The Crofts was Charlie’s house, but the forest was his home.
He ran through the trees and he imagined himself as Hickory Heck running from his old life in the city. The trees here were shorter than the buildings Charlie was used to, but they made him feel smaller than any skyscraper ever had. They made him imagine a world beyond the one he knew.
At first, Charlie had been afraid of the emptiness. The land here was as wide and spare as the city had been tall and crowded. But that was before he had learned what to look for.
After running away from his family, Heck had wandered through the mountains for three days until he came to the tree where he dug out the burrow that would become his home. Before then, he’d slept between roots and alongside boulders, and some of the trees he passed along the way had been taller and older and thicker than the tree he eventually chose. But when he found the right one, he knew it. This was just how Charlie had felt when he first laid eyes on the clearing in the woods to the east of the lake.
He liked to sit on the stump in the center of the clearing. The breeze there carried a collection of scents: the faint rot of wood from the stump he sat on, moss from the green carpet that covered it. There was a hint of stale water from the nearby lake and of blooming grass from fields to the north.
Dad once saw a picture Charlie had drawn of this place, and he had called it a faerie circle, but Charlie didn’t know why. He had never seen faeries there.
Even on a day as nice as today, there were no faeries. There was the angel, but the angel lived on the other side of the lake. Here there was only the forest and the air and the earth. The sound of branches playing on the wind and roots stretching in the ground was a conversation he listened to through long afternoons. This was where he had learned to be still.
Mom and Dad believed that he spent hours here playing alone, but they were only half right. It was a game of a sort, though not one they would have recognized or approved of. And while he was by himself, he wasn’t always alone.
When he reached the clearing, he sat on his stump and waited, as he did each day. It was not long until he felt the gaze of something just out of sight burning into the back of his head. He had not yet been fast enough to see the one who watched him, but Charlie was patient. In time, he was sure, he would catch sight of the stranger in the trees.
Charlie often tried to imagine the eyes that followed him from the forest. It could be anything, Charlie told himself, and his heart thrilled to the thought of it. The world here was as alive as it was in the pages of Hickory Heck. There were beavers up at the lake and groundhogs in the fields. There were snakes under the rocks and frogs by the shore. There were deer in the grasslands and mountain lions in the caves.
But Charlie felt certain that his watcher in the woods was something else entirely.
6
Exton, with its brightly painted Victorians and handsome shops, was two valleys but an entire world away from Swannhaven.
Embroidered banners strung along lampposts announced an annual dance festival, and the outdoor seating areas for the town’s restaurants bubbled with the conversations of patrons. When Ben picked up his books from the bookstore on its main street, tourists and locals alike basked in the warm summer light.
Ben would have enjoyed his time in town, if not for the ugly task ahead. He chose a pay phone across from the bank to call his mother. His dread grew with each coin he thumbed through the slot.
“Hello?” She’d had a nice voice once, but years of liquor and smoke had left their scars.
“It’s Ben, Mom.”
“Ben?” It was early evening, but Ben got the impression he’d woken her.
“Yes. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I got a little place not too far from the beach. Can walk to work, and they let me pick all my shifts. And I—oh, you were just being polite, weren’t you? Asking me how I was.”
“I’m glad you’re okay.” She rarely slurred her words, but there was a thickness to her voice that he recognized well. “The lawyer says you haven’t signed the papers from Grams’s estate.”
“Oh, Benj. It’s just too hard. I look at the papers, all ready to sign, but then I think that if I sent them off, then your sweet Grams would really be gone.”
A lie, and not a convincing one. Mom and Grams had rarely spoken over the last decade, and Ben doubted that any conversation they might’ve shared would have left either of them eager for another.
“Well, there would still be the money.”
“It is a nice sum, that’s true,” she said.
Ben grimaced as she coughed wetly into the receiver.
“But then I think of that house she had and all the nice things she had in it, and I wonder what happened to that. Still had that land upstate, too, I imagine.”
He was surprised she knew about the farmstead.
“She had expenses at the end,” he told her. “The assisted-living facility, hospice, the medications, the aides, the funeral. If she’d ever run into trouble, Ted or I would have helped, but you know how she was. She’d never want to burden us.” He couldn’t resist adding a note of insinuation to his voice.