by Lauren Wolk
“Help me understand this,” my father finally said when Toby had finished his last bite, eyes closed. “I don’t see how Annabelle . . . spirited you away from under our very noses. The constable has been looking for you since yesterday.”
Toby shrugged. “I was fishing under the creek bridge all through the rainy part of the day, and then I was at the Turner place for jerky, and then back home after dark—”
“After Constable Oleska had been to the smokehouse and gone—” I said.
“And I hung up my wet things and went to sleep. Didn’t know about Betty being missing until Annabelle knocked on my door before sunrise and told me what was going on and why I should go with her.” He almost smiled at my mother, but she did not yet look inclined to smile back. “She sounded like you did just now.”
My father couldn’t help but grin at that, though briefly. “I know that voice,” he said, mostly to himself.
“You’re going to know it even better if you’re not careful,” my mother said.
“So you’ve been in the barn since . . .”
“Very early this morning.” Toby ran his good hand through his beard and down his throat. “Seems like a long time ago.”
“You went down there in the dark by yourself to get him?” my father said to me.
I nodded, split between pride and guilt. “I couldn’t sleep and I knew how bad it looked. Don’t you think that the trooper would have taken Toby away if I hadn’t?”
Which was an argument that no one bothered to refute. We all knew what people thought of Toby, Aunt Lily and the Glengarrys among them.
“And then?” my mother said.
“I hid him in the hayloft. Took him some food and water. A book. Some clothes. Soap. I borrowed your scissors to give him a trim.”
“And Jordan was born,” she said thoughtfully.
“We didn’t plan it out like that,” I said. “And we didn’t plan to go down to Cobb Hollow again, either. But I remembered a sound I’d heard in the dark last night, by the smokehouse. At the time, I thought it was a porcupine. But later, when the trooper told us what Andy said, about Betty wanting to go down there, I thought . . . what if she did? What if that’s where she was? And I thought some more about the porcupine sound. And I remembered the well.”
We sat silently for a little bit, looking at one another.
My father crossed his arms over his chest. “Who decided that Toby should join the rescue effort?”
“I did,” I said, again not sure if it was all right to feel clever about it. “I was pretty sure he would blend in with the other strangers and be able to watch how things played out. Keep on going if he had to. Stay if he could.”
I looked at each of them in turn. “But he can’t, can he?” I said.
My father sighed. “I don’t know, Annabelle. This is a mess, start to finish. And there’s something else.” From the way he frowned at Toby, I knew this couldn’t be good. “The constable told me when he called just now that the hunt has intensified.”
Toby frowned right back at him, clearly baffled. “But we found Betty.”
“Not the search for Betty,” my father said. “The hunt for you.”
For the next hour we talked about what to do and how to keep what was now our secret until we had found a way to make things right.
But soon the day caught up with us, me especially. I’d been going since the wee hours of the morning, and I felt like a bag of rocks. Toby, more accustomed to little sleep and plenty of motion, was nonetheless a wreck himself.
“I still think I should leave right now,” he said. “I can be twenty miles from here by morning.”
“Which is exactly where they’re looking,” my father said. “And I don’t see you walking twenty miles in the shape you’re in.”
My mother had fetched two blankets and a pillow, which she now handed to Toby.
“It won’t be very warm out in the hayloft,” she said, “but I think it’s the only safe place for you right now.”
“The loft will be fine,” he said. “It smells good up there. And I like the doves.”
“And here’s some bread and cheese for the morning. Annabelle can bring you coffee before she goes to school.”
The idea of school amazed me. But I knew I had to go. Nothing could call attention to us or our farm. Everything had to be as it always was.
“Good night,” I said, handing Toby my grandfather’s coat.
“If anyone sees you, just say I’ve hired you to fix some gaps in the barn,” my father added. Which was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
But everything felt a little too easy to me as I headed off to bed.
When I woke, I knew I’d overslept. The light was late-morning bright and the house quiet. I hurried down to the kitchen where I found my grandmother, cutting butternut squash in half and laying them facedown on a baking sheet.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing at all,” she said, smiling. “Your mother decided that you deserved to sleep a little longer.”
It was awkward, not knowing what she knew or what I could safely say. The truth was so tightly braided with secrets that I could not easily say anything without saying too much. So I simply sat down to my cereal and waited for the day to unfold.
“Well, look who’s up,” my mother said as she came in the door, a basket of eggs in her hand. She tied on an apron and said, “Scrambled or fried?”
“I already had some cereal.”
“Then go on and get ready for school.” But as she said it, she winked at me. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
I was still marveling over the wink when she came into my room and shut the door.
“Your father took care of Toby this morning,” she said softly. “Gave him breakfast.” She sat down on the edge of my bed while I got dressed. “When he got back, he told me some things.” She patted the bed next to her. “Annabelle, come sit for a minute.”
When I did, she took a moment to choose her words. “Annabelle, your father thinks that Toby may be a little . . . confused.”
“About what?”
“You know we’ve always thought he was odd. You did, too, I’m sure. Walking all day but going nowhere. Not talking unless he had to. Living in the smokehouse when he might have lived somewhere better.”
“But I thought you liked him.”
“I do,” she said. “I always have. I’m sure he went through horrible things that made him the way he is, and I’ll always help him if I can. But last night, in those clean clothes, with his hair and beard trimmed up, sitting at the table, and talking in complete sentences: He didn’t seem odd anymore. But he is odd, Annabelle, and I don’t want you to forget that.”
“Did something happen in the barn this morning?”
She shook her head. “No, but your father spent some time with him and he reminded me, so I’m reminding you, that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Toby is confused. And you need to remember that, much as you like him.”
I was baffled by all this talk of confusion and book covers. “I don’t understand,” I said. “You always said that people shouldn’t be afraid of Toby just because he looked scary. And now you’re saying that I should be afraid of Toby, even though he went down that well to get Betty, just because he looks good?”
My mother stared at me, still as a post. “Annabelle, I didn’t say you should be afraid of him.” She looked at her hands in her lap and sighed. “I’m just worried about you spending time alone with a man we really don’t know all that well, who is, by all accounts, odd. Annabelle, he simply is.”
“But—”
“Annabelle, you know how he carries those guns all the time?”
“Yes. So?”
“Your father had a look at them. Annabelle, only one of those guns works. The other two are ruined. They aren’t good for any
thing. But he’s carried them around for years, regardless, heavy as they are. Wouldn’t you say that’s a sign of confusion?”
I thought about the dreadful stories that Toby had told me. I remembered the baby only moments old.
I looked my mother full in the face. “I wouldn’t say that’s a sign of confusion. I would say that’s a sign of something that we don’t understand. Toby has his reasons, and I don’t think that makes him odd at all. Or if it does, then I’m odd, too, and so are you.”
I got up and continued to get ready for school while my mother sat on the bed and watched me. Then she got up and left the room without another word.
School was different that day, for two reasons.
First, because I walked in to find myself the subject of a standing ovation. Even my brothers joined in, though they looked a little abashed about it. No one had ever clapped for me before, and I was sorry to be applauded now for something I might have done faster and better than I did.
In the second place, school was so much better without Betty, or Andy, for that matter, and I was not sorry about their absence. But it was also worse because Ruth was gone, too, and some of the littlest ones kept home by mothers who did not know Toby as I did and feared he might be lurking in the bushes, waiting to toss their babies down the nearest well.
We were no more than twenty, so Mrs. Taylor was able to spend plenty of time with us at the board in turns, doing sums and grammar.
It was during one of the arithmetic lessons that I began to realize what I should do next. The logic of the numbers was soothing, and it fired the nuts-and-bolts part of my tired brain.
If proving Toby innocent was the problem, then Andy was the answer.
He knew everything—who had thrown the rock, who had strung the taut-wire, why Betty had gone to Cobb Hollow—all of it.
If getting Andy to tell the truth was the problem, then I didn’t know the answer.
But I remembered how much easier it was to tell my own secret when I realized my mother already knew part of it—that Jordan was really Toby. And once the cork was off the bottle, the rest of it flowed out.
If the answer was to pull the cork, then I needed to figure out how to convince Andy that we already knew the truth he had not yet told.
I spent the rest of the day thinking about that. And by the time school ended, I had the beginnings of an idea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I needed some time to think about my new idea before I did anything about it.
For days I had popped from one problem to another like a pumpkin seed on a griddle. And I was tired of it.
Just weeks ago I’d begun to hunger for change, impatient with my life, much as I loved it. Somewhere, excitement waited for me like an uncut cake.
Now I wanted nothing more than to be still and thoughtful and quiet for just a little while.
The Turtle Stone was not far from the schoolhouse. Deer traveling the path out of Wolf Hollow had beaten other narrow trails that led to the fern beds they loved.
I took the first of these, once again grateful that Betty was not waiting for me. I wondered if I should feel guilty about that, but I didn’t. I could have hurried more to find her, but I hadn’t put her down that well. She’d done that all by herself.
I was truly alone. My brothers were long gone. And all the birds and small animals were hiding in plain sight, waiting to discover my intentions.
I had none.
The Turtle Stone sat at the center of the clearing like a great moon in a galaxy of yellow maple stars. It was a beautiful thing with quartz veins running deep and clear through its hard, reddish shell. We had long wondered about it—where it had come from, why it was the only one of its kind in these hills.
I’d been angry about a lot of Betty’s nastiness, but when I saw the scars she’d made on the stone and remembered the reason for them, real fury overcame me.
I ran my hand over the stone, expecting some suggestion of softness. Instead, the stone itself told me a thing or two about age and resilience, and the trees at the edge of the clearing quietly concurred.
Who was I to worry about a stone that had been here since long before any of us, that would be here long after we all were gone?
I had come here to consider serious matters and how I might figure in the scheme of things. Important things. Instead, the stone made me aware for the first time that my life, however long, would amount to nothing more than a flicker. Not even that. Not even a flicker. Not even a sigh.
As I made my way back through the woods, I thought of the men who had dug pits close by here. Maybe boys, too, not much older than I was right now.
I imagined those pits, the wolves trapped in them, snarling and whining for release. The bones they’d left behind. The unborn pups and their rose-petal ears.
I thought about Betty and her “gone” father and why she had intended Toby such harm.
The awful stories he’d told me, and the terrible softness of his scars.
And I decided that there might be things I would never understand, no matter how hard I tried. Though try I would.
And that there would be people who would never hear my one small voice, no matter what I had to say.
But then a better thought occurred, and this was the one I carried away with me that day: If my life was to be just a single note in an endless symphony, how could I not sound it out for as long and as loudly as I could?
When I got home, I found my mother and my grandmother in the sitting room, their laps full of mending.
I said my hellos and “Where are the boys?”
“Out in the haymow with Jordan,” my mother said, giving me a look.
I kept my jaw from dropping. “With . . .”
“Jordan,” my grandmother said, her eyes on her work. “Such a nice man to stay on and help your father patch up the barn.”
“Can I go help, too?” I asked.
“For a while,” my mother said. “Bring your brothers back with you when you come.”
“Did you give Jordan some lunch?”
At which my mother looked up, smiling. “No, Annabelle. Your father asked him to help in the haymow all day, but we didn’t invite him in at lunchtime.”
My grandmother chuckled.
“I was just asking,” I said.
“And I was just telling,” my mother replied. “Now get out there so you can get back here to help with supper.”
I followed the sound of hammering and boy-holler out to the barn. At the big upper doors to the threshing floor, I found my father and Toby patching a gap-toothed wall while my brothers swung to and fro from a knotted rope.
I guess it was jealousy I felt at the sight of them carrying on so well and easily without me.
“What kept you?” my father said. “The boys have been here a half hour or more.”
“I spent some time at the Turtle Stone,” I said.
My father and Toby both looked at me like the horses did when I disturbed their grazing.
“It’s quiet there,” I said. Which seemed to satisfy them both.
I looked over my shoulder at the boys, who were making more noise than crows over a hawk. “Did you hide the stuff up in the loft?”
My father nodded. “I buried the hair in the woods. We wrapped the guns in Toby’s coat and stuck them under a bale of hay. The bedding, too. The camera’s in his hat, behind the bales. And I told the boys to stay out of the loft.”
Which was the most alarming thing he might have said. Telling the boys not to do something was like giving steak to a dog and telling him not to eat it.
“I have an idea,” I said.
It amazed me when these two grown men put down their hammers at my four little words.
“Let’s step outside,” my father said. Toby and I followed him out through the big side doors. “What idea?”
I thought back for a moment to the thread that I’d followed at the schoolhouse. And the decision I’d made at the Turtle Stone: to use that thread to mend what I could.
“I think I know how to get Andy to admit that you’re innocent, Toby,” I said.
They waited.
“Andy and Betty saw you above them on the hill that day. They saw you up there with a camera.”
“So?”
“So we just tell Andy that you took a picture of Betty throwing the rock.”
Toby shook his head. “But I didn’t. It happened too fast. And then they ducked back into the bushes. And all I got was a shot of the road down below. You. And Ruth, hurt.”
“We know that, Toby,” my father said. “We saw the picture. It made you look guilty. But Andy doesn’t know that. He just knows you were up there on the hill with a camera. We’ll tell him the pictures came back and one of them shows Betty throwing the rock. And if he thinks he’s been caught in the biggest lie, he has no reason to lie about the rest of it.”
“And you had no reason to push Betty down that well,” I said to Toby.
“We need to go talk to Andy as soon as we can,” I said to my father. “Take the constable with us so he can hear for himself what really happened.”
But that’s when the boys scattered our best-laid schemes like a fistful of birdseed.
We all turned as they raced out of the barn toward us.
“Look what we found!” they cried.
James held a black hat high in his fist.
Henry, a camera.
We stared at them, speechless.
“Toby’s been in our barn,” Henry said. “Maybe he’s still around here, hiding.” He suddenly lowered his voice. “Maybe he’s still in the barn somewhere. Daddy, do you think he’s still in the barn?”
What were we supposed to say?
We couldn’t tell them that Toby was standing right in front of them. The boys were blabbermouths.
And we couldn’t tell them not to say anything about what they’d found. They would see no earthly reason to keep such information from the police when there was a manhunt going on, whether they liked Toby or not.