“And the smoke, do you see it?” Father Cal asked.
Ben did see it: The way the smoke coiled and curved like a dark halo above the blaze. The way its tendrils looked like two arms and two legs. The way the cloud of smoke at the uppermost edge of the page looked like a featureless face.
“Okay.” The word came out cold and tight.
“I asked him about the man in the smoke, but he didn’t answer me,” Miss Woods told him. “He gets quiet sometimes.”
“Yeah.” Ben ran his hands over the unblemished wood veneer of Charlie’s desk. He didn’t need to look at the desks around him to know that they were etched with half-formed words and scratched by restless pens.
“We thought it best to point it out to you, Ben,” Cal said. “It’s normal for a child his age to have lingering anxiety from witnessing a fire like that. Everyone processes these things differently—children often deal with fear or trauma in unanticipated ways.”
“I didn’t realize it was still on his mind,” Ben said. He’d never tell them, but he couldn’t recall ever discussing the fire with Charlie. He remembered that afternoon, with his son sitting in the field watching the fire, his dark tousled hair and unblinking blue eyes immobile among the waves of grass. “Sometimes it’s hard to guess what he’s thinking.”
“It’s probably a small thing,” Cal told him again. “We share a counselor with another school who’s trained for this, if you’d like Charlie to see her.”
“Thanks.” Ben rubbed his eyes with his hands. “I’ll talk to Caroline about it.”
“Good,” Cal said. He smiled and straightened his back, his duty done. “Thank you, Miss Woods.”
“Yes, thank you,” Ben said, and stood up.
“How’s everything else?” Cal asked once they were out of the building.
“Fine. Busy, you know.” He was happy not to have to talk about the drawing or the man in the smoke.
“I’m sure.”
“Caroline’s still upset that we weren’t able to open in time for the foliage.”
“You’ve both accomplished amazing things in such a short amount of time.”
“I’ve tried to tell her that, but she’s back to the pace of her finance days. She can never admire the things she’s accomplished. The tasks left undone are all that matter.”
“And it’s not as if the Crofts is your only project. Have you heard back from your editor?”
“Yesterday,” Ben said. He stopped at the path that would lead him back to the athletic fields, but Cal moved to walk deeper into the dying garden. “I should probably head back to Charlie.”
“Indulge me for a moment,” Cal said. “I learned something that I think you’ll appreciate. And I’m dying to hear what your editor said.”
“Oh, he said he liked the pages.” Ben had also used the opportunity to ask his publisher to release part of his next advance payment early. He hated asking, but Caroline said they were having “liquidity issues” and that an early payment would help keep them going for a while longer. Ben hadn’t been in a position to argue, but it was still hard for him to believe things had gotten so bad so quickly.
“Congratulations!”
“Thanks.” He’d been happy with the pages he’d sent in, but lately the words weren’t flowing as easily as they had been. “He said he’d feel better if I sent him an outline for the rest of it, but he knows I don’t really work that way.” He forced himself to smile. “But I couldn’t have done it without you,” he told Cal.
The priory had extensive if unorganized records that dated to the colonial period, and Cal’s curiosity about the Swanns and their home had prompted him to sniff out some intriguing details about their history. While Ben had gained a valuable perspective by attending the Preservation Society meetings, Cal’s research had proven just as useful. As arresting as Chief Stanton’s ancestor’s account of the Winter Siege was, the ones shared in later meetings of the Preservation Society were very similar. Terrible strife and losses followed by faith, cooperation, and—ultimately—salvation. The story had a pleasing arc, but there was something missing from it. Ben had sensed this same weakness in his own book. He didn’t know how to fix it.
“That’s very flattering,” the priest said.
“I mean it,” Ben said.
Cal waved him away, but Ben knew the older man was pleased.
They stopped in front of the mosaic of St. Michael and the dragon. With the bite in the air and waning forests all around, Ben thought that today the dragon might hold the advantage.
“Yesterday I was in the archives to see if there was any mention of the railroad that passed through Swannhaven in the nineteenth century. Jamison Swann had been one of the railroad’s founders in the 1840s. It was an exceedingly lucrative venture until the railroad collapsed in the 1870s. Does this ring a bell for you?”
“Of course. It’s all anyone talks about.”
“Those were tough times, and I was genuinely surprised to discover amidst the priory’s accounts of good works that one of our chapter’s favorite bits of lore is more fiction than fact. When I first showed this mosaic to you, I was under the impression that it had been created by a talented brother who’d lived here.”
“And?”
“Most artists sign their work, don’t they?”
Ben dutifully moved closer to the mural to examine the edge of the mosaic. The tiles that made up the piece were exquisitely fitted. In order to achieve such a sense of dimension against such a dark palette, the artist must have expended great effort to make use of every nuance of color.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Anything out of place?”
“The Socratic method, is it?” He panned the shadows of the wall twice before he found it in the right corner of the foreground: a curved neck and ebony beak, the carefully wrought texture of feathers. “Is that…”