The Winter Place (5 page)

The older woman scrunched up her brow, cutting Tess off with a dismissive huff. “It's solid oak my dear.” She reached over Tess's shoulders and rapped on the door behind her. “He can't hear you through it, so there's no need to keep up the act. Now listen. A little pretend from time to time is harmless enough, but your brother doesn't understand . . .” She trailed off. “It seems to me like you might be taking advantage of him.”

Tess opened her mouth to speak, but then she thought better of it. Her father could forgive a lot, but cussing out their landlady would be too much, even for him.

“You've got him convinced he's tracking a real live bear,” Mrs. Ridgeland went on. “It can't be good for his condition, traipsing all over the place, and at this time of year. You're going to wear him out.”

“His
condition
is fine,” Tess said.

Mrs. Ridgeland sighed, her eyes suddenly glistening. “Oh, honey,” she said.

Tess felt either a scold coming or a forced hug. She didn't care to get either, so she said a loud
“thank you!” and used that ink cloud to slip back out the door, closing it firmly behind her. Axel had gone down the front steps to wait in the yard. He usually had a good sense of when people were talking about him and would make himself scarce for their benefit.

“The flashlight?” he said.

“No batteries.” Tess set down the steps. “Come on.” Axel picked up his broom, and together they passed through the angel-crowded yard and left Mrs. Ridgeland's house behind them. Everything had grown closer and larger in the dark.

They walked back home in silence. The A-frame burned through the birches up ahead, alongside the taillights of the last cars still trickling away from Mud Lake Park. Tess was still mulling that look of surprise that had flashed over Mrs. Ridgeland's face, wondering if maybe she'd imagined it, when she caught sight of a tall, slim silhouette standing against the glow of their house. At first it looked like their father, but he wasn't supposed to be back from teaching for another few hours. It was a stranger. Tess shushed Axel—he'd been yammering about irregular weather patterns as a potential catalyst for a confused, migratory grizzly—and they approached quietly.

For his part, the stranger didn't seem to notice
them coming. As the man came into fuller view, Tess saw that he wasn't tall—he was
towering
. He skimmed the underside of seven feet, if you counted his boots and hat, but he was just about as skinny as Axel, which made him look like some gaudy marionette from a stop-motion movie. He wore a long duster, patched here and there with patterned swatches. No question this joker had been an attendant or presenter at the faire. He even had an elaborate wizardish walking stick, which he used for support as he lowered himself into an odd squat: free hand on his knee, his narrow butt waggling out like a mockingbird's. Tess realized that he was talking to somebody in the woods—a second stranger, among the trees. That was enough for her. Renaissance Faire or no, oddly dressed strangers in the night were to be avoided. She took Axel's wrist and made to lead him silently across the road.

“Maybe he knows where the bear is?” Axel whispered.

“Who cares where the bear is,” she said, tugging on his wrist. He wouldn't budge.

“Come on, now!” the stranger was yowling. He had an accent, but from where Tess couldn't be sure. “You're being an infant. If it's too early, then it's too early. You'll just have to wait and come back later.”

Whoever was in the woods made no reply.

“Having a sulk?” the stranger said. “I bring you all the way to this armpit and you're having a
sulk
?”

Again Tess pulled on Axel's wrist, but he set his heels. The kid weighed almost nothing, but when he wanted to, he could make himself leaden.

“I'm going to go ask,” Axel said, twisting out of her grip and continuing down the road. Slowly, the stranger began to grow more distinct. His patchy duster was neatly tailored, with suede elbow pads, and on his feet was a pair of mud-spattered knee-high gum boots. His head was roughly the shape of a sideways egg—so oblong that Tess wondered for a moment if it might be some kind of fancy prosthetic makeup or a well-fitted mask. He wore a beat-up old fedora with a sprig of lily of the valley sprouting from the band. He'd apparently decided to attend the faire dressed as either a depression-era wizard or a vaudeville hobo.

“You think I won't go back without you?” The stranger stood up to his full height, his body unfolding. “I can do that. See how well your sorry self makes it home without me.” He gave his head a sad, violent shake. And as his face whipped about, he caught sight of Tess and Axel approaching. “Oh!” he said, startled. He looked back into the woods and then at them again. “No pictures,” he said.

“What?”

The stranger pointed at the camera slung over Axel's shoulder. It took Tess a moment to realize that the finger he was pointing with was one of only three on that hand. The stranger had been badly mangled, and the ring and pinky fingers of his left hand were missing entirely. Hard to fake that with makeup.

“It'll cost you,” the man said. “We have a booth for that. You need to get tokens.” He flashed them a smile, and wow, was it ugly. His mouth was thin and stretchy, and his teeth . . . It's hard to describe them. They were clean and even. But they seemed to vibrate slightly. They looked like they wanted
out
.

Axel, for his part, was totally unfazed. “What makes you think we want your picture?”

The stranger smiled again, and Tess wished he wouldn't. “Not mine,” he said. “Hers.” He nodded at the dark patch of woods, and there it was—not it,
she
. The brown bear. She was lying down in the shadows, her big head resting on her front paws. She did look sulky.

“Oh,” Axel croaked.

“That is, more or less, the desired effect,” the stranger said, with a pixie-dust wriggle of his three fingers.

“Are you her trainer?” Axel said.

“I can't say that, no. I haven't the temperament for hoops or balls, and I'm afraid that she doesn't, either. I'm just a lowly
Keeper
.” The stranger said this word like it was some kind of official title. He even gave a little bow and doffed his cap, revealing a single lick of red hair on his otherwise bald head.

“But you're
her
keeper, right?” Tess said. “You know that she escaped?”

“Escaped?” The Keeper jabbed his walking stick into the crook of his elbow and clapped his hands once. “
Escaped
would imply that I get a vote in where she goes or what she does when she gets there.”

From inside the woods the bear got up onto her haunches and seemed to moan, or growl. Axel took a step back, cupping the camera in his free hand. Tess saw that he was trying to be discreet about adjusting the settings, flipping open the flash.

“Well, she came right into our yard,” Tess went on. “She could have hurt somebody.”

“You're telling me,” the Keeper said. “Old girl is a monster.” Then, to the still grumbling grizzly: “Quit it, you drama queen.” He removed his fedora, took a mantislike step into the woods, and batted the bear across the muzzle with it. Amazingly, she didn't eat his face. She behaved
neither the way a wild bear would nor the way a tame one should.

Axel's broom fell away as he lifted the camera and snapped a picture. But no sooner had he taken it than the Keeper reached over and snatched the camera away.

“Hey!” Axel sounded more surprised than anything else.

“I said no pictures.” The Keeper was calm but plainly annoyed.

“That's our dad's camera,” Tess said.

“Trust me, he won't miss it.” The Keeper brought the camera up to his face, seeming to puzzle over it.

“He's a knight of the realm,” Tess said, her cheeks warming. “He'll get you kicked out of the faire.”

“Some realm,” the Keeper said. Then, without any warning whatsoever, he lifted the camera high above his head and let it drop. It landed on the embankment with a heavy, glassy crunch. For a moment, Tess and Axel just gawked at him.

“You're going to break it!” Axel shouted. He scooped up his broom and swung it at the Keeper. To Tess's horror, the ragged head caught the strange man directly across the face. Everything went quiet. The Keeper stared down at them, and Tess made ready to grab Axel and sprint for the house.

“Good reach,” the Keeper said. For a moment it looked like his face had turned red. But it wasn't just him—the whole roadside was bright and blinking. Tess glanced back at the road and saw a police car driving up, very slowly, cherry top whirling. It turned down the dirt driveway to the A-frame, where it stopped. Someone must have called to complain about the bear.

“I'm going to tell them what you did,” Axel said.

“Be my guest,” the Keeper said, unfurling his mangled left hand in the direction of the police cruiser. A pair of officers had gotten out, walking slowly toward the front door of the A-frame. They took such tiny steps.

“You think I won't?”

“I'm sure you will,” the Keeper said. “Have at it.”

Axel hesitated, maybe reluctant to leave his sister alone with this crazy person. Behind the Keeper, in the shadowed park, the bear let out another groan. She stood, quite suddenly, on her hind legs. “Hey, now,” the Keeper said, sounding nervous for the first time. The bear groaned again and then rolled her haunches so that her front paws landed to one side. She spun around and charged deeper into the woods, away from her keeper, lost in the firefly-dotted depths of the park.

“Stupid thing,” the Keeper said. “She's going
to get lost.” Then he turned back and gave them one last look. He reaffixed his hat to his broad, ugly head, then picked the camera up off the embankment and tossed it to Tess. The view screen blinked and sizzled—the thing was definitely broken. “It was nice to meet you both,” the Keeper said. “And I'm sorry.”

“Don't be sorry,” Axel virtually hissed. “You can't just wreck our dad's camera and then say
sorry
.”

“That you had coming,” the Keeper said. “What I'm sorry for is everything else. Everything that's about to happen to you.”

And with that cryptic bit of garbage, he took his walking stick in hand and bounded jauntily into the woods after the bear.

T
he two policemen had reached the front door and were tapping on it gingerly. Axel cut through the birches and then around the A-frame, coming right up behind them—a young officer and an older one, both in strange, dark blue uniforms. These were city cops, Axel realized, not the troopers who normally patrolled town. The bear must have covered a lot of ground.

“Hey, you just missed them!”

The men spun around. The younger one had his hand on his belt, not six inches from his holster.
Stupid,
Axel thought. Not them—him. He knew better than to sneak up on city people.

“Whoa, kid. You shouldn't . . .” The older officer looked flustered. He glanced at his partner,
and it seemed like they were having a silent argument over who would speak next. The older one finally gave in. “Do you live here?”

Axel nodded impatiently. “Listen, they're just in the park, but they're getting away.” He pointed across the road, into the murk of the woods, still flickering with siren light.

“Who is?” The younger officer glanced into the evening. It was plain to see that he was still half spooked.

“The bear,” Axel said. “She's with her keeper, but I don't think he knows what he's doing. Also, he broke my dad's camera!”

The officers looked at each other and had another long stretch of talking with their eyebrows. “I don't know about any bear,” the older one finally said. “But I do need to talk to your mom—I mean, Mrs. Fortune. Is she home? Is this the Fortune house?”

Axel stared at them both. Police coming up from the city, asking for his mother, not knowing enough not to. Axel's own knowing started that very moment, but for the next few minutes he'd resist it.

“Our mom is dead,” Tess said. She'd appeared in the middle of the driveway, her arms hanging slack at her sides, the camera dangling so low that it grazed the gravel under her feet. “But this is the Fortune house.”

“That's your sister?” The younger officer said, his voice creaky. He seemed to have had enough of kids appearing out of the darkness.

“My name's Tess.” Axel's sister sounded weirdly hesitant—like her name was somehow up for debate.

“He's getting away,” Axel said. “The bear is, too.”

“Okay, now,” the older officer said, nodding like he was listening. But he wasn't—his attention was on Axel's sister. “Are there any adults in the house, young lady? You have any other brothers or sisters?” Then, as a little aside to Axel: “Mind that's not a question you should normally answer to a stranger, all right? We'll just make an exception this time.” As though Axel were growing younger under this nice old dude's gaze. The officer had started out talking to a ten-year-old, and now Axel was maybe six or seven to him, tops. All the proof he needed that something was wrong. Wrong in a new kind of way, as big a kind of wrong as had entered his life since he was a baby. Still, he kept himself blind to it.