Dreamwood (6 page)

“I was wedged in tight and couldn't move. Then I saw my father. He looked like he was shouting. He was pulling me, but I was stuck tight.”

“So what happened?” Pete asked.

Lucy bent over the wooden railing and stared at a police wagon coming up the dusty street. “I don't know. It loosened up a bit. I popped out.”

Pete leaned an elbow on the railing beside her. His eyes were thoughtful. “And you were okay?”

“Sure. All I did was get my leg stuck. Only after that my father said it wasn't a ghost after all, but something else, something he'd suspected but no one had ever proven the existence of. A nature spirit.”

That night her father was more distracted than she'd ever seen him. Muttering to himself, marching up and down.

“Then after that he didn't want the railroad to dynamite anything. He called the newspapers and said there was a spirit in the rock and he'd prove it to everyone. He went out there with his thought interferometer—”

Pete's forehead wrinkled. “What's
that
?” He had some sunflower seeds in his pocket, which he now began to eat, cracking and spitting them over the edge of the sidewalk into the street.

“It's like a colander with wires. You wear it on your head. And his od-oculars.” She heaved a big sigh. “They're like goggles. But the newspapers just took photos of him.” Her father, wearing a colander and goggles, pointing to a rock. Headline:
Ghost Clearer Gone Mad.

The next day the railroad went in with dynamite and blew the Maran Boulder to smithereens.

Lucy sucked her lip. People in Wickham believed in ghosts, but not
rock spirits.
She was a laughingstock among her friends. “My father lost his teaching job. No one would hire him, not even for ghost work. Then we lost our house and . . . just moved on.” She stared out at Pentland's modest, weathered storefronts—their displays of burl art and saw blades—suddenly pierced with homesickness. It wasn't even Wickham that she missed so much, just the way things used to be.

Pete thrust his hands in his pockets, perhaps hoping to find something useful there to say to her. “That's rough,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes.

She shrugged. “It's all right.”

A few doors down, there was bang of doors and another man was thrown out of a saloon. Lucy watched him roll like a tumbleweed into the street.

She hadn't told Pete the worst of it: her secret. Sometimes she wondered if her father had gone crazy; she wasn't sure she believed his obsession with nature spirits and the Maran Boulder. Maybe he was wrong. And maybe he suspected her of thinking that. Since that day he hadn't taken her on any more clearing jobs. The day she slipped into the crevice did more than ruin her father's reputation; it changed something between them.

But what was the Darrington motto? Onward.

She straightened her shoulders. All her posture lessons at Miss Bentley's hadn't been completely wasted. “Come on,” she said. “Let's find that Climbing Rose.”

T
he Climbing Rose was a saloon on the far end of town set away from the other buildings. Its outside was painted with eyes and a mouth, like the faces she'd seen on the Lupine poles. Ancient rose vines climbed up its sides, and beyond stretched a muddy flat grown thick with blackberry brambles. Beyond that was a gray and tumbling river. A pack of skinny dogs trotted by, following a trail of scent along the mucky ground.

Inside, the place was dark, with a hammered tin ceiling reflecting the glints of hurricane lamps. An elk's head hung on one wall, the antlers so large across that a grown man could lie down inside them. A motley assortment of drinkers were gathered about the bar, seated at tables, or in the back, throwing darts. The men looked to be mainly of two kinds: big and mean or scrawny and trigger-happy.

The bartender had two long braids and a scar across one cheek. He was polishing a glass and put it down when Lucy and Pete came in.

“This isn't a place for children,” he said. “Get on with you.”

Children? Her eyes narrowed. If he thought that was going to get them out his door, he was sorely mistaken.

“We're looking for my father, William Darrington,” Lucy said in as loud a voice as she could manage.

Pete, who'd also bristled at “children,” stepped forward, blocking her way. “Lucy, I can handle this.”

One of the men drinking at the bar sniggered at Pete's bravado, and Pete shot him an angry look.

“I can handle this myself,” she told Pete. She clambered onto a bar stool to get everyone's attention. “We heard some of you here knew William Darrington.”

Pete looked up at her in embarrassment. “What are you doing?” he hissed.

At her father's name, a few men had looked up from the table where they sat. Dark-eyed, with their black hair worn long, they were First Peoples in settler dress, wearing dungarees and flannel. One had a string of bear claws on a leather thong around his neck. She thought of Niwa and wondered whether these Lupines lived in Pentland among settlers.

At the far end of the bar, a man in a worn deerskin jacket inched his hat down lower on his face.

Nobody was going to talk.

After a moment the men turned to one another and resumed their conversation, their solitary drinking, their dice games and dart games. The bartender went back to polishing glasses.

“Come on, Lucy,” Pete said in defeat. He held out a hand to help her down.

But she couldn't leave without an answer. She climbed from the stool to the top of the bar and stamped her foot—hard. Whisky jumped in glasses the bartender had set out. All eyes turned to her and the room was so still, she could hear the quiver of a dart still shaking in the board.

Pete crossed his arms nervously.

“Now see here.” She mimicked the stance of her most intimidating Miss Bentley's teachers: arms crossed, beetled brows. “I
know
he talked to you. And he wanted to hear your stories. He was looking for something. A ghost or a spirit. So what I want to know is, what's the biggest haunt you've got?”

She held her breath and crossed her fingers.

“Your father came in here, sweetie,” said an old man with a great white mustache that curved out on either side of his jowls. “And he did ask questions. But that's where you should leave it.”

At that moment, the doors to the Climbing Rose banged opened and a man walked in. Lucy's first glimpse was of someone tall and broad—a general impression of power—caught in silhouette against the light.

The drinkers in the Climbing Rose sat up, as if a current ran through them.

Once the doors had shut behind him, Lucy could see the newcomer more clearly. He had gleaming dark hair, swept back from a strong, handsome face: square-jawed under a black beard, with deep, commanding eyes.

He raised one eyebrow as he saw Lucy.

“What's this?” he said to the bartender. “You're letting girls run all over your place now?”

“Ha-ha.” The bartender laughed with no sign of humor.

The big man settled himself in, as others made way for him. Lucy could see at once the fine cut of his clothes and the gold watch chain peeking from the folds of his morning coat. He was the only person she'd seen so far in Pentland who appeared to be prospering.

“I'll warn you, Shatterhand,” he said to the barkeep, “you're about to have a thirsty crowd in here. There's been more Rust at the mill. Logs from Billups's place. Who knows how many of them.”

There was a general intake of breath as the men in the Climbing Rose took in the bad news.

A scrawny, toothless drinker sidled up to the big man's side. “Mr. Murrain,” he said fawningly, “how is Billups? He gives me work now and then and I fear to see him ruined.”

The big man frowned. “I haven't talked to him yet. But the infection is far gone and spreading.” He took a drink from the bartender and emptied it in a swallow. Then, seeing the plaintive look on the toothless man's face, he put a coin on the bar in front of him and gestured at the barkeep to pour for the little man as well.

Murrain?
Lucy tried to catch Pete's eye. Was this the man they'd been looking for earlier?

“Pete,” she whispered.

But for some reason Pete was too deep in his own thoughts to hear her. His forehead was knit with worry as he stared into a middle distance.

“Pete!” she said more loudly.

Hearing her, the big man looked up. “You're still here?” he asked Lucy. “What are you now, a bar ornament?” He produced a handsome calfskin case from his pocket and took out a cigar.

The men around him laughed; his toothless friend laughed loudest.

“No.” She'd been stuck up there thinking how she would gather her skirts to climb down with dignity. “I came to ask after William Darrington. I was hoping someone here would tell me how to find him.”

“Darrington.” Mr. Murrain cocked his head and put his cigar down, unlit.

Lucy settled for scooting down on her backside. The stranger had taken the stool she used to climb up on, so she had to turn around and dangle for a second before jumping to the floor.

“Yes,” she said once she'd landed. “He's my father.”

He swiveled on his stool to face her, his handsome face animated, eyebrows arched in surprise.

“Then you must be Lucy. But you're supposed to be in San Francisco.”

Now it was Lucy's turn to be surprised. “Yes! How did you know? Have you seen him? Where is he?”

“Whoa there.” He rested an elbow on the bar as his dark eyes swept over her. “I do know your father. I met him here, in fact. I'm Angus Murrain.”

“The head of Pentland Timber,” the toothless drinker told her, adding in an awed whisper, “A
very important
man.”

Angus smiled tolerantly. “It's my mill, so that means a great deal around here,” he said, as if amused by how much importance people gave to this little detail. “But your father was doing significant work. He told me he could find a cure for Rust.” He leaned back, smoothing his luxurious silk tie. “I told him I'd give a thousand dollars to any man who could deliver the cure.”

It went silent inside the Climbing Rose as everyone contemplated this sum, something so vast it was like trying to grasp the size of the universe.

Even Pete was jarred out of his thoughts. “Jiminy,” he said and whistled quietly.

Lucy couldn't speak. Was this the breakthrough her father had written her about? William Darrington had always been careless of money. Had he finally grown tired of being poor, stopped looking to understand spirits, and simply decided to use his scientific abilities for personal gain? It didn't sound like him.

“A pity,” Angus said, stroking his chin. “I thought he was the first person who stood a chance. Your father's a very convincing man, Miss Darrington.”

She couldn't have stood on a bar stool now; her confidence was too shaken by the timber baron's casual attitude—about all that money, about her father's disappearance. “Wha-what did he say about the cure?” she asked. “Did he tell you what he thought it was?”

“He told me he believed it could be found on Devil's Thumb.”

It was as if a wild animal had come into the room. Eyes went wide, chairs scraped.

A man in a chalk-stripe suit with a handlebar mustache slammed his glass on the bar. “If it's on the Thumb, it may as well be in hell.”

The men around him muttered agreement.

Lucy had an image of Anya's brown thumb sticking out into the white of her bread dough. Her stomach sank. From the moment she heard of Devil's Thumb she'd been carrying a fateful dread that that's where he had gone. And now it was confirmed.

Another man spoke up. “No one's come back from the Thumb in a hundred years.”

“You forget,” said a giant lumberjack. “Brocius Pile went in five years ago and
he
lived.”

“But not to tell,” said the gentleman in the striped suit, his eyes blazing. He raised his voice, his mustache quivering with emotion. “Whatever he saw in that forest stole his wits. His brain's a mass of jelly now.”

“Brocius Pile was a strong man, but no one would ever call him an intellect,” Angus countered. “Who's to say the Thumb had anything to do with the state of his brains?”

The man in the deerskin jacket had been watching all this from under his battered hat; now he spoke up, revealing a thin, sallow face. “I do.” He set his glass quietly on the bar. “There's something there that wishes humankind ill.”

“Scare stories,” Angus said with a shake of his head. “Superstition.”

At their table, the group of Lupine men were silent. Watchful.

“If something's haunting the place it can be cleared away,” Lucy said, pitching her voice to the room. “Hasn't anyone thought to try that?”

An uncomfortable silence fell.

“Everyone's too afraid.” Angus planted a broad fist on the bar. “Why, this slip of a girl has more sense than you.”

A few of the men hung their heads. Lucy loved to be held up as an example—it happened far too infrequently since she had left her home in Wickham. But she tried to keep her tone modest as she added, “You just need to take a scientific approach.”

“Exactly, exactly what I always say.” Angus turned to her. His eyes were the deep brown of expensive leather, and Lucy found herself nodding to his words. “Don't fall prey to every spooky story you hear. Approach it rationally, with logic.”

Lucy stood up taller. She'd hardly expected to agree so much with the head of Pentland Timber, but it was as if they were two minds with the same thought. Pete was looking at her with an awed expression.

“A sarsaparilla for the young lady, Shatterhand,” Angus ordered. Then, catching sight of the openmouthed Pete, he frowned slightly. “Make that two.”

He indicated two seats beside him where he wanted Lucy and Pete to sit. Obediently they climbed up on the stools.

The sallow-faced man in the deerskin jacket had had enough. He slammed down his empty glass and stalked past them on his way out. “I respect what's in that forest. You'd do well to do the same.” The doors banged closed behind him.

Angus made a face of mock fear. “Oh no. Beware the curse. I'm terrified.”

Lucy giggled. She glanced at Pete, who appeared shocked, as if Angus had just blasphemed. Then he gave a tentative laugh, looking like he expected any moment to be struck by lightning.

“You see what people are like here,” the timber baron said to her. His eyes, rich and sharp as coffee, gleamed under thunderous brows. “They don't test things. They're not open to new ideas. Your father thought something very valuable was hidden in that forest. I've been thinking of sending my own men to the Thumb to explore.”

“Don't do that, boss.” The Lupine man with the bear claw necklace spoke up. His companions looked away, seemingly annoyed he'd decided to break their silence. “You'll make it worse.”

“Make what worse? What do the Lupines know of this?” Angus demanded sharply. He turned on them. “Are you suggesting there
is
a connection between that place and Rust?”

The Lupines were now muttering among themselves in their language.

Lucy leaned forward even though she couldn't understand what they were saying.

“We don't know about Rust,” said the man with the bear claws. He gave an apologetic look to Lucy. “But the forest there . . . it's not good. If that man went to the Thumb, he's dead.”

Lucy couldn't breathe. This was her fear, coiling inside her like a snake, all along. Now it had struck and she felt the shock, just as if a real viper had bitten her.

Dead.

She turned to Pete, her eyes brimming. “He's not,” she said. “He's not!”

Pete's mouth twisted and for a moment he looked stunned. “Naw. Course he isn't,” he managed at last. But he sounded uncertain and Lucy was not reassured.