Wolf Hollow (15 page)

It took some convincing, but once Toby accepted the idea that no one would recognize him now, he began to see the possibilities.

We decided that he should stay in the barn until after dark, maybe morning, and then join the search. If anyone asked, he had come in from Hopewell to lend a hand. Had heard about our missing Betty and come to do what he could. And so on.

“This is starting to feel like a game,” he said. “I don't like it.”

“I don't either. This is all just a big dumb misunderstanding. But you really are the deer, Toby, and all those other men are the hunters. You can't hide forever, and I can't keep this secret for much longer. It's like a stone in my belly.”

Toby nodded. “I know what that feels like.”

He rubbed his bad hand over his face, seemed startled to find his beard so short.

I couldn't help but stare at his scars, so close and terrible.

He saw me staring, lowered his hand slowly, and held it out toward me.

“I don't mind,” he said.

I'm sure he didn't mean for me to touch it, but after I had a long look at the ruined skin—as lumpy and veined as October cabbage—I took his hand in both of mine and turned it over, turned it back, my hands so little and soft in comparison.

When he started to pull away, I held fast.

When I looked up, I found that Toby was crying.

And then I was, too.

What Toby told me that afternoon I've never told another living soul.

Perhaps it had been such a long time since someone had touched him that those few moments of his hand in mine were enough to split him open.

What showed through the breach was so sad that I've never stopped wondering how he survived it.

He talked about the war.

“Not this war now,” he said. “The other one. The one that was supposed to be the last one.”

I didn't understand a lot of what he said. Most of the time he wasn't even talking to me. Not really.

Just talking. Sometimes through his hands. Pacing. Telling a story.

About the “something bad” he'd done.

He talked about the sound a bullet makes as it pierces a skull.

The taste of dirt mixed with blood. The smell of it. How it feels to crouch in a muddy trench that shudders with bomb-blast and wonder if mustard gas is snaking across the ground above, closer each moment.

How a man bellows, cow-like, as he is cut to pieces. How another man whistles like a train.

He talked about what it was like to eat grass in a field, as if he were a horse, and to sleep in a tree, his gun belt a cinch, and to want to stay there forever, to starve there, his rib cage a home for nesting birds, his bones falling, one by one, as gravity released them, like dead branches.

He talked about the soldiers he'd shot. “So many,” he said. “So many.”

And he talked about a baby, just born, its belly still tethered to the womb, and the mother, too . . . beyond which he didn't say much that made any sense, if any of it had.

I tried to interrupt once or twice, to tell him that he wasn't the terrible person he claimed to be, to promise him that God would understand, but it was as if I were one of the rock doves overhead, cooing in a language that made no sense to him.

So I held very still and waited, trying not to hear it all, hoping, even at just eleven, almost twelve, that I would never have sons of my own.

When he wore himself out, Toby lay down in the hay and went to sleep at once. His lashes, wet against his cheeks, were more like a child's than I would have thought possible.

He slept without a sound. Without moving. And he didn't know when I covered him with his coat and left him there.

I climbed slowly out of the loft, nearly falling once, and made my way down the stairs, through the stable below, and out through the open gate.

It was odd, but everything had changed color. Just a little. Everything was sharper. Brighter.

As I passed the henhouse, one of the chickens clucked at me through the screen of its little window and I wanted to kiss the yellow thorn of its beak.

If only a dog had come blustering out of the woodshed to grant me passage, I would have lain down in the leaves and made him into a pillow. I would have stayed there and let his fur become my world for a while.

Instead, I saw a strange car parked in our lane. The trooper's car. And I buttoned my heart, took a deep breath, and gave myself a chore to do.

I was good at chores.

Entering my house helped. It was nothing else but what it was.

“Where's Officer Coleman?” I asked my mother from the mudroom.

She and my grandmother were making enough slaw for “a posse of Huns,” one of many confusing things my grandfather liked to say.

“Oh, it's just his car that's still here, not him,” my grandmother said. “It was easier for your grandpap to take him down to the Woodberrys' in our truck than to try to give him directions.”

I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them work. “So he's coming back here?”

“Soon, I would expect. They've been gone for quite a while.”

“Annabelle, wash up and get started on these potatoes,” my mother said. “All those men who've come to help look for Betty will need to be fed, and some of them are sure to tag along home with your father.”

When I didn't move or answer, she turned to look me over. “Annabelle?” She wiped her hands on her apron and came to feel my cheeks. “Are you all right? You're so pale.”

I nodded. “I feel fine.”

She didn't look convinced. “Well, then wash your hands and come help.”

I had meant to keep an eye on my brothers, making sure they didn't go anywhere near the barn, but they were so worn-out from searching that I found them lying on the sitting room floor, surrounded by Tinkertoys, listening to
The Adventures of Superman
on the radio.

I felt quite old as I watched them.

But then Officer Coleman came back with my grandfather, and in a trice I was a worried girl all over again.

At the sound of the trooper's big voice, my brothers crept into the kitchen and crawled under the table as before.

I tried very hard to listen properly to what Officer Coleman had learned from Andy, but it wasn't easy.

The sound of Toby's voice, the sight of him sleeping in the hay, muffled everything else, as if I were inside a Mason jar and not nearly enough holes in the lid for breathing.

Over hot coffee and pie, Officer Coleman told us the rest of the story, and I could see why Andy had held some back.

“He told me what he'd already told the constable. That he and Betty had meant to play hooky and meet up in the woods. But there was more to it than that. When I pushed him, he confessed that they'd made plans to go down to Cobb Hollow. If Toby was in his smokehouse, they'd go someplace else. If not, they meant to have a look around.”

“Oh, for pity's sake,” my mother said. “Why in the world would they do that?”

“You might well wonder,” the trooper said, shaking his head. “It took some digging, but Andy's father is a hard man who, well,
encouraged
his son to cooperate. So Andy told us that they had decided to make some trouble for Toby that day. Maybe even set fire to his place, drive him away.”

“I told you she was like that,” I said, but my mother shushed me.

“You can be quiet, Annabelle, or you can get started on those potatoes.”

The trooper gave me a small smile. “I'm not sure what to make of all this. Constable Oleska filled me in as much as he could, but it feels like a circus, the other business that's been going on. All I really want to do is find the girl.”

“Andy wasn't any more help than that?” my grandmother asked.

“Not much.” Officer Coleman pushed his plate away and finished the last of his coffee. “It was raining so hard the day she disappeared that Andy never imagined she'd be anywhere but school or home. When I asked him, he said he didn't think she would have gone down to the smokehouse alone. But she was the one who'd had the idea to devil Toby and drive him away. She was dead set on it. And now she's gone. And Toby's gone. And I think it's time I looked harder for him, instead of her.”

He stood up and put his hat back on. “I thank you for your hospitality, ma'am,” he said to my mother. “And for your help,” he said to my grandfather; “and yours,” he said to me; “. . . and yours,” he said, bowing to peer under the table at Henry and James. “I'm sure the constable can manage the search from here on in.”

And he left. Just like that.

I felt relieved, of course, that he'd be looking for Toby somewhere else. And I trusted that Constable Oleska would sort out what to do next. But he didn't know all the things that I knew.

He didn't know that Betty had thrown that rock, regardless of the story that the picture or Betty herself had told.

He didn't know that Toby hadn't taken her.

He didn't know that the bloody wire they'd found in the smokehouse didn't mean a thing. That Betty had put it there. I was sure of it.

Which meant that she had indeed gone down to the smokehouse on the day she disappeared. While Toby was fishing under the creek bridge. While the rain came down in curtains.

And that's when the whisper in my head got louder. And I thought I knew where Betty was.

“Potatoes, Annabelle,” my mother said. “Your father could be back anytime, and company with him.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

The sink was full of huge potatoes, far easier to peel than small ones, and I let my hands do the work as the whisper gathered strength.

I tried to poke holes in my theory, but it had a pretty tight skin. Every question I asked myself had an answer. Every doubt a promise: She had to be there. It made sense that she was.

I was tempted to tell someone right then and there. To fix what was wrong without any more delay or confusion.

Finding Betty wouldn't clear Toby, though.

She had lied before and she would lie again, saying things that nobody could prove untrue. How was Toby supposed to prove that he hadn't hurt Ruth or James or Betty herself? How was he supposed to explain why he'd been hiding out if he wasn't guilty of those things?

I should have left him in his smokehouse. I should have left everything alone. What if he was forced to leave, now, with winter coming on?

“Annabelle, when you finish with those potatoes, go fetch me a jar of peaches from the cellar.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

Chores first. Then whatever news my father brought home with him. And then, perhaps, I would tell them.

When my father came through the door an hour later, he looked more than weary. “I don't know where that girl is,” he said as he took off his boots. “But if she's anywhere around here, she's out of sight and earshot.”

A moment later, four other men, two of them strangers to me, came filing in, equally worn-out. Two of them were Mr. Earl and Mr. Jim. I couldn't remember their last names, but I knew that Mr. Earl was a mechanic and Mr. Jim was a grocer. My father introduced the newcomers: a Theodore Lester from Aliquippa, and Carl Anderson all the way from New Castle.

We said our hellos and how-do-you-dos, and my mother poured coffee for everyone while I set places at the table.

“I don't know what more we can do, Sarah,” my father said. “The Glengarrys are beside themselves. Betty's mother has come, and she's been, well, hard on them for letting this happen.”

“But that's not at all fair,” my grandmother said.

“Not much about this that's fair,” he said.

The afternoon was blending into evening, Aunt Lily would be home soon, and if I needed another reason to head for the barn, I soon had it.

“The constable ought to be back by now with a couple of bloodhounds from Waynesburg,” my father said as he sat down with the others to a supper of beef with roasted potatoes and carrots. Stick-to-your-ribs food. Something Toby sorely needed, and I vowed to get some out to the barn as soon as I could. “They found a little boy stuck in a game trap in an old coal mine shaft, been missing for two days. But now they're ours and I believe we'll get somewhere in short order.”

I should have been glad. If Betty was where I thought she was, they would find her, which was important. Of course that had to be the most important thing. And if it was—and I knew it was, it had to be—then the worst part of this would be over soon, one way or another.

Or I could just stand up right now and say, “I think I know where Betty is.”

I almost did. The words leaned out of my mouth and nearly made the jump, but talking to Toby first seemed a better idea.

At the very least, he would have something to say about what happened next.

There was still some light left in the sky.

Soon, the men would go back out with those dogs.

I slipped into the mudroom and put on my coat and boots, rummaged through the closet until I found an old wool plaid hunting coat my grandfather hadn't worn for some time, stuffed some gloves in its pocket, and slipped out the mudroom door. Behind me, I heard my mother calling my name, but I kept going, out and down around the house and into the woods, as fast as I could.