He shook his head and tried her number at the office. After the fifteenth ring, he decided she must be on her way, so he hung up. She was no good in the snow, not having grown up in New England, and besides she had the car without the front-wheel drive and no chains, and he wished she would just show up already. The boys had gone off on one of their games, and he had no one to talk to and a surplus of nervous energy. He dialed her office again, the receiver smelling of soap, but it just rang and rang.
The fidgets threatened to overwhelm him, but fortunately, he remembered the seven lobster pots in the workroom. Earlier in the day when he was mending the slats and mesh, he had noticed how odd and out of place was the new material against the old. The whole stack should be taken outside and given a chance to weather and fade in the cold and damp. Now, he brought them up a pair at a time, and on the third go-around, he decided to save time by taking all three remaining traps. At the threshold, he stumbled into the kitchen, dropping them all and sending one clattering across the floor. Nick and Jip rushed to see what had happened.
“Butterfingers,” Tim said. “When you try to save yourself some trouble, you only get more trouble.”
“Where are you going with these traps?” Jip asked.
“I fixed them up and thought I could sell them as antiques to the tourists this summer, Lord knows, they’re old as sin. But you see where the new wood sticks out against the faded bits. Folks can tell. So I need to get them beat up a bit and exposed to the elements. You boys interested in lending a hand?”
They carried the traps to the mudroom and laid them near the outside door. Tim shoved his hooves into a pair of boots and grabbed a parka from the hook. “Get a coat, Nick, and some boots. You can help me take these round to the back. A good freeze and a couple months of salt air and they’ll be good as new. Good as old.”
Tim stepped out into the heavy snow, flying thick and steadily, and the boy trailed behind, faithful as a hound, under the bulk of the lobster pot. They trudged to the top of the hill and set them against the railing that ran along the back of the house. The colored lobster buoys hanging there had little caps of snow. At the end of their third trip, they stood to admire their work and watch the storm, white frosting on their hair and shoulders. A good four inches had fallen, creating a smooth and even layer undisturbed by man or beast, except for their own prints along the edge of the foundation and a very fresh and clearly delineated path between the house and the sea. Footprints had been covered over, but the dents in the snow remained. Tracks of someone who had been walking out there at some point in the past few hours. The trail began at the edge of the shore and meandered across the rocks before disappearing around the far side of the house. Tim put his boot into the nearest print and measured its length. Big as a man’s foot.
The boy brushed the snow from his head and slicked back his wet hair. Almost immediately a new frosting of snow stuck to him. They did not speak, but by tacit agreement, they set off down to the sea, following the tracks to their source, picking their way around the rocks until the trail petered out at the shoreline. There was no other path to the right or the left. Whatever had made those marks seemed to have come out of the water.
*
On the tenth ring, Jack Peter answered the telephone. From the vantage of the kitchen window, he could discern the path his father and Nick had made, the heavy flakes covering them like snowmen, white shadows in a world of white. They had nearly disappeared into the page. Because he hated talking on the phone, he almost never picked up a call, but the incessant ringing was worse than his loathing of the instrument. He did not say hello or anything at all, waiting instead for the person on the other end to begin. At first only the sound of breathing filled the void, and then came his mother’s disembodied voice.
“Is anybody there?”
“It’s me.”
“Jack? Hello. Where is your father? It was ringing and ringing.”
“He’s not here. Nobody’s here.”
A breath of exasperation escaped her throat. “What do you mean? Where’s Nicholas? Where’s your father?”
“They are in the water.”
“What do you mean?”
“They walked to the ocean.”
“In this storm? Are they crazy? What are they doing down by the ocean?”
He dropped the receiver, went to the window to check on the two, and then came back to the phone. “Following the footprints.”
“Jack, where did you go? Stay on the phone, do you hear me? What footprints?”
“A monster’s.”
“How many times do we have to tell you?”
“One hundred times,” he said, but she did not laugh. “They went out to take the lobster pots, so Daddy could weather them.”
“That man, honestly. Why he felt the need to do it in a blizzard.”
“To sell to the tourists.”
She laughed, finally. “Listen, Jack, when your father comes in, I need you to tell him to come pick me up. In the Jeep. My car is stuck, do you understand?”
He nodded.