Greenglass House (22 page)

Georgie watched with a thoughtful look as Milo's father hiked through the snow around the back of the house. Then she seemed to remember that Milo was there, and turned to smile down at him. “Looks like it's you and me, pal.” Milo figured either she didn't like being stuck with him, or she was thinking the same thing he was: what was Mr. Pine
really
going to check on?

Of course, he reflected, as the two of them stomp-stepped their way through the crusty snow to the tree line, there was no reason Georgie should know that the woodshed was made of stone and couldn't be hurt by a falling branch, no matter how big it was. As for the rest of the outbuildings . . .

Oh.
Milo stumbled as he realized what the noise had been, and where his father was going.

Georgie took a huge pair of leaping steps to Milo's side. “What?” she asked.

“What?” Milo repeated, trying to look innocent as he resumed stomping toward the trees. Then he spotted something that made him stumble again, and he forgot all about what his father was up to.

There was a man in the woods ahead of them, stepping off the top stair onto the platform. He dropped the bag he was carrying with an explosive sigh and crumpled to the ground. Georgie made a strangled noise, then fell silent as she and Milo scrambled to reach him.

Gingerly, they picked their way to where he crouched. Georgie dropped to her knees. “Where did you come from?” she asked breathlessly. “Are you okay?”

“There's a bench over here, mister,” Milo said.

“I don't think I can move a muscle,” the stranger groaned.

Milo and Georgie looked at each other, then each reached for one of the man's arms. Carefully, they lifted him to his feet. Georgie slid her shoulder under the arm she held. “I'll help him to the house. Can you bring his bag, Milo?”

“Sure.”

Leaning on the blue-haired girl, the man allowed himself to be half carried, half dragged toward the inn. Milo picked up the bag he'd dropped and staggered along in their wake.

He helped Georgie haul the stranger up the icy stairs—poor guy, Milo thought, after the hundreds of icy stairs he'd just climbed—and they somehow managed to get the door open. Milo glanced at the bell as they passed it, wondering why he hadn't rung for the railcar. The whole thing was frozen, a solid mass of metal and ice.

They maneuvered the newcomer inside and deposited him on the bench in the foyer. “Somebody bring blankets!” Georgie called.
“Now.”

“Mom!”
Milo added in his best
it's an emergency
tone.

Mrs. Pine was there in a flash, with Mrs. Caraway a step behind her. Milo's mother stopped short, stared at the man shuddering from the cold and his hike up the hill, then got right to helping Georgie get him out of his coat.

“It's going to be okay,” Georgie said softly. “You're going to be fine. You're safe now.”

“Who is
that?
” Mr. Vinge leaned over them, peering down his nose for a closer look.

“Don't know,” Milo said. “He hiked all the way up from the waterfront, though. The bell isn't working.”

“Clem,” Mrs. Pine shouted, “bring some coffee!”

“My name's O-Owen,” the stranger managed. “Thank you.”

For the second time that night, Milo's jaw dropped. He looked at Georgie. She caught his eye and her face went redder than cold alone could account for. Yes, this must be the mysterious Owen she and Clem had in common.

“I'll get the blankets,” Mrs. Caraway said, and disappeared.

He was youngish, like Clem and Georgie. His hair was dark, and so was his skin, kind of, now that the color was coming back into it. His eyes marked him as at least part Asian.
He looks a little like me,
Milo realized with a start.
Or at least, he looks more like me than anyone else in this room.

“All right, coffee coming through. What's the big—” Clem Candler arrived in the foyer, took in the group huddled there, and stopped talking abruptly. The cup fell from her hand and bounced off the head of Mr. Vinge, who was crouched beside the newcomer. Steaming hot coffee spattered everywhere, and the mug shattered on the floor.

Mr. Vinge leaped away, clutching his head and howling, and backed into Mrs. Caraway as she came running down the stairs with an armful of blankets. Two adults and four quilts went flying. Mrs. Pine clapped her hands over her eyes, then pulled herself together and reached out to help Mr. Vinge to his feet. “I'm so sorry, Mr. Vinge. Come with me. I'll make up an ice pack.”

Clem stood stock-still, staring down at the young man on the bench. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide. For the first time since she'd arrived at the inn, her easy poise seemed to have left her.

Milo followed her gaze back to the stranger, Owen. He managed a weak smile. “I told you I'd find you, Ottilie.”

Georgie, who'd been watching this exchange just as closely as Milo, spoke one word softly, painfully.
“No.”

No one else appeared to hear her. Clem nodded slowly. “You win, Owen.”

Georgie burst into odd laughter. So odd, in fact, that when she first made the sound, Milo was almost certain it was a crying noise, something like a sob. But no, she was smiling—strangely—when she spoke. “He calls you Ottilie?
Ottilie?
”

“It's my middle name,” Clem said quietly.

Two shining lines of damp streamed down Georgie's face. “And I thought Clemence was ridiculous.” She wiped her face on her sleeve, stood abruptly, and stumbled up the stairs.

The group watched her go, then turned their attention back to the half-frozen young man. Clem tucked layer after layer of blankets around him, then she and Mrs. Caraway got him carefully to his feet and maneuvered him to the sofa.

“You know this fellow?” Mrs. Pine asked from the entrance to the kitchen. Behind her Mr. Vinge watched with a tea towel full of ice held to his temple.

“Yes,” Clem said. She took a steaming mug from Lizzie and wrapped Owen's cold hands around it. “Here.” She helped him raise the cup to take a sip.

It has nothing to do with Owen.
And here, as if out of nowhere, was an Owen who was on a middle-name basis with Clem. Georgie'd covered it up pretty well until the end, but it was clear she knew him too.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pine was somewhere outside, still investigating the noise. Milo was torn. On one hand, Owen, whoever he was, was a huge clue to . . . something. On the other hand, with all the ladies fussing around him, it wasn't as if he could answer any questions.

Still in his coat and boots, Milo slipped back outside and followed his father's footprints across the grounds. Just past the stone woodshed, the trail disappeared into the creaking woods. Mr. Pine's tracks were all but invisible in the darkness, but that didn't matter. Milo knew where his father had gone.

There was a scattering of old red stone outbuildings in the woods here, remnants of a long-ago time when the grounds on which Greenglass House stood had belonged to the monastery way at the top of the hill. Milo had turned one of them into a fort the previous summer. Another one had a spring in it that bubbled up out of the stony ground. Mr. and Mrs. Pine used another for storage, and had filled it with scrap wood and stone and old ironwork. The very oldest was nothing but three walls and two-thirds of a chimney, and it was pretty much held up by the vines that had grown around it. And then there was the one that hid the entrance to an abandoned subterranean railway line.

Nagspeake's failed railway experiment was called the BTS: the Belowground Transit System. Once, ages ago (or at least, before Milo was born), there had been a stop here called Sanctuary Cliff. And although the railway itself had been shut down, nobody had bothered to do much about the old stations that dotted the city. Most people, according to Milo's dad, didn't even notice them. Mr. Pine said that they'd been built to blend right into their surroundings, but Milo thought that if they were all like the Sanctuary Cliff station, the builders of the stations might actually have been trying to hide them. You'd never have spotted it if you didn't know what you were looking for.

The smugglers of Nagspeake had all sorts of tall tales about what they called “the old hole-and-corner railway.” It figured into the legends about several of the city's most famous runners, and some of the ne'er-do-wells who'd stayed at Greenglass House even claimed it had never really been abandoned.

Most of them, though, had no idea how true that was. There was exactly one train that still ran on the old lines, and one conductor who worked on that train. Milo and his parents and the Caraways were among the very, very few who knew this, because that conductor was a regular guest at the inn and had come to trust the Pines somewhere along the way.

Milo hiked through the trees and up the hill until he reached the snow-rimed red stone of the Sanctuary Cliff station house. Two figures stood outside it, staring at the dark slab of the iron-bolted wooden door, which lay at an angle on a drift of snow. A third figure emerged from the darkness inside the station and reached a hand out to the other two, who helped him scramble up the slope of the door and out.

“Sorry, mate,” said the third man, who wore a huge padded coat over gray coveralls, and a pair of leather-bound goggles pushed up on his forehead. “The lock was frozen solid.” Between the weird accent and the goggles, Milo immediately recognized him as the conductor of the last running Belowground Transit train, Brandon Levi.

“Don't worry about it.” That was Milo's father. Together the three men picked up the fallen door and pushed it back into place. “I'm just glad you didn't wind up stuck in there.”

The tall conductor turned, brushing snow from his leather gloves. “Oy, Ben, we've got company.” He waved. “Evening, Milo.”

Milo waved back. “Hi, Brandon. Don't worry, Dad. Georgie's back at the house. And there's a new guy.”

“A new guy?” Mr. Pine crunched across the icy snow and peered through the trees toward the house. “Since when?”

“He was coming up the stairs when Georgie and I got to the pavilion. His name is Owen,” Milo said, “and it seems like he knows Clem Candler, but he called her something else. Ottery or something. It was a weird name.”

“Good grief.” Mr. Pine turned back to Brandon and the third man. Milo recognized him too: Fenster Plum, the short, scruffy plant smuggler who was a springtime regular at Greenglass House. The very same Fenster who'd sailed with Doc Holystone and had once seen his ghost.

“I think,” Milo's father continued, scratching his head under his knitted cap, “you two had better come up with a story in case anyone asks what you do. Like I said, it's an odd bunch in there. There's a thief, at least, and while I don't think any of them look like customs agents or anything, I can't say for certain.”

“No worries. I'll tell them the truth and just leave out the bit about the Belowground Transit,” Brandon said easily. “Anybody wants to check with the fight houses on Morbid Street, there are plenty of people who'll vouch for me. Had a bout just last month.” He winked at Milo. “Won it with a round kick to the other fellow's head, right on the button.”

Then he and Mr. Pine looked at Fenster. “What?” the smuggler asked weakly. “I'll come up with something.”

“Come up with something
now,
” Brandon suggested with a scowl. “And try to stick to something you know about. You know what a bad liar you are.”

“I am not,” Fenster protested, which was so obviously a lie that even Milo rolled his eyes. “I know about flowers and bulbs and whatnot,” he said defensively. “I can say I'm a gardener or something.”

“That's not bad,” Brandon said. “You could say you work at the monastery and got caught in the storm on the way home.”

“Kind of a boring fake identity,” Fenster grumbled. “I mean, if I'm going to have one, why can't I—”

“It's perfect,” Brandon interrupted. “You can hardly get yourself into trouble with it, and that's what matters.”

Instead of trooping straight for the inn, Mr. Pine led the little group on a roundabout route through the woods that brought them to a flat white swath that cut through the trees—the snow-and-ice-covered dirt road. Then, with a grumbling Fenster bringing up the rear, they hiked down it back toward Greenglass House. “So it'll look like they came in on the road, instead of through the woods?” Milo guessed.

“That's the idea.” Brandon tapped the side of his nose. “The less said about the Belowground to strangers, the better.” He glared at Fenster again. “Keep it in mind, will you?”

“I'm not an idiot,” Fenster muttered.

They rounded a bend, and there were the giant snowy lumps of the Pines' truck and Mrs. Caraway's car in the inn's little parking lot, and the lights of Greenglass House glowing cozily through the aged glass windows beyond. Then, just as the four of them started across the lawn, a wind knifed through the trees downhill, sending everything in the world, it seemed, rattling and cracking even worse than before. The wind went on rushing uphill; there was a deep, rending noise somewhere among the evergreens; and barely a minute later, right before Milo's eyes, the lights of Greenglass House went out.