Wolf Hollow (18 page)

“And took off,” my mother said.

“And took off.”

Here was everything I'd feared. How was Toby supposed to prove something he
hadn't
done
?

By now, Mrs. Gribble would be spreading the news down every telephone line on her switchboard, tapped like an octopus into houses all over these hills.

Within the hour, Toby would be a murderous monster and Betty a poor dear thing.

In the silence that followed, I watched my mother trace the grain of the tabletop with her finger as if she were reading a map.

“Well, I certainly do want to thank you for your help tonight, Jordan,” my father said. “When you're ready, I can take you back to wherever you've left your car. We have some apples in the—”

“John,” my mother interrupted.

He stopped short. “What?”

My mother looked from Jordan to my father.

“He doesn't have a car,” she said.

She gave my father a little smile, though it was sad, perhaps because the relief we'd all felt at Betty's rescue was to be so quickly replaced by more trouble.

“How do you know that?”

She turned to Toby. “Let me see your hands,” she said.

I let out the breath I'd been holding in for two days.

“Sarah?” My father looked so confused that I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.

Toby sat up straight. He lifted his hands from his lap. With his bare right hand, he pulled off his other glove. The scars on his left hand were as irrefutable as a fingerprint.

“Jordan?” my father said, leaning closer.

“That's not his name,” my mother said.

“It is, though,” Toby said. “My name is Tobias Jordan. I am a carpenter from Maryland. And I did not push Betty down that well.”

I could have escaped then.

Toby was the only one who knew that I'd been hiding him. The clothes he was wearing were more or less exactly the same as all the men wore, and it would be a while before my father missed them. I would have more than enough time to deal with the Mason jars, the camera, the scissors, and other things still in the hayloft. And I knew that Toby would never give me up. He'd say he'd taken the clothes from a laundry line, cut his own hair and beard, crept into our barn of his own accord.

“Toby didn't run off,” I said. “I made him come with me. And he didn't hide. I hid him. In our barn. And I cut his hair and gave him some of your clothes to wear, Daddy. And he wouldn't have done any of that if I hadn't made him.”

Though my mother had found Toby out, she looked shocked at these admissions. My father, too, was speechless.

“She was trying to help me,” Toby said. “You can't be angry with her.”

“I most certainly can,” my mother said. “But I'm not. Not yet. I'll get to that soon.”

“I can't believe you're Toby,” my father said, staring at him wide-eyed. “You look so . . . different.”

“But he's really not, Daddy.”

“Well, yes he is,” my father said.

“Yes, I am,” Toby said. “Though that has nothing to do with it. I didn't do what Betty says I did. None of it.” He stood up and pushed back his chair. “But I had better go before I make things worse for you all.”

As I began to object, my mother said, “Sit down. I for one need a minute or two to sort things out. Good grief. The trooper was right. It is like a circus around here.” She tucked a strand of stray hair behind her ear. “Besides,” she said. “I made a pie and we are going to eat it if it's the last thing we do.”

She got up from the table and began to dish out the pie, this time with whipped cream on top, as if it were Christmas.

“Wait for the coffee,” she said as she put the pie on the table. Which we did. My mother was using her don't-argue-with-me voice. The same one I'd used on Toby to get us here, to this table.

She gave me a glass of milk, more coffee for the men. “Well, go on,” she said. “That pie's not going to eat itself.”

Toby ate his piece slowly. Made it last long after we had finished ours. We sat and watched him as if he were a giraffe or a Martian. Even I had trouble believing that Toby was sitting at our kitchen table, eating pie, after years of avoiding any but brief contact with us, barely speaking, never allowing a soul to see him without his dark trappings.

“Help me understand this,” my father finally said when Toby had finished his last bite, eyes closed. “I don't see how Annabelle . . .
spirited
you away from under our very noses. The constable has been looking for you since yesterday.”

Toby shrugged. “I was fishing under the creek bridge all through the rainy part of the day, and then I was at the Turner place for jerky, and then back home after dark—”

“
After
Constable Oleska had been to the smokehouse and gone—” I said.

“And I hung up my wet things and went to sleep. Didn't know about Betty being missing until Annabelle knocked on my door before sunrise and told me what was going on and why I should go with her.” He almost smiled at my mother, but she did not yet look inclined to smile back. “She sounded like you did just now.”

My father couldn't help but grin at that, though briefly. “I know that voice,” he said, mostly to himself.

“You're going to know it even better if you're not careful,” my mother said.

“So you've been in the barn since . . .”

“Very early this morning.” Toby ran his good hand through his beard and down his throat. “Seems like a long time ago.”

“You went down there in the dark by yourself to get him?” my father said to me.

I nodded, split between pride and guilt. “I couldn't sleep and I knew how bad it looked. Don't you think that the trooper would have taken Toby away if I hadn't?”

Which was an argument that no one bothered to refute. We all knew what people thought of Toby, Aunt Lily and the Glengarrys among them.

“And then?” my mother said.

“I hid him in the hayloft. Took him some food and water. A book. Some clothes. Soap. I borrowed your scissors to give him a trim.”

“And Jordan was born,” she said thoughtfully.

“We didn't plan it out like that,” I said. “And we didn't plan to go down to Cobb Hollow again, either. But I remembered a sound I'd heard in the dark last night, by the smokehouse. At the time, I thought it was a porcupine. But later, when the trooper told us what Andy said, about Betty wanting to go down there, I thought . . . what if she did? What if that's where she was? And I thought some more about the porcupine sound. And I remembered the well.”

We sat silently for a little bit, looking at one another.

My father crossed his arms over his chest. “Who decided that Toby should join the rescue effort?”

“I did,” I said, again not sure if it was all right to feel clever about it. “I was pretty sure he would blend in with the other strangers and be able to watch how things played out. Keep on going if he had to. Stay if he could.”

I looked at each of them in turn. “But he can't, can he?” I said.

My father sighed. “I don't know, Annabelle. This is a mess, start to finish. And there's something else.” From the way he frowned at Toby, I knew this couldn't be good. “The constable told me when he called just now that the hunt has intensified.”

Toby frowned right back at him, clearly baffled. “But we found Betty.”

“Not the search for Betty,” my father said. “The hunt for you.”

For the next hour we talked about what to do and how to keep what was now
our
secret until we had found a way to make things right.

But soon the day caught up with us, me especially. I'd been going since the wee hours of the morning, and I felt like a bag of rocks. Toby, more accustomed to little sleep and plenty of motion, was nonetheless a wreck himself.

“I still think I should leave right now,” he said. “I can be twenty miles from here by morning.”

“Which is exactly where they're looking,” my father said. “And I don't see you walking twenty miles in the shape you're in.”

My mother had fetched two blankets and a pillow, which she now handed to Toby.

“It won't be very warm out in the hayloft,” she said, “but I think it's the only safe place for you right now.”

“The loft will be fine,” he said. “It smells good up there. And I like the doves.”

“And here's some bread and cheese for the morning. Annabelle can bring you coffee before she goes to school.”

The idea of school amazed me. But I knew I had to go. Nothing could call attention to us or our farm. Everything had to be as it always was.

“Good night,” I said, handing Toby my grandfather's coat.

“If anyone sees you, just say I've hired you to fix some gaps in the barn,” my father added. Which was a perfectly reasonable explanation.

But everything felt a little too easy to me as I headed off to bed.

When I woke, I knew I'd overslept. The light was late-morning bright and the house quiet. I hurried down to the kitchen where I found my grandmother, cutting butternut squash in half and laying them facedown on a baking sheet.

“What's wrong?” I said.

“Nothing at all,” she said, smiling. “Your mother decided that you deserved to sleep a little longer.”

It was awkward, not knowing what she knew or what I could safely say. The truth was so tightly braided with secrets that I could not easily say anything without saying too much. So I simply sat down to my cereal and waited for the day to unfold.

“Well, look who's up,” my mother said as she came in the door, a basket of eggs in her hand. She tied on an apron and said, “Scrambled or fried?”

“I already had some cereal.”

“Then go on and get ready for school.” But as she said it, she winked at me. “I'll be up in a minute.”

I was still marveling over the wink when she came into my room and shut the door.

“Your father took care of Toby this morning,” she said softly. “Gave him breakfast.” She sat down on the edge of my bed while I got dressed. “When he got back, he told me some things.” She patted the bed next to her. “Annabelle, come sit for a minute.”

When I did, she took a moment to choose her words. “Annabelle, your father thinks that Toby may be a little . . . confused.”

“About what?”

“You know we've always thought he was odd. You did, too, I'm sure. Walking all day but going nowhere. Not talking unless he had to. Living in the smokehouse when he might have lived somewhere better.”

“But I thought you liked him.”

“I do,” she said. “I always have. I'm sure he went through horrible things that made him the way he is, and I'll always help him if I can. But last night, in those clean clothes, with his hair and beard trimmed up, sitting at the table, and talking in complete sentences: He didn't seem odd anymore. But he
is
odd, Annabelle, and I don't want you to forget that.”

“Did something happen in the barn this morning?”

She shook her head. “No, but your father spent some time with him and he reminded me, so I'm reminding you, that you can't judge a book by its cover. Toby is confused. And you need to remember that, much as you like him.”

I was baffled by all this talk of confusion and book covers. “I don't understand,” I said. “You always said that people shouldn't be afraid of Toby just because he looked scary. And now you're saying that
I
should be afraid of Toby, even though he went down that well to get Betty, just because he looks
good
?”

My mother stared at me, still as a post. “Annabelle, I didn't say you should be afraid of him.” She looked at her hands in her lap and sighed. “I'm just worried about you spending time alone with a man we really don't know all that well, who is, by all accounts,
odd
. Annabelle, he simply
is
.”

“But—”

“Annabelle, you know how he carries those guns all the time?”

“Yes. So?”

“Your father had a look at them. Annabelle, only one of those guns works. The other two are ruined. They aren't good for anything. But he's carried them around for years, regardless, heavy as they are. Wouldn't you say that's a sign of confusion?”

I thought about the dreadful stories that Toby had told me. I remembered the baby only moments old.

I looked my mother full in the face. “I wouldn't say that's a sign of confusion. I would say that's a sign of something that we don't understand. Toby has his reasons, and I don't think that makes him odd at all. Or if it does, then I'm odd, too, and so are you.”

I got up and continued to get ready for school while my mother sat on the bed and watched me. Then she got up and left the room without another word.