Wolf Hollow (12 page)

It wasn't easy to get back to sleep that night.

I'd been over to Andy's farm with my father many times to trade produce for dairy—apples for cheese, beans for butter—so I couldn't help but picture it now, dark and quiet, then the constable knocking on the door, the porch light coming on, Andy's father appearing, rumpled with sleep. Rousing Andy to come down for questions.

I hoped Andy knew where Betty was. Maybe she had realized that all her lies were about to catch up with her and she had run away. Or maybe she'd gone out exploring, though probably not in the rain, probably not without Andy.

I couldn't imagine that Toby had anything to do with it. In a way, I wished he was, indeed, far from here by now. But the bigger part of me hoped he'd turn up as always.

Had he left the camera hanging from a hook in his shack, I would have believed him gone. Toby would not have taken our camera, though it was really his, too.

When I finally wore myself out with thinking, I dreamed about Betty, but nothing clear or memorable. Just a murky swirl that faded as soon as I woke.

It wasn't morning. Too dark for morning, but something more. The feel of night. Still, I could sense movement below.

This time, when I went downstairs, I found that my parents were up and dressed, breakfast on the table, though it was just four o'clock, early even for farmers at this time of year. Constable Oleska sat at the table, eating eggs and sausage.

“Did you find her?” I asked from the doorway, blinking in the light.

“Annabelle, what are you doing up?” my mother said. “It's still nighttime. Go on back to bed.”

“I'm all slept out,” I said. “Did Betty come home, Constable?”

“No, I'm afraid not,” he said. “We'll start the search at first light. Her grandpa and some neighbors are already out there, but they won't find anything in the dark. The rest of us will head out soon, fresh and dry, and we'll find her if she's to be found.”

He didn't look fresh and dry to me. I suspected he'd been up all night. “What did Andy say?”

“Your parents and I were just getting into that,” the constable said. He talked while he ate, obviously famished. “Andy's a little too big for his britches, so I expected some lip, but he was shook up pretty good. He told me that he and Betty had planned to skip school and spend the day together, tramping around the farms and, as he put it, ‘having a lark.'”

The constable shook his head. “The boy was mostly calf when he talked about Betty. All the rough gone out of him. He said they were supposed to meet at the Turtle Stone first thing yesterday morning, but at the last minute his pa made him stay home to fix a fence. By the time he got to the stone, she was gone. He went looking for her, wound up at school, found out she hadn't shown up, so he went to the Glengarrys'. Nobody was there. He figured they'd taken Betty someplace. So he went home.”

“Did you ask him about the belfry and all that?” I asked.

“Not now, Annabelle,” my mother said. “There will be time for that business when she's found.”

Which made sense, I suppose, but I didn't see this as separate strands. It was, to my thinking, a rope, any part of which was twined with every other part. But I held my peace.

My mother warmed the constable's coffee and the three of them talked about the search while I helped myself to breakfast and listened.

And then Aunt Lily appeared in the doorway. She'd taken the rollers from her hair and it fell in anemic curls around her shoulders. She was still in her robe and slippers, traces of night cream under her eyes. “Did you find him?” she asked.

“Who?” we all said, like a family of owls.

“Toby,” she snapped.

“I'm not looking for Toby,” the constable said. “I thought you meant Andy.”

“Who isn't lost and doesn't need finding,” she said. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the table. “It's Toby you ought to be looking for before he snatches another young girl.”

“Lily!” my mother said sharply.

“You think Annabelle shouldn't hear such things? I agree, Sarah, but you're the one who thinks she belongs here at the table with adults. And I'd like to know, Constable: Has it occurred to you that the two of them are together somewhere, Betty his prisoner?”

The constable sighed. “Of course it occurred to me, Lily,” he said, “and I've already called the state police so they can start looking for him. Or them.”

Such talk shocked me deeply. I had never thought such a thing. I was beginning to agree with my aunt about one thing, at least.

“I think I will go back to bed,” I said.

My mother gave me a sad little smile. “Good girl,” she said. “And maybe you and the boys should stay home from school today. You're tired. And nobody will be paying much attention to their schoolwork with all this going on.”

Another shock, since my mother had never suggested such a thing before. We had to be pretty sick or there had to be a blizzard raging to keep us away from our lessons.

I nodded. “Okay.”

I tried to go back to sleep. I really did. But I could not stop thinking about what my aunt Lily had said. I couldn't imagine why Toby would want to take Betty with him, make her his “prisoner.” She was a nasty girl, and he knew it. But for some reason Aunt Lily and even the constable thought they might be together.

I was sure they were wrong.

And I feared that I was the only one who cared as much about helping Toby as finding Betty.

My parents liked him, true enough, but a missing girl was a missing girl. Nobody else was likely to put Toby ahead of that.

I lay in my bed and tried to admit that Toby had left our hills. But to have taken the camera? To have left without saying good-bye? Without even some small remembrance to let us know . . . to let
me
know that he was sorry to be leaving?

I could not believe that. I was convinced that Toby had not left after all. That he was right where he was supposed to be. Right where the police would be able to find him as soon as they went looking.

And I asked myself, in the face of this possibility, what I was prepared to do about it.

I dressed in the dark, adding layers so I could stay out long in the cold, and crept down the stairs. When I peeked into the kitchen, I found that my father and Constable Oleska were gone. My mother worked at the sink, her back to me. No sign of Aunt Lily.

I crept into the mudroom, aptly named given the amount of slop we'd all tracked in over the past day, carried my boots to the door, pulled them on from the threshold before I stepped into the wet, and quietly closed the door behind me.

Anyone who's ever gone from warm and bright to cold and dark knows how I felt. To my back, all safe things. Before me, a night not as black as it had appeared through the windows, but dark enough, the sky overhead clear now, no clouds to whiten the darkness, precious little starlight and no moon at all. The trees bowed to one another as if before a dance, making their own sad music. And I was suddenly filled with misgivings.

I had been out in the night before, many times, but never alone, not past the end of our lane.

Still, as I hesitated, my eyes adjusted to the night and the darkness paled some. And it would be morning soon. And I knew where I was going.

Toby's shack was in Cobb Hollow below the Glengarry place, on the other side of our hill from Wolf Hollow, away from the schoolhouse, set in the woods not far off a dirt lane I'd walked many times. It wasn't too far. And there wasn't much between here and there except woods.

I didn't like the thought of bears, but I'd seen one only once, and it had scampered away at the sight of me. Sometimes people talked about a mountain lion in the area, but not for a long time. No more wolves around here. And I really wasn't completely alone. With me, out here in the dark, were men searching for Betty.

I would have to be careful to stay out of their way. If they mistook me for her, it would deal everyone a terrible disappointment. And me some trouble.

So I kept to the woods, following deer trails, careful in the slick leaves. I knew my way simply by heading downhill. It was difficult to get lost in these hills since every hollow had a lane or a proper road running through it and, alongside, a house now and then, each one of which I knew.

When I reached level ground, I took the dirt road toward Silas Cobb's old place. I didn't see a soul, but once or twice I heard people calling back and forth in the distance. The burned-out foundation of the Cobb house was set back in the trees far enough so it was not visible from the road, but there was still a passable lane and a crooked wooden post sign that said
COBB
to mark the place.

The lane was marshy, and the trees on either side bent low overhead, making a tunnel that dripped and trembled in the wind. There was no sign of a clearing where the Cobb house had once stood. It had been entirely swallowed up in bramble, off to one side of the lane, and trees had grown up through the foundation, but they were thin enough that some sky showed above, and I could tell from the suggestion of blue in the black that the sun would soon be up.

As I paused there, I heard something new.

It wasn't wind. Nor was it the sound of searchers in the distance. More like an animal sound. A call of some kind, I thought. Not owl. Not fox.

Most ground animals and brooding birds kept quiet at night, for fear of attracting the attention of predators, so whatever was making that odd noise had no such fear.

I'd heard a porcupine once or twice. A blend of tooth-chatter and whine, mixed with the mild bleat of a bike horn with a leaky bulb.

This sound was something like that, and I was suddenly frightened. I'd seen a dog once, its nose bristling with quills, and I had no intention of tangling with a porcupine.

But as I stood there the sound stopped. I listened for it, but all I heard was wind.

Toby's shack was just another bit ahead, behind a stand of thick trees and ivy. He had kept the area around it clear. I could make out a stump with an ax in it and I thought, unbidden, of King Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone.

At the door to the shack, I hesitated for only a moment, the word
prisoner
rising in my mind, before knocking.

To my astonishment, something inside moved. Made noise.

I stepped back away from the door just as it opened.

And there was Toby.

Toby was wrapped in an army blanket, his feet bare.

“Annabelle.” It was both statement and question.

“Hey, Toby.” I realized that I had no idea what his last name was. No way to call him Mister anything.

He looked past me, perhaps expecting my father to walk out of the gloom. “What's wrong?”

“The constable told us you'd gone away and might have taken Betty with you or that you know where she is. And he called the state police and they are going to be here soon to look for you.” I had more to say, but that much had used up all my breath.

He thought about that for a minute. “The girl who said I threw a rock at the German.”

I nodded, the beginnings of confusion like an itch inside my head. “Yes. She's been missing since yesterday morning. Didn't you know that? People are looking for her everywhere.” I could see that this was truly news to him. “The constable came to see you last night, but you weren't here. He thought you'd left. Maybe with Betty?” My voice trailed away. His white face was even whiter now.

“You didn't know she was missing?”

He shook his head. “I was fishing under the creek bridge. Traded the fish to Turner for jerky.”

The Turners raised cattle and pigs for meat. My father liked their jerky, too, and it lasted for a long time, with or without an icebox.

“Stayed in their barn until the rain let up. Came back here late.” He turned and looked into the smokehouse. “Someone stole one of my pictures.”

I'd never heard Toby say so much at one time.

“Constable Oleska took it,” I said. “The one that showed me on the path to school. And he looked at the pictures that just came back in the mail, too. I'm sorry about that, but Aunt Lily gave them to him. You took one from up the hill, above Mr. Ansel's wagon, the day Ruth got hurt.”

Toby gave me a hard look.

“I didn't throw that rock,” he said.

Hearing him say it was good, though I hadn't realized I needed to hear it until I did.

“I believe you,” I said. “But now they know you were on that hill, and Betty said she saw you throw the rock and now she's missing. They think you did some bad things, Toby.”

Toby took a long breath. “I did,” he said.

I crossed my arms over my chest, which made me feel bigger. “What did you do?”

He pulled the blanket tighter around himself.

I waited.

I said, “But you didn't throw that rock.” It still sounded too much like a question.

He shook his head. “She did.”

I was surprised, though I had suspected as much.

“You saw her?”

“I tried to take her picture, but she threw it so fast. And then she ducked into the bushes. And that boy with her. But not before she saw me a bit higher up than they were. And knew that I'd seen her.”

“Then why didn't you say so when my father came to talk with you?”

Toby looked away. “Things come out right. Or they don't.”

“What? Toby, you should have told him what happened. Nobody's going to believe you now.”

“Nothing I can do about that,” he said.

An odd and frustrating way to look at the world, but I was not Toby, and he was not me.

We stood for a long moment. All around us, birds woke up the sky.

And I heard, in the distance, people calling for Betty.

Toby took a step back into the smokehouse. Which made up my mind for me.

“All right,” I said firmly. “I want you to come with me now.”

Toby's mouth twitched just a little. It was the closest thing to a smile that I'd ever seen on him. “You sound like your mother.”

I took that as a compliment. “Good. Because if she were here she'd say the same thing. Please, now,” I said, “will you get dressed and come along?”

Toby seemed to be torn. “Where to?”

“Somewhere safe until we can sort things out.”

He shook his head. “Doesn't matter much to me.”

“Well, it matters to me,” I said. “And if you don't care one way or the other, how about we do it my way?”

Again, that twitch.

Again, in the distance, the sound of people calling.

After a few minutes, Toby joined me outside the smokehouse. He was dressed as always, the camera around his neck, his guns slung across his back.

The walk back up the hill was harder, but Toby climbed behind me, waiting while I tree-pulled myself up the steepest parts, worse because they were slippery. The strengthening light helped a lot, but it worried me, too.

We were very watchful and as quiet as we could be, given the shouting in the distance. Had I feared real hunters, I would have worn red, but we were both in brown and black, invisible if we stood still and hid our faces.

As we crested the hill and made our way toward home, I realized that anyone would be able to see us through the farmhouse windows if we came across our pasture, so we kept to the woods until we were on the far side of our barn, cut across the open quickly, and ducked in from the back. I went ahead first, calling to see if anyone was around, happy that the dogs were part of the search, pretending to help.

When one of the horses swung his big head over his stable door and looked at me curiously, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Time for you to be out, Bill,” I said, unlatching the Dutch door and pulling it open. He snorted at me and sauntered down the aisle toward the big open gate that led to the pasture. I freed Dinah next, and she followed him into the sunlight, her tail twitching. Next, the milk cows, Molly and Daisy. We never named the calves, since we had to give them up so quickly, but our milk cows we kept until they had to go.

I put out my hand as they lumbered past me, and the second of them planted her big square black nose in my palm for a moment, the hair on it a soft bristle.

Had my father not been out searching for Betty, he would already have set them loose by now. I hoped that the sight of them in the pasture would keep anyone from coming out to the barn to do that chore, though they might come to see who had done it.

I wondered if anyone had missed me yet.

“Follow me,” I whisper-called to Toby, opening the door to the stairs that ran up the middle of the barn to the threshing floor.

Ours was a banked barn set into the side of a hill with stalls down below that opened onto a long aisle. A cistern squatted on a slab at the back of the barn, next to a long corncrib.

A huge pair of side doors on the top level opened to a lane and staging area on the upper slope. We could drive hay wagons up that lane and in through the side of the barn, store the big equipment in winter, work there in foul weather. Big tubs of oats stood next to grain chutes that led straight down to mangers in the stalls below. Part of this upper level had a very high, peaked roof hung with ropes and tackle for hoisting bales into the loft that consumed the better part of the space along the rafters.

It was an old barn with some missing planks and years of dirt and straw built up on the floor, but it was dry enough and plenty snug in the hayloft, where my father liked to nap on rainy days. I hoped for a nice stretch of dry weather.

At the foot of the long ladder to the loft, Toby stopped. He looked at the ladder, looked at me, looked back at the ladder. I started up. “Come on,” I said over my shoulder. “You can wait in the loft until everything gets sorted out.”

But he stayed where he was. “I don't like high places,” he said.

I almost fell off the ladder. He didn't look pleased when I started to laugh, so I stopped and climbed back down.

Here was a big man in a black oilcloth coat, three guns slung across his back, long gnarled hair and beard, a black hat, a white face barely visible in the shadow of its rim. A man who'd been through a terrible war. A man who lived mostly on game and berries in a smokehouse in the woods.

“You're afraid to climb up to the loft?” I asked him.

He ducked his head. Shifted his guns.

I chewed my lip. “You live in hill country,” I said. “You're high up most of the time.”

He shook his head. “Not the same.”

“Well,” I said. “You can either climb up to that hayloft or you can hide in the corncrib with the mice.” This time, I, too, heard my mother in my voice.

Perhaps it was the word
hide
or the idea of clambering into a corncrib that did it. Perhaps the suggestion that he was a mouse. Toby didn't say. But after a moment he flapped a hand at me and, when I began again to climb the ladder, followed.

From the top, I looked back and saw him slowly climbing, two feet on every rung, gripping the side rails hard, his left hand knotty and slick with scars, focused on what he was doing, never looking down. The hardest part was at the top. He slapped his good hand out flat on the floor of the loft and dug his nails in. I grabbed his wrist, though largely for moral support, and he crawled off the ladder and clear of the edge of the loft, breathing harder than he had as we climbed the hill out of Cobb Hollow. I didn't tell him that it would be harder still to climb down.

At least I could assume he'd stay where he was for a while. That first step down onto the ladder from above would keep him put while I figured out what to do next.

“I'll be back as soon as I can with some food and water,” I said. “And a bucket for, well, you know.” I could feel myself pink up. “If anybody comes in the barn, just scoot back between the bales and stay quiet. The boys might come around, but they'll probably stay out of the loft.”

Toby sat down on a bale of hay. When he laid his guns aside and took off his hat, he looked like a boy himself. Much older, of course, but just as young.

“Don't worry,” I said. “Everything will be fine.”