Ben swiveled so he could see the foot of the stairs.
The weight of the desk had worked against it at impact. Its final gasp was a haze of ancient paper remnants, exhaled like the release of an earthbound spirit.
“Help me out here, buddy?”
Charlie walked down to Ben. He peered into the hole Ben’s leg was wedged in. When he looked up, a rare smile filled his little face.
“I think you liked Mom’s pancakes too much,” he said.
Ben braced himself against Charlie’s shoulder and the banister to lift his calf out of the hole. He sat down heavily on the stairs. Charlie sat next to him as Ben hoisted the leg of his jeans.
“Does it hurt?” Charlie asked.
Skin along his calf had bunched up, and the flesh below was already turning purple.
“Not really. Going to be sore tomorrow, though.”
“Do you still need help carrying stuff?”
“I think we earned ourselves a break, don’t you?”
Charlie scampered back up the stairs, but Ben walked down them. He pulled the desk away from the wall to examine the damage. The lock on the lid of the desk had loosened but not enough for him to pry it open. But the side panel had splintered, and he forced his weight against it until it broke away with a satisfying crunch.
He pulled the flashlight out of his pocket and positioned the desk so that he could shine the light into the hole in its side. Upstairs, Charlie was calling Caroline to come look at Ben’s leg.
The hollow space was filled with scrolls of thick paper. Ben slid one through the hole and unraveled it to find a schematic of the Crofts and a small map of the grounds. He removed another to find a similar document dated a few years after the first. While interesting, these architectural plans didn’t explain the shifting weight within the desk. Once Ben had removed all of the blueprints from the compartment, he finally saw what looked like a thick black box. He used the back end of the flashlight to break away more of the cracked wood to make space for the object. When he pulled it out, he saw that it wasn’t a box; it was a book. A black book with a metal cross embedded in its front cover. A Bible. Ben again tested its heft, but it didn’t seem large enough to justify its weight. The cover was thorny and ridged, as if it had been bound with dragon skin.
“Are you okay?” Caroline called from the top of the stairs.
On impulse, Ben slid the Bible into a pile of yellowed linens, out of sight.
“Foot went right through the stair. Didn’t draw blood, but it’ll leave a nasty bruise.” He walked back up the steps, pausing at the one with the hole in it. “Rotted through.”
“Makes you wonder about the rest of the place,” she sighed.
Before signing on the dotted line, Ben had warned Caroline about the thousand things that could go wrong in an old house like this. Rotting wood, vermin infestations, toxic mold, leaky roofs, rusty water, noisy pipes, warped floors, lousy insulation. But none of that had mattered to her at the time. She’d wanted her clean slate.
“Better that it happened to me than to you or Charlie,” he said, resuming his climb up the stairs. “I’m hungry.”
“Already?” she asked. “It’s barely noon.”
“I want to ice this. May as well eat while I do.”
The hall was wide, white, and cold. More than a dozen other rooms had doors that opened onto this hall. Huge rooms with wooden floors with inlaid ebony borders, and tall windows with once-proud moldings that stretched to the soaring ceilings. Each one, imperious, alien, and staggeringly empty.
“I had something planned for lunch. But it’ll be a little while before it’s ready.”
“Need help?”
“What, you don’t trust me in the kitchen?” she asked.
Ben looked at her and was grateful to see a playful twist to her lips. Caroline was an excellent cook, but during their busy years she’d rarely flexed those talents. The exceptions had been special occasions, when she might spend days on a perfect meal. The first birthday Ben had spent with her, she’d baked him a staggering chocolate cake filled with hazelnut pastry cream, wrapped in seamless fondant, topped with blown-sugar flowers. He still remembered the awe of the moment when that extraordinary cake had been set in front of him, back when it seemed that Caroline could do anything.
“It’s mostly the fact that you’re making food in the first place. No Thai takeout, no hermetically sealed packages from FreshDirect.”
“I was thinking cucumber, yogurt, lemon, and dill sandwiches on whole-wheat bread. And I was going to boil down some of that tomato soup from two nights ago, add some cream, and toast some croutons.” She slid her toned arm inside his as they walked down the hallway to the kitchen. Even with a few bumps along the way, today was going better than Ben could have hoped.
“Very civilized. Maybe too civilized for a humble laborer like me,” Ben said. They didn’t banter like this much anymore, and he had missed it.
Caroline’s pregnancy with Bub, coupled with the stress of her bank going under, had awakened something inside her. Ben thought of it as the Wolf. One night, after a bad day, he’d written on the back of a Con Ed bill, He skirted the forest as close as he dared. Though he could not see it or hear it, he knew the Wolf was there.
Even with medication, Caroline had been lost to him for weeks, broken and raging in a way that Ben hadn’t thought possible. Trying to care for her, Charlie, and a newborn all on his own had almost undone him. After Charlie’s problem at school, Caroline thought that a change in geography would be good for all of them. She thought that the million tasks necessary for turning the Crofts into an inn would keep the Wolf at bay and help bring all of them close again. From the outside, it was a crazy idea—moving hundreds of miles to restore a decaying house with a second-grader and a baby. But their old life no longer fit them. Something had to change.