Bedtime Story (54 page)

Once I had made the decision to bring David with me, it hadn’t taken long to pack, leave a vaguely worded note for Jacqui, and get out of the house. The fates were with us: we drove right onto the ferry without having to line up.

I made a couple of phone calls from the main deck of the
Spirit of Vancouver Island
, balancing my notebook on my knee as I dialled.

The first was to Carol Corvin.

I cleared my throat as the phone rang, and someone picked up and said hello.

“Carol Corvin, please.”

“Speaking,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” Suddenly flummoxed. “I was expecting to get a
receptionist.”

“No, this is my home number.”

I had thought she’d be someone matronly, someone who sounded like old money. This voice was down-to-earth, cheerful.

“And you are?” she prompted.

“It’s Chris Knox calling. From Victoria.”

A family of three were walking by us on the outside ferry deck, the pigtailed little girl picking her nose. When she saw David, staring sightlessly out of the seat next to the window, she tugged wordlessly on her mother’s arm. They slowed as the mother looked at David, then at me, giving me a wrinkled look of sympathy as they passed.

“The reporter.”

“Yes. About the interview.”

“I’m afraid time’s a little tight right now.”

“Actually, I was wondering about tomorrow. I’m going to be passing through Seattle, so I thought we might meet for coffee, if that works.”

“How about in the afternoon? Say, around two?”

I hadn’t realized just much tension I’d been feeling until she said yes and I felt it release, all at once. “I think that’ll work.”

I had expected her to suggest a coffee shop or a restaurant, but instead she gave me her home address.

“That way you’ll be able to meet Matthew as well.”

I looked over at David. “That sounds good.”

The next call was to the Hyatt in Bellevue, where we had stayed before.

Traffic was light on the highway toward the border, so I didn’t have too long to fret. Having heard about custody cases I worried that we might have a problem at Customs and Immigration, but the guard seemed satisfied when I told him that David’s mother was in Seattle on business and we were meeting her down there for a family weekend. He didn’t ask to see the supporting letter from David’s mom, the one that I had faked her signature on.

He even told us to have fun.

Just before eight I pulled off at a rest area and dug into my laptop
bag for the photocopied pages of
To the Four Directions
. I turned on the dome light and in that busy parking lot, crowded with campers and trucks, I started to read.

It took most of two pages before David’s hands stilled, before his eyes came to rest. I read a bit further, just to be sure, but I forced myself to cut it off between paragraphs, to conserve the remaining words.

“I think that’s enough for tonight,” I whispered, tucking the book back into my bag.

David, of course, didn’t say anything.

This had better be worth it, Tony Markus thought to himself as he signed the charge slip at the front desk of the Hotel Vintage Park in downtown Portland. He was hard-pressed, however, to think of anything that might make up for the hellish travel day he had just had.

He was dialling for room service practically before the bellman had left his room. A rare steak and a couple of servings of
frites
was exactly what he needed. Screw the salad—he was away from home; it didn’t count.

Leaning back on the bed, he kicked off his shoes and dialled the number programmed into his cell.

“Cat, it’s Tony Markus.”

“I take it this means you survived your flight?” It always sounded like she was flirting with him. Something about her voice.

“Just barely,” he said, making it sound like a big joke.

“So where’s the company putting you up?”

“The Hotel Vintage Park. Right downtown.” He had led her to believe, in his last four phone calls, that D&K was sending him out to the coast with the sole purpose of meeting with her.

“That’s all right.”

He looked around the room for the first time: it was, in fact, more than all right.

“I was wondering when we might be able to meet,” he said. Might as well cut right to the chase. “If you give me directions, I can—”

“Actually,” she said, “it turns out I have to be in Portland tomorrow for an appointment. Maybe we could meet there instead. Dinner, maybe?
I think the restaurant in your hotel is supposed to be quite good.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” he lied. All he knew about the hotel’s restaurant was that he had stood in front of it while the valet took his bags out of the trunk.

He hung up the phone after they had agreed to meet there at five-thirty. He lay back in the bed, taking pleasure in stretching his toes, in doing slow loops with his head, loosening up his neck.

He was interrupted by a knock on the door and a voice saying, “Room Service.” He practically bounced off the bed.

Things were starting to look up.

David lost track of how many days they had been riding. It didn’t matter: the landscape changed around him again, but all he did was follow the horse in front of him, keep his eyes low, his mouth shut, mile after mile.

Then, abruptly, the forest around the trail broke apart to reveal the shore of a huge lake. His horse waded in, bending his head to drink. Far to his left, the blue water seemed to meet the green of densely forested hills almost at the horizon; down the shore to his right, he could see the narrow mouth of a river, and more trees, more hills. Directly across from him, a small island, little more than a gently rounded hill, seemed to float on the surface of the still blue water.

“Lake Abislot,” the magus said, as if it could possibly be anything else.

David huddled in his blanket, shivering despite the heat of the afternoon. His head throbbed with a dull power that made his jaw ache, and he felt utterly spent.

Do you think you’re sick?
Matt had asked early that morning as they were riding away from the night’s camp.

I think I’m dying
, he had replied, finally putting into words what he had been feeling since before he had brought back the second canister.

Is it your burns?
Matt asked, his voice sharp with concern.
You should have the magus look at them
.

It’s not the burns
, he said flatly.

But if they’re infected—

It’s not the burns
, he snapped.
It’s all this
. He looked around at the guardsmen on horseback, the forest, the imaginary world in which he was trapped.
It’s being here. It’s killing me
.

He had expected Matt to contradict him, to argue with his conclusion.

But he hadn’t.

And Matt hadn’t spoken since.

The magus dismounted with a flurry of robes and stepped to the water’s edge. “Well,” he said slowly. “It seems we have quite a task ahead of us.”

One of the guardsmen moved into the shallows and reached for the reins of David’s horse.

“The men will take the horses,” the captain said, “and make camp farther down the shore, so we’re not so exposed to the trail. We”—he locked eyes with the magus—“are going to take another look at that map.”

David’s first step down from his horse sent a punishing wave of pain up through his body. He walked out of the water and huddled on the grassy verge above the beach.

The magus sat down next to David and unrolled the map. The symbol of the Sunstone hung over a confusing welter of lines.

“As you can see,” the magus began, “the trail is easy to follow. There’s Osham’s Bridge, and we followed this line, which brought us here.” He poked his finger at the spot where the trail intersected with the shores of the lake. Written in the space above it, in now familiar script, was the word
Abislot
.

“So we know we’re at the right place,” David said quietly. He was having trouble focusing on the map.

“We know we’re at the right lake,” the captain said bitterly. He was standing next to David, looking out at the water. “But as you can see—” He swept his arm to encompass its length. “That doesn’t really help us.”

“So there’s nothing here?” David said. “No clues, no markings, nothing to tell us where we’re supposed to look?”

The captain shook his head. “Not unless you can see something that I can’t.”

David picked up the map.

“Be careful,” the magus cautioned. “The vellum is very thin. It’s a wonder it has survived as long as it has.”

David held it gingerly as he settled it onto his lap. “This is what you were talking about,” he said, pointing at the busy confluence of lines in the middle of the lake on the vellum, lines that seemed to have no relationship to the rest of the map.

The magus nodded. “I don’t know what they indicate, or what they might represent,” he said. “The other maps were so clear, so direct. This—” He traced his finger along a line that ran above the outline of the lake, curving toward the Sunstone symbol, then falling away. “There’s no river of that size to the west of Lake Abislot. Not one that I’ve ever heard of, at any rate.”

“So right now,” David said, looking up from the map to the lake and the mountains, “we’re looking west?”

The magus nodded. “Due west.”

He looked down at the map again, back at the line curving under the Sunstone. “And there’s no river here,” he said, pointing at the line.

“Not that …”

David nodded, but he wasn’t really listening. Instead, he was feeling the thinness of the vellum between his thumb and forefinger, remembering the moment when the captain had first unrolled the scroll the night before, the way the firelight had shone through it.

He looked up at the lake again, the stretch of beach, the icy-looking blue water, the island and the mountains behind.

“I think I’ve got it,” he said.

W
HEN
I
WOKE THE NEXT MORNING
, the sunlight was spilling white through the sheers on the windows and the whole hotel room seemed to glow. A small seizure had woken us up in the middle of the night, but David seemed fine now. Or what passed for fine.

“Good morning,” I said, my voice still thick from sleep. “Did you have a good sleep?”

I would have given anything for him to answer me. Instead, I snuggled myself into his silence, sliding one arm under his pillow and head, the other over him, pulling myself close. I rested there for a long time, drifting in and out of sleep, warm in the smell and heat of him.

It took me quite a while to get us both ready to go, to get him down to the garage and buckled into the van. I almost forgot my notebook, tucking it into my pocket with my cell phone as an afterthought.

David hadn’t risen from his spot on the grass all afternoon, shivering as the hot sun passed high overhead. The captain and the magus checked on him regularly while the guardsmen set up camp.

As the sun started to sink over the western shore of the lake, they both joined David where he waited. They sat close on either side of him, trying to share his perspective on the vista before them.

“I hope you’re right about this,” the captain grunted.

I hope so too
, Matt muttered, his first words all afternoon.

David didn’t say anything, just held the map loosely in his lap.

After another few minutes, the magus asked, “What are you expecting to see?”

“Do you see those rocks?” He pointed to a rounded outcropping of rock just off the shore to their left. “What you were saying about water, and about time,” he said to the magus. “A thousand years ago, those rocks were probably a different shape, right?”

“Yes,” the magus said uncertainly.

“But they still would have been there. And this shoreline, it’s probably changed some over that time, but it’s still mostly the same. So that island”—he pointed across the water—“that’s been there, pretty much unchanged, for the past thousand years too, right?”

“Dafyd, what’s this about?” the captain asked impatiently.

“This map,” he said, lifting the vellum off his lap. “It works.”