The Secret of Raven Point (35 page)

She threw down her pack and sat on one of the desks and began tugging off her boots. “I’ve never been so tired,” she said.

“Hey, you did wonderfully,” said Willard.

“If he’s alive in the morning, I suppose. But we’ll never know.”

He took her boots from her and set them tidily on the floor. “Listen, if we don’t have any luck locating them tomorrow,” he said, standing before her, “we have to start heading back to the hospital.”

Juliet nodded. They wouldn’t find them; she saw it clearly now. Just as she hadn’t found Tuck. She’d been defeated in everything. “Absolutely fine.”

At daybreak the air was clear and sharp. As they emerged from the schoolhouse, Juliet stared at the empty space where she had parked the jeep the night before. She circled the nearby oak tree as though the jeep might be hiding on the other side.

“How did we not hear the jeep starting in the middle of the night?” she asked.

Willard stood silently on the steps of the schoolhouse. He scanned the horizon and then seemed to work through some complicated thought.

“Dr. Willard?”

Willard was opening her pack, yanking out several articles of clothing and shoving them into his own pack. He lifted her pack, testing the weight.

“You’ll need to carry this,” he said. He handed her the pack and hefted his own onto his shoulders. His motions were rough, nervous. He began walking toward the road. “Come on, Juliet. We need to start moving.
Now.
This is bad.”

She followed quickly. The morning frost had crispened the grass, and there was a biting chill in the air. Everything looked different without the jeep. The trees loomed shadowy and frightening.
The distances were vast. A small brook she hardly noticed when they drove over it the night before now had to be forded; they held each other’s hands and sidestepped the black ice-glazed rocks, jabbing sticks into the slushy water for balance. It was the first time Juliet had hiked since Basic Training, the first time her legs had covered distances beyond the hospital encampment. Her back ached; she shifted her pack from one hip, then the other. Her toes grew cold, and she felt a blister forming at her heel. A pain at the front of her feet finally brought her to a halt after only thirty minutes.

“Dr. Willard, I forgot to cut my toenails.”

Willard, who had been nearly silent during their hike, dug into his pack and tossed her a small scissors. “Do it now; it’s not getting any warmer.”

She sat on her pack and tugged off her boots. “Don’t watch. This isn’t pretty.”

“Juliet. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s cold and I’m carrying thirty pounds on my back. Let me be ridiculous.”

He threw his hands up and turned, and her fingers, already numb from the cold, fumbled to snip the nails. She carried the scissors back to his bag.

“We have to keep moving,” he said, cinching his pack.

“I’m sorry about the jeep, Dr. Willard.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Then why are you so angry?”

“I’m not angry,” he snapped. He turned his back and lifted his pack. He was afraid, she thought, as afraid as she was. He knew the darkest stories of the war, stories worse than the Goumiers, no doubt. They had never anticipated trying to make it back to the hospital without the jeep.

“Now, lift your pack and come on,” he urged.

Without the noise of the jeep, the landscape was hauntingly silent. Juliet could hear each of her footsteps on the ground, and
she thought about land mines hidden beneath the soil. She wondered, too, who had stolen the jeep; were thieves lurking across the countryside? Would their food and bags eventually be taken from them? Willard insisted on walking ahead—so that he might trigger a mine first, she supposed—but he turned around several times a minute to make sure she was still in sight. Juliet had trouble moving as quickly as he did, and every few minutes he halted, impatience evident on his face. All their playfulness had vanished. They had lost their vehicle, lost their chance to find Barnaby and Reardon, and if they somehow managed to return to the hospital, they would likely be punished.

Only when they crossed a stream where several old women were filling buckets with water did Juliet feel her spirits lift.

“We must be near something,” she called.

“We should be getting close to Massa,” he shouted back. “We can try our best there to see about getting a vehicle.”

They pressed ahead into a field of felled oaks, zigzagging between wet stumps. They scrambled over the fallen trunks, stirring squirrels and mice from beneath logs. Against one stump, two bundled figures lay locked in an embrace.

Willard gestured for her to veer around the figures; Juliet followed his path, but midway she paused, turning curiously toward the motionless forms. Beneath the draping of blankets, she glimpsed the pants of a khaki uniform, and in a surge of irrational hope, the last she would ever permit herself, she shrugged off her pack and slowly walked toward the men. She moved quietly around the other side of the stump until she could see their faces. Frost clung to their unshaven cheeks; their eyes were closed, the lashes ice-crusted. They were huddled together, arms linked, facing the stump, as though to avoid being seen. Juliet couldn’t believe it; it was
them
.

“Dr. Willard,” she yelled, taking their pulses. “They’re alive.”

It took four hours for Juliet and Willard to carry the men,
one by one, back to the schoolhouse. It was the only shelter they knew of. There they shoved aside the desks and laid each man on the stone floor. Juliet draped them with blankets and her own jacket.

“Jesus, they’re pure blue,” she said, kneading their limbs. “They need a fire and food.”

Willard lit their stove to heat a bowl of water, and when it was warm, Juliet peeled off their gloves and dipped their fingers in. When some color had returned to their faces, she did the same with their toes. Tugging off Brother Reardon’s boots, Juliet saw that his left ankle was swollen.

“We’ll need a lot more than the rations we have,” said Willard. He set his hand on her back. “I’m going into town.”

Juliet looked up in alarm.

“What town?”

“I’m fairly certain we were almost to Massa before. If I backtrack, I think I can be there and back by sundown. Sooner if I can find us a vehicle there.”

She didn’t know what to say. He was right, and yet she dreaded the thought of him wandering into the wilderness alone. Of being left alone. They were not supposed to separate; that was the rule. What protection could Barnaby and Reardon offer her?

“What if you’re not back by sundown?”

“I’ll be back. You’re safer here than out there with me.”

She knew the men needed food; she knew their options were limited. And she saw in his face that he was not particularly eager to go.

“Come back as fast as humanly possible,” she pleaded.

“Lock the door.”

The hours passed in a painful slowness. Brother Reardon and Barnaby were still sleeping, and only the sounds of their snores kept Juliet company. She paced the small classroom, collected all the pencils from the desk, snapped them in two, and used them to
feed the fire. Twice, she opened the door a crack and stared out at the darkening landscape. The trees, stripped bare of their leaves, stood oil black against the gray sky. But it wasn’t until she began to hear the sounds of nightfall—the sharpening winds, the low, faint hooting of owls—that a weak knock finally sounded on the door. Willard waddled in, cradling eggs in his jacket; in the crook of his arm was a wine bottle. She wanted to berate him but saw exhaustion in his face. His cheeks were red from the cold. “I’m so sorry,” he huffed.

A breath of raw air had come in with him, and she hurriedly closed the door. Without looking him in the eye, Juliet took the eggs, trying to mask her anxiety and anger. “Brother Reardon sprained his ankle,” she said, matter-of-factly.

She cracked an egg, and with her forefinger she beat it in a cup. She added water from her canteen, then held the cup to each man’s mouth, coaxing him to swallow.

“There, that’ll put color back in their faces.”

She laid Barnaby’s head in her lap and carefully peeled his eye patch away from his tangle of blisters and facial hair. The patch was fraying at the edges; she tried not to tear the skin beneath, but one section pulled at a patch of frostbite and he winced.

“Ouch.” His dark brown eye was staring directly at her.

“Dr. Willard,” she whispered.

Willard crouched beside her, and Barnaby turned to look at him, somewhat sleepily.

“Hey there, Doc.”

“Hi, Christopher. How are you feeling?”

He hugged himself and rubbed his shoulders. “Fucking
cold
.”

Willard laughed. “Me too. Do you know where you are?”

Barnaby looked around and squinted at the chalkboard. “This looks like a schoolhouse.” He looked back at Willard. “We’re not at the hospital anymore?”

“We left the hospital,” said Willard. “It wasn’t safe there.”

Barnaby slowly nodded, taking in the breadth of danger that might be lurking.

“They wanted to lock me up,” he said.

“Yes,” said Willard.

“We made a run for it?”

“So to speak.”

“I owe you,” he said.

Juliet, unable to contain herself, pressed her head to Barnaby’s chest. The world seemed filled with glorious possibility.

By midnight, Brother Reardon had finally awakened and explained, in a mild delirium of fever and dehydration, where they had been since leaving the hospital. Willard listened intently, crouching over the stove, boiling an egg in a crackling C ration tin. Juliet spooned steaming food into Reardon’s slack mouth, his face white and glossy with fever.

When the men had both fallen back asleep, Willard carried a cup across the dark classroom to Juliet. “I made some coffee,” he said softly.

She set it down to cool and leaned back against the wall. Willard sat beside her, and they were silent for a long while.

“No luck finding a vehicle in town?” she asked.

“I couldn’t even try. The MPs were there.”

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How are we going to get them to Signora Gaspaldi’s?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and her disappointment in his answer must have shown. He brushed off his knees and stood. He began pulling a hospital sheet from his bag. “We need to black out the windows. With Brother Reardon’s ankle, we’re definitely stuck here for at least a few more days.” Willard hung the sheet over
the window, but it was sheer and torn in spots; they could both see it would hardly help. He surveyed the room, rifling through the drawers of the teacher’s desk. “Plenty of pencils and paper, though. Rulers. Stencils. An abacus.” He took one of the rulers and said, “Well, we can use the big map.”

With the ruler’s edge, he pried out the nails along the map’s right side and peeled back the corner. He yanked the map from the wall, and a wooden door stared at them.

Cobwebbed desks and chairs cluttered the cold, dark cellar. Against one wall stood a supply shelf stacked with boxes of chalk and pencils, a pile of blank writing tablets, and shiny tins of assorted treats for children: cookies, peppermints, caramels, candied chestnuts. Two marionettes—one boy and one girl—dangled limply together from a hook in the ceiling.