the worn cobble path to the tree line, a springtime breeze tossed his thin, white hair about his head like spider webs. 

“Five o’clock, Mr. Mellon,” Dawn called from the glass double doors that emptied onto the stone veranda, an addition to the house in the 1960s. “Promise me?”

John raised an arm into the air, fighting off an urge to flip her the bird. I’m not an infant. I can do what I damn please.He turned and watched her slip back into the house, his house, her sashaying caboose the last part that disappeared. He didn’t want to run off this one. They don’t make them like that much anymore. John pointed himself back toward the trees, and lifted the walker. He still had a ways to go.

The trees quickly swallowed him. Birds flapped in the canopy, and something small on four legs skittered in the underbrush. John smiled. An unseen world lay all around, and most people never knew it. They could all go to hell. 

The cobble path gave way to hard dirt at the tree line; John always liked that. Nature. Nature was the thing people had lost. They spent their time in their cars, their air-conditioned houses, the Internet, everywhere but in the place the human race was born. Pathetic. The slit tennis balls on the front legs of the walker made no sound as he shuffled down the path. He was soundless, nearly invisible. A ghost. John frowned. He was never a ghost. A young man with flowing blond hair, and lean, sleek muscles bulging from his arms, and his chest. Everyone knew John Mellon, everyone wanted to be John Mellon. The girls just wanted John Mellon. A smile cracked the corner of his mouth. Girls, yes, girls. Lots and lots of girls. But never a Mrs. Mellon. He was always too busy, too interested in the next conquest at the next dinner party in New York, or Miami, or that one damn place in Texas where his father had insisted on buying a house, or even the cheap little bar down in town Mother always hated him going to. Now it might be too late.

John rounded a bend in the path, an enormous gnarled oak stood like a sentry before the final stretch of his journey. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead, but he didn’t notice. The Circle lay just outside the shade of the great oak, a wide moss-lined stone pocket in the forest floor, the only object to break the flat symmetry of the dimple was a log John had once dragged out there so he could relax, and feel the magic just a little bit longer.

The walker rattled as it fell over on the path, and John stepped inside the Circle. He was home.

***

Dawn stood at the glass doors, her arms folded under her breasts, as she waited for John to reappear. A tapping brought her around to see Donnelly walk into the room, a smartphone pressed against his ear. “Yes, I’ll hold,” he said, noticing Dawn. He nodded once, clicked the disengage button, and slipped the phone into his breast pocket. “I lied. I hate to be put on hold.” He stood next to Dawn and looked out the door. “John on another one of his walks?”

She nodded. “Has he always gone off by himself like this?”

Donnelly glanced at her, his head slightly cocked. “Yes. Are you worried about him?”

Dawn nodded. “Of course,” she said, then paused, and stared out at the trees. “He’s fragile.”

A short laugh sprang from Donnelly. “Well, don’t tell him that. You might bruise his ego. And don’t let that little, thin man fool you, his ego is enormous.”

“I know. My mother told me about him. She …” Dawn stopped, and looked at Donnelly, her pretty face taught. “She used to know John. I mean, Mr. Mellon.”

The telephone in Donnelly’s pocket rang, the ring tone Ride of the Valkyries. “See,” he said. “This was much nicer than being put on hold.” Donnelly pulled out his phone, and walked away. 

***

Dawn stood outside on the veranda when John moved toward the house from beneath the shelter of trees. The aluminum walker over his shoulder quickly dropped back to the ground, John leaned his shrinking weight on it as he walked onto the cobblestones toward the cherub fountain.

“You’re late, Mr. Mellon,” Dawn called across the lawn, her tone lightly scolding, like a babysitter’s. He grimaced. Babysitter my ass. He laughed, a laugh that would have been a cackle this morning, or worse, a wheeze. But his lungs were still clear, strong. That would wear off soon enough.

She waited while John slowly clinked up the stone walk. He could have made it in a few quick strides, maybe a short jog, but he couldn’t let her know that. Not yet. John tried to look like he struggled with the walk to the house, all the while wondering what Dawn looked like naked.

She gently wrapped her fingers over his bicep to help him into the house, the muscle still hard beneath his cotton shirt. A look of surprise wiped across her face. “We were all getting worried, Mr. Mellon,” Dawn said, the babysitter impatience gone from her voice. Replaced with, what? Concern? No, surprise. John nodded slowly to himself. She’d felt what was left of his fading muscle. 

Dawn moved him into the kitchen, and sat him onto a hard wooden chair. Her eyes stared into his clear blue ones, his irises normally washed pastel by age were steely cobalt, the sclera tinged in yellow were now white. Her face slowly pinched, not quite knowing what she saw. “You spend so much time out there,” Dawn said, moving her eyes off his, and down at his hands, the normally pronounced veins hidden. “A lot of things can happen.” She exhaled, the frown replaced by a smile. A fake smile. “Next time you go out, I want to go with you,” Dawn said. “I just need to make sure you’re all right. Besides.” She paused and glanced out the enormous windows that overlooked the forest. “I like a good walk in the woods.”

She gave John skim milk and sugar-free cookies before she took him upstairs, and helped him into his hospital bed. John knew he could get on the bed himself. He could probably pounce into it, but not in front of her. Not yet.

“Good night, Mr. Mellon,” she’d said, and disappeared around the corner of the dark, heavy bedroom door.

John waited until he heard a car door shut, and the quiet sound of Dawn’s Hyundai drive down the long lane toward the rural highway. The walls of the Mellon estate were thick. In December, with the windows shut tight, he wouldn’t have heard a shotgun blast outside the house. But with the windows open, he could hear everything, the night birds starting to take flight, the far-off yip of coyotes, and the trees. Above all, John heard the forest. He yawned laying back into the pillow as the forest sang to him. 

***

A gaunt, gray face that couldn’t be his stared at John from the bathroom mirror. The golden morning sun just rising over the forest trickled into his suite. John tapped the safety razor on the side of the washbasin, and pulled it across his soap-covered right cheek, thick white stubble disappeared under the stainless steel blade. “You’re not me,” John told his reflection, going through the razor-cleaning ritual again. “I’m still a young man. I have time. I have lots of time.” The blade mowed another swath across John’s cheek. He winced. A drop of blood fell into the washbasin, the red quickly washed pink before being replaced by another, and another. 

“Goddamn it.” John grabbed a crisply folded towel from the wrought iron table beside the basin, and dabbed the blood on his face. He didn’t mind a little blood; it was that damn Coumadin he took that was the problem. The blood thinner wouldn’t let him stop bleeding for a while, and he had to make an impression today. A good impression. If only–

“You’re up early.” The words stopped his thoughts cold. John turned as Dawn walked into his bedroom as smoothly as a ballerina. He envied that kind of movement. When he was younger, he danced. He danced with girls, girls who looked a lot like Dawn. Girls he should have spent more time with.

“Yes,” he said, wiping the soap from his face, blood seeped from the nick. 

“Oh, you’re bleeding.” She sat a cloth bag that held the morning’s pills, and inoculations onto the bed, and rushed into the bathroom, pulling a cloth bandage from the front pocket of her scrubs. She brushed John’s protesting hand aside, and stuck the bandage over the small wound. “There,” she said, standing a bit too close as she smoothed it over John’s leathery skin. A waft of baby powder drifted across his nostrils. Probably her deodorant, he thought, and closed his eyes, savoring the smell.

“You know you’re not supposed to shave with this thing, Mr. Mellon. It…”

“John,” he interrupted.

Dawn took a step away. “I can’t call you John,” she said. “That’s something your executor insisted on when he hired me. ‘You’re to call him, Mr. Mellon’.”

John knew that. Donnelly expected him to die any day now. He treated the staff like John was a goldfish. Don’t get too attached, we might have to flush it soon.

“Sure,” John said, wincing as he turned. The walk yesterday left him stiff. “Please commence with your medical voodoo. I’m taking my walk after breakfast.” 

***

“I’ve seen this before.” Dawn stood at the dresser near John’s bed, putting her equipment back into the bag. She picked up a picture in a brass frame, and studied it. A man of about 30 leaned against a scarlet 1971 Bugatti Type 105, a plain white T-shirt stretched across his muscular chest, a mane of blond hair draped over his shoulders. That shot had appeared in the local newspaper at the time, ‘Young Mellon Tours Europe.’ “Is this you?”

“Yes,” John said, finishing his orange juice. “Vacationing in Italy. I was quite the looker back then. I had hair.” 

She placed the frame back on the dresser top. “Yes,” she said, her voice played with a laugh. “Lots of it.” Dawn turned toward John, the bag gripped tightly in her hand. Any expression of humor that had toyed with her voice was gone, emotion wiped from her face. “I’m going to ask you a question, Mr. Mellon.”

John sat on the hospital bed buttoning a white cotton shirt, his thick, gnarled fingers crisscrossed with blue veins worked slowly. “And what is that?”

She sat next to him on the bed, so close he could feel the warmth from her body. “What do you do on your walks?” she asked. 

He shrugged. “You just answered your own question. I walk.”

Dawn reached out slowly. Her hand slid over John’s right bicep, fingers wrapping around his stick-like arm. John’s eyes shot toward hers, and met Dawn’s gaze; her eyes burned like ice. “I’ve watched you come home from your walk every day,” she said, her voice low, and tight. “You’re happy, almost giddy. There’s a spring in your step. That’s not the man you usually pretend to be. And yesterday.” She paused, and slowly sucked in a breath. “Yesterday I grabbed this arm, and it was hard, Mr. Mellon. I felt muscle that I couldn’t fit my fingers around.” She gently squeezed. “I can now.”

The Nurse Lady from Alcatraz never noticed anything different about me when I came home, he thought. The crazy nurse with the cat before her didn’t either. Nobody cared what I did at first – except this one. 

“Something happens to you out in the woods,” she said, her voice soft. “What is it?”

John smiled. “How was the date?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

Dawn stood and helped John with the last two buttons. “Not as good as I’d hoped. For some reason I was an hour late to the restaurant. He didn’t wait for me.” She grinned at him. “I met him on a dating website. I’m not too bummed.”

“A dating website?” John sat still and let her hands fasten the buttons of his shirt. “A beautiful girl like you resorting to the Internet for dating? Men today aren’t what they used to be.”

“You got that right,” she said, and patted John’s hand. “We’re going on a walk. Let’s get those shoes on.”

***

John knew Dawn was 50 years younger than him, and that meant he was nothing to her but a doddering old man she kept alive with blood pressure checks, pills, and the occasional smile. He was great-grandpa age, a relic from a bygone era, a person she sometimes had to help off the toilet.

“How far do you go, Mr. Mellon?” Dawn asked. They walked past the cherub fountain, its trickling water soothing in the early morning. A slight fog still hugged the ground, and weaved through the trees. She held onto his arm like he might run away, or fall over, as he slowly lifted and dropped the aluminum cage that helped him walk.

“Oh, about a half-mile,” he said. John swallowed, trying to kill the tickle that grew in his throat. All he needed now was a coughing fit. 

“That’s quite a ways for you,” she said as they stepped under the canopy of elms, and maples. A rabbit, spooked by their passing shot across the hard dirt path. Dawn jumped at the sudden movement. John smiled.

“No, not really,” he said, breathing in the cool morning air as deeply as he dared. “There’s something about the trees that has always given me energy. The forest is alive, you know. It breathes, it sees. It knows we’re here.”

A slight sound escaped from Dawn. Was that a chuckle?

“I’ve always felt at home out here,” he continued. Something moved in the woods off to the right of the trail; a fox, John knew. He couldn’t see it, he couldn’t smell it, but he could feel the fox. “It’s the forest that gave my family all it has, but you knew that. My great-grandfather got rich off cutting trees down, and selling them.” The fox veered away from the path, and shot deeper into the woods after a chipmunk. John wasn’t sure how, but he knew that too. “Grandfather always planted more trees than he cut down. It would be wrong not to.”

The giant bent oak stood in the distance, standing guard over the Circle, John’s Circle.

“But that’s about to come to an end,” John said, a trickle of sweat slowly made its way down his bent back. The trips into the trees were getting harder. John knew he wouldn’t be able to take his walks much longer, but he also knew he had options. “I don’t have any one to leave the company to.” He paused to laugh. This time pain wracked his chest as he bent over the walker; his coughs came in wet, rattily bursts. The palm of Dawn’s hand pressed onto his back as the coughs subsided.

“We should probably go back now, Mr. Mellon,” she started, but he raised a shaky hand to stop her.

“No,” he wheezed, pointing the same hand down the path. “It’s just a little further. Just up around that big oak tree.”

A frown crossed her face. “Okay, but if you cough like that again I’ll have to take you home.” Was that concern in her eyes? Or something else? Something John couldn’t quite make out. “You really shouldn’t come out here alone anymore,” she said. “I don’t think it’s safe for you.”

Go to hell, danced on his tongue, but he stilled the words. He hadn’t wanted this one to come out here, not this far. But now, for some reason, he knew she must. John nodded, and started moving the walker slowly down the trail.

“I wonder about you, Mr. Mellon,” she said, breaking the silence. She paused, and flipped the bangs from her face. “John.” Dawn’s hand gently rested on his arm as they walked. “Sometimes I can see that guy in you. The one standing next to the Bugatti.” Her words came out easily. “What were you like back then?”

The boughs of the great oak groaned from under the force of wind, but the morning air was still. Dawn didn’t seem to hear it. 

They took the next few steps in silence except for the moans of the tree. 

“I wasn’t a nice person,” John said. “I just wanted fun. I didn’t really care much about the future.” A sigh escaped him. “Now that the future’s here, I regret quite a lot.”

He moved the walker under the limbs of the oak, the moans audible to Dawn now. But were they? She didn’t react to them. The limbs swayed above the path like the tree was full of monkeys, but if Dawn saw this, it didn’t show. He looked from Dawn to the tree as it continued to dance, and scream above them. Or did it?

“Like not settling down?” she asked. 

John could see the spot from the shade of the oak. The Circle, the forest’s heart, sat fifteen feet from them. “What do you mean?” he asked, slowing the walker.

“Well, you don’t have a wife,” she said. “You don’t have children. You don’t have anyone to leave it to.”

Except Donnelly, that weasel bastard.

The oak’s limbs above him shook violently, its twisted bark crawled across the trunk as John watched. A hooked limb dropped slowly above them, the twisted branch formed into a claw, the wood fingers flexed with the sway of the wind – the wind that wasn’t there. Thin tentacles reached toward Dawn, pinching at her. She didn’t see it. She didn’t hear it. She didn’t feel it. A whisper brushed across John’s grizzled ear, but he couldn’t understand the words.

Donnelly? Donnelly?

The wooden fingers moved to grip Dawn, but she stepped through the claws as John and the walker kept moving along the trail. The groan of the oak split the morning. The great tree bent toward Dawn, a crack in its side forming into a maw as if to swallow her. She paid no notice as they walked out of reach of the straining tree. It snapped upright as if it never moved. 

“Donnelly.” John’s voice was nothing more than a whisper. Did that just happen? Or am I finally going Old Man Crazy.“Donnelly’s a good accountant,” he said, blankly. “He kept the business’s finances safe while I pissed away whatever I got my hands on. He’ll take good care of things.”

“But,” she said, resting a soft hand on his shoulder. “You don’t like him much.”

John stopped just outside the shadow of the oak not knowing if the tree had moved, or if he’d imagined it. “I don’t like most people,” he wheezed.

“Do you like me?” Dawn asked.

A ring of moss-covered stones about thirty-feet across lay on the opposite side of the oak. John stopped at the edge of the ring, the tennis balls on the legs of the walker bumped against the stones. He pulled up, but the weight of the hollow aluminum tubes felt like they were made of lead. He couldn’t lift it over the ring. Is any of this real?

“We’re here,” he said, his voice gravelly. John hocked deep, and spat, keeping the phlegm outside the Circle. “Are you ready for this?”

“It might help if I knew what this was.”

He pushed the walker over, the metallic clank deadened in the thick forest. “You wouldn’t believe me,” John said, and stepped inside the mossy stone circle.

The Change was small at first, as always, a slight pins and needles tingle like he’d sat in one position too long. Nothing anyone would notice if they stopped inside the circle to catch their breath, or take a drink from a water bottle, or just admire the big oak for a few minutes. “What’s going on, Mr. Mellon?” Dawn asked from outside the Circle. “You didn’t bring me out here just to tease me, did you?”

He held up a hand to silence her; Dawn’s normally smooth, welcomed voice grating in the stillness of the forest. Shut up, you silly cow. You want to ruin everything?

Next came the wave of dizziness. John remembered his first time in the Circle ten, or was it twenty, years ago? Malaria, was it? I thought I’d contracted malaria. In Missouri, no less.

He reeled like he’d been punched. Pain lanced through him. Tendrils of agony pushed their way through every muscle of his body, throwing him to the forest floor. He dropped onto his hands and knees, pinching his eyes and mouth shut to keep in the pain. Slowly John raised his right hand, palm up to where he knew Dawn stood, mouth probably agape, as she watched him writhe in agony. Oh, she’d snap out of her surprise soon enough, realizing something was wrong, and come to help. But nothing’s wrong. 

As suddenly as it started, the pain left; washed away like his blood droplets dissipating in the basin of water.

“Mr. Mellon?” she asked. “John, are you all right?”

John. Donnelly had asked her not to call him that, and now when she did, he didn’t like it. Not at all. “I’m fine,” he spat. His voice was different, he knew. He could feel it. Deeper. Stronger. He lowered his hand to the ground, placing it next to the other. Smooth skin was pulled tight over thick, strong hands. Not like those useless, twisted, sticks he had to fight with just to button a shirt. He lifted his head, and looked at Dawn through a mop of blond hair. Her pretty eyes nearly bulged from their sockets. You’re scared, little mouse. You should be. John sprang to his feet with as much effort as if he’d stood from a chair.

“You’re,” Dawn whispered. “You’re–”

“Young,” he finished for her. “I’m young, Dawn. You wondered why I took a walk in the woods each day.” His fingers nimbly pulled the buttons of his shirt from their holes, and let the cotton oxford drop to the ground. He flexed his arms, and his chest, then stretched. God, that feels good. “I take walks in the woods for my health, Miss Harris. Can’t you tell?”

Dawn’s feet edged closer to the Circle, but stopped at the ring. “How is this possible?” she asked. Her words fell from her mouth like they were forgotten. “It’s not possible. It’s just not.” 

She gasped as John fell to the ground, but he didn’t fall. As fast as what she saw processed in her head, John pumped out twenty push-ups, and sprang back to his feet breathing evenly as if he’d done nothing.

“When I’m here I feel like running, lifting things. I want to use this body,” he said, stretching an arm out before him, and flexing as he slowly brought it back. He stopped, and rested his hands on his hips. His eyes met Dawn’s. “Now what were you saying?”

“What?”

He stepped close to her, waving a hand in front of his face. “About having no one to leave my fortune to.” He stopped, and studied her. Blond trollop. “What exactly were you getting at?”

Dawn bent low, closer to the ring of stones, but she wasn’t studying them. Her knees had given way. “What happens when you leave this place?”

He scoffed. “You know what happens. You’ve seen it. I return to reality.” He paused, and grabbed her shoulders, pulling her up toward him. He studied her face. It was a pretty face, not an unkind face, but one that hid something. “I’m an old man, Dawn.”

“But you could stay here. You could stay right here and never be old. Never.”

John released her, and began to pace. He couldn’t hold the energy inside. “I’ve thought of that. I’ve thought of having a house built right here, but that wouldn’t work. I would be young again, yes, but I could never leave. That’s no life for a man.”

“So–”

He stopped, inches from her, their faces close enough he smelled the morning coffee on her breath. “So I’ll ask again. What were you getting at?”

She dropped her eyes from his. “I was just saying it would be a shame for the family business to go to someone who–”

“Isn’t family,” he finished for her. “I’ve considered that. Believe me, I’ve considered it.” A laugh suddenly burst from his mouth, forcing Dawn to step back. “I just haven’t found the right girl yet.” 

He held out his hand toward Dawn. She stared at it. “You were going to tell me you were that girl, isn’t that right, Miss Harris?” He moved his fingers, beckoning her toward him. 

Fear. She’s terrified. Now that’s what I’ve been looking for. A sudden rush of doubt flushed across Dawn’s face. “This is wrong,” she said, her voice barely audible. “This is just wrong.”

A smirk formed on John’s face. “Why? Because I won’t die fast enough for your taste?” His arm shot out, and he grabbed her in a steel fist.

Panic gripped her. “What are you doing?”

“Making your dreams come true.” As John pulled her toward him a sound drifted through the forest. A breeze? It sounded to John like a laugh. Dawn hesitated, trying to pull back, but John’s thick, strong hand wouldn’t budge.

“Let me go,” she whispered. Dawn’s body quivered. The pins and needles had already gone, John knew. The dizziness. Yes, it must be the dizziness. She suddenly pulled back from him screaming. Oh, yes, the pain. The glorious, glorious pain.Her free fist pounded on John’s shoulder. Violently at first, then weaker, and weaker. When the flailing of a child whipped his chest, he held a six-year-old Dawn at arm’s length, the little blond girl terrified, and confused.

“Do you even know what you’ve done?” he asked. John shifted his grip, and Dawn’s nurse’s scrubs fell from the body of the child as it became an infant that continued to shrink in his hands. He turned his gaze toward the oak as the weight of the Dawn-baby quickly vanished between his fingers like water. 

“You were a bad girl, Dawn Harris,” he said, bending to pick her clothing from the forest floor. He walked to the east side of the Circle, and dropped them into a gulley. The pastel purple shirt and pants drifted to the bottom, past the Nurse Lady from Alcatraz’s once-white skirt that had caught on a tree branch. The scrubs came to rest over the medical bag the crazy nurse with the cat insisted on taking everywhere. “This may have worked if you’d been honest with me. That’s all I want, for someone to be honest with me.”

John picked up his shirt, and slipped it effortlessly on. His times in the Circle were never this short. Never. But he needed to make a call when he got home. An important call. He had another car for the Boyt boy to take care of.

***

“Where’s Dawn, John?” 

Karl Donnelly stood at John’s hospital bed holding his leather notebook, the Montblanc in his hand. Forms for my funeral, no doubt.

John shrugged, and slid slowly off the bed, holding onto the rail. “She left yesterday before lunch. Something about a man she met on the Internet.” He scribbled his signature across the marked line, and handed the pen back to Donnelly. “She’s probably butchered, and buried in a fifty-five gallon drum by now.”

Donnelly snapped his notebook shut. “That’s sick. Sick. Dawn was a good hire. Heaven knows what you did to drive her off. It had to be something terrible. She had a lot in common with you.”

In common? “What are you talking about?”

The pen slipped into Donnelly’s shirt pocket in a motion the man had done hundreds of times. “She knew everything about you. You should have seen how excited she was when I offered her the job.” He chuckled. “She had this newspaper clipping of you standing next to some damn Italian sports car back in the ’70s. She pulled it out of her purse to show it to me. I should have known something was wrong with the girl.”

John looked up at Donnelly, and frowned. “She just wanted my money, Donnelly. Are you too stupid to see that?”

Donnelly laughed. The man sounded like a goat. “Your money? Her name was Harris. Don’t you recognize the name Harris?”

Harris? Harris? “Harris,” he whispered. “Harris Oil?”

The short accountant nodded. “Yes. Her family could buy and sell you.” He turned to go, then stopped. “You know, it’s funny. She said something to me yesterday, something about her mother. It got me thinking. Her mother’s not much younger than you are.”

“So?” John spat. 

“So,” Donnelly said. “The more I thought about it, there’s something about Dawn’s eyes, and the set of her jaw that look familiar.”

John balled a fist. He wanted to throw it at Donnelly’s face. “What’s your goddamned point?”

“I think she wanted this job just to get to know you better.” Donnelly crossed his arms, and glared hard at John. “You seriously didn’t notice anything about her? Her hair? The way her lip curls when she smiles? I’m pretty sure she’s your daughter, John. The only child of the legendary John Mellon.”

A wheeze shot from John’s lips, and he collapsed onto the floor.