by Jon Cohen
Oriana tried not to show her surprise. She hadn’t been to the library since Olive had given her The Grum’s Ledger. She’d never seen Ronnie in the library. Ronnie a reader? The world was full of secrets and wonders.
“Been helping out Olive. Before the county building inspector comes,” he said. “The place is in pitiful shape.”
Ronnie picked a long piece of grass, nibbled the sweetness at the tip. “You might say I was guided there. By a you-know-what.”
By a feather. It was the wellspring of their relationship—Oriana told him about wingèd Dean and the convolutions of the candy in the forest, and he told her about the feathers that floated, every couple of weeks, into his life. And neither of them discussed any of this with Amanda. Ronnie wasn’t good at keeping secrets, but he was real good at being afraid of Amanda.
Ronnie leaked secrets like a rain cloud leaks water—Oriana would never tell him about the gold. Never ever. He was special to her, but he was something different from a pure friend. They were fellow sufferers. They shared Dean, the unsolvable puzzle of his death. But now, with the arrival of Harry Crane, Oriana was on her way to solving that puzzle. For herself, anyway. Ronnie, though, was still in limbo. In a way, Oriana suddenly realized, he was like Harry. Both men felt responsible for a loss that pierced their hearts.
She shaped and twisted the daisy stems. The chain of flowers was growing. “So another feather? How did it guide you to Olive?”
He nodded. “See, it landed on a book I stole from the library. Stole when I was a kid.”
“A fairy tale?”
“Nah. Treasure Island.”
“That’s a fun one.”
Ronnie agreed. “Anyways, the feather landed on the book. And I hotfooted it to the library. I repented, and Olive put me to work paying off my fine.”
This was good, Oriana thought. She needed him occupied and out of the forest, away from Harry and the gold.
But why did Daddy guide Ronnie to the library? She thought hard.
Why was it so important?
She closed her eyes. Daddy guiding Ronnie to the library. And now he’s fixing it.
And then the answer came to her. The library, Pratt Public Library—was magical. Because a magical book like The Grum’s Ledger could only have come from a magical library. And Olive—surely she was no ordinary librarian. She cursed, and smoked a pipe, and she had given Oriana a book that had turned Harry Crane’s sadness into gold.
Oriana suddenly saw something in Ronnie she’d never seen before. That he was essential. To everything. He was another one of the important grown-ups in the Endless Mountains. Her mother was the Rock. Olive, the Magic Door. Harry, the Great Adventurer. And Ronnie, the Guardian Angel. And it all began with Daddy—the first grown-up to change into something other than what he was. Daddy died and became wingèd. Daddy led Ronnie to the library. And Ronnie’s task was to be the rescuer of the library. It faced so many dangers.
“Ronnie. The library is super-special. It needs you. And Olive needs you. You’re doing a wonderful thing.”
“Thanks to Dean.”
“So you better get back to work.”
“Just wanted to check on you.”
She gave him a quick hug. “You’ve been such a help to me and Mom, Ronnie. But now it’s the library that needs you.”
* * *
Oriana waited until the sound of Ronnie’s truck faded, then moved circuitously through the forest.
She stood at the south end of the old shale quarry. It was the size of a football field, overgrown and rocky, open on one end where the steam shovels used to come through. There were a million good spots in among the tons of broken bluestone, the abandoned refuse of a half century of quarrying.
She chose a closet-sized, ragged gouge you could see only if you pushed away a curtain of roots dangling from a spruce tree growing on the edge of an overhang. There was poison ivy everywhere, and a yellow jacket nest. It was an unpleasant sort of place that no one would bother. The perfect hiding place for a shimmering mound of grum gold.
22
It was a warm spring day. The new grass on the rolling pastures was a vast sea of wind-tossed green, and the new calves were lifting their pink, spotted noses to the sky as if to suckle upon the sun. And there was Hoop, lanky in the distance, the steady clink of his hammer on a metal fence post adding cadence to the chorus of birds.
I sure do have a pretty farm, and the only blot on it, thought Cliff, is Cliff Blair. He flicked at the encrusted manure on the knee of his jeans. Clots of dried manure sticking to him, head to foot. Isn’t that fitting. I’m more manure than man. He remembered (as if he would ever forget!) Amanda’s furious parting words.
Cliff’s thoughts turned to the day after the Amanda debacle, when he had attempted to atone for his sins. He had wanted to hit the erase button in Hoop’s brain. He approached Hoop in the semidark of the dawn barn. Hoop in the milking parlor adjusting a stanchion, not turning around to greet Cliff, just giving an almost imperceptible nod.
Cliff tried not to stammer as he addressed Hoop’s back. “What I showed you, a while back? Certain, um, images concerning Amanda Jeffers? Hoop, you didn’t see them, okay?” Meaning, the laptop glimpses of Amanda, naked from the waist up. The now smashed-to-smithereens laptop.
“Them udders?”
“Darn it, Hoop, not udders. A woman has breasts.” Oh, Hoop, Cliff thought. I should have just showed you pictures of a Holstein cow clad in a revealing dress. Cliff shook his head and reddened. That’s a mean thought. Hoop had been minding his own business, and I’m the one who shoved the forbidden pictures in his face.
“Never mind,” Cliff said.
“Never mind it is,” Hoop said, and turned his attention to the udders of more immediate concern, the fifty swollen ones dangling under the fifty lined-up cows restless to be relieved of their milk.
Cliff finished securing the solar panel on the water trough, which a cow had bumped off its stand yesterday. He walked slowly across the field back to the tool shed. The Amanda event was a couple weeks back. It haunted him. What had he been thinking, ordering a mini video camera off Amazon? I mean, what the hell, Cliff? You never make an online purchase in your life, and that’s the first item you buy? The minute he clicked on “complete order” it felt creepy. You’re a buy-local kind of guy. You operate an organic dairy farm. That’s who you are. You shop for your supplies at the Agway in New Milford, and what you can’t get there, you get down in Scranton.
He was overflowing with shame, but he had to face Amanda. Or at least have a semi-encounter, put his toe in the water. It was Tuesday. Every other Tuesday, with the consistency that was the trademark of her unswerving character, Amanda ate dinner at Green Gables with Oriana. Cliff hadn’t been to Green Gables to have a beer with the guys since the incident. Here’s what he would do. He would sit at the bar, within glaring distance of Amanda. He would sit there, yes he would, and endure her righteous glares. And if she chose to stand up, cross the restaurant and splash a Coors Light (she always had just one, a twelve ouncer) in his face, humiliate him publicly, he would endure it.
* * *
Well, I mean, good gosh, Cliff thought. I can’t believe it. None of them could believe it. In Amanda’s booth, some guy, sitting across the table from her and Oriana, eating his Salisbury steak, baked potato, and a big leafy pile from the salad bar like it was a regular and casual thing, the three of them enjoying their Tuesday night dinner out. And what’s up with Oriana? Cliff thought. She’s not staring at a book. Doesn’t even have one with her. And except for the two quick laser glares she shot at me, Amanda has been all smiles. Deep in conversation, she even reached out and touched the guy’s arm. Who was he?
Old Walter didn’t know him. Tom the bartender didn’t know him. The EMT guys didn’t know him. Stu didn’t know him. Ronnie, however, knew him. He gulped his beer and tried to look
like he didn’t know him.
“Look at that guy. Who is that guy?” Stu said. His first thought being territorial. Please Lord, don’t let it be some fancy real estate guy up from Scranton, using his fancy Scranton dollars to wine and dine the financially vulnerable Amanda Jeffers. I should’ve wined and dined her. That’s my property the bastard’s trying to steal. And he’ll get six figures.
The men hunched in a tight muttering cluster at the far end of the bar, which gave the best view into the restaurant area. They could not wrap their brains around it: no one but Dean sits in Amanda Jeffers’s booth. In the history of mankind, it had never before happened.
Stu was dying to go out to the parking lot for a cigarette, but he didn’t want to miss the show. “What do we know about him?” he said.
Old Walter said, “We know he likes Salisbury steak, and he chews with his mouth closed.”
An EMT guy said to the group, his voice low, “We know his name’s Harry.” When Harry came in, Amanda called him by name and waved him over to her booth.
Harry Crane, Ronnie almost said. Except for Olive Perkins, Ronnie had told not a soul about Harry. Ronnie was a dam about to burst. Any minute now, he’d gush the facts as he knew them. Already, Stu was glancing at him, because Ronnie was keeping suspiciously quiet.
Cliff was quiet, too. Stunned. Earlier, driving to Green Gables, he thought he might actually go over to the booth, make some sort of friendly gesture. Tip his hat. Or maybe he’d pick up the bill for Amanda’s supper. Or buy Oriana a slice of ice cream cake. Then, coming into Green Gables, he lost his nerve, and, besides, gestures were probably a bad idea. But as he stood there waffling, the stranger had entered the bar, nodded to the men. Amanda called out, “Harry,” and waved him over. What the—?
Tom the bartender leaned over the bar and said, as if it was a detail that would crack the case, “Well, we know he’s a Corona drinker. Without the lime.”
“Like you ever put a lime on a Corona,” Stu muttered.
“I tried it a couple weeks. Nobody sucked on them.”
“’Cause they’re not for sucking. The customer squeezes them into the bottle.”
“Well, nobody around here was squeezing.”
Stu glanced over at the booth. That real estate guy chatting up Amanda—he sure looks like he knows how to squeeze a lime, down to the last drop. Then Stu eyed Ronnie, squirming on his bar stool.
Old Walter nodded toward the booth. With his usual devastating clarity, he summed it up for the little impotent gaggle of men. “I think what all you youngish studs find problematic is one thing, pure and simple. Looks like Amanda Jeffers found a fella. And a pretty good-looking fella, at that.”
Amanda was screwing a real estate agent? thought Stu. He’s getting six figures and sex? Six and sex? And the bastard’s got good hair, too. Stu despised people with good hair. Or any hair, for that matter. Clench-jawed, Stu zeroed in on Ronnie. “Spill your beans, Ronnie.”
Everybody leaned in Ronnie’s direction. From the restaurant came the sound of Amanda’s laughter. The men flinched and drank fortifying gulps of beer.
Ronnie’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Well, I don’t know the particulars. But he is living in the tree house.”
My God, thought Stu. Living in the tree house. And Amanda close by in her big Dean-built log house.
Cliff, hearing Ronnie’s words, had the stunned look of a neutered bull.
* * *
Look at those fools, Amanda thought. It was killing them, just killing them seeing Harry in her booth. And I hope, in particular, Cliff Dirty-Video-Taker Blair, it’s killing you.
Amanda and Harry were lingering over their beers. Oriana was in the alcove between the restaurant and the bar playing on the old-fashioned skittles table. She bowled the little wooden ball. Pins toppled. She pumped a fist. “Yes!”
Yes, this was very good, Amanda thought, this additional, and not entirely unintended, perk of having invited Harry to Green Gables. “I just want them all to back off, you know?” she said.
Harry looked over his shoulder at the men. They were doing a bad job of trying not to look his way. He could see Ronnie in their midst.
Amanda said, “They just don’t get it. They think, ‘Oh, a year’s passed.’ Like it’s some sort of unspoken timeline. That every widow—” she nodded at Harry “—or widower is ready to get back in the game because that official year has passed.”
Getting back in the game, Harry thought. Even more inconceivable than handing out millions in gold.
“Thing is,” Amanda said, lowering her voice, “I did get back in the game, just for the sex, you know, the physical ache you get, but should definitely ignore, because it gets you into trouble.”
“Sex,” Harry said. The word had not entered his brain during the past year, let alone left his mouth.
“Right?” Amanda. “Hard to say it, and dumb to have it. Ugh. But lesson learned, you know? Lesson learned.” It was then that Amanda shot one of her laser glares in Cliff’s direction.
Harry followed it. Which one of those guys was she aiming at? Not Ronnie. And that guy in the bad suit—rule him out. But there were a lot of strapping, good-looking males in that cluster. The one wearing the EMT uniform? No, Amanda would not mix work and pleasure. Pleasure, Harry thought. He’d only just managed to remove his ring—pleasure was a million light-years away.
Amanda’s hand suddenly on his arm. Harry jumped. She left it there and gave him a big smile. She spoke through her smiling teeth. “Sorry. But smile back at me, okay? So they’ll think we’re a thing. Please?”
Harry smiled. Her hand on his arm. He was wearing a flannel shirt, the contact was not even flesh to flesh. Still, he didn’t breathe until she removed her hand. His forearm tingled electrically. It would probably tingle for the next month.
She looked over at the bar. Her touching Harry had sent a charge through the group. “They can’t believe it.” She turned back to Harry. “How perfect is this? The date that isn’t a date.”
A pause, then Harry said, “Well, I am paying for dinner.”
“No way.”
And it was almost as if his hand moved on its own. That had to be it. That it was reflexive. When Beth’s hair would fall in front of her face, at the breakfast table when she was reading the paper, or when they stood in line at the movies and she looked down to check her phone, when that lovely wisp of hair fell, he would reach out and tuck it behind her ear again.
And that’s what he did when a wisp of Amanda’s hair came loose and fell in front of her face. When she said, “No way,” shaking her head, her hair came loose and Harry spontaneously reached across the table and fixed it behind her ear. And at the moment he touched her hair, when he looked at Amanda, into her eyes, he saw...Amanda.
His hand hovered by her ear. She was not a woman who rattled easily. But there was sudden color in her cheeks.
He pulled his hand away. And though his heart was pounding, he managed to say, almost smoothly, “This date that isn’t a date? Wouldn’t a guy do that?”
Amanda’s flummoxed frown became a slow smile. “You’re good. And right, right, it’s perfect you paying for dinner.” She studied him. “Boy. You look innocent, but you’re devious and cunning.”
Harry smiled nervously. You have no idea, he thought. He watched Oriana bowl over the skittle pins.
Over at the bar, heads were bobbing, beers rapidly downed. Amanda said, “They look like a frantic beehive that’s lost its queen.” She glanced at Harry. “See, that’s what I don’t like. Being these guys’ queen. They need to get a life.”
Don’t bees sting? Harry thought. Some of those guys were pretty big. His eyes fell on the small guy at the end of the bar who was picking at his scalp. “Who’s the scratcher?”
“The weasel real estate agent who’s after my house. Stu Giptner.”
Harry went quiet, th
inking, The bags of gold. Of course. Put one on Amanda’s doorstep. Right? She needs the money.
But Amanda, staring at the men, eyes ablaze, said, “I don’t want saviors, you know? I don’t want weasels trying to threaten me or tempt me with money. This idea that I can’t make it on my own. Pisses me off.” Her cheeks were flushed. She turned back to Harry. “That’s what’s so great about you.”
He looked at her.
“You’re the only guy in this place who gets it,” Amanda said. “We both don’t want the same thing.” She raised her beer mug. Harry raised his.
“A toast. Here’s to not us,” Amanda said. They both laughed. But before they could touch mugs and consummate the toast, a crash of skittle pins and Oriana’s excited voice. “Strike!”
She ran over to the booth. “Mom. Can I have another quarter? Please? One more game?”
Amanda looked beyond her daughter to the men sagging at the bar. “Nope. I think we’ve bowled over enough pins at Green Gables tonight.”
* * *
They were out in the gravel parking lot a few minutes later. It was a school night for Oriana, and work started early in the morning for Amanda. Amanda said good-night to Harry. Behind her, Oriana traced the toe of her sneaker in the gravelly dirt. When they got in the truck, Harry saw that she had drawn the letter G. He glanced at his phone. As the truck pulled out, Oriana gave him a questioning look. And very, very discreetly he gave her a thumbs-up.
G for gold.
The tracking notification showed that his first shipment had arrived. Harry stood by his car, staring at the glowing screen, dazzled, as if he was looking directly into the sun. Or the bright, golden core of Fort Knox. Transfixed, he did not hear the men approach.
“Howdy, stranger,” came a nasal voice.
Harry startled back against his car door. There were six of them, Stu Giptner at the head. He looked like a Chihuahua leading a pack of German shepherds.
“We just wanted to welcome you to New Milford,” Stu said.
Harry nodded carefully. For the first time in his life, he missed his big brother. Wolf was tailor-made for this moment. He spotted Ronnie in the group. “Hello, Ronnie.”
