“Do you two have any idea how much this stuff is worth?” was the question asked most. A reporter in a dirty trenchcoat came in. Then another. “Can we get you anything?” they were asked again and again.
“Yes,” said Helen at last. “Call my dad.”
Ryser was dressed in old corduroys and a plaid shirt. Like all the others he looked into the plastic bag and ran his fingers through the powder and tasted it. He plodded over to Helen and Pinky. “As I’ve always said,” he began, coughing sheepishly, “the hardest thing about growing up is learning to admit you’ve made a mistake.” He looked down at his feet and shook his head in disbelief. “Nothing more I can say. Nothing I can do to thank you,” he added. Then he beckoned and called over two of the policemen by name. He unpinned the badge from each man’s shirt front and solemnly pinned them onto Helen’s soaking parka and Pinky’s still-dripping rain slicker, like medals.
The shiny silver badges were the first things that Helen’s father saw.
Helen rode home, sitting between her father and Pinky in the front seat. The motorbike took up the whole of the back of the station wagon. On one side she held Pinky’s hand. On the other she fell asleep against her father’s shoulder.
Helen woke enough to walk into the house under her own steam. Aunt Stella waited in a dressing gown. She said only “Shhhh!” her finger against her lips when Helen passed by. Her father pulled off her wet parka and led her to her bed, covering her with her quilt and kissing her as softly as a butterfly brushing her forehead with its wing.
Helen woke up hours later, in damp, uncomfortable clothes with a hard lump under one thigh. She undressed and put on her nightgown. In the pocket of her jeans she discovered the candle end she’d saved from Lucy’s cellar. She put it in a pin dish right in front of the ebony-framed portrait of Lucy and Lorenzo.
She lit the little candle end and watched as the wick took and the flame glowed. Next to the portrait was the older Lucy, the one in the Valdosta newspaper. Should I write your story or not? she asked herself.
Out of Lucy’s magnificent black eyes she tried to pry a signal. The signal was there. It came from across the divide of mortal time, from beyond the planets in the land of the dead. But whether the answer was yes or no, Helen couldn’t tell.
It’s up to me, isn’t it? she said slowly to herself. She looked back at the picture of Lucy and Lorenzo that Mrs. Fairchild had pressed into her hands, her eyes, like the younger Lucy’s, filled with trust.
Enough wrong has been done, and enough right too, Helen decided. She pinched out the candle. Someone else could write the story.
A Biography of Rosemary Wells
Rosemary Wells (b. 1942) is a bestselling children’s book author and illustrator. Born in New York City, Wells was raised in New Jersey. She grew up in an artistic family; her mother was a ballet dancer and her father was an actor-playwright. “We had a houseful of wonderful books. Reading stories aloud was as much a part of my childhood as the air I breathed,” Wells recalls. “It was also the golden age of childhood, now much changed for my grandchildren.”
Her love of illustrating also began at an early age, and she started drawing at two years old. When she was older, Wells attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She married Thomas Moore Wells in 1963, and the pair lived in Boston for two years while she worked as a book designer for Allyn & Bacon, a textbook publisher. The couple moved to New York in 1965, when Tom entered Columbia University for his graduate degree in architecture, and Wells went to work for the trade publisher Macmillan. Her first book, an illustrated edition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s A Song to Sing, O!, was published in 1968.
Since then, Wells has published more than 120 books, including 7 novels. In her picture books, she pairs her delightful illustrations with humorous, sincere, and psychologically adept themes. She was praised in Booklist as having “that rare ability to tell a funny story for very young children with domestic scenes of rising excitement and heartfelt emotion, and with not one word too many.” Kirkus Reviews touted her “unerring ability to hit just the right note to tickle small-fry funny bones.” The Christian Science Monitor called her “one of the most gifted picture-book illustrators in the United States.”
Among her bestselling picture book titles are Voyage to the Bunny Planet, Noisy Nora, and Read to Your Bunny. She is best known for the Max and Ruby series, which depicts the adventures of sibling bunnies. Many of her series also feature animal characters, including McDuff (illustrated by Susan Jeffers), Edward Almost Ready, Yoko, and the Mother Goose books edited by Iona Opie. In addition to her picture books, Wells has written several historical fiction and mystery/suspense novels for young adults.
In 2002, the Max and Ruby series was adapted as an animated television series, and has become a popular show for young children. Her picture book Timothy Goes to School was adapted for TV in 2000, and several of her other books have been produced as short films. Wells’s work has also been recommended on innumerable lists, including the New York Times annual Best Illustrated Books round-up and several American Library Association Notable Book lists. She has won countless awards, such as the Parents’ Choice Foundation Award and multiple School Library Journal Best Book of the Year awards.
In addition to being a prolific writer and illustrator, Wells is a keen advocate of literacy programs. She was a speaker for the national literacy initiative the “Read to Your Bunny” campaign.
Wells has two daughters: Victoria, who is now an editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, and Marguerite, an organic farmer who teaches at Cornell University. She also has five granddaughters: Zoe, Eleanor, Frances, Phoebe, and Petra. The girls are sources of unending fun and inspiration for the never-ending stories that come out of the Wells studio.
Rosemary Wells at age three, in 1945.
Wells, at age four, poses for the camera.
Wells’s parents, James and Helen Warwick, in the early 1950s.
Wells’s father, James Warwick, a Hollywood screen actor, in a pith helmet in Inside the Lines, which premiered in 1930.
Wells’s mother, Helen Warwick, a dancer in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in 1925.
Wells horseback riding in Nevada in 1958.
Wells (right) and school friend at the US Open in Forest Hills, New York, with tennis star Alex Olmedo after he had just won his match.
Wells, at age twenty, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Wells’s husband, Tom Wells, an architect, in 1965.
Wells at age twenty-five.
In 2002, while on a research trip for her young adult novel Red Moon at Sharpsburg, Wells visited a Civil War reenactment at the Antietam battlefield.
Wells at a children’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, in October 1985.
Wells with her Westie, Sophie, in 1990.
Wells with her husband, Tom, and their two dogs, in 1991.
Wells in her studio in Greenwich, CT.
Wells’s four granddaughters with her daughter Victoria.
Wells with her granddaughter Frances Wells Arms in 2010.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1984 by Rosemary Wells
cover design by Kim Brown
978-1-4532-6593-2
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integ
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The Man in the Woods Page 18
