Wolf Hollow

by Lauren Wolk

  While I read about the Spanish-American War, I listened for the door to open. For Betty to walk in. But she didn’t.

  It was still raining at recess, so we stayed inside and played marbles and cat’s cradle. Before calling us back to our lessons, Mrs. Taylor had us do a long series of jumping jacks. “To make you strong,” she said, though I knew what the afternoon would be like if the boys, especially, didn’t wear themselves out a little first.

  As we were returning to our desks, the door finally opened, but it was Andy who came in, not Betty.

  He tipped off his hood and shook all over like a dog as he looked around the schoolhouse. “Where’s Betty?” he said. When no one answered him, he said, more loudly, “Mrs. Taylor. Where’s Betty?”

  She turned from the chalkboard. “I have no idea, Andy. She didn’t come to school this morning. I wonder if she might be sick.”

  Andy pulled his hood back up over his head. Left without another word.

  Mrs. Taylor stood where she was, looking long at where he’d been.

  “Settle down everyone,” she finally said. “Time for lessons.”

  At the end of the day, as my brothers were putting on their rain boots, Mrs. Taylor took me aside and said, “I’d like to come see your parents after suppertime, Annabelle. Do you think that would be all right?”

  I was startled by the very idea of it. “Did I do something wrong? Or my brothers?”

  “Oh no, Annabelle. Nothing like that. I just want to talk with your parents for a few minutes.”

  “Well, then, sure,” I said.

  I didn’t want to be rude, but I was curious: “Do you have a telephone at your house, Mrs. Taylor?”

  “I do. Why?”

  “Because we do, too.” I hoped I didn’t sound fresh. “You could just call them up, if you want.”

  Mrs. Taylor gave me a little smile. “I could. But . . .” She paused to choose her words. “Well, I’m sure you know that Mrs. Gribble is, sometimes, a little . . . curious . . . when she puts a call through.”

  Ah.

  Annie Gribble lived in a small house that we passed on our way to market. I’d only been there once, to drop off a bushel of peaches at canning time, but she’d invited us in for a glass of lemonade, my father and me, and I’d been fascinated by the switchboard that dominated her front room like a loom strung with thin black snakes.

  She sat there all day long and made connections between the families in our hills that had acquired telephones. To use ours, we had to ring up Annie and tell her where to place the call. And she had a habit of listening in to hear news that she thought other people really ought to know.

  We were used to the idea by now. Nobody dared tell a secret over the telephone, for fear that Annie was eavesdropping. But Annie made hay out of even small things, so we’d learned to start a conversation with the most boring of our news, hoping that she’d be more easily distracted by another customer calling in for a connection.

  Whatever Mrs. Taylor wanted to talk about, it wasn’t meant for Annie’s ears.

  “Do you want me to tell them you’re coming by?” I said.

  “I would appreciate it,” Mrs. Taylor said.

  I pulled on my boots and tried to tie the laces of James’s hood under his chin, but he tossed his head like a young horse and galloped out of the school into the rain before I could do a proper job. Henry followed him, and they both did a mud dance across the sloppy schoolyard before gaining drier ground in the woods.

  I was not in the mood to walk home alone, in the cold and wet, but I saw no alternative until Mrs. Taylor called me back. “Annabelle, I could come for a visit now if you think that would be all right, and you could ride with me.”

  I rarely had a chance to ride in a car as nice as hers. More importantly, it would be warm and dry.

  “I imagine my father will be at the house or close by on a day like this,” I said. “And I’m sure my mother will be there. So now would be okay, I guess.”

  I followed her to the car and climbed into the backseat, feeling a little like a queen, until I realized that I was sitting where Ruth had been.

  It was a slow and careful ride to the farm, the roads awash in some places, but we got there without mishap.

  “You go on in and make sure it’s a good time for a visit,” Mrs. Taylor said. “I’ll wait here.”

  So I did that, and my mother hurried past me to open the door and beckon Mrs. Taylor inside.

  “Mrs. Taylor, come in, please,” my mother said, in her Sunday voice. She called most people by their Christian names, but not the minister, the doctor, the constable, or the teacher.

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Taylor said, trying to shed as much rainwater from her bonnet as she could before she stepped inside.

  “Oh, don’t fuss about that,” my mother said. “You’d be the only one who did. Annabelle,” she said to me before I could take off my poncho, “run to the barn and fetch your father.”

  So back outside I went. And laughed out loud when I saw my brothers pull up short at the sight of me as they slithered down the muddy lane. “Mrs. Taylor gave me a ride in her car!” I yelled to them and, laughing still, headed for the barn.

  Our old barn taught me one of the most important lessons I was ever to learn: that the extraordinary can live in the simplest things.

  Each season meant a world refashioned inside its stalls and storerooms.

  Pockets of warmth in winter, the milk cows and draft horses like furnaces, their heat banked by straw bedding and new manure.

  In spring, swallows fledged from muddy nests wedged in crannies overhead, and kittens fresh and soft staggered between hooves and attacked the tails of tackle hanging from stable pegs.

  Come summer, yellow jackets nested in the straw, old oats sprouted through the floorboards, Houdini hens laid eggs in odd places where they might yield chicks, and dusty sunlight striped the air like bridges to somewhere else.

  But I loved the barn in fall, especially, when I’d often find my father there, mending wagon wheels, oiling the joints of wagon parts, and sometimes—as on that November day—napping in the hayloft, snoring softly in the dim, blue light.

  “Mrs. Taylor is here to see you,” I said softly into his ear while the rain thrummed on the tin roof just above our heads and the horses stamped for their oats below us. “Wake up.”

  My father roused suddenly from continents away. “What?” he said, sitting up in the hay.

  “Mrs. Taylor is here to see you,” I repeated. I sat back on my heels. “You have straw in your hair.”

  He pawed it away, I plucked off a stubborn bit, and we both rose and climbed down the hayloft ladder, my father clearing his throat and shaking the sleep from his head.

  “I was just having a little rest,” he said as we walked abreast down the dim stairs into the stable below. He ran his hands through his hair. “Mrs. Taylor, you say?”

  “She wants to talk with you and Mother.”

  He looked at me sharply. “What did James do?”

  “Nothing. Henry neither. I don’t know what it’s about, but I think it has something to do with Betty.”

  My father sighed as he pulled his hood up over his head. “I’ve had about my fill of all that,” he said. And walked straight out into the hard rain.

  By the time we pulled off our boots and hung up our wet ponchos, my mother had made coffee and put some oatmeal cookies on a plate. Mrs. Taylor was waiting for us in the front room, perched on the edge of a chair, her hands folded, as if we had bad news for her.

  I was afraid it would be the other way around.

  “I’m not sure Annabelle needs to be part of this,” she said hesitantly once we were all seated.

  “Well, I’m not sure what ‘this’ is,” my mother said, “but if it has anything to do with what happened to Ruth, she really ought to hear it. She�
��s been right in the middle of that mess from the start.”

  Mrs. Taylor nodded. “If you think it’s all right.” She spent a moment quietly, unfocused, and then she looked up and said, “I understand that Betty claims she was in the belfry looking out the window when she saw Toby throw the rock that hit Ruth.”

  My father nodded. “That’s what she says.”

  “Only that can’t be right.” Mrs. Taylor sighed. “A few days before Ruth got hurt, I caught Betty and Andy up in the belfry at recess. I shooed them out and then I locked the door that leads to the belfry stairs. It was still locked today when I tried it. And I have the only key right here.” She patted her pocketbook.

  “One more lie,” my mother said quietly.

  “One more big lie,” I said, trailing off as everyone turned to look at me. “What? It’s true. Betty didn’t see Toby do a thing. Betty’s a bully. She’s just mad at him because he told her to leave me alone.”

  My father took my hand. “It’s all right, Annabelle. You aren’t wrong. Betty had that lie already on her tongue because she’d been up in the belfry before and knew just what to say.”

  Mrs. Taylor sighed. “That does seem to fit.”

  “Would you please go tell that to Constable Oleska?” I said.

  She nodded. “I will,” she said. “But I wanted to come see you first. The Glengarrys are my friends, and I didn’t want to make an accusation without talking it out first.”

  “No accusation about it,” my father said. “Just information. The constable will do with it what he can.”

  For days I’d been feeling as tense as a banjo string, twanging every time some new problem arose, but there were also moments of relief, like this one. Finally, maybe, people were beginning to understand what kind of person Betty really was.

  Mrs. Taylor stood up and we with her. “Betty didn’t come to school today. I imagine she’s home sick. Perhaps I should go by and speak with the Glengarrys first before I see the constable.”

  My mother shook her head. “We’ve been in your shoes, and lately. It won’t do any good. They are set on the idea that Betty has done nothing wrong.”

  Mrs. Taylor nodded. “I expect you’re right about that. Betty’s an . . . odd girl, but she’s their granddaughter.”

  We didn’t talk about the rest of it, how badly she had bullied me, how I suspected she and Andy had hurt James. But the lid was off, the worms were rearing their slick little heads, and they would soon be spilling out with their mucky secrets.

  I can’t say I was glad, exactly, but I wasn’t sorry.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We were all in bed that night, the house dark, when we were awakened by pounding at our door. The dogs that generally slept in the woodshed were by now having a loud conversation with someone outside, and we could hear him talking back to them firmly.

  The rain had stopped, but the night outside our door was thick with wet air, and Constable Oleska looked like he wore a layer of spiderweb over his black raincoat. One or two dogs continued to question him, but they quieted down at a single word from my father, who stood in the doorway in his night things, my mother behind him tightening her robe, while I peeked around her, my brothers behind me, and Aunt Lily came marching to join us, her hair in rollers, her face angry.

  “And what is all this about now?” she said.

  I imagined my grandparents sitting up in their bed, hoping they wouldn’t have to join the fray.

  “Very sorry to wake you, John, Sarah . . . hello, Lily,” Constable Oleska said. “I know it’s late, but can I come in for a minute?”

  “Of course,” my father said. He stepped back to let the constable by.

  “I wouldn’t have come so late, but I’m afraid I couldn’t wait until morning,” the constable said. “Betty Glengarry has gone missing.”

  “Missing?” my father said.

  “You’d better come on in and sit,” my mother said.

  “I’ll bet she got eaten by a bear,” James said, his hair sticking out in all directions.

  “You, boys, back to bed,” my father said. “Now.”

  When they hesitated, Aunt Lily took them in hand with a sharp word and a set mouth. “Bed, your father said.” As if they were wayward sheep, she poked and prodded them out of the room.

  I, it seemed, would be allowed to stay.

  For a while, being included in these conversations had made me feel tall. Now I was ready to be eleven again and back up in bed like my brothers. I could feel myself tightening up as before and wished that whoever was doing the tuning would have pity. None of this was fun.

  “Please. Come on now. Sit,” my mother said.

  When the constable looked down at his mud-caked boots, water streamed from the divot in his hat. “I’m a mess, Sarah.”

  But my mother took him by the arm and led him to a chair at the kitchen table.

  “You’re cold right through and wet,” she said as she put some supper coffee on the stove to warm. “A little mud won’t matter.”

  We all took a seat as Aunt Lily returned to the kitchen. “You, too,” she said to me. “Back to bed. This is no talk for children,” as if my parents were not sitting right there alongside me.

  “Leave her be, Lily,” my father said. “Annabelle may know more about this than we do.”

  The constable took off his hat and laid it on his knees. “Mrs. Taylor came to see me about the whole belfry business,” he said, smoothing his hair flat. “We talked it through, I saw where things were headed, and I had made up my mind to visit the Glengarrys in the morning . . . when here they came, knocking at the door.” He rubbed his hands to warm them. “It was dark by then. Betty hadn’t come home from school, and they were worried. More so when Mrs. Taylor told them Betty had never come to school in the first place.”

  I nodded. “We thought she must be sick.”

  Constable Oleska shook his head. “No, she left for school as always, rain or not. Her grandma dressed her for the wet and then watched her go down the lane and disappear, headed toward Wolf Hollow. Same as ever.”

  My mother got up to pour him some coffee. “No sign at all of where she went?”

  “In this weather? The whole world’s mud and flood.”

  “Then what?” my father said. “If there’s something you need from us . . .”

  “Toby’s gone,” the constable said. “First thing I did was go down to his shack to find out if he’d seen her. Not—” he said suddenly, his hands up, “not to suggest he’d done anything wrong. First time I went to see him, after Ruth got hurt, I found him outside the shack, chopping wood. When I told him what Betty was saying about him, Toby got a look on his face, and I have to say . . . I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t happy that he had an ax in his hand at the time. But he didn’t say a word or do a thing. Just went back to his work.”

  The constable shook his head. “There wasn’t much I could do at that point except collect pieces of the puzzle and try to keep an open mind. So when I went back there tonight, I truly meant only to learn if he’d seen Betty today. Toby covers more ground than most people, including the woods and orchards and out-of-the-way places between the Glengarry place and the schoolhouse. But he wasn’t there.”

  “How do you know he’s really gone?” my mother asked.

  “Well, I suppose I don’t. But he wasn’t in the shack. No fire. Cold coals. No guns. No camera. No nothing.” He heaved a sigh. Looked at me and away.

  “He had stuck pictures all over the walls,” he said. “I had my searchlight in my truck. Spent some time in there, looking at those pictures. I tried to pull one off, but he used pine sap and it was on there good.”

  He took a crumpled photograph from his pocket and handed it to my father, who smoothed it out and looked at it for a moment before passing it to my mother.

  “So?”

  “So you d
on’t think it’s odd that a man like Toby is sneaking around taking pictures of your daughter when she’s unaware?”

  I moved around behind my mother and peered over her shoulder. The picture showed me walking down the path to school. Sunlight coming through the branches lit up my face, but the rest of me looked vague in the shadows. It felt strange, seeing what I looked like when I thought I was alone. I had never known that Toby was there, in the trees nearby, watching.

  “It’s odd the way Toby is odd,” my mother said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s something worse.”

  Aunt Lily stood up suddenly. “More of his pictures came back in today’s mail,” she said, and hurried off to her room.

  When she returned, I reached out my hand. “He wanted me to give them to him as soon as they came back,” I said.

  “Well, you can’t very well do that when he’s run off,” she said, handing the package to the constable.

  He opened it, took the pictures out of the envelope inside, and held them well away from his wet coat as he looked at each one. His face became tougher as he did.

  He held one back, passing the rest to my parents, who looked at them together, Aunt Lily across the table fidgeting impatiently.

  “What?” she said. “Pass those here.”

  “Some yellow trees,” my father said. “A field of pumpkins.” He paused and turned to the constable. “But I suspect that one you’ve got there is something different.”

  The constable nodded. He passed it over, and I moved behind my father so I could see it.

  We were looking at the schoolhouse road from high above. Some tree branches split the scene, but I could make out Mr. Ansel’s grays, his wagon filled with apples. Ruth, lying in the road. Mr. Ansel climbing down from his wagon. And me.

  “Oh my Lord,” my mother said quietly.

  “But this doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Just because he took that picture doesn’t mean he threw the rock.”

  “I’m afraid it means quite a lot, young lady,” the constable said. “Especially since Betty is missing and Toby’s gone, after she accused him of hurting Ruth, after I went down there and told him so—and you must realize that he knew we’d be looking at these very pictures at some point—all of which adds up to a worrisome conclusion. But right now the most important thing is finding Betty.”