The Winslow Incident (33 page)

Hazel picked her way across the
ballroom and when she reached the velvet couch, she touched Rose on the forearm
to get her attention.

Rose stiffened as if she’d been
electrocuted and let out a surprised cry.

“I’m sorry.” Hazel pulled her hand
away.

“What are we doing here?” Rose
said. Sweat-drenched hair plastered her head and neck.

“Don’t you remember?” Hazel sat on
the arm of the sofa.

“I don’t remember.”

“Are you feeling better?”
Please,
please, please say you’re feeling better.

“I’m seeing things.” Rose was pale
and perspiring and shaking, her eyes as big as saucers. “Horrible things,
Hazel.”

“They’re not real.”

“Black bears with no arms keep
coming out of the woods to look at me through the window.” Rose mewled
helplessly. “I think they want to eat me so they can grow their arms back.”

Hazel went to touch her again but quickly
thought better of it. “No, they don’t, Rose. They’re not really there.” Yet
Hazel found herself peering through the window at the dark trees.

Rose covered her eyes with her
hands and moaned. “Wolves with heads as big as Molly’s entire body. They keep
their snouts low to the ground, sniffing around.” She dropped her hands and
looked at Hazel with desperation. “I’m afraid they’ll smell me.”

“Don’t worry. They won’t get in
here. I promise.” So many promises Hazel had made now.
They’ll prove hard to
keep
, she predicted.

Hazel worried then about Rose’s chocolate
Lab; when had Molly last been fed? She remembered Sean tossing dinner rolls to Molly
and Jinx outside the Crock Saturday morning and she’d yelled at him that the
rolls would make the dogs sick—Jinx especially since he had already eaten
a donut.

Sick dogs. Rolls from Rhone Bakery
. . . suddenly she felt ill too.

Hazel scanned the ballroom before
asking Rose, “Where’s Owen?”

“Owen,” Rose repeated, not
understanding it to be a question. “Why isn’t the doctor here? Will you take me
to the hospital?” Her eyes pleaded. “Will you, Hazel?”

Hazel didn’t know what to say to
her. Images flashed through her mind of Doc Simmons running bow-legged into the
night, of Tanner pointing at Sean’s apology on the granite wall, of her father
slapping handcuffs onto Sean’s wrists—he doesn’t want to but he has no
choice—while Sean looks directly at her and repeats, “I’ve always done
everything for you.”

Hazel tried to stop trembling.
“Rose, I can’t. My arm’s messed up. I can’t drive.”

Rose’s mouth turned down in
despair.

“You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
Hazel realized she was banking everything on that. They had to get better soon.
It could only happen that way. “In the morning, you’ll feel better.”

Rose did not reply.

And Hazel could no longer look at
her, into those Olive Oyl eyes, because those eyes would know Hazel wasn’t
telling her the whole truth. So she turned and walked away from Rose on legs
suddenly gone to jelly.

Gus Bolinger hadn’t moved since
that afternoon from his green wing chair by the window. She’d never given much
thought to him before, just another old guy around town. Except he had wild
gray Einstein hair. James Bolinger’s grandpa. He taught history at school
because he’d fought in the Korean War and he walked with a hitch from the
bullet he’d taken to the shinbone during the Battle of Bloody Ridge.

Hoping he might be feeling better,
Hazel went to him and kneeled. “Mr. Bolinger?”

Quietly he was saying, “I can’t
see I can’t feel I can’t see . . .” He’d aged; the past few days had turned him
into the spoils of an archaeological dig. And the anguish in his voice made her
heart heavy. “I can’t feel,” he repeated.

“It’s going to be all right.” She
patted his hand in what she hoped was a comforting gesture. “I promise.”
Why
the hell do I keep saying that?
Now if he stayed blind and paralyzed she’d
feel guilty forever and surely he’d haunt her for breaking her promise.

The man slumped in the matching
chair next to Gus suddenly sat bolt upright and hissed at her: “Can you hear
that, little girl? They’re breaking in. They’re coming to get us.”

I should’ve never come back.
Hazel’s heart began to thump so loud it was a wonder she
could hear anything over it.

“Where are the children?” Sprawled
on the floor before the fireplace, a woman was repeating a lament of her own. “Where
are the children?”

Hazel glanced around; the woman
was right.
There are no children here.
She should find Aaron Adair and
Violet and Daisy Rhone.
Right away
, panic squeezed her lungs.

“Where are the children?” the
woman cried again.

Kohl Thacker stopped running in
circles beneath the center chandelier long enough to answer her: “Hawkin Rhone
got ’em.”

The woman wailed.

“All of ’em,” Kohl added.

“Didn’t we rid ourselves of him?”
another woman asked.

“He’s back.”

Hazel’s heart launched another
small attack. No one ever proved Hawkin Rhone guilty of poisoning anybody, but
he’d been banished from Winslow all the same. “People saying he did it is all
that mattered,” Sean had told her at Three Fools Creek a long, long time ago.

Alarmed, she dashed from the ballroom.
I have to get rid of the bread—all of it!
Where did they deliver
Saturday morning? To Sean’s mom Honey here at the hotel, to Clemshaw
Mercantile, to the Crock.
Where else? Think, think!

She raced through the dining room
toward the kitchen, knocking over a chair along the way and imagining Ben
Mathers watching in horror as his wife choked and suffocated to death before
his very eyes. Harmless escargot to everybody but Lottie Mathers. For her, the snails
were poison. For her, fatal.

Hazel burst through the swinging
kitchen door to find Honey Adair clutching the edge of the countertop and
crying soft helpless sobs. Owen Peabody was also in the kitchen, standing in
front of the open silverware drawer next to the stove. Spoons were lined singly
along the countertop and Owen pointed to each in succession as he counted,
“five six seven eight . . .”

Hazel went to his side. “What are
you doing, Owen?”

He kept his eyes on the spoons as
if not wanting to lose his place. “Taking inventory.”

“Why?” Hazel asked, though she was
grateful he’d taken up such a harmless preoccupation.

“Because as soon as the water
stops poisoning us, we’ll have to put everything back where it belongs,” he
explained, sounding impatient, as if he resented the interruption. “We’ll need
to know if anything is missing.”

He resumed counting while Hazel
thought,
It’s people we’re missing, not things.

Seeing Hazel had somehow made
Honey start to cry even harder. Hazel crossed the kitchen and hugged her as
best as she could with one arm and murmured soothing lies, “It’s okay, it’ll
all be okay.” Honey’s sobs were contagious and Hazel had to force back her own
tears. She couldn’t break down now.

“Aaghh!” Owen fumed in
frustration. Then he took a deep breath, let it out in a huff, and started
again. “One two three five seven eight nine . . .”

Honey pulled away from Hazel. “My
sons are missing.”

“I’ll find them,” Hazel made yet
another promise.

“Eighteen nineteen twenty-two
twenty—aaahgh! One two . . .” The muscles in Owen’s Popeye arm flexed as
he pointed at each uncooperative spoon:
Lay there and be counted or I’ll fix
you.

“Your grandmother,” Honey said
then, “watch over her.”

Can seventeen-year-olds drop
dead from heart attacks?
Hazel wondered.
She had a genetic predisposition. Her grandfather was only sixty-five when his
hit. “Where is she?”

“Last time I saw her she was with
Samuel.”

A fresh bolt of panic struck.
Before she’d left that afternoon she told her grandmother that she’d be back
soon with help and ordered her to lay low until then. Now Hazel shot up the
servants’ staircase to the second floor.
Help, Grandpa
, she silently
implored.
If you’re up there guardian angeling, Grandpa, now is the time to
help us.

When she reached the top step, she
found Samuel Adair tearing it up, but Sarah was nowhere in sight. Obviously
blind drunk, Sean’s father swerved down the hallway, smashing into side tables
and knocking off their contents, slamming into photographs along the wall,
cursing with a passion. He carried a baseball bat. Sean’s—she recognized
it. She stared at it for a moment before realizing she was checking for blood,
for signs he’d used it.

Noticing her, Samuel stopped dead.
Then he squinted at her like a parody of a drunk, cocking his head this way and
that as if it would sharpen his focus. “Ruby Winslow?” Holding the bat in swing
position he took a few steps toward where she stood at the top of the
staircase. “That you, Ruby?”

Hazel was afraid of that bat and
those beet-red eyes. She couldn’t step away because the stairs were behind her.
If she wanted to run down she’d have to turn her back on Samuel and he was
within striking distance now.

“Not Ruby,” she managed to keep
her voice steady, “Hazel. A real live Winslow.”

Samuel picked up a candy dish from
the table and tossed it at her like a Frisbee. It bounced painfully off her hip
and landed on the floor at his feet, not breaking but spilling mints across the
Oriental rug. “Guess you’re real.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced.

“You need to go sleep it off,
Samuel,” Hazel tried.

“Don’t you tell me what to do.” He
took another step toward her.

“It’s late, Samuel, really late.
Time for bed.” She took a step backward onto the staircase. Brained with a
baseball bat would be a terrible way to go. She imagined it might take more
than one swing. That or she might tumble to her death down the staircase.
Either way, it would definitely hurt.

Running a hand across several
days’ worth of beard he said, “I
am
bone tired.” Incredibly, he lowered
the bat and turned away from her.

She was amazed he’d given in so
easily and figured he must be even more stewed than usual. After he weaved back
down the hallway and disappeared into the Adairs’ quarters she began to breathe
again. But there was always tomorrow—always more to drink—so still she
would worry about that bat.

Somehow she’d have to get Aaron
out of there. She looked down the hallway, then up at the ceiling. “Aaron?” she
asked in the quietest voice. “If you’re floating around out here and can hear
me, go get your body and come back out to the hall.”

She stood still for a minute,
believing it might actually happen, that the little boy would emerge from their
living room in his cowboy pajamas.

When he didn’t she resigned
herself to wait until she was certain Samuel had passed out before going in to
retrieve him.

She tiptoed down the hallway to
her grandmother’s rooms, praying that the girls had minded her and stayed put.
She tried the door. Locked. Good.

She knocked softly. “Violet,” she
whispered through the keyhole, “it’s me—let me in.”

After much hushed discussion
behind the door, the lock turned and Violet cracked it open barely an inch.
Confirming it was Hazel, she opened it just wide enough to let her squeeze in.

Relief washed over Hazel. Here
were all three: Violet, Daisy,
and
Aaron. But she knew they couldn’t
stay. The hotel was too dangerous now: desperate people, drunks with bats, no
place for kids.
They’re so small and breakable
, Hazel thought, the girls
in their silk gowns, Aaron in his short-sleeved PJs. None of them had on shoes.

The children had all the lights
off and the kerosene lamp lit. In the winter the electricity always goes out in
Winslow. During the first storm and every storm thereafter. Now the wick lamp
that usually occupied her grandmother’s mantel sat on the outer hearth, casting
yellow light upward onto their innocent faces. Boo glared at Hazel from beneath
the vanity. Though the kids looked glad to see her, they kept their distance.
In the flickering light of the oil lamp, Hazel figured she must look a fright.

“Are you sick too, Hazel?” Violet
asked.

“No, no, I’m fine.” She smoothed
her tangled hair and hiked up her drooping shorts. “Have you seen my
grandmother?”

“Haven’t seen anybody ’cept Aaron.
Maybe she’s hiding too.”

“I hope so. Here, sit.” Hazel
positioned the three kids on the chenille bedspread. “I’m glad you’re all
together. Listen, we have to leave here.”

Each nodded their head as though
they already knew that.

“Remember how we play
hide-and-go-seek?”

More grave nods.

“Let’s play it now, only I’m going
to count to one million zillion so you need to stay hidden for a long time.
Don’t come out till you hear me yell ‘olly olly oxen free.’ Just me.
Understand?” Then she thought,
Brilliant.
Now if something happens to
me, they’ll wither away in their hiding spots, waiting for a call that will never
come.
She chased the worry away. No time for it now.