Ben flinched, because the same question had rung through his mind since Friday night. Why? Why? Why? was interrupted only by How? How? How?
Everything that happened had a cause. Maybe the reason seemed insufficient or unfair, but there always was one. It wasn’t fate that brought them to the Crofts any more than it was chance that Bub had been abducted. Why did we come here? was a good question, but why did we stay? was a better one. The former had a dozen answers, but the latter had only one: They’d stayed here because Ben was a fool.
Though he’d done his best to try, he had no one to blame but himself.
One of many flaws he had, he saw now in the ice-cold clarity of hindsight, was that he’d seen himself as the unerring protagonist of this story when he was at best the unreliable narrator.
Since Caroline got sick, Ben had been convinced that she would be their undoing. He’d even faulted Charlie for a while, holding him responsible for some of the things that happened around the Crofts. Confronted with his family’s flaws, Ben couldn’t look at them without revising their characters to the way he wished they were. But it turned out they weren’t the problem in the first place. If Ben had gotten out of his head for ten seconds, he might have seen that. If he hadn’t been so critical of those closest to him, if he hadn’t fixated on the quirks of their tight familial unit or been so absorbed in his stupid book, he might have noticed the signs of things going catastrophically wrong all around them.
Now his mistakes had cost them something that could never be replaced.
You got everything you ever wanted, didn’t you, Benj?
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” Ben said.
“It’s not your fault,” Charlie said. He turned away from the cushions with red-rimmed eyes.
But it was. Ben knew that it was.
Feeling had returned to his hands, and he groped in his desk drawer. He had a present for Charlie in here somewhere. It was hard to believe that Christmas was a few days away. He could see it sitting like a tombstone at the end of the calendar for the rest of his years.
“I got a book for you,” Ben said when he found it. It was set in postapocalyptic America, a place where every bad dream had come true. He was glad that Charlie had grown out of the saccharine fables that populated the bookshelves of less-advanced readers; a narrative from the wasteland of the future seemed more instructive.
Charlie accepted the book and looked over the jacket illustration.
“Thanks,” he said.
Contents of the crates from the Swannhaven Dispatch archive lay spread across the table by Ben’s desk. Three years’ worth: 1878, 1933, 1982. Bad years all around, and worse in Swannhaven. Just like this one, Ben thought bleakly.
He brushed the brittle yellowed papers through his hands absent-mindedly as he watched Charlie start to pick through the book he’d given him. He told himself that Charlie would be safe in the city by this time tomorrow. One less person to worry about. One less person to disappoint.
Then his eyes strayed to one of the 1933 papers’ headlines. BOY LOST IN STORM rang out at him in thick lettering. He thought of Bub, and his stomach clenched.
He had to read only the first sentence for his head to catch up to his gut.
BOY LOST IN STORM
On Thursday evening, Peter and Emily Lowell of Swannhaven reported to authorities that their son, Owen, aged five, was missing.
Peter and Emily Lowell were Ben’s great-grandparents. Owen was the great-uncle Ben hadn’t heard of before finding the ancestry quilt in the Lowells’ basement.
Mrs. Lowell informed police that she put the boy to bed at seven o’clock in a room that he shared with his sister, Alice, age nine. Owen was found to be missing at ten o’clock, when Mr. Lowell returned from his work in the family’s dairy farm.
Police Chief Edward Stanton reported that the boy appeared to have left the residence by his bedroom window. Upon discovering the boy’s footprints in the snow, investigators tracked them to the forest on the west end of the family’s land, where, due to weather conditions, they were unable to continue following the trail.
Chief Stanton confirmed that Alice Lowell had not woken during her brother’s disappearance, making the possibility of an abduction unlikely. “We do not believe that the boy was forcibly taken from the residence,” Chief Stanton said. “Based on the evidence and interviews with the family, it is likely that he snuck outside to play in the snow. He must have become disoriented in the dark and wandered into the forest.”
With temperatures as low as twenty degrees below freezing, the probability of the boy having survived the night is considered remote.
The article was thin and perfunctory, but it still left Ben shaken. He wondered if his great-uncle’s body had ever been found. There was a photo of Owen above the headline. It was hard to make out between the yellowing paper and the faded ink, but Ben could see that the boy was not smiling.
For the hundredth time that day, Ben wished that his grandmother were still alive. She’d been nine when Owen died—not much older than Charlie was now—but that was old enough to remember the death of a brother. Ben wondered about Owen, if the boy had spent his hours playing among the trees. He wondered if his parents had ever found him in the fields at night, running to the beat of the land.
Through the attic windows, Ben watched snow whirl through the air. From where he stood, he could see Charlie in profile as he read his book. Ben would have to go outside again soon. He would need to find some way to flush the man from the forest. That’s when he realized that Charlie hadn’t been reading his book at all. His pale eyes were focused above the page open before him. He was watching the mountains.
—
“Do you have him?” Ted asked.