Homing (4 page)

Russell nodded, but his hands spread in a gesture of helplessness. "I know," he sighed. "But I figure if I gave in on this one, at least he might behave himself at the wedding." His eyes twinkled mischievously. "Or do you really want him to stand up in the middle of the ceremony and call you a harlot in front of the whole town?"

"He wouldn't," Karen said. Then: "Would he?" Russell shrugged. "He might. Anyway, it's only for three nights, and it occurred to me that you and the girls might like to have a few nights by yourselves before you get swallowed up by all of this." His right arm moved in a graceful arc that encompassed the surrounding acreage.

"So I agreed that you'd stay in his house until the wedding, and he'll use the guest room in the big house.

Okay?"

What was she supposed to say? Karen wondered. That she didn't want to stay in a house owned by a man who obviously disapproved of her? That she wanted to be with Russell, and that she didn't really care what his father thought? But then she realized that Russell was right-it was only a few nights, and it was quite possible that the Whole idea of having three new people on the farm might be as upsetting to Otto as the idea of moving to Pleasant Valley was to Julie. She would simply think of the next few days as a buffer zone-a time of transition for all of them. "Okay," she agreed.

"Then, let's get your suitcases inside," Russell told her.

He began pulling her baggage out of the trunk of the old Chevy. Karen was about to pitch in, too, when suddenly she felt an eerie chill run down her spine.

The kind of chill you feel when you know someone is watching you. Certain she knew the source of the chill, Karen turned to gaze up the hill at the house that, in just a few more days, would become her home.

In the front window she could see a silhouette.

Otto Owen, watching her.

Watching her, but not coming outside to greet her.

What if, after all, Julie had been right?

What if coming back to Pleasant Valley wasn't the best thing she'd ever done?

What if it turned out to be the worst?

Shuddering at the thought, she instantly rejected it. The day was perfect, and she was in love, and Pleasant Valley was beautiful, and she wouldn't let anyone ruin it for her, Least of all Otto Owen.

When she glanced up at the window again, he was gone.

Molly Spellman awoke with the first crowing of the cock, threw the cotton quilt back and scrambled out of the bed she was sharing with Julie for the last time. While Julie grabbed the blanket and wrapped it around her, rolling over to bury her face in the pillow Against the brightening morning, Molly scurried over to the window and gazed rapturously out Over the broad expanse of countryside surrounding the house. To her, every day on the farm brought a new adventure, and today's was going to be the biggest yet.

Her mom and Kevin's dad were getting married.

It seemed to Molly as if she'd been thinking about it forever, but she still hadn't quite decided how she felt.

Mostly, she thought it was going to be great, since after their mother married Russell, Kevin would be almost like her real brother, and a big brother was what Molly had always wished for most even more than a horse.

Now she would have both-the colt, whom she'd named Flicka, after the one in her favorite book, and a brother, too!

And she really liked Russell, although she still didn't know what she was supposed to call him. She couldn't call him Dad, since he wasn't really her father, and "Uncle Russell" seemed kind of stupid. Why would her mother be married to her uncle, anyway? So far, she hadn't been calling him anything. Pretty soon she'd have to make up her mind. The only thing that made everything less than perfect was Kevin's grandfather. Whenever he looked at Mollie her sister and mother-he always appeared angry.

And he hardly ever even spoke to them, unless he absolutely had to.

Yesterday she'd asked Kevin why his grandpa was mad all the time, but Kevin had just told her not to worry, that after a while he'd get used to having them all around and then it would be okay.

But what if he didn't get used to them?

And what was it he had to get used to, anyway? There wasn't anything wrong with them!

A vision of Otto Owen's angry face, his eyes smoldering deep in the wrinkled folds of his leathery skin, suddenly rose in Molly's mind. In her imagination he was staring at her, his gaze boring into her, making her heart pound with fear. Then, as she struggled to banish the terrifying face from her imagination, the old man himself appeared in the yard outside.

Molly felt a chill as he glanced toward her, and she quickly backed away from the window. She began getting dressed, fishing yesterday's jeans out from the jumble of clothes on the chair in the corner, and scrabbling through her open suitcase for a clean T-shirt. Stopping in the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice from the pitcher in the refrigerator, she peered warily out the window, searching for Otto Owen. If he was in the barn, she didn't want to go down there at all.

But what about Flicka?

Her eyes moving away from the barn, she searched the pasture next to it, but neither Flicka nor any of the other horses were out yet, which meant that Kevin must still be asleep.

Should she go down to the barn by herself? Kevin had shown her what to do the day after they'd come to the farm, and yesterday she'd gotten all the chores done without forgetting anything. Maybe by the time Kevin came down, Molly thought, she could have the chores finished.

But what if Kevin's grandfather was there?

She thought it over, then made up her mind. The horses needed to be fed, watered, and turned out into the pasture, and even if Kevin's grandfather was in the barn, he wasn't going to hurt her. He was just a cranky old man, and she wouldn't pay any attention to him.

She picked up some sugar lumps from the bowl on the kitchen table, pulled on her windbreaker Against the morning chill, then resolutely marched out the back door and crossed the yard to the barn.

But when she got there, the courage she'd carefully constructed in the security of the kitchen failed her.

What if he was inside?

What if he yelled at her?

She listened at the door, but all she could hear from inside was the sound of the horses nickering quietly in their stalls. Finally, working her nerve up once again, she pulled the big barn door wide open, then stood at the center of the opening, staring into the gloom within.

"M-Mr. Owen?" she called out, her voice cracking slightly. "Are you in there?"

There was no reply, and her voice echoed hollowly back at her.

As she took a tentative step into the shadowy interior of the barn, the courage she'd felt in the bright sunlight deserted her. She'd been in the barn yesterday morning, and the morning before that, and it hadn't been scary at all, she told herself But Kevin had been with her yesterday, and the morning before, Julie had been there, too.

Now she was alone. And the barn seemed much bigger than it ever had before.

"H-Hi, Greta," Molly called to Flicka's mother, who was gazing placidly over the door of her stall. Though she'd spoken more to hear the sound of her own voice than to greet the horse, the big bay mare whinnied in response. Encouraged by the sound, Molly screwed up her courage to move farther into the barn, stepping carefully through the gloom to the stall shared by Flicka and Greta.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out some of the sugar lumps, feeding one to the colt, then one to the big mare. As the animals munched the sugar cubes, Molly moved across the stall and opened the outside door. The horses followed her into the pasture, nuzzling at her pockets in search of more sugar. Molly, giggling, pushed them away, then went to the trough and turned on the water tap, letting it run until it flooded over, just as Kevin had showed her. While the water ran, she filled the feeding trough with fresh alfalfa, then returned to the barn to get a coffee can full of oats to add to the fodder.

It was while she was scooping the oats from the barrel near the tack room that she first heard the sound.

A faint humming noise, coming from somewhere in the barn.

Molly peered upward into the darkness of the loft, but could see nothing.

She frowned, wondering if she ought to find Kevin, or maybe even his father, but when she looked around again and still saw nothing, she decided to ignore the strange noise.

She took the oats out and added them to the fodder, then turned the other two horses out of their stalls into the pasture.

Returning to the barn, she began mucking out the stall that Flicka and Greta shared. She raked up all the soiled straw, shoveled it into the wheelbarrow, and took it outside to add to the big compost heap over by the kitchen garden, where Kevin had promised that she'd have her very own rows of squash and tomatoes. "They grow real fast," he'd told her the day before yesterday. "With a lot of stuff, you can hardly see anything. But with squash, you can practically watch them grow." Maybe this morning, before they had to get ready for the wedding, he'd help her plant the seeds.

The wheelbarrow empty, she started back to the barn, pausing to shrug off her jacket now that the sun was fully up. The day was starting to get hot. Leaving the jacket on the ground by the door, Molly went back into the barn, intent on finishing the cleaning of Flicka's stall.

The humming sound in the barn seemed louder at first, but as Molly swept the last of the dirty straw out of the stall, it began to fade away into her subconscious. She worked steadily, concentrating hard to be sure she didn't forget any of the things Kevin had taught her. Only when she was finally satisfied that the stall was as clean as Kevin himself could have gotten it did she move to the bin beneath the hayloft to gather fresh straw.

Now the humming was much louder. When Molly looked up, she saw its source at last.

High up, just beneath the eaves that soared above the hayloft, bees were circling, barely visible except when they flashed across the beams of sunlight that filtered through the cracks and knotholes in the barn's siding.

Fascinated, her eyes fixed on the darting insects, Molly started up the ladder to the loft. She had barely gotten to the top when she heard a voice from below.

Otto Owen's voice.

"You stop right there," he said. Though his voice wasn't really loud, there was an urgency in it that stopped Molly cold. She froze on the ladder, and then, looking slowly upward, she saw it.

Her heart began to pound.

Not more than five feet away from her, clustered around one of the posts that supported the barn's roof, was an enormous, crawling, humming mass.

A swarm of bees.

Terrified by the sight, Molly nearly lost her grip on the ladder.

The swarm was almost two feet across, black with the bodies of thousands of insects crawling all over each other while hundreds more hovered in the air around the undulating mass.

"It's all right, Molly," she heard Otto tell her, his voice low but very clear. "Just start coming back down, real slow. Don't move too fast, and don't startle them, and they won't hurt you."

For a long moment, her gaze fixed hypnotically on the writhing mass of insects, Molly didn't move at all. Only when Otto spoke to her again, his voice much sharper, did she come out of the spell and begin to creep back down the ladder.

Otto Owen was waiting for her at the bottom. Callused hands seizing her by the shoulders, he carried her out of the barn, not setting her down until they were halfway across the yard. "Why did you go up there?" he demanded, his deep-set, frightening eyes fixing on her.

"Didn't you hear the bees? Didn't you see them?"

Molly, terrified, began to cry. "I j-just wanted to see what they were doing," she wailed. "They didn't-sting me or anything."

Otto glared down at her, and for a second Molly was afraid he was going to hit her. Then the angry set to his expression faded away and he stiffly knelt down so his eyes were level with hers. "Now you listen to me, young lady," he said, his voice still severe, but no longer threatening. "If you ever see that many bees again, you stay away from them, all right?"

Molly's chin trembled as she struggled to stop crying.

"B-But they weren't coming after me."

"No, they weren't," Otto Owen agreed. "But if you'da bothered them, they mighta come after you." Molly's eyes widened. "They coulda killed you, Molly," the old man went on. "Don't you never, ever go near that many bees.

Not unless you know exactly what you're doing."

As the words sank in, Molly turned to look back at the barn. A few bees hovered in the air, and more were clinging to the barn's siding. From the yard, though, they looked completely harmless. Then the slamming of the screen on Otto's back door distracted her, and she turned to see her mother hurrying toward her.

"Molly?" Karen called. "What's going on? Are you okay?"

Molly pointed to the barn. "Bees!" she called out, her fear of a moment before suddenly forgotten in the presence of her mother. Running toward Karen, she started to tell her what had happened, pointing toward the barn.

"They're up there, Mom. A whole swarm of them!"

Karen's eyes shifted to the barn's second story.

What was Molly talking about? There were a few bees up there, going in and out, but Then it happened.

Suddenly the barn itself seemed to erupt into life as thousands of bees churned through the cracks and knotholes. In seconds the air was black with them, their humming a deafening drone that seemed to shake the very earth. Then they were swirling toward her. Karen grabbed Molly's hand and began racing back toward the house, half dragging her daughter behind her.

"What are they doing, Mom?" Julie asked, a hard knot of fear forming in the pit of her stomach as she gazed at the mass of bees that rolled just beyond the window. "Are they trying to get in?"

With an arm around each of her daughters, Karen stared out the window at the swarming insects. As soon as she'd gotten Molly safely back inside Otto's house, she'd phoned up to Russell's. Kevin had answered, telling her not to worry, that he and his grandfather could take care of bees. "I don't think so," Karen finally replied, more out of need to reassure her daughters than because she herself felt that the insects would remain safely outside. "We'll just stay right here, and let Kevin and Otto deal with them."