Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Louis glanced up just as four trucks rounded the gate and pulled into the drive, blocking the cars. The dark, lean young man reached for his gun as Ian whispered, “Please, be nice.” The man tried to look away. Frank heard the gun hit the gravel.

  “What’s going on here, Frank?” shouted Tom Ross, who drove the fifth truck. He got out, lightly swinging a mallet. The Gerrick twins piloted the huge tractor around the garage.

  Louis, suddenly seeming confused, looked around and shook his head as if an insect bothered him. “What did you say?”

  “I said who are you!” It was broad, ruddy Peter Shepson, striding toward Louis like Friar Tuck. “You’ve no place here.” He struck Louis with one broad hand and the older man stumbled. “We got . . . word to come, Frank.”

  Wiley Mitchell, the American writer, joined them with his girlfriend, who carried her shotgun in the crook of her arm. “We called the police in Wherry, Frank,” he said. “They’re on the way. Who are these assholes?”

  The professor dropped the car seat and skipped into the first few steps of a run. The author’s fiancée cocked her gun. “Stop, please,” she said to the back of his head. The professor stopped, and raised both hands slowly. “Just get on your knees,” she said. “Don’t move.”

  “Were you a police officer?” Frank asked.

  She said, “Marine.”

  As the tall dark-skinned man made a charge in the opposite direction, down the driveway, Shipley Gerrick tripped him, and, when the man sprang back to his feet, hit him across the back with the maul he carried, which must have weighed ten pounds. Shipley spun the mallet in his big hands as another man might have spun an umbrella, and struck the man again. They turned to look when a great, shrieking whuff burst from the man, who fell forward into the dirt. He was conscious, but lay still.

  With them diverted, Louis took his chance to run. Frank gasped at the agility with which Louis bounded up to the paddock fence and over, fleet-footing it straight for Glory Bee and the remaining colt. Time slowed as Frank wondered what Glory Bee would do. Glory Bee was a prey animal, and, as such, her feelings toward any of them were slight, touch-based, lukewarm compared with the ardent devotion even of Sally the dog. Now, however, Glory Bee had an imperative—her remaining foal, Gloria in Excelsis. Still holding Ian’s hand, Frank stepped forward as Louis ran straight toward the big mare waving his arms and yelling, “Gaw! Move, you bitch!”

  And she did. Putting herself between Louis and her baby, Glory Bee quivered and twitched, sliding her haunches under her as she cross-stepped, snorting and pawing. Only a fool would be unafraid of the massive black horse, her mouth dripping foam. Louis skipped away, to one side, toward the back gate, but Glory Bee wheeled and faced him there.

  “Gaw!” Louis shouted again, and Glory Bee was up and on him, berserk and bellicose, her shod hooves hammering his shoulders, clipping his skull, and when he was laid out flat, his legs and back.

  Frank glanced down at Ian, his impulse to shield him from the sight. But Ian was watching intently, making no move to stop Glory Bee, his candle-pale small face motionless, his arms folded tight across his chest. Looking up, he turned and put his face against Frank’s rough barn coat.

  Then, rattling down the road from the direction of town came a sixth truck, Harry’s old panel vehicle, and shuddered to a stop at the front wall. Colin burst from it, running wet as an otter into Claudia’s arms. “I told them,” he said. “I ran up the hills and behind the houses to town and I told them all to come and help Frank and Claudia at Stone Pastures Farm.”

  Frank picked Ian up. “You did this, Colin. I couldn’t save you.”

  “You could, Dad. You were fooling,” Ian said. “You knew.”

  Frank thought, Could he? Had he?

  “I ran down the stairs me and Patrick made,” Colin said, “and then up the hill to the Lashes’ house and to Declan’s, then over to the Gerricks’, and Mrs. Gerrick drove me to town to get Harry, but I called them all the way, I called, Help them. Help Frank and Claudia.”

  “You’re very brave,” Claudia said. “You’re brave and wise. I love you.”

  Colin put his arms around Claudia’s waist and began to cry. Frank saw how tall he had grown, at nearly ten his head nearly grazing Claudia’s shoulder. Setting Ian down, he said, “Go get your sweatshirts. For you and Collie. Everything’s okay now.”

  A moment before the humped dark police car appeared, Patrick jumped out of the truck lettered Tenacity. Stopping in the road, not even taking the time to close the door of the truck, he vaulted over the wall. When he saw the dead foal, he laid his boot against the face of the professor, holding him down, apparently gently, in fact increasing the pressure with his heel on the man’s throat until his eyes went wide and blank and the police said, There, that was good enough, they’d take it from here, but, turning away, Patrick seemed to stumble, his heel grinding the young man’s nose. The woman from across the way kept her gun on both of Louis’s men, until the police told her it was good now, to put it away.

  It was a while before any of them except Frank noticed All Saints, who lay emptied in the dust like a man’s old coat, and at last Louis, splayed crooked in the middle of the paddock. Frank didn’t hurry the police along.

  All that day and the next, the police took prints and measured and photographed what shoe marks they could find. After Tom Ross and the Gerricks helped Patrick bury Sally and All Saints, the police went over the paddock carefully before they allowed Frank to clean away the blood. Finally, they sent a tow for the car, in which they would later tell Frank they found a single strand of wool fiber and several of Frank Mercy’s own hairs.

  After the professor’s broken nose was bandaged, police questioned him and the dark-skinned man at the central station. Neither of them spoke, except the professor, to ask for a glass of milk. Neither had a criminal record or any identification, not even a change of clothes. They would both be charged with assault and staging a home invasion, and the dark-skinned man with criminal damage to property in the death of the colt.

  At Queens Hospital in Leeds, doctors said they would conduct scans to see if Louis’s coma was reversible. His cheekbone and four ribs were broken; he had a long, thin crack in his skull. On the third day, he stopped breathing on his own and was placed on a ventilator. The brain scans were inconclusive.

  “Did you know these men?” an inspector asked Frank.

  “I don’t know them,” he explained. “I thought I might have seen the older man once before, but I’m not sure.”

  The officer leaned back roughly in the dark maroon chair that had been Frank’s father’s. “That’s the piss. If it wasn’t for that, we might say the man in hospital and two in jail were mistaken and meant to be after someone else here, that it was all a cock-up and they took a family of farmers, and a doctor, of course, for drug runners or somewhat.”

  “It was a mix-up, I’m sure,” Frank said. “What could they have wanted from us? We don’t have any jewelry or art or drugs, nothing like that. They didn’t even bring a horse trailer, and that’s all we have, our horses, and two little boys.”

  “They weren’t looking for two little boys. Unless they’re film stars,” said the young constable. “Are they film stars, hiding out up here?”

  Frank said, “You guessed it.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  SO MANY THINGS happen when people can’t sleep.

  Colin sat up late with Claudia not one night, but four in a row. He wanted just one thing—the reason that the yellow-haired man had killed Sally, and especially why he had killed the foal called All Saints, who couldn’t make noise or bite him.

  “A baby horse isn’t dangerous,” Colin said.

  “He knew that All Saints wasn’t dangerous,” Claudia told him. “He killed him anyway. He was trying to show us that he would kill people, too.”

  “I know I can’t change that All Saints is dead,” Colin said. “But I think Ian should have stopped that man.”

  “He is evil,�
� Claudia told him. “Ian couldn’t stop him. Ian has to have something in the person that’s good so he can grab on to it with his mind. It wouldn’t have mattered if All Saints was a human baby. He would have killed him anyway.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You’re not supposed to get it. It’s not something people can ever understand. Because of how that man was, in his head. Ian couldn’t stop him. He couldn’t stop the other man from killing our dog. I don’t know why, but they weren’t like other people.”

  “Ian should have thought of a way,” said Colin. “Why didn’t Dad kill them with his gun?”

  “Dad would have gotten in trouble for that. They would have taken Dad to jail for killing a man who shot a horse by mistake.”

  “But it wasn’t by mistake. It was on purpose.”

  “They would say it was a mistake and the gun went off because Dad was trying to hurt them. The police might believe that. They might think Dad was the bad one. We’re not from around here. They didn’t have any proof, Collie.”

  On the fourth night, Colin got up off the bed and picked up Frank’s old iron boot pull. Rearing back, he hurled it across the room, where it stuck in the old wood of the armoire like a hatchet. He stalked out of the room, knocking a deck of books off the shelf onto the floor as he went. Colin was more upset about what had happened to the animals than he was about the threat to all of them.

  “Don’t go after him,” Claudia said. “He needs to be that angry.” She got up too quickly to gather the books and winced. Under her long white shirt there was a hot purple bruise under her ribs, thick as the tip of a scythe. The baby was fine. A doctor recommended by her colleague at Hope of the Moor had taken over Claudia’s obstetrical care. So Frank was not worried about Arthur, except in hoping that they would soon think of an actual name for him, but he was worried about Colin. Colin was running more than ever, but now he came back not just with a stinking pullover but with swollen eyes. He cried in private, and at home, he raged. Would he always be so angry? A kid did right; he risked himself to prevail, and his own little horse, his just for a few hours, the only animal he’d ever decided to let himself like, was shot like a steer with a bolt gun. Colin had looked up how animals were slaughtered for meat, and announced that he would never eat meat again. You’ve told him that he probably can’t ever understand it, Frank told Claudia, so how do we help him handle that memory? It was as if Colin had removed himself from a world he found too forbidding; he hadn’t spoken to any of them in thought since his long run for the help that saved them.

  “We bind him to us. Hang close,” Claudia told Frank, with something that began with a shrug and ended in a shudder running over her shoulders. “Hang close until something better comes. There isn’t anything else we can do. Until he gets on a team. Until he’s fourteen and falls in love. There’s nothing to make him better yet because how could he be better? We aren’t going to feel better for a long time.” To her credit, she never mentioned the things she had told Frank, months before, when she said that there were no guarantees the boys wouldn’t see something awful again, wherever they alighted on earth.

  They went to the zoo in London a week later, on Saturday, a doleful, meek little bunch wandering tentatively as sandpipers under a thrashed sky that fitfully spit rain. Ian didn’t sleep well, and neither boy was enchanted by the Thistle Hotel in Kensington Garden or had an appetite for the lush cream tea. Early on Sunday, they came home, creeping onto the farm like ghosts of themselves. Driven by fear into a frenzy of activity, Hope had cooked the kitchen into an aromatic cave that burst with pepper and tomato soup, thick dark bread, and hearty pies. The boys tasted the hearty food, and nodded gently, but their eyes were masked as clouds.

  That day, snow fell. Claudia woke the boys to invoke the customary enchantment and again they smiled politely, like adults inhabiting little bodies. Then, just before their late dinner, there came a huge knock at the door. Shipley Gerrick stood in the frame with a caul of snow over his long dark hair and a great covered basket in his arms.

  “Come in for some tea,” Hope said.

  “Oh, I’d love a cup where I stand, Mrs. Mercy. But it’s them boys I’ve come to see. Happy Christmas early, lads,” he said to Colin and Ian. “I’ve not asked your mum and dad if I can gift you because they’d sure say no.” Shipley opened one of the sides of the wooden basket and a fat, honey-colored puppy began to squirm out. Ian’s face opened; Frank groaned, and Shipley said, “Who can have a farm without a dog? She’s a good one, from my own Gentle Annie and my brother’s big herding dog, Ring. I guarantee that if you had sheep, she’d keep them humble. She’s wormed and I give her a shot, and if you want another just like her, I got another. One for each boy. As it is, I think I hear my good wife calling.”

  “Well, Shipley, I guess this is where I say thanks,” Frank told him as the little pup squatted and placidly squirted on the rug. “I think one puppy is just fine. That will be an outside dog, now, Collie, like Sally was, so we’ll make her a basket and a barrier here . . .”

  Colin said, “He can take her back, then.” And he left the room.

  After a moment, Claudia said, “Thanks, Shipley. We’ll keep her indoors. A dog inside is a good thing, and this isn’t a Beverly Hills Murano glass kind of a house.”

  That night, after she’d eaten scrambled eggs with cheese, and was tucked into a crate lined with the boys’ outgrown summer shirts and made of boxes taped together with thick slits cut in the sides, Jennifer (“Jennifer?” said Claudia) slept like a proverbial baby. At least, she slept until about midnight, when she began squealing so ferociously that Frank leaped out of bed and ran for the boys’ room. Ian was already standing on the bed, screaming, “She’s dying! She’s going to die right now!”

  In fact, all that had befallen Jennifer was panic: she’d stuck one paw into a slat in her makeshift crate and couldn’t free it. Frank carried her outside, where she peed a river, and then headed back up with the puppy in his arms. When he was halfway up, Claudia called him and asked if he could bring up a glass of water. Frank tucked Jennifer in first and Claudia apologized. “I hate to make you go back down.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  He brought the glass, and cracked the window. Claudia had one of her ancestral quilts—still paper-fragile, still cherished—gathered up around her breasts. “I just heard Colin scream,” she said.

  “That was Ian. That was before.”

  “No, this time it was Colin. He just did, when you were downstairs.”

  What the Christ now? Frank thought.

  “Dad,” said Colin. He stood pressed against the stone wall outside their room, shivering in his underwear. “There’s a ghost in the yard.”

  “Oh, that again,” said Frank. “Well, I’ll check.”

  He crossed to the window, and caught his breath. Just beneath the window stood what Frank first actually thought was a ghost, but then, switching on his reasoning mind, he understood was a fallow deer. He had never seen one, except in pictures, and would never have believed that the real thing could look so much like a mythical creature—a massive stag with bouldered shoulders and a rack of antlers that would have disgraced an American elk, four or five feet from tip to tip. Pale and motionless as marble, only its eyes and nose alive, it peered up at him like an illustration breathed from an old tapestry.

  Her quilt around her like a cape, Claudia came up behind him and whispered, “My God. Is that normal?”

  “I don’t think they live around here. I think they live in France. Or in a park at some palace.”

  “But it’s real?”

  “It’s real,” said Frank.

  “It really is a real ghost!” Colin told Ian. “I’m right. See?”

  “Is it coming through the wall?” Ian asked. “Is it coming up the stairs?”

  “No. Don’t worry. It is real, but it’s an animal. It would be scared of us,” Frank said. “It’s a stag. A father fallow deer. There are lots of fallow deer in some places. O
ne special kind is pure white. They are very rare.”

  Then Claudia held up her hand. “Listen. What’s that?”

  The sound was also something Frank had never experienced, but in a moment, he also knew what it was. It was birdsong. Branches filled with blackbirds, from the sound of it, were singing, their liquid five- and seven-note trills sliding up and slipping down, calling and answering.

  “Are those singing ghosts?” Ian said.

  “They’re birds,” Frank said.

  “Now you’re really lying, Dad. It’s night,” Colin told him. “They’re not birds. They’re ghosts. Who’s playing that noise?”

  “They’re not ghosts.”

  “They could be angels,” Ian said. “Do you think they’re angels?”

  “They’re birds,” Frank said.

  “Angels,” said Ian. “Maybe angels are coming for All Saints and Sally?”

  “You know,” Claudia said, elbowing Frank. “Maybe they are.”

  So they hustled back into their room, carrying Jennifer in her box. Claudia hitched away from her customary spot near the middle of the bed, and Frank made a space for the boys between them, and both of the boys curled in, by now knobby-elbowed figures of frost, for neither of them could abide staying covered. As they settled down, Frank told them that in England, blackbirds often sang all night, and that until he looked it up online, he thought it must be a recording, or the kind of weird reversal of nature, like whales leaping out of the seas, that foretold some great natural disaster overturning the natural order. No sooner had he said this than he cursed himself inwardly, for he could all but hear the boys thinking of a storm, and it was only caution that prevented Colin from sending that thought to Frank. And so he talked on, and told them how local people professed to be annoyed by the sound. “But how could they be? It’s so good, isn’t it?” Frank said. “It’s a good noise.” They all murmured sleepily, and Frank nearly closed his eyes, hitched by the sweet sounds to some ancient chain of hopeful repose.