The Starlight Claim

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The Starlight Claim Page 1

by Tim Wynne-Jones




  1. The Dream

  2. Escape

  3. For the Rest of Your Death

  4. The Numbster

  5. The Lie

  6. The Budd and Beyond

  7. Trespass

  8. Refuge

  9. Dodge’s Return

  10. The Seeker

  11. Night Flight

  12. The Masked Stranger

  13. Prisoner

  14. Bird

  15. The Remington

  16. Bird Revealed

  17. Five-Story High

  18. The Threat

  19. Snow-Blind

  20. Camp

  21. The Names of Stars

  22. No Rest for the Wicked

  23. Wounded

  24. The Ambush

  25. Wait. It. Out.

  26. The Plan

  27. Raising the Stakes

  28. WWDD?

  29. The Weight

  30. The Opposite of Nothing

  31. Delirium

  32. Sanctuary Cove

  33. A Turn for the Worse

  34. The Hard Truth

  35. WWND?

  36. The Passenger

  Afterword

  The dream was waiting for him. Dodge Hoebeek under a thick sheet of crystal-clear ice, his eyes wide open, his fingers scraping at the glassy ceiling above him, his mouth screaming, bubbles pouring out, and his long blond hair trailing behind him in the black water.

  Then somehow the streaming bubbles formed themselves into words. “You gotta come, man! You owe me!” And Nate, kneeling on the ice above his friend, his bare hands flat on the surface — frozen to the surface — tried to speak but couldn’t, as though he were the one who was drowning.

  “You owe me, Nate! It’s your fault!”

  “I’m sorry!” Nate shouted. “I’m so sorry!”

  It was like he was looking into a warped carnival mirror, unable to say anything, unable to do anything except throw his head back and howl.

  He woke up, his heart beating like a two-stroke engine. Had he really howled? He listened to the ticking stillness. No one was coming, so maybe not. Last fall he’d howled, good and loud. He’d woken, time and time again, with his head pressed to his mother’s chest, her arms around him, his father standing just behind her, his hand on her shoulder, strong and calm.

  “I’ve got to find him,” Nate would say. And his mother would shush him. And he’d yell at her. “No! You don’t understand. He needs me. He’s waiting for me up there!” Eventually he would wear himself out. “It’s all my fault,” he’d say. “It’s all my fault.” His voice would grow hoarse and the tears would come and finally he’d lay his head back down on his pillow. His mother would fuss with the covers as if he were a five-year-old, touch her fingers to her lips and place them on his forehead, a benediction. Then she’d leave the room. But his father would stand there in the dark. Stand guard until he fell asleep. Stand there as long as it took.

  It was a daring escape. “Brazen escape,” the TV anchorman called it. Nate watched as two jailbirds attempted to climb a knotted rope hanging from a helicopter.

  “Is this for real?” said Nate. His father nodded, his eyes glued to the television. “So how come if they’re filming it, nobody’s trying to stop them?”

  “CCTV,” said his father.

  Nate leaned against the doorjamb at the entrance to the den. It was late. He was in his pajama bottoms and a ratty Lockerby Vikings T-shirt. The men weren’t getting very far on their climb toward the chopper. They were about as athletic as a couple of filing cabinets.

  “Not exactly James Bond,” said Nate.

  His father chuckled.

  The helicopter began to rise with the two guys hanging on for dear life. Up, up they rose toward the roofline of the jail that surrounded the yard on all four sides. The closed-circuit camera was in a fixed position, and soon enough the dangling criminals were whisked out of view. And then there was a new camera in play, the TV station camera, presumably, outside the jail. But there were no criminals or helicopter in sight, obviously. This was later. The camera was following the path the helicopter might have taken across a city covered in snow.

  “Whoa!” said Nate as the scenery beyond the enclosed compound came into view. “Is that here?”

  His father nodded. “The Sudbury Jail.”

  There were other shots of police roadblocks on various highways out of town, and then the news returned to the talking head with the frozen image of the escape on a screen behind him. Nate’s dad pushed the mute button.

  “I don’t blame them one bit,” he said.

  “The convicts?”

  “Uh-huh. That place is disgusting. Overcrowded, understaffed. And the mice? The place is completely infested.”

  Nate stared at his father. “Dad, is there something you want to tell me?”

  His father held up his hands. “Busted,” he said. “Yeah, I spent some time in the stony lonesome.”

  “Really?”

  The grin gave him away. “Only as a visitor.”

  “Oh,” said Nate, relieved but sort of disappointed. Burl Crow was the most decent, upstanding guy imaginable. It would be kind of cool if he had a shady past. Then again, maybe he did. “Visiting who?”

  His father shook his head slowly, back and forth. He was looking toward the television but he had one of those thousand-yard stares on his face, the kind of blank, unfocused gaze of someone looking into the past. Then he snapped out of it.

  “What are you doing up?” he said.

  “Uh-uh,” said Nate. “You’re not getting off the hook that easy.”

  His father raised his eyebrows, trying to look parentally threatening but missing by a mile. Then he patted the couch next to him. Nate slouched into the room and sat down.

  “My dad,” said Burl. “Your grandfather.”

  “Oh, right.” Nate had never met his grandfather, but he knew a bit about him. The burn on his father’s right arm: that was thanks to Calvin Crow.

  “What was he in for?”

  His father laughed. “You name it. Arson for one thing, drunk and disorderly, aggravated assault, petty larceny — not-so-petty larceny.”

  “What’s larceny?”

  “Taking what isn’t yours. That’s my old man to a T.” He put his hands together thoughtfully. “He was a thug, Nathaniel. Bad news.”

  “Did he die?”

  “Haven’t heard.”

  Nate frowned. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  His father shrugged. “Five or six years ago, I guess. He was in for carjacking that time. He wanted me to bail him out and I had to draw the line. Not anymore. We’re done.”

  He turned to Nate and tapped him on the knee. “What’s up, son? I thought you went to bed an hour ago.”

  Nate let his head flop back onto the top of the couch. Closed his eyes.

  “You want to tell me about it?” said his father.

  “Not really,” said Nate. It was old news. A jail he couldn’t quite escape. “The dream,” he said at last, trying to make it sound like no big deal.

  “Again?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I thought it had stopped.”

  Nate shook his head. His father waited. His father had an amazing capacity for waiting. He could wait out a rock. If you asked him about it, he’d say he learned it fishing.

  “You think it’s ’cause you’re going up there?”

  Nate sat up straight, yawned, pushed the hair out of his eyes. Felt a little dizzy for a moment. “I guess. Probably.”

  “You can always change your mind,” said his father.

  Nate shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. He pursed his lips tight. Nothing would change his mind about going up to the lake. It had
been in the cards for too long. Nate and Paul and Dodge. Except, no Dodge. Not now.

  “You still planning on heading up Thursday?” Nate nodded. “Then you’d better get some shut-eye, kiddo. It’s going to be hard slogging.” Nate nodded again. “There’ll probably be two or three feet of snow on the trail.”

  “I know, Dad. It’s cool.”

  “More like minus twenty.”

  Nate scowled at his father. “Are you seriously trying to talk me out of this?”

  His father held his gaze for a moment. “Do you think I’d stand a chance?”

  Nate could see the hint of a smile. Shook his head. Then his father ruffled his hair. “Git,” he said.

  Nate pushed his father’s hand away but then held on to it a moment. His father’s hands were strong, brown even in the dead of winter. He could see the burn on his forearm, poking out under the rolled-up cuff of his shirt. A place where no hair grew, grizzled. Fried.

  “How’d he take it?” asked Nate.

  There was a pause while his dad figured out what Nate was talking about. “My old man?” Nate nodded. His father looked thoughtful. “Calvin Crow is used to taking only what he wants. He doesn’t like being crossed, and he sure let me know it. All I could do was let him rant and shout and punch a hole in the wall — or try to. Then he clammed up. I left without a goodbye from him. And that was that.”

  Nate thought about it, tried to imagine turning down your father’s plea for help. Couldn’t. “What’d you call it? The ‘stony lonesome’?”

  His father smiled. “Git,” he said again.

  The front door opened and closed: Mom, home from her night class.

  Nate looked at the watch on his father’s arm. “She’s late,” he said, climbing to his feet, yawning, stretching.

  “Probably out on a pub crawl with her twenty-something classmates.”

  They both laughed at that. They were still laughing when Astrid appeared at the den doorway. “What are you two up to?” she said.

  “We were talking about your drinking problem,” said Nate. He hugged his mother and got as good as he gave.

  “Right about now my drinking problem might stretch to a cup of herbal tea. Anybody else?”

  So the three of them made their way to the kitchen. It was March break — spring break for folks in warmer climes. Sudbury was still serving out its sentence for being north of the forty-sixth parallel. The days were longer, but winter was hanging on tight. Burl put the kettle on the stove, Nate got out the cups, and Astrid set out a plate of jam-filled thumbprint cookies on the table while she talked about all the fun stuff she’d learned in Vibrations and Dynamic Systems. His parents had both been high-school teachers; Burl still was, but Astrid quit and was in her last year of studying mechanical engineering.

  Astrid Ekholm was as blond as Nate’s father was dark. And Nate was a little bit of all they were: almond-shaped eyes like his father’s but glacial blue like his mom’s; his father’s straight hair but some in-between color. “Hey, Doc Savage,” Dodge had called him not long after they met. Nate had shrugged it off. “At least I’m not named after a car,” he’d said. And Dodge had said, “A truck. I’m named after a truck.” And that was that.

  “How was the party?” said his mother, pouring him a cup of Sleepytime.

  Nate snapped out of his thoughts. “I didn’t go.”

  His mother stopped pouring. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

  He shrugged, dolloped honey into the steaming cup. “No, I just . . . I had a bad feeling it was going to get dicey.”

  His mother turned to his father, who held up his hands in wonder. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” said Astrid. “It’s March break and my newly sixteen-year-old son decides not to go to a party because it might get ‘dicey’ — was that what you said?”

  Nate sighed, showily, to make his exasperation clear. “Jason’s parents are out of town. The party was all over the school — it’d gone viral. There were going to be like a million people there — guys crashing from all over and . . .” He twirled his finger in the air and made a sound like a police siren. “Who needs it?”

  His mother nodded slowly. “Did either of us tell you lately you’re an amazing son?”

  Nate appeared to give it some serious thought. Then he nodded. “Yeah. All the time.”

  “It’s a crazy idea, Art. . . . No, seriously. I can’t object more strenuously.”

  Burl is on the phone. Early last November. Nate seldom hears his father raise his voice, although if anybody could wear his patience thin, Art Hoebeek was the one to do it.

  Nate waits, watches his father rub his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. He and Art back-and-forth a bit and finally the call ends. “What was that about?” says Nate.

  Burl takes a deep breath. “Art’s got another harebrained scheme,” he says. “He’s found this secondhand propane refrigerator in ‘mint condition’ and he wants to bring it up to the camp. Now. Says he’s going to spring Dodge and Trick from school to help out.”

  For a fraction of a moment Nate is elated. The Hoebeeks live in Indiana; he gets to see Dodge all summer but seldom after Canadian Thanksgiving. But the consternation on his father’s face brings him up short.

  “So what’s harebrained about it, exactly?” he asks. His father gives him the look that means work it out. “Okay,” says Nate. “So if they bring it up on the Budd car, they’d have to truck it in from the track on the Mule.” His father raises an eyebrow. Nate thinks. “Is the Mule’s cargo bay big enough to handle a fridge?” His father nods. “But it’s a propane fridge, right? So basically, you try to cart it in on the trail, it’s going to be scrap metal.”

  His father holds up a hand. “The fridge is sturdy enough. The big problem is the risk of shaking loose scale in the cooling tubes —”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Nate, seeing a TED Talk coming on. “Bottom line, the trail is murder if you could even use it now. I mean, if there’s snow up there . . .” Another nod. Keep going. Nate clenches his teeth and resists growling. His friends’ fathers tend to have all the answers right on the tips of their tongues. Nate knows that his own father has the answers, all right, but he keeps his tongue inside his head. Work it out, Nate. “Okay, so . . . Oh!” He slaps himself on the forehead. “He’s not going to come in from Mile Thirty-Nine; he’s planning to get off at Southend and bring it up the lake?”

  “Got it,” said Burl.

  “Won’t it be frozen by now?”

  His father shrugs. “It’s been a warm fall. I doubt it. But the water will be pretty darn close to freezing, in any case.”

  Nate thinks about it. He’d been up to the lake at least once in every month of the year. You didn’t go in the water after September if you could avoid it, and you got out quick if you did. “So why doesn’t he just wait for it to freeze solid and then we could drag it in with the snowmobile?”

  “Bingo,” says Burl. “That’s what I tried to tell him. But he’s dying to get up there again before winter sets in, because of having to miss close-up.”

  That was the usual way of things. The two families met at Ghost Lake the second weekend of October and had one last big meal together, then closed the two camps up good and tight: boarded up the windows, shut down the pumps, put away the boats, et cetera. But this year had been different. Mr. H. was a big-deal pharmaceutical salesman, and a medical conference had come up, something he couldn’t miss. The Crows had offered to close up the Hoebeek camp for them, but Art had declined the offer because he was going to get there “by hook or by crook.” That’s what he’d said. Which, at the time, had not seemed such a big deal. If they were just going to come up on the Budd car to Mile 39, where the trail led into the north end of the lake, it would be fine. It might be wet, it might be cold; there might even be snow but not too much, not this November. In fact, the idea had sounded great to Nate back then. He’d planned to go along.

  But the fridge changed all that.

  So the plan, it turn
ed out, was to get off the train at Southend, which was more than twenty kilometers down the lake.

  “What’s that in real people’s language?” Art Hoebeek would have said.

  “About twelve and a half miles, Art,” Burl would have answered him, knowing full well that Art knew the distance to the end of the lake. “You’re going to have to take it real slow and stay as close to the shore as you can, just in case. With a weight like that and the three of you on board . . . it could be dark before you make it in. I don’t like it one bit.”

  But Mr. H. was determined. And Burl had backed down.

  “He’s a grown man,” Burl had said to Nate. “What are you going to do?”

  A grown man but an idiot as far as Nate was concerned.

  Later, when the whole story came out, or as much as anybody would ever be able to piece together, they learned Art had asked Likely La Cloche if he and the boys could borrow his sixteen-foot aluminum utility boat. Likely was an old-timer, a Ghost Lake icon. Nate didn’t know his real name. Burl told him that he was called Likely because if you thought you’d discovered something new about the lake, it was likely that old Monsieur La Cloche already knew about it. He lived at Sanctuary Cove down near Southend most of the fall. There was a whole busy little community of folks at Sanctuary, thirty or forty camps’ worth, that Nate hardly ever saw, except the odd boatload of anglers who came up the lake to troll for trout between the islands. Likely had said, sure, Art could borrow the boat. What Art had failed to tell him was that he was bringing a fridge.

  “Why would Likely let them do that?” Burl had said when he first heard about the accident. Turned out Likely reneged on his offer when he saw the fridge. Said they could store it with him in his shed and take it in next summer. “So what happened?”

  Burl’s forehead had crinkled up and he’d looked away.

  “Dad?”

  “I guess Art must have turned on his salesman’s charm.” Nate had nodded. “You know what he’s like. The weather’s calm, the lake placid, the sun bright in a cloudless sky. A beautiful late fall day. What could happen?”

  They had found the boat overturned in Dead Horse Bay.

  They had found Art Hoebeek and Trick, Dodge’s twelve-year-old brother, floating in their PFDs just the way they ought to be, face up, arms out. No chance of drowning in a personal flotation device. They hadn’t drowned; they were dead from hypothermia.

 

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