The sledgehammer blows thundered from the ceilings.
“Mom’s making holes in the walls,” Charlie said.
“It sounds that way.”
“I want to help you today.”
“You want to help.” Ben rolled the words around in his mouth. He ladled a few spoonfuls of applesauce onto a plate in front of Charlie. As he did, he hit the spoon hard enough against the plate to make the boy jump. “How do you propose to do that?”
“I want to go with you. Into the forest,” Charlie said. “To look.”
“It’s really cold out,” Ben said.
“I know the forest.”
“The snow is deep in places.”
“I’ll be careful. I’ll step in your footprints.”
“Uncle Ted’s flying from Los Angeles,” Ben said. “He’s coming to take you back to the city tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“It will be better there.”
“I want to stay with you.”
“It’s just for a little while,” Ben said. He looked at Charlie when he didn’t say anything. His son’s eyes had flooded with tears. Ben wondered if the boy would begin to cry again.
“But I can help you today.” Charlie choked out the words.
“Fine,” Ben said. He looked at his son’s plate and wondered if he should eat something. But he was too tired to eat and too afraid to sleep. All he could do was search.
—
Ben put on a long-sleeved shirt over his T-shirt, slipped a heavy sweater on, zipped up a track jacket, then wrapped a scarf around his neck before putting on his winter coat. Charlie wore long underwear underneath his snowsuit.
“You have to tell me if you get too cold,” Ben told him.
“Okay.”
They stood on the steps outside the kitchen and looked at the vast white world.
“Where are we going?” Charlie asked.
“You tell me,” Ben said. “Where did you see him?”
Charlie stared at his feet.
“The man in the smoke. I know he’s real. I saw The Book of Secrets. I saw his fingerprints on it.”
“I—” Charlie started. He glanced up at Ben. Today his eyes were gray like the sky. “I didn’t know he’d take Bub. I didn’t know that’s what he wanted.”
Ben looked out over the valley’s dusted treetops.
“The lake,” Charlie said. “Let’s go to the lake.”
They climbed the slope to the lake. When they got there, they were met by the flat white plain that the lake had become. A rim of dead cattail husks was the best evidence of its outline.
They walked along the woods to the east of the lake, picking up Ben’s footprints from earlier. Ben was so exhausted that moving his feet felt like hoisting stones. Charlie stopped at the tree line, just outside a small clearing.
“I saw him here last time. At night.”
“What was he doing?” Even his speech was slurred with fatigue.
“He scared me. He—he killed a deer. He said I was going to die, too. Alone in the cold and the dark.” Ben saw Charlie shiver. “I didn’t know what to do, because he wasn’t scary before. He’d leave me dead animals, like a cat does. Like they were presents. I’d find them sometimes when I followed the sounds in the forest.”
“He left you dead animals?” Ben asked. He tried to keep his voice even as he processed what he was hearing.
“Sometimes.” Charlie pointed farther along the lake. “I saw him try to fish once, but he was doing it wrong, so I let him borrow The Book of Secrets, because Hickory Heck and Shoeless Tom always helped each other in the forest. You’re supposed to help people when they need it, aren’t you?” Charlie asked.
“Tell me everything, Charlie.” Ben didn’t want to know, but he had to know.
“He used to write things like go and leave by the dead animals,” Charlie said. “He’d write it in blood or with their insides on the trees where he staked pieces of them.”
“Pieces? He mounted them?” Ben asked. He’d lost the fight for calm. He tried to push images of Hudson far from his mind. Within him, a pendulum swung from exhaustion to adrenaline-fueled terror.
“But it didn’t make sense, because why would he give me gifts and tell me to leave at the same time? I thought it was part of the game.”
“Jesus, why didn’t you tell me this?” Ben asked him. “Why didn’t you tell me that some crazy man in the woods was mutilating animals, delivering death threats, and telling us to leave the Crofts?”
“Because I didn’t want to go,” Charlie said. “But—but now I know I should have told you. I’m sorry.” The boy was again on the brink of tears. He’d been like this since Friday. No one could doubt he was sorry.
Ben peered into the thicket of trees on the far side of the clearing. The forest went all the way to the mountains and then continued into the state forest preserve. If there were still traces of Bub or his kidnapper out here somewhere, it would take a search party of hundreds to cover those many miles of dense wood. Ben wondered if the FBI had simply given him and the villagers the task of searching here in order to keep them out of the way of the real work. Ben wondered if a person could survive finding the pieces of his baby mounted to the trunk of a tree.
“Why did the man take Bub?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know. But the last time…” Charlie trailed off.
“Last time what? You have to tell me everything, Charlie.”
“Last time I felt like he didn’t want to kill the deer. He didn’t do it carefully, like with the others. Hickory Heck would only ever kill something for a reason. For food or clothes. The man wore their fur just like Heck. But it was different with this deer. I had to think about it, but now—now I think he did it to scare me, because I think he was scared, too,” Charlie said.
“You were here when he killed it?” Ben asked.
“I was in my hiding place.”
“Show me,” Ben told him.