Wolf Hollow (22 page)

Betty Glengarry died at 10:18 that morning.

We didn't know about it for another hour.

Henry was the one who answered the telephone.

“It's Mrs. Gribble,” he said, holding out the receiver to my mother.

My mother took the phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. “What does she want?”

“I don't know,” Henry said. “Maybe she has a call for you but didn't want to put it straight through.”

My mother put the receiver to her ear and leaned into the mouthpiece. “Hello, Annie?”

I could hear Mrs. Gribble, but not what she said. Just a babble, louder than usual, urgent, but not eager, the way she usually sounded when she had news.

My mother listened for a moment before suddenly gasping, her free hand flying to her cheek.

“Oh no,” she said. “But how can that be? Oh, the poor thing. How is that possible?”

My mother wasn't a crier and she didn't cry now, but the look on her face was worse than tears.

I thought this was news that Toby had been killed.

I felt hot and terribly cold at the same time. Henry stood close beside me. He smelled like maple syrup and dog. I fiercely wanted to trade places with him.

“I'll tell him,” my mother said, her voice breaking. “He and John are out with the hounds, but I'll tell him when I see him. I will, Annie. Thank you for letting us know. Good-bye.”

My mother slowly hung the receiver back on its hook.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“No,” she said, turning to look at me. “Betty is. She died of infection. It spread everywhere and they couldn't stop it.”

She sat down in the nearest chair.

Henry inched closer to me. I could hear him breathing.

“Hey,” James called, galloping in from the mudroom where he'd been making a saber out of cardboard. “You wanna play pirates with me, Henry?”

“Sure. In a minute,” Henry said. “But let's go find Grandma first. I think she needs us to help her with something.”

He gave me a long look, as if he were seeing me for the first time, and then he left the room, James trailing him like a noisy shadow. “Like what?” James said. “Does she need us to carry something? Henry, does she want us to carry something?”

The boy-sound grew distant.

I sat on the floor at my mother's feet and laid my head in her lap.

She stroked my hair as if I were a cat.

One of us was trembling. Maybe both.

“I could've found her faster,” I said.

My mother's hand went still.

“Don't you dare do that,” she said sternly.

She pushed my head off her lap and leaned down to look straight into my face.

“Do you think you're God?” she said impatiently. “Do you think you control things? Well, you do not. And it's arrogant to think that you do.”

I was so surprised that I had nothing to say.

“Betty's dead, and that's terrible.
Terrible
. But you didn't do it, Annabelle.”

She sat back. “In fact, if you hadn't led the way to that well she'd have died down there, alone and afraid. And we might never have found her at all.”

I pictured Betty in the dark, cold, terrifying well, badly hurt. And dying, all by herself.

I pictured someone coming upon that well, years later, and filling it in with earth, burying her old bones deep in that accidental crypt.

“Come here,” my mother said, opening her arms.

She was warm.

“Sometimes things come out right,” she said. “Sometimes they don't.”

I heard an echo of Toby in her voice. Something he had once said. Something about guilt or blame.

My grandmother did cry when she heard the news. It didn't matter that she hadn't known Betty.

I cried, too, the sight and sound of her tears spurring my own.

James didn't cry. When he heard that Betty had died, he laughed instead.

“Don't be silly,” he said, waving his saber over his head.

It took my mother some time to convince him, and then he became very serious and went with Henry to make an “I'm sorry” card for the Glengarrys.

As he was leaving the room, Henry turned in the doorway. “Do you want to come with us?” he asked me.

The way he said it, the way he looked at me, took me aback. “I'll be up in a minute,” I said.

“Annie Gribble asked me to tell the constable about Betty if I see him,” my mother said.

“You can be sure everyone in the county will know it before he does,” my grandmother said, drying her eyes. “Annie will see to that.”

“She called it ‘murder,'” my mother said quietly.

My grandmother cleared the tears from her throat. “That's exactly what it is,” she said. “If Toby pushed that poor girl down a well, that's exactly what it is.”

I clung to the
if
with all my might, but few people were as patient as my grandmother.

She might be willing to wait for certainty, but I doubted that the constable would be, or the police either, to say nothing of the Glengarrys.

If helping Toby had been important before, it was more so now. They would shoot him. Or, if they didn't, they would cuff him to an electric chair and cook the life out of him.

I prayed that he had let go of those old guns finally, tossed away his coat and hat, borrowed others from an unlocked house, and made his way to a road where a kind trucker might pick him up and take him to Ohio, maybe farther, before setting him down into a new life.

But I didn't think he'd done that.

I wasn't sure he'd even left these hills yet. He hadn't seemed at all afraid. Just sorry to be blamed for what he hadn't done and weary with the burden of what he had, but not inclined to do much about either. Perhaps he was convinced that there was nothing he could do.

I felt like I was suffocating.

I paced from window to window, like James did every Christmas Eve, seeing nothing but his own reflection in the darkened glass but sure, nonetheless, that Santa Claus was out there somewhere, winging his way toward our farm.

I watched instead for farmers with whistles, or policemen with guns, but I didn't see anyone.

The horses in the pasture, like guardsmen, were the first to know that something was coming. They lifted their heads sharply, both at once, and stared into the woods leading down toward Cobb Hollow.

We heard the dogs, too, even through the locked doors and windows, long before we saw them. But it was our dogs making all the noise.

The bloodhounds, just two of them, were all business as they came into view, their long, droopy faces sweeping the ground ahead of them, one of them up from below the kitchen garden, the other across the horse pasture.

“They're coming this way,” my grandmother said from the mudroom window. “And John is with them.”

My grandfather's coat and gloves were already up in my closet.

I would smell like them, I realized. I would smell like Toby to those hounds. At least I hoped I did. I nearly smiled at the thought. Let them come on in. Who would believe a dog that thought I was a crazy woodsman?

Still, I was relieved to see the handlers tying the hounds up to the laundry posts.

“Sarah, you'd better put some more coffee on,” my grandmother called over her shoulder. “We're about to have company.”

The handlers were as quiet as their dogs—said very little, in fact, and softly when they did—and they acted much the same, looking around the kitchen curiously, from floor to ceiling, stopping often to zoom in on a detail they found of interest.

When my brothers came down to the kitchen, the handlers looked at them as if they were rabbits. James ducked back under the table, pulling on Henry's pant leg, whispering, “Come on, matey,” but Henry sat next to me instead.

I looked at him curiously. He looked back at me, unsmiling.

My father and Constable Oleska had come in with the dog handlers.

“We decided to wait here for the others to catch up before we go back out,” the constable said. “We already scoured the area around the smokehouse. So much scent there that we went in circles, but the dogs finally decided on this direction.”

The men didn't bother to take off their coats.

“Sit down,” my mother said. “We have some news.”

When he heard that Betty had died, the constable said, “Lord God,” and put his head in his hands.

The dog handlers barely noticed. They must have been through such things a hundred times. Missing children. Criminals on the run. After a while, they must have become as matter-of-fact as their dogs, intent only on the chase.

They had been denied the chance to find a missing girl. They would do what they could to find her killer.

My father looked from my mother to me, his eyes full of questions.
What should we do now? How are we supposed to know what to do now?

I wasn't sure, either. But I knew I couldn't spend one more minute doing nothing. I knew I couldn't grow up and live a long life with the knowledge that I had not done what I could. Right now. Before it once again made no difference.

I slipped out of the kitchen and into the sitting room, leaving the rest of them to sort out their next steps.

Mine were clear, but I sat quietly for a while and went through them in my head, watching myself do and say the only things I could think to do or say.

I didn't see how I could make things any worse than they were.

I carefully shut the door between the kitchen and the sitting room.

I picked up the telephone receiver and turned the crank as quietly as I could.

“Mrs. Gribble?” I said softly into the mouthpiece.

“Sarah?”

“No, it's Annabelle, Mrs. Gribble. Can you put me through to the Woodberrys please? It's very important.” I knew that would whet her appetite.

“Annabelle, does your mother know you're using the telephone?”

“Of course,” I said. “Do you want to speak with her? She's helping my grandma with some chores right now, but I can get her if you want. Only we need to hurry. This is really important.”