She couldn’t ask Nick if he had heard Father Storey speak, of course—the only time his deafness had ever frustrated her. She wanted desperately for someone, anyone, to have heard him. She considered sending for Carol. Perhaps Tom would respond to his daughter’s voice. By some accounts, he had before. Even if he didn’t stir again, Carol had a right to know her father had spoken today.
But after turning the thought over, she rejected it. Carol would rejoice to hear her father was recovering—but the rejoicing could wait. Harper wanted to talk to him before anyone else did. She wanted to see what he remembered, if anything, about the night he had been clubbed in the head. And she wanted to warn him about what the strain of the last months had done to Carol, how the winter had left her ravaged and feverish and mistrustful. He needed to know about the slaughter on Verdun Avenue, and children marching around camp with rifles, and people forced to carry stones in their mouths to shut them up.
No: in truth, Tom didn’t need to know those things. Harper needed him to know those things. She wanted the old man back to make things right again. How she had missed him.
She sat with him the rest of the night, his hand in hers, stroking his knuckles. She spoke to him sometimes. “You hibernated through the whole winter, just like a bear, Tom Storey. The icicles are dripping. The snow is almost all gone. Time to wake up and crawl out of your cave. Nick and Allie and Carol and John are waiting for you. I’m waiting, too.”
But he did not speak again, and at some point close to dawn, she dozed off with his hand in her lap.
Nick woke her an hour later. The rising sun shot through the mist outside, turned it shades of lemon and meringue, sweet as pie.
“He looked at me,” Nick told her with his hands. “He looked at me and smiled. He even winked before he went to sleep again. He’s coming back.”
Yes, Harper thought. Like Aslan, he was coming back and he was bringing the spring with him.
Just in time, she thought. He’s coming back just in time and everything is going to be okay.
Later, she would remember thinking that and laugh. It was either that or cry.
5
Harper needed to clear her head, needed to do some quality thinking, so she walked out of the infirmary into the bitter chill. No one stopped her. They were all in the chapel together. Harper could hear them singing, could see their mystery lights flickering around the edges of the closed red doors.
The funny thing was that they were all singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” which didn’t seem like the kind of rag they’d go for in chapel. Almost everyone in the congregation had seen someone they loved devoured by fire, lived in fear of burning themselves. But now their voices rose together in hopeful praise of ashes and soot, voices that quivered with a kind of hysterical delight. She left them behind.
The air was clean and sharp and the walking was easy. Harper had left her big belly, and the baby inside of it, back at the infirmary, needed a break from being pregnant. It felt good to be thin again. She let her thoughts wander and in no time at all found she had reached the place where the dirt track from camp joined Little Harbor Road. That was farther than she had meant to go, farther than was necessarily safe. She glanced at the rusting, battered blue school bus, expecting to be yelled at by whoever was on watch. A gaunt, dark figure slumped behind the steering wheel. She guessed whoever it was had to be dozing.
She was going to turn around and walk back when she saw the man in the road.
There was a guy right in the middle of Little Harbor Road, not a hundred feet away, pulling himself arm over arm, like a soldier wriggling under barbed wire on a battlefield. Or, no: really, he was pulling himself along like someone whose legs didn’t work. If anyone came along in a hurry, he was going to get run over. Aside from that, it was awful, watching him struggle along across the icy tarmac.
“Hey!” Harper called. “Hey, you!”
She lifted the chain draped across the entrance to Camp Wyndham and started briskly toward him. It was important to get this done—deal with the man in the road—and get back out of sight before a car turned up. She shouted at him once more. He lifted his head, but the only streetlight was behind him, so his face remained in shadow: a round, fleshy, fat face, hair thinning on top. Harper hurried the last few steps to him and knelt down.
“Do you need medical attention?” she asked. “Can you stand up? I’m a nurse. If you think you can stand up, give me your hand, and I’ll walk you to my infirmary.”
Nelson Heinrich lifted his head and gave her a sunny smile. His teeth were red with blood and someone had removed his nose, leaving a pair of red slots in the ragged flesh. “Oh, that’s all right, Harper. I’ve made it this far. I can lead them the rest of the way without your help.”
Harper recoiled, fell back into the road, sitting down hard. “Nelson. Oh, God, Nelson, what happened to you?”
“What do you think?” Nelson said. “Your husband happened to me. And now he’s going to happen to you.”
The headlights came on down the street, flashing over both of them. The Freightliner awoke with a boom of combustion and a grinding of gears.
Nelson said, “Go on, Harper. Go back.” He winked. “I’ll see you soon.”
She held her hands up over her face to shield her eyes from the light and when she lowered them she was awake, sitting up on her elbows in bed in the infirmary and having another contraction.
“These are dreams about the baby coming,” Harper said to herself, in a low voice. “Not about Nelson Heinrich leading a Cremation Crew to camp. Nelson Heinrich is dead. He was torn apart by machine-gun fire. You saw him dead in the road. You saw him.”
It was funny how the more she said it to herself, the less she believed it.
6
It was five days before Father Storey spoke again.
“Michael?” the old man muttered, in a muzzy tone of bemusement and curiosity, and a moment later Mike Lindqvist pushed the curtain back and ducked into the ward.
“Did you call for me, ma’am?” he asked Harper.
The sound of Father Storey’s voice jackknifed Harper’s pulse, made her blood strum with surprise. She opened her mouth to tell Michael that it had been the old man, then thought better of it. Michael would carry the news to Allie and who knew where that would lead.
“I did,” Harper said. “I need your help. I need you to carry a note to Allie.”
“That’s no trouble,” he said.
“I’m afraid I require a bit more than that. I want to get together with the Fireman again. And I want Allie to go with me. Allie and Renée and Don Lewiston. You should be there, too, if it can be managed. And—if at all possible—Gil Cline and the Mazz. Is there a way . . . any way . . . such a thing could be done?”
Michael paled. He rested one cheek of his ass against the edge of the counter and lowered his head and plucked at the copper wires of his little goatee. Finally he looked up.
“What’s this meeting about?”
“The possibility of leaving. The possibility of staying. It’s past time for some of us to make plans about our future. Father Storey is stable for the moment. But if his condition changes suddenly, we’ll want to be ready.”
“For the worst?”
“For whatever.”
Michael said, “If Carol finds you all out on the island together, making secret plans with the Fireman, she’ll lock every one of you up. Or worse.”
“We could face worse even if we do nothing.”