by Terry Brooks
Then, maybe, the buzzing in his ears would lessen and the headaches would go away and he wouldn’t be spending all his time arguing within himself about what he should do.
The phone picked up on the other end, and a man said, “Yes?”
The buzzing stopped. “Agent Robinson?”
“Good afternoon, Deputy Sheriff Spence.” Robinson’s voice was smooth and reassuring. “What do you have for me?”
Spence looked off into the distance, unsure once more. Ross didn’t seem like much of a threat to him. Hell, he could barely walk with that bum leg. Nest didn’t seem all that taken with him either, not in the way Robinson had suggested she was. He was pretty old for her, more like a father. It just didn’t feel right.
“Deputy?”
“Sorry, I was checking on something.” He brushed his concerns aside, hearing whispers of derision and urgency that warned him of the dangers of equivocation. He was anxious to get this over with. “I was out at Nest Freemark’s house just a little while ago. John Ross was there.”
“Good work, Deputy. What did you tell them was the reason for your visit?”
“Oh, I made something up about checking on drug sales in the park, said it was a rumor we were investigating. I just asked if they’d seen anything, either of them.” He flashed on the angry response he’d gotten from Nest when he’d pushed the matter with Ross, and decided not to say anything about that part.
There was a pause on the other end. “Did you notice anything unusual? Was Ross carrying anything?”
Spence frowned. “Like what?”
“I don’t know, Deputy. I’m asking you.”
Spence flushed at the rebuke. “He was carrying a walking stick. He’s got a bad leg.”
“Yes. Anything else?”
“Not that I could see.” His breath clouded the air in front of him. The buzzing returned, working its way around inside of his head, making him crazy. He pushed hard at his temples. “I don’t get it. What am I supposed to be looking for?”
Robinson’s voice was iron sheathed in velvet. “You know better than to ask me that, Deputy. This is an ongoing investigation. I’m not at liberty to reveal everything just now.”
The whispers burned their way past the buzzing, filling Larry Spence’s head with sound and pain. Don’t ask stupid questions! Don’t go into places you don’t belong! Do what you’re told! Remember what’s at stake!
Nest! Nest was at stake!
He pictured her in his mind, upset with him now, and it was all because of John Ross. He pressed at his temples anew and leaned into the shelter of the call box, suddenly angry and belligerent. It wasn’t right, the way she protected him. What was he doing here, anyway? He was taking up all the space in her life, so that there was no room for anyone else.
Like me! She should be with me!
Just do as you’re told, and everything will be all right, someone seemed to say. Then he heard Robinson add, “I’ll be in touch.”
He caught his breath. “But I thought that was all you wanted me to do,” he said, and the line went dead.
Ross and Josie finished their cookies and milk, waiting on Nest’s return. Josie talked about life in Hopewell, about working still at Josie’s, about the people who came in and the way they were. Ross mostly listened, not having much he could tell her that wouldn’t reveal things he wanted kept secret. He did say he had gone back to university a couple of times, audited some courses, taught a few classes. He talked a little of some of the places he had been. Josie listened and didn’t press, taking what he would give her, giving him the space he required when he chose to back away.
“I’d better be going,” she said finally. “You can tell Nest I dropped by.”
She rose, and he stood with her, levering himself up with his staff. “You sure you don’t want to wait?”
“I don’t think so.” She carried their glasses and the empty plate to the sink and began rinsing them. “Will I see you again before you leave?” she called over her shoulder.
The question startled him. “I don’t know,” he said automatically. Then he added, “I hope so.”
She turned, her eyes meeting his. “Would you like to come to dinner tomorrow night?”
The back door opened and closed, and they both looked toward the hall. A moment later Nest appeared, rubbing her hands briskly. “Cold out there. Hi, Josie.” She looked from one to the other. “Have I missed anything?”
“We were just visiting,” Josie Jackson offered brightly. “I stopped by with some cookies, Nest. John was keeping me company.” She hesitated only a moment. “I was just asking if he might like to come to dinner tomorrow night.”
Nest never looked at John Ross. She walked over to the sink, picked up a cookie from the tray, and began munching on it. “Sounds like a good idea to me. Why don’t you go, John?”
Ross felt himself transfixed by Josie’s eyes. “You’re all invited, of course,” she added, her smile warm and encouraging.
“No, thanks anyway,” Nest interjected quickly. “I have a Christmas party to attend. I was planning on taking Bennett and Harper with me. I’ll just take Little John, too. There will be lots of other kids there.”
She looked at Ross. “John, you go to Josie’s.”
Ross was thinking that he shouldn’t do this. He wanted to, but it could only lead to the same sort of problem he had encountered with Josie Jackson fifteen years ago. It didn’t make any sense to let history repeat itself when he knew he couldn’t change it. Besides, it meant leaving the morph alone with Nest, which was dangerous for her. It meant taking a risk of the sort he should never even consider.
On the other hand, Nest Freemark seemed to be the gypsy morph’s only hope. He had brought the morph to her in an effort to save it. He would have to give it up to her at some point, and time was running out. Maybe it would help if they could spend some time together without him.
“John?” Nest said quietly.
He was still looking at Josie, taking in her familiar features, her face and body, so much of it remembered so well after all these years. Everything about Josie was just right, a composite so perfectly formed that he couldn’t imagine her being any other way. Being with her made him feel as if anything was possible and none of it mattered. Only her, and only now.
Fifteen years, and she still made him feel like this. A sweet ache filled him, then a small whisper of despair. No matter how she made him feel, it would end in the same way.
“I’d better take a rain check.”
Josie stared at him without speaking for a moment. “All right, I understand.” She started for the kitchen entry, her eyes lowered. “Bye, Nest.”
She went down the hall, stopped to pull on her coat, scarf, and gloves, and went out the front door. Her car started up in the drive and pulled out onto Woodlawn.
Nest busied herself at the kitchen counter, putting away the rest of the cookies. When she looked at Ross again, her expression was neutral. “Sit down, and I’ll tell you what happened in the park.”
He did as she asked and listened patiently as she talked about her meeting with Two Bears. But his mind drifted like smoke on the wind.
Outside, it was beginning to snow.
Chapter 13
By nightfall, eight inches had fallen and more was on the way. Local forecasts called for as much as two feet by morning, and a second storm was expected by Christmas. Ross listened to the weather report on the radio and stared out the kitchen window at the thick white fluff that blanketed everything for as far as the eye could see—which wasn’t far, because snow continued to fall in big, swirling flakes that reflected the street and porch lights in gauzy yellow rainbows and curtained away the night.
Bennett Scott was sitting on the living-room floor with Harper, working on an old wooden puzzle. Harper would lift each piece and study it, then set it down again and move on. The puzzle had only twelve pieces, but she seemed to regard the preparation process as more important than actually building anything.
Little John had turned away from the window and was sitting on the floor beside them, watching intently. He still wasn’t saying anything. He still barely paid attention when he was spoken to. He was still a complete enigma.
Nest put together a stew for dinner, chopping up potatoes, onions, carrots, and celery, adding frozen peas, and throwing the whole mess in with chunks of browned chuck roast and some beef broth. She worked on memory and instinct, not from a recipe, and every now and then she would hesitate and consider before choosing or passing on an ingredient. She spoke sparingly to Ross, who sat there with his gaze directed out toward the snowfall and his thoughts drifting to Josie.
It bothered him that he found himself so obsessed with her. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought of her before he’d seen her this afternoon; he’d done so often. But his memories of Josie had seemed part of a distant past that was unconnected to his present. He supposed that seeing her again and remembering how strongly he felt about her simply pointed up the emptiness of his life. Bereft of family and friends, of loved ones, of relationships, of an existence of the sort other people enjoyed, he was one of the homeless he had worked with years ago in Seattle. It was only natural, he supposed, that he should want those things that others had and he did not.
Once or twice he pondered the appearance of Two Bears, but there was nothing he could make of the Sinnissippi that wasn’t self-evident. A pivotal moment in the war between the Word and the Void was at hand, and Two Bears was there to monitor what happened. Perhaps he was there to attempt to tip the balance, as he had done twice before in Nest Freemark’s life, but Ross knew it was pointless to try to guess what O’olish Amaneh intended. The Indian lived in a sphere of existence outside that of normal men, and he would do what was required of him. For Ross to dwell on the matter was a waste of time.
But so was thinking of Josie. So there he was.
It was after six and dark two hours already when Robert Heppler called. He wanted to know if Nest would go tobogganing in the park. A check of the ice by the park service people revealed it was strong enough to take the weight of an eight-man sled, and with the snow packed down on the chute, the slide was slick and ready. Robert was taking Kyle while Amy stayed home with his parents, but he needed a few more bodies for weight. How about it?
While she was listening to Robert and before Ross even knew the nature of the conversation, he saw her do something odd. She started to say it probably wasn’t a good time or something of the sort, and then she looked off into the living room where Harper and Little John were sitting with Bennett, hesitated a moment, her gaze lost and filled with hidden thoughts, and then said she would come if she could bring her houseguests, two adults and two children. Robert must have said yes, because she said they would meet him at the slide at eight, and hung up.
She relayed the conversation to Ross, then shrugged. “It might be good for the children to get out of the house and do something kids like.”
He nodded, thinking she was jeopardizing the morph’s safety by taking it out where it would be exposed and vulnerable, but thinking as well that the morph was useless if she couldn’t get close enough to it to discover what it wanted of her and that maybe doing something together would help. There was no rational reason to believe going down a toboggan slide would make one iota of difference to anything, but nothing else seemed to be working. Nest had gone out to Little John several times before starting dinner, sitting with him, trying to talk to him, and there had been absolutely no response. She was as baffled by the morph’s behavior as he was, and trying something different, anything, no matter how remote any chance of it working might seem, was all that was left.
“Maybe Little John will like Kyle,” she offered, as if reading his thoughts. “Maybe he’ll talk with someone closer to his age.”
Ross nodded, moving to help with silverware and napkins as she carried plates to the table and began arranging the place settings. The morph had taken the form of a child for a reason, so treating it like a child might reveal something. He thought it a long shot at best, but he couldn’t think of anything better. He felt drained by the events of the past twenty-odd days, and the gypsy morph was a burden he wasn’t sure he could carry much longer.
They sat at the table and ate stew with hot rolls and butter and cold glasses of milk, the morph eating almost nothing, Harper eating enough for three. Then they cleared the dishes and bundled into sweaters, parkas, boots, scarves, and gloves, and headed out into the night. Nest had enough extra clothing that she was able to outfit everyone, even Ross, who wore spares she had kept from her days with Paul. The night was crisp and still, and the wind had died away. Snow continued to fall in a hazy drifting of thick, wet flakes, and the ground squeaked beneath their boots. No other tracks marred the pristine surface across her backyard and into the ball diamonds, so they blazed their own trail, heads bent to the snowy carpet, breath pluming the air before them.
Ross limped gingerly at the rear of the group, his staff making deep round holes where he set it for support. All the while, he glanced around watchfully, still not trusting Little John’s safety. As they crossed the service road, he caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. An owl winged its way through the trees bordering the residences, lifting away across the park, a tiny shadow attached to its neck—Pick, on patrol.
“Mommy, look!” Harper called out, dancing this way and that with her mouth open and her tongue out, trying to catch snowflakes. “Mmmm, stawbury! Mmmm, ’nilla!”
They crossed the open spaces of the ball diamonds toward the east end of the park and the toboggan slide. Lights blazed from the parking area, which was filled with cars, and shouts and screams rose from the slopes where the sleds were making their runs. Ross peered through the snowfall, which was slowing now, turning to a lazy drifting of scattered flakes against a stark backdrop of black sky and white, snow-covered earth. The toboggan slide came into view, timbers blocky, dark struts against the haze of lights, looking like the bones of a creature half-eaten.
“Mommy, Mommy!” Harper was calling excitedly, pulling on Bennett’s arm, trying to get her to move faster.
They found Robert waiting with the toboggan and Kyle throwing snowballs at another boy. Nest made quick introductions. Robert seemed pleased to see Bennett Scott and Harper and wary of Ross. Ross didn’t blame him. Robert Heppler had no reason to remember him with any fondness. But Robert shook his hand firmly, as if to prove his determination to weather the unexpected encounter, and beckoned them onto the slide.
The toboggan slide had been in Sinnissippi Park since Nest was a small child. Various attempts had been made to dismantle it as unsafe, a climbing hazard that would eventually claim some unfortunate child’s life or health and result in a serious lawsuit against the park district. But every time the subject came up for discussion, the hue and cry of the Hopewell populace was so strident that the park board let the matter drop.
The slide was built on a trestle framework of wood timbers fastened together by heavy iron bolts and sunk in concrete footings. A fifteen-foot-high platform encircled by a heavy railing was mounted by ladder. Two teams could occupy the platform at any given time, one already loaded and settled in the chute, the other waiting to take its place. The slide ran down from the top of the bluff to the edge of the bayou, where it opened onto the ice. A space had been cleared of snow all the way to the levee and the railroad tracks. A good run with enough weight could carry a sled that far.
At the top of the slide, a park district employee stood just to the right of the chute with a heavy wooden lever that locked the sled in place while it was being loaded and released to free the sled when it was ready to make its run.
When he got a close look at how it all worked, Ross took Nest aside. “I can’t do this,” he told her quietly. “Getting up there is just too hard.”
“Oh.” She glanced at his staff. “I forgot.”
His eyes shifted to the others. “I’d better wait here.”
She
nodded. “Okay, John. I’ll watch him.”
He didn’t have to ask whom she was talking about. He stood aside as Robert got the rest of them in line, carrying the toboggan tipped on end with its steering rope hanging down the bed. When they reached the ladder and began to climb, Nest took the lower end of the toboggan to help boost it up. Ross glanced downhill to where the toboggan chute rested comfortably in its cradle of support timbers, lowering toward the earth as it neared the ice in a long, gradual incline. Lights brightened the pathway, leaving the chute revealed until it reached the ice. On the ice, everything was dark.
Robert’s group climbed the platform and stood waiting for the sled ahead of them to load and release. Ross shifted his weight in the snow, leaning on his staff, his eyes wandering off into the trees. A pair of feeders slid like oil through the shadows. He tensed, then shook his head admonishingly. Stop worrying, he told himself. There were lights and people everywhere. A few feeders creeping around in the darkness didn’t necessarily mean anything.
He glanced skyward for Pick, but didn’t see him.
Moments later, Robert’s group was climbing onto the sled, Robert steering, Kyle behind him, then Bennett, Harper, Little John, and Nest. They tucked themselves in place. Except for Robert, each had legs wrapped around the waist of the person ahead, hands and arms locked on shoulders. Kyle and Harper were laughing and shouting. Little John was staring off into the dark.
When the lock bar was released, the sled slid away from the loading platform into the night, picking up speed as it went, the sound of its flat runners on the frozen snow and ice a rough, loud chitter. Down the sled went, tearing through a wave of cold and snow, of freezing air, of shouts and screams. Ross watched until it reached the ice and disappeared from view.
All around him, families were lining up for another run.
One run, however, was more than enough for Bennett Scott. Harper, crazy little kid, was eating it up, screaming and howling like a banshee all the way down the run, laughing hysterically when it was over, then begging all the way back up the slope to do it again.
