کتاب 03-13

13

Harper retreated, watching the flames for further wonders. Any thoughts of closing the hatch had been startled out of mind. She looked around for John, to ask him what she had just seen—to ask him what the hell was in the furnace—and saw he was asleep. His breath came in a thin, strained whistle.

She felt her own exhaustion deeply. Weariness was a dry, bitter ache in every joint. She settled in a soft chair with threadbare linen cushions, in a good position to watch the fire, to keep an eye on it in case it did anything else.

The flames rippled and flowed, casting their ancient hypnotic spell, draining the will and thought out of her head. It cast a blaze of heat, too, that was as agreeable as a comfortable old quilt. A part of her was afraid the woman would part those incarnadine curtains of fire and peer out at her once more. Another part of her longed to see her again.

She might’ve closed her eyes for a while.

A cry jolted her upright—a small sob of pain or terror. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, a minute or an hour, and didn’t know if the cry had been real or imagined. She listened intently, but heard nothing more.

The flames had burned down some and she recollected at last that John had wanted her to close the hatch. It took all of her energy to get up and shut the sliding steel door. After she sat again and for a long while she floated, untethered, in the peaceful gray zone between sleep and wakefulness. She was as free and adrift as an empty boat on an empty sea, a good way to feel, but a bad thing to think, and suddenly she sprang all the way awake. The boat. John had warned her it had to be pulled farther up on the beach or they would be stranded.

The thought of losing the boat startled her out of the chair and onto her feet. The rest of her mental cobwebs were blasted away the instant she stepped outside into an abrasive, salty gust of wind.

It was near dawn and the fog was pearly and silken in the first light. The breeze was scattering it, pulling it to silvery scarves, and through a great rent in the fabric of the mist, Harper could see to the opposite shore.

Three canoes had been hauled up onto the snow. Everyone had come back alive, then. Nick was on the beach, dragging one of the canoes across the sand. Harper wondered who would’ve sent a little boy, all by himself, to haul the boats back into the boathouse. This close to morning, he belonged in bed.

She waved. The instant he saw her, he gave up on what he was doing with the canoe and began waving himself, frantically, flailing both arms over his head in the universal gesture of distress. And at last she registered the wrongness of the moment. Nick was not dressed for the weather, wore only a light black fleece and his slippers. And the canoe—he had not been dragging it toward the boathouse, but down into the water. No one had sent him to stow the canoes. He had come to find her.

In two steps she was up to her ankles in the brackish, stinking muck once again. Her boots were in that slop somewhere. She didn’t look for them, just ran the rowboat into the water and stepped in.

By the time she pulled up alongside the dock, Nick was waiting with a mossy length of rope. He wound it around a cleat at the end of the boat, then seized her arm. She believed if he had been big enough he would’ve flung her up onto the pine boards, like a fisherman hauling in his catch.

He wanted to run but he didn’t want to let go of her, either, yanking her arm as they climbed the steep slope. Nick’s breath screamed in his throat. She couldn’t go as fast as he wanted, crunching along in the granular snow in her bare feet.

“Stop,” she said, and made him hold up with her, pretending she needed to catch her breath when really she intended for him to catch his. “Can you write? What’s happened, Nick?”

Harper slipped her arm out of his to mime the act of writing, scribbling an invisible pen on the foolscap of the milky air. But he shook his head, desperately, miserably, and ran on, not bothering to try and drag her anymore.

The mist rolled down through the trunks of the red pines, flowing like the ghost of a great flood, pouring over the ground, back toward the sea, in slow motion.

She followed him—pursued him, really—to the infirmary, where he had at last stopped to wait for her at the bottom of the steps. His aunt was beside him, dressed in thin flannel pajamas and barefoot herself.

“My father—” Carol said, her voice coming in savage bursts between sobs for air, as if she and not Harper were the one who had just charged half a mile up the hill through the snow. “It’s my father. I prayed, I prayed you’d come back and you’re here and you have to say you’ll save him, you have to say.”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Harper said, taking Carol by the elbow, turning her toward the infirmary. “What happened?”

“He’s crying blood,” Carol said. “And he’s talking to God. When I left him he was begging God to forgive the person who murdered him.”