Wolf Hollow (14 page)

When I was finished, Toby looked astonishingly unlike Toby.

“You look like your own brother,” I said, meaning a version of himself.

Toby looked at me quite seriously. “I don't have a brother.”

“Sister?”

He shook his head.

I paused. Bit back my curiosity.

“Now the beard,” I said.

Toby jerked his head back. “Not too short,” he said.

I nodded. “Don't worry.”

But before I could begin, I heard the dinner bell ringing hard back at the house.

“Uh-oh,” I said, handing him the scissors. “My father's home. You'll have to do the beard yourself.”

He stood up suddenly. “Will you let me know if they found her?”

“I will,” I said. “But be careful now.” I returned the soup jar and spoon to my pocket. “I don't know who might come out here next. Hide all the rest of this behind the bales, okay? I'll be back as soon as I can.”

This time, when I looked back up from the threshing floor, Toby was peering over the loft rail.

If I hadn't known it was him, I wouldn't have recognized Toby looking down at me. He was that different, shorn.

I expected to find my grandfather and my father and my brothers, maybe some hungry neighbors come home for soup.

These I got, but much more, too.

The yard around the mudroom door was littered with dogs of all colors and sizes, empty feed bowls, water bowls ringed by tongue-splash.

Inside, the mudroom had earned its name, hemmed with pairs of clotted boots, the floor patterned with sloppy prints.

In the kitchen, wet and weary men crowded around the kitchen table, many standing, muddy to the knees, all but one in their stocking feet.

Here, in our very own kitchen, was a trooper from the state barracks, the only one in the room with his boots still on. They reached to his knees and were mostly clean, so I knew he hadn't been in the woods all morning like the others. He creaked with leather: belt, boots, holster, chin strap. There was a row of long, sharp bullets tucked into loops in his belt. The handle of his gun was a smooth wood—almost pretty—his uniform stiff and sharp from hem to hat, except for some goofy pouches that stuck out from the sides of his trousers.
Aha
, I thought.
Jodhpurs
.

Constable Oleska was talking.

“. . . and every county bordering ours, but nobody's seen him. Of course, he's bound to be in the woods somewhere, more likely to be spotted by some hunter or a farmer. The word is out and it will spread. Someone will see him eventually and we'll get a chance to talk to him. But Officer Coleman is here to help us find Betty, not Toby.”

I sidled around to stand by my grandmother, who was ladling out soup while my mother carried the hot bowls, one by one, to the men. I caught a glimpse of my brothers through the trooper's planted legs, huddled under the table, wide-eyed.

Officer Coleman had a deep voice, of course. It went well with his square chin and broad shoulders. He was a man straight out of a book.

“The constable is right,” he said. “But we can't look for Betty properly unless we know why she's missing. Shouldn't be looking for her at all, around here, if Toby's taken her.”

And there it was again. That horrible suggestion. I wanted to yell,
He didn't! He's in the barn reading
Treasure Island
!
That would teach them a thing or two.

“Until we find him, and we will, we have to assume that Betty's just hurt and can't call for help. You could walk right past her in the leaves and mud and not see her at all.”

“She was wearing a yellow poncho when she left her house yesterday,” the constable said.

“Well, that's a blessing,” the trooper said. “But you wouldn't see that if she were in an oil shack or down a well.”

Inside, I went still.

I felt like someone had reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. Somewhere from my memory, a whisper.

“There are old pits in Wolf Hollow,” my grandfather said. “Pretty much filled in, but maybe she stepped into a pocket and went down.”

“We looked all around the hollow,” Andy's father said.

I wondered where Andy was. Perhaps out searching, still.

“Keep looking,” the trooper said. “If he took her, you won't find her. If he hurt her, though, you might find . . . something.” He glanced at my mother over his shoulder. At me.

“You might find something,” he repeated. “If she's still around here and just hurt, she might be unconscious. In one of those pits and can't answer your calls. Keep calling, though. Even if she can't answer, she might hear you and take heart.”

“Wouldn't the dogs find her then?” This time it was Mr. Ansel asking the question. His accent, in this company, sounded stronger than ever.

The trooper shook his head. “Not your dogs, I'm afraid. And our hounds won't be here until later today if we're lucky. Maybe tomorrow. They're working a job in Waynesburg. But we'll be getting some help soon. People come from all over when there's a search on. In the meantime, we keep looking. And I want to talk to your son,” he said to Andy's father.

Mr. Woodberry got a look on his face and said, “He didn't do nothin'.”

“Well, nobody said he did, but I'm told he was close to the girl. With her before she disappeared. And he might know more than he thinks he knows.”

The men were all eating their soup and rolls, settling down into the quiet business of food and rest, while the trooper talked some more. “Constable Oleska told me about the other troubles you've been having. The girl who lost an eye”—at which Mr. Ansel paused, his spoon halfway to his mouth. “Your son cut on a taut-wire.” This addressed to my father. I saw James, under the table, reach up to finger the scab on his forehead.

“I found a coil of sharp wire in Toby's smokehouse, tucked under his bedding,” Officer Coleman continued. “And there was blood on it.”

My mother went still. She was standing next to me and I felt her change. Stiffen.

Again, I wanted to yell out,
Betty took it. Toby didn't hurt anybody.

But I didn't. I needed time to think about all this. To listen to the whisper in the back of my mind.

I filled a mug with soup and ate it standing up, slowly as Toby had, listening to the men talk about where they'd been and what they'd seen. And for the first time I began to wonder in earnest where Betty had gone.

Until now, I had spent all my time fighting the suggestion that Toby had done her harm. I'd assumed that Betty was playing another of her stupid games, or that she had run off somewhere. But now I began to wonder where she really was and why no one had found her.

When the men had their fill, they went back out to continue the search, and this time I really did want to go with them. But I stayed behind to help with the dishes, a chore that always helped my thoughts settle, and hoped I'd hear that whisper again more clearly.

“Annabelle, if that plate gets any drier it's going to turn to dust,” my grandmother said.

I looked down, surprised to see the same plate I'd been drying for quite some time.

“Sorry, Grandma. I wasn't paying attention.”

“Not to that plate, anyway.” She nodded at the rack of steaming dishes waiting their turn. “How about you get on with those.” She still had a sink full of dishes meant for that rack.

I picked up a mug, dried it, picked up another, dried it. And so on, my hands with a mind of their own as I thought and thought and thought about the wire and the trooper and the rest of the mess.

When we were done with the dishes, I helped sweep up the dried mud in the kitchen from where the men had been, though the worse of it was in the mudroom. “Do what you can,” my mother said. “But don't scrub anything. It will just get mucked up again at suppertime when they come back.”

It was so unlike my mother to leave a mess that I realized, suddenly, how tired she was, too. And how worried.

“I'm sure they'll find Betty soon enough,” I said.

She sighed. “I expect they will, one way or another.”

Again, that suggestion of something worse to come.

Something everyone else seemed to expect.

I was glad that I didn't, though I was beginning to think that perhaps I should.

“Can I go out and look around some more?” I asked.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she replied. “I was surprised when you didn't ask to go back out with the rest of them.”

I tucked my broom into the closet. “I'm a little tired,” I said, which was the truth. “But I would like to go on out for a while.”

My mother nodded. “Same as before: Don't go far. Don't get in any trouble.”

“I won't,” I said, hoping I meant it. “I'll be back soon.”

Toby was again hiding in the bales when I returned to the loft. I announced myself softly and then stopped short at the sight of him.

“I climbed down,” he said nervously. “With everyone inside for lunch, I decided to clean up at the cistern, like you said.”

He had trimmed his beard short, scrubbed himself clean, washed his hair so that it stuck up, featherlike, all around his head.

He looked . . . new.

In my father's clothes, he could have passed for anyone, really. An ordinary man, too thin, a little ragged, unremarkable but for the scars on his hand.

Having seen the transformation, I could not unsee it. Could not know if he was as changed as he seemed to be.

But it occurred to me—and I warmed, in the process, as if a small sun were rising—that no one else would know him as Toby, changed as he was.

“Golly,” I said. “You look so different.”

He looked down at himself. “I feel like a stranger.”

I nodded. “You look like a stranger.”

He sat on a bale and looked at me expectantly. “What?”

“What what?”

“You seem worried.”

“Well, I am worried. I'm worried about all kinds of things. But I just got worried about something new.”

“What?” he said again.

It was odd to feel like the grown-up, but that's how I felt as I stood up there in that loft and talked to this man who was four times my age.

“If I had a way to . . . let you . . . to help you clear things up, you know, about what Betty said . . . would you do it?”

Toby gnawed on that for a minute. “It would depend.”

“On what?”

“On what you had in mind.” He touched his short hair, as if he wore a new hat that didn't quite fit. “Everything's moving a little too fast for my liking as it is.”

But I thought that fast was probably better than not at all, which was what he'd have done without me.

For the first time, I wondered if I had made things worse by trying to make them better.

“Well, you can wait here for as long as you want,” I said. “And maybe they'll find Betty and realize you didn't do anything wrong.”

Toby rubbed his bad hand and looked at me curiously. “Or?”

“Or you can do something about it.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Such as?”

I spent a moment deciding where to begin.

“Last year,” I said, “I walked up over the hill above our house, just at twilight, real quietly, hoping to see a mother and fawn I'd seen there before. I crept to the top of the hill and stood there for a long time, watching, but there weren't any deer anywhere. Until I batted at a fly and spooked a doe standing against the trees at the edge of the field. She was hiding in plain sight.”

Toby peered at me. “That's a very nice story, Annabelle.”

“I'm glad you liked it.” I waited for the penny to drop.

He waited right along with me.

“You're the deer,” I finally said.

“I'm the what?”

“You're the deer. You're the one who's hiding in plain sight.” I realized he hadn't seen himself in a mirror, had no way of knowing how entirely he'd changed. “No one will know you're Toby, not like you look now.”

He made a face. “Even if that's true, how is it going to help me fix anything?”

So I told him.