All right, now, Benjamin, his grandmother said. Time to shine.
Ben whirled around and saw nothing. The forest was dark, and there was only the wind in his ears. He groped his pocket to check the time on his phone and saw that two hours had come and gone. He pulled himself into a seated position.
He’d surely have died if he’d slept much longer. But he wasn’t dead. He was still alive, and Bub was still missing. He turned back to the lake, but it was too dark to see anything. If the man had come, then he’d missed him. He closed his eyes and caught a hint of the rose scent from his grandmother’s soap, but when he searched for it again, it was gone. He tried to remember his dreams but couldn’t. Something about the forests and the mountains. There had been the sense of something important ending.
Ben was so disgusted with himself that he almost rolled off the platform. He felt like falling through the icy air and landing on the frozen ground below. From this height, he thought, he might break his arm or at least dislocate a shoulder. Something like that would make him feel better.
Instead, he reached for the rope ladder and lowered himself from the tree.
He made his way out of the clearing. Beyond the tree line, the wind was a muscular and serpentine thing. It worked its way around his arms and up his jacket, plying his spine with a frozen tongue. He had a flashlight, and he used it to search for footsteps along the shore of the lake. His own steps were whipped away by the wind as soon as he left them, but he looked anyway.
46
Hope sometimes came to Ben in the morning, but not today.
A twinge went up his back when he turned toward the window. He’d spent the night on a comforter in front of a love seat he’d pushed against his bedroom door. Murky light doused the room in shadows.
He stood to stretch. Charlie was still in bed next to Caroline. When Ben looked at him, his eyes were already open.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Did you sleep okay?” Ben asked.
“Yes. Did you?”
“Yes.” This morning they were both liars.
“When’s Uncle Ted coming?”
“Depends on how bad the roads are.” Ben checked his phone, but there were no messages. He pulled aside one of the window’s curtains. The snow had stopped, but the land and sky were a single gray color.
“Is there a lot of snow?” Charlie asked.
“Looks like it,” Ben said. He decided that if Ted couldn’t get here today, then all three of them would move to an inn in Exton.
Charlie picked through a bundle of bedsheets to look for Caroline’s face.
“Just leave her be,” Ben told him.
He shoved the love seat away from the door and peered into the hallway.
Ben had locked all the doors that connected the stairs to this floor and propped water glasses on top of the knobs. It was something he’d seen in a movie, but he’d tested it and it had worked. If someone tried to get through a door, the glass would fall to the ground. Ben checked the glasses, and they were all just as he’d left them.
When he got to the kitchen, Ben shoveled coffee into the machine. He turned to find Father Cal in the doorway. By the time Ben had finally returned to the Crofts from the blind, the roads were so bad that Cal had to stay the night. While Ben warmed himself by a space heater, he tried to explain to the priest what he’d learned about JoJo Tanner.
“I don’t think you’re going to make it to school today,” Ben said.
“We’re closed. You should be getting a text and an e-mail any moment now,” Cal said. “To be honest, I always thought it was a bit cruel to be open at all on Christmas week. May I help with breakfast?”
Ben had forgotten about breakfast. “Charlie should eat fruit. Would you mind slicing up a banana? Where did he go?”
“He scampered past me on the stairs. He said he was going to get his book. How’s Caroline this morning?”
“I’m going to let her sleep as long as she can.”
“They’re both lucky to have you.”
Ben looked out the window and saw the husk of the elder tree. Its black skeleton marred the vast white space.
“Cal, did you know that the mosaic Joseph Swann created for the priory was based on the view from this house?” The sight of the elder tree had reminded Ben of this. It looked like a withered hand clawing its way out of the field of endless rolling white, as if a giant beast waited underfoot.
“I thought it was of our valley.”
“The dragon is perched right on the edge of the Drop. The tree in your mosaic is now a blackened wreck on my lawn,” Ben said. “You said Joseph stayed at St. Michael’s after his brother died, around the time of the Great Fire and the railroad collapse. There’s a photo of Joseph Swann’s brother, Philip, on display in Lisbeth’s cellar. She had other photos and paintings of young people who’d died here in Swannhaven. It was strange.”
“Sounds a bit ghoulish,” Cal said. He handed the plate of sliced bananas to Ben. “By the way, I hope you don’t mind, I took your Bible to bed with me.” The priest had brought the dragon-skin Bible down with him. “I can’t remember the last time I saw such an old Bible.”
“They say Aldrich Swann brought it over from England,” Ben said. “His grandson, Henry, was a pastor during the Winter Siege. I assume he’s the one who wrote the notes in the margins.”
“Yes, the notations were what attracted my attention. Very much of the ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ variety, especially in the books of the Old Testament. For instance, here in Job, he writes, True faith thrives when tested by ailments of body and spirit. No torture is undeserved. No torture cannot be survived if he wills it. And here, in Genesis in the story of Abraham…” Cal flipped the pages of the Bible. “All that he demands must be surrendered, as all is his to claim. Nothing is truly lost, as heaven possesses every necessity for body and spirit. We shall see him again. We shall see them all again,” Cal read.