Stray Narrow

by Jerusha Jones

  Pete read my mind. “Not sure why he called me now, but it’s quiet. I can spare a trip out there to see what he’s thinking about. Dredging, most likely. He might want to open up a bigger staging area to accommodate more barges during harvest. The Coast Guard will have to approve it, and their permit applications can be tricky.” Pete shrugged. “Might just be paperwork.”

  And therefore boring. Which explained the hand-off of our small charge, who’d busied himself with walking, heel-to-toe, along my masking tape lines, arms outstretched for balance. Also, there was no good reason for a co-op manager out in Arlington to know that Pete now had a tagalong boy. That would prompt a lot of questions we weren’t at liberty to answer just now.

  Pete and I weren’t saying a lot, but the thoughts were zinging back and forth. He was watching me closely with those crinkle-cornered sapphire-blue eyes and a faint grin on his face, then he moved in to give me a good-bye kiss.

  There were no gakky noises from the peanut gallery this time.

  “I’ll be late,” Pete whispered, his arms strong and warm around me. “You’ll be okay?”

  “No. I’ll be pining away for you,” I whispered back, and gave him an extra kiss in the soft spot under his ear for good measure.

  oOo

  Burke should get paid intern wages. Sadly, the Imogene Museum isn’t in the habit of remunerating interns, counting instead on their general goodwill and volunteer generosity, our budget being somewhat restricted. And more importantly, perhaps, the board of directors would have severe ethical difficulties with employing child labor.

  But he was a cheerful helper, and we made significant progress in plotting out the paths of the life-size forensic diorama during the next hour. He also had been thinking deeply about his potential living situation, judging by the nature of the slew of questions he lobbed at me.

  He started with, “Why don’t you and Pete have kids?”

  “We just got married a few months ago. Haven’t had time to think about it, really.” I shrugged and double-checked a measurement with my laser sight. The exhibit needed to be wheelchair accessible, and that necessitated sufficient width in the aisles of the diorama.

  “Are you going to have kids?” he persisted. Good grief. The nosy matrons of Sockeye County had nothing on the boy.

  “I don’t know. There are a lot of variables in that equation. We’re still working on, you know, getting along with each other, first and foremost.”

  Burke snorted derisively. “You get along fine. All that smooching.” He rolled his eyes, but I wasn’t going to validate his reaction by letting him know I’d seen the snarky motion.

  “I’m pretty sure your parents smooched a time or two as well.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. He didn’t need a reminder of what he’d lost.

  Burke responded immediately with a heavy sigh. “Yeah.” He stomped on a skittering dust bunny the size of a great-granddaddy cockroach that had been released from a corner with all of our bustling.

  With his head bent and his shaggy hair hanging in his eyes, I couldn’t read his expression. How do kids grieve? Burke had been remarkably mellow about it so far, but he’d also had five months to become accustomed to the idea. The shock was in learning that his father’s absence was now permanent rather than temporary. It would undoubtedly take that reality quite some time to sink in.

  He flopped his arms awkwardly and balanced on one leg to brush the sole of the dust-bunny-obliterating sneaker on the jeans on his opposite shin. “It’s just that I’d kind of like a brother,” he continued in a voice so quiet I had to stop writing dimensions in my notebook in order to be able to hear him. His little face scrunched for a reluctant concession, “Or a sister.”

  It was my turn for a heartfelt exhale. “I can’t make that kind of promise. But I understand. I was an only child too. That’s probably why I like books so much, not having playmates when I was growing up.”

  “I wouldn’t be bossy,” Burke continued, as though he hadn’t heard me. “I’d show ‘em stuff, and I’d let ‘em use my things sometimes. We could even share a room if we had to.” Apparently he had it all planned out.

  “You’d make a good big brother,” I said softly.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, without a trace of pride.

  I took my human-connection starved boy home for an early supper when I could hear his stomach rumbling from across the room.

  oOo

  Cleaning. Cleaning like a madwoman.

  I’d spent all day making a mess (new exhibits always look like a disaster zone until they don’t—it’s a fine line in development), then spent the next hour at home in a flurried frenzy of dusting, vacuuming, and mopping. Tuppence was banished to the back porch until I could remove her footprints and nose smudges from the lower regions of the kitchen.

  Because I’d recalled—somewhat belatedly—that our interview with the social worker was on the books for that evening. If I was going to prove that I could care for a child, I also had to prove that I could care for a rambling farmhouse. And I wanted to do so much more than just meet the most basic requirements. I wanted to shine—maybe to demonstrate to myself as well as to Hester Maxwell that I could do this thing called parenting.

  It’s just that the Tinsleys’ gift to us was so much bigger than my fifth-wheel trailer, and I was still learning exactly how much time I needed to allocate to general upkeep, not to mention preventive maintenance. We loved the space, of course, but it required a commensurate commitment in time and elbow grease.

  It was also a weird sort of déjà vu of our marathon session at the museum the day before. At least I’d gotten some good practice in.

  I’d just spotted a full, dark, Pete-size handprint on the wall below the light switch next to the front door, and had a bottle of Windex poised, trigger primed to obliterate the grease, when a thud on the front porch stopped me cold.

  Tuppence hadn’t barked. The drapes were closed, so I hadn’t seen a sweep of headlights cross the front windows as a car approached. We still had half an hour until the agreed-upon meeting time. And the noise had come from the front porch.

  I didn’t know Hester—yet—but from our brief chat on the phone, she’d struck me as friendly, easy-going, and efficient. The kind of person who’d know to come to the back door, just as Olivia Oliphant had known, and thereby conforming to the standard social practice in these parts.

  Noises on the front porch are highly suspect, regardless of the circumstances. Unless it was a wayward raccoon looking for a handout. I tapped the hinged flap on the old-fashioned fish-eye peephole in the front door out of the way and bent to peek through.

  That was no Hester Maxwell. He stood like a man. Wiry, slender, stiff with irritation. And behind him was a bigger guy. They were in quiet consultation, pitched toward each other, and standing well to the side of the beam from the front porch light.

  The light was on a timer. Out of habit, and for the sake of appearances, even though all coming and going occurred through the back, so it previously hadn’t been an issue that it didn’t provide the best illumination.

  But I’d still seen enough to do some mental matching with Ms. Oliphant’s sketches.

  The men were casting murky shadows and hunched next to the porch swing. But the height and size discrepancy between the two was another confirming factor. Their relative demeanors were exactly as Burke had described them.

  Murderers, standing on my front porch. I forgot how to breathe.

  They hadn’t actually knocked. The thud I’d heard must’ve been accidental, and the conversation was so hushed that I couldn’t pick up any snatches of it even though I’d tipped my ear toward the crack between the door and the door frame.

  “Who is it?” Burke hissed.

  He’d been washing the dishes from supper—I’d figured that if he was going to eat so much he might as well learn how to deal with the aftermath—but I’d been concentrating so hard on the distorted view through the peephole that I hadn’t he
ard him as he’d approached. Or maybe he was naturally stealthy as a result of living in hiding in the forest for a couple years. But now he was pressing his body against my hip as though in desperate need for reassuring contact, worry etched across his face. He was too short to see through the peephole himself.

  I didn’t have enough saliva in my mouth to tell him.

  My silence was sufficient—or he read the fear in my eyes—because he grabbed my hand and nearly yanked my shoulder out of its socket.

  CHAPTER 20

  I wanted walls around me. Solid two-by-four studs bolstered with lath and plaster and paint. Maybe the basement—that glorious concrete box of a bunker deep below ground with shelves stuffed full of Harriet’s canning jars.

  On second thought, the basement had only one way in—and one way out. Walls were still sounding good, though. Crucial, in fact.

  But Burke was insistent as he tugged me toward the back door. “Outside!” he whispered.

  “We can hide in here.” I planted my feet, but the kitchen linoleum was slick in its newfound cleanliness, and Burke was determined, and I skidded along on the flat soles of my moccasin boots.

  “No we can’t,” he argued breathlessly. “Like fish in a barrel. We have to get out.” He continued towing me across the room. “Hurry!”

  I had the presence of mind to snatch our coats off the hooks as he barged—somehow silently, unless adrenaline had temporarily turned me deaf—onto the back porch. The kid was a wonder, and I began to wonder myself just how much he knew about hiding and slinking through the woods. Much more than I did, clearly. So far, his instincts had preserved him, and it was perhaps prudent for me to trust them—for both our sakes.

  Tuppence scrabbled up from the old blanket she’d been snoozing on, instantly eager, her tail whipping furiously in anticipation of something—anything—exciting. She’s always ready to go for a hike.

  And trek we did, with our arms pumping and our legs churning—a mad dash in surreally sloggy snow, leaving our gashed footprints behind like find-us-this-way arrows, disturbed only by the prancing circles my dog made around them.

  The thing I’d forgotten to grab? My phone.

  Already I was missing its comfortable weight in my pocket, but there was no going back now. I risked a hasty glance over my shoulder. No dark, man-shaped silhouettes against the snowy landscape near the house, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be, and soon.

  Burke headed straight for the pole barn. I was thinking this strategy was far too obvious, but I was also panting too hard to voice an objection. It was all I could do to keep up with him.

  He crashed open the door into the barn—unlocked as well, per usual—and immediately careened around my pickup toward Pete’s workbench on the far side.

  In weather like this, I park the truck in the pole barn instead of up closer to the house. It saves having to crack ice off the door handles or sweep snow off the windshield the next morning. But the old workhorse did us no good at the moment because my keys, too, were in the house. I don’t know how to hot-wire a vehicle’s ignition. It’s one of those important skills they don’t teach you in school. And I suspected that in spite of all his forest-smarts, this was one street-smart Burke didn’t have either, not that he could’ve reached the pedals anyway.

  He was making a desperate racket now, flinging scrap lumber and dowels and a spare broom handle and plywood remnants out of Pete’s previously neatly organized stash. Homeowner spares, Pete liked to call the remaining bits and bobs that were too big and/or too valuable to throw away once a project was finished, always with a note of satisfaction in his tone.

  “Here!” Burke called, dragging out a huge, flattened cardboard box. The one our new washing machine had been packaged in. The one that might come in handy if we ever wanted to spray-paint something, according to Pete. This hoarding of potentially useful stuff had been a new aspect of his personality I hadn’t known about earlier—probably because neither of us had had the space to store anything beyond the most bare of necessities before. And it was a trait that was taking me some time to get accustomed to.

  “Come on!” Burke was flapping his arm, snapping me back to reality, and urging me toward the door on the other side of the barn.

  I pushed off from the pickup’s fender and dashed across to him, my breathing rate still not having descended into a comfortable zone. Oh, for young legs again, but this was no time for lollygagging.

  Burke’s intention and ingeniousness became apparent the moment I stepped out into the snow again.

  Our property has a gentle slope to it, down to the river. Gentle is a relative term, compared to the steep, nearly perpendicular basalt rifts that comprise the majority of towering rock faces through which the Columbia River Gorge has been carved over millennia.

  He was already sitting on the flattened cardboard, and I dropped onto the platform behind him and scooted in against him, wrapping my arms around his middle and straddling my legs out alongside his shorter ones.

  Burke began rocking furiously, and I reached back and shoved hard against the gravel under the snow, and we were off, tilting backward against the gathering speed and hanging on for dear life.

  Our hill has stupendous giddyap-and-go. Within moments, I was breathless again, for a completely different reason. I had to let go of Burke and snatch at the raised cardboard flaps on either side of us, adding my own strength to his for fear that our makeshift transportation would break apart and disintegrate in midair.

  Because we did depart terra firma a few times, briefly, and then slammed back down. Snow is not so soft and cushiony as I’d assumed it was. We were two thin layers of paper pulp and some snarled packing tape away from disaster.

  There was a rough shout somewhere in the distance behind us. I couldn’t look back, but the noise—not stealthy in the slightest—could only mean one thing. We’d been spotted.

  But another, madder rush of clamor filled my ears and wiped every other thought except the vital grip of cardboard in my frozen hands from the forefront of my mind. We were screaming through the air now, across that horizonal intersection of gas and solid, the frosty surface whizzing and scraping and juddering below us, sounding like an endless zipper as we hurtled downhill at a pace that was beyond reckless.

  My eyelids were stuck open, the lashes iced together, creating a picture frame for our impending doom.

  At least we weren’t going to sail straight into the frigid water. We were going to splatter all over the side of the intervening railroad berm—the one built from boulders and covered over in the past several decades with a scant layer of wind-deposited soil and a few hardy weeds and now about eight inches of thoroughly misleading snow.

  I had a sudden urge to scream—not that it would do any good.

  In a rapid reversal of g-forces, we rocketed through the little dip ahead of the berm, pressed like lumps of sodden clay into our cardboard toboggan, then swooped up the side of the berm with a stomach-churning lurch.

  Way, way up.

  And up.

  And up.

  Until gravity took over and we rolled back down, heels over heads in a jumble of limbs and joints and boots and flapping coats, and at least one tooth that went through my lower lip.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Are you dead?” The small voice, blaring in the sudden hush of a pricklingly cold night, came from my near left.

  We were intertwined, and I didn’t know which parts were mine and which were his. But now I knew what crash test dummies feel like. Tuppence chose that moment to stick her surprisingly warm nose in my face, accompanied by a short whine.

  “Not hardly,” I groaned. “Are you?” Air seared into my gasping lungs.

  “No.” But the word was shaky and pinched.

  I rolled to my side and slowly pulled in my legs until I was kneeling. I brushed snow off Burke’s face and chest, quickly ran my hands over his arms and legs. “Where does it hurt?”

  “Everywhere. Nowhere.” He awkwardly pushed
up on his elbows, and squinted at me. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.” I swiped my sleeve across my mouth, realizing a moment later that I was dripping crimson blops onto the pristine snow.

  “We’ve gotta move,” I whispered around my swelling lip and growing awareness of pain—dull, knotted pain in several locations I didn’t want to think about.

  “I know. But still, that was awesome!” Burke grunted as he scootched onto his knees.

  He is such a boy. In other circumstances, I suppose we should’ve taken a moment to appreciate our daring feat—and that we’d survived.

  Instead, I gingerly pulled him to his feet, and he seemed steady on them. For the first time, I swung my head to look back up the hill, and there they were—two men in dark clothing sliding downhill sideways in the track we’d made, their foot placement making them look like tentative snowboarders standing out in relief against the bluish-white background.

  They wouldn’t be tentative for long.

  “Up and over the berm,” I said. “The riverbank is rough with big boulders. It’s our best chance at having cover.”

  “I know. I already explored here. I was going to hop an eastbound train on this side while it was still going slow from crossing the bridge.” Burke tested his first step, and began to climb.

  I had nothing to add to that revelation, except to note with an incongruous burst of brief hopefulness that it was phrased entirely in the past tense. Maybe he was no longer considering carrying on with his solo sojourn. Besides, I had no ability to speak, as I, too, was clawing my way back up the berm, grabbing whatever stout weed stems and stray, denuded blackberry brambles I could for balance. I only noticed the thorns piercing my palms in a surreal, abstracted way as my hands developed traces of reluctant blood.

  “Don’t linger,” I huffed as we neared the top. “Straight across.”