He lay back on the warm rock and stared at the sky, where a hawk was circling far, far above. What had he done wrong? Nothing. Who was he hurting? No one. So why was he being tortured? He didn’t know. Had Althea Tower muttered something about snakes? Was there a law against snakes in some holy book? He didn’t know. And he didn’t know what he could do about any of it.
Stymied, he closed his eyes. The sun shone on him, and he grew sleepy and dozed off.
When he woke up, he could see that it was late afternoon. The shadows of the trees crept across the field, and the air had grown chillier. Grover felt bleak. What was he going to do when night came? What would he do tomorrow? He was hungry, and he was cold, too, because with his T-shirt and his sweatshirt wrapping up his wrist, all he had on was a flannel shirt and his jacket. Which was better, to be warm and have that noise screaming at him, or be cold and without the noise? He decided to be cold, at least for the moment.
For the first time, he realized that he was going to spend the night up here. He hadn’t really thought about it before, when all he wanted was to get away. But he saw that he would have to. Darkness would fall before he could get down the trail—and he didn’t want to be back in town anyway.
So he’d better use the daylight that was left to get ready. He’d make himself some sort of den to sleep in, and he’d look as hard as he could for some nuts or shriveled-up berries to eat.
First the den. He wanted to be in among the trees, not out in the open. So he crossed to the west side of the field and made his way into the thicket of undergrowth, stamping down brush and breaking off twigs that got in his way. It was like burrowing through barbed wire, he thought, so many stickers and scratchers. Underfoot, the ground was leaf-littered and rocky and uneven. And damp. It wasn’t a great place for a campout.
But after creeping around for a while, he found a sort of scooped-out place in the ground surrounded by a group of pines. The pine needles were thick on the ground, and he mounded them up to make a mattress. This wouldn’t be too bad, he thought. Now for food.
A few rays of sunlight still fell across the top of the mountain and lit up the trees on the other side of the field. Grover started to make his way out of the woods, back through the brush the way he’d come. But just as he got to the edge of the clearing, he saw, within the trees on the opposite side, something white moving.
He stood still. The trees would hide him, he thought, if he didn’t move. If only he had binoculars! His heart began a quick, steady thudding. Could the terrorist hear the faint hum of the bracelet?
The white patch moved slowly. It seemed to be coming toward the clearing. Grover held his breath. He squinted, trying to see more clearly in the failing light. The white patch moved, stood still, moved again, and at last came out from the shelter of the trees and into the field.
And Grover’s heart gave a great lurch. This terrorist was not human. And it was not a terrorist, either. It was a bear. A white bear—something Grover had never seen nor heard of.
The bear came out into the field. It walked with a lopsided motion, as if maybe one of its feet hurt. Its nose was down; its head swung slightly from side to side. Its coat, Grover could see, was not pure white at all. It was a dirty cream color, smudged with gray.
It came closer. Grover held his breath. He didn’t really think the bear would attack him. He’d caught sight of bears up here before, and he knew that the main thing was not to take the bear by surprise. Make a noise, let it know you were there, and it would turn around and shuffle off. Still, he was nervous. It was almost night, he was all alone, and he was making a strange noise the bear would soon start to hear.
And as soon as he had that thought, the bear lifted its head. It stopped moving and looked straight toward Grover. The last rays of the sun shone on its small round ears, turning them pink.
So Grover did what he knew he should do. He stepped out from the trees and stood in the open. He raised his right arm, so that the humming ball at the end of it stood up in the air like a stop sign. In as strong a voice as he could muster, he called out: “Bear! Here I am! I’m your friend, not your dinner!”
They stared at each other. Grover saw that the bear’s nose was a pale tan, and its eyes shone in the slanting sunlight like little rubies. He called out again, waving his arm. “I see what you are!” he said. “You should get away from here! You’re not safe!”
And as if it understood, the bear turned away. It didn’t hurry. It turned around and trundled back the way it had come. In a few minutes, it had gone into the woods and disappeared.
Grover slept that night on his cushion of pine needles. He covered himself with more pine needles, and he used the wad around his wrist as a pillow. The bracelet whined in his ear and, when he finally fell asleep, made its way into his dreams as a screaming jet plane diving toward him and swooping away, over and over. When he awoke in the morning, he was very cold and very hungry, and he knew there was nothing to do but go home. At least it was Saturday; no one would try to make him go to school.
CHAPTER 25
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The Open House
The house looked beautiful on Saturday morning. Its floors were polished, its paint was bright, and the pieces of furniture that remained were the finest antiques of the lot, and dust-free. Big vases stood here and there, with artistically arranged pine branches and bare twigs arching out of them.
Now Crystal was scuttling among the downstairs rooms, looking for anything that might discourage a buyer. Was there a crack in the plaster? Cover it with an antique portrait in a gold frame! A scuffed place on the floor? Put a Persian rug there! She puttered and fussed, fixed and fidgeted, talking the whole time. “The Tiffany lamp! Here would be the perfect spot. And wait, these cushions…Nickie, would you get those green ones from the middle bedroom? That’s better. Really, it’s looking good. Except for…hold on a sec…maybe the leather-topped game table over here…Help me move it, Nickie.”
Over an hour went by, during which Nickie could not stop thinking about Otis two floors above, needing his breakfast, needing to go outside, ready any second to start whining or barking. But Crystal, for once, wasn’t in a hurry.
At ten o’clock, she turned on the radio. “There ought to be some news,” she said. She stopped dashing around and sat down to listen. Nickie listened, too. “We are expecting an announcement from the White House at any moment,” said the newscaster. “The president’s deadline ran out yesterday, but so far there has been no word on the status of the situation.”
They kept listening, but no announcement came. There was a report about an earthquake somewhere, and a riot somewhere else, and then something about two movie stars getting married, and finally the announcer came back on and said that there was still no news about the tense international situation and that people should stay tuned.
“It’s odd,” said Crystal, flicking off the radio. “But at least it’s not war. Not yet.”
She went back to work. For another half hour, she wandered around adding final touches here and there. Finally she flopped down on the red plush sofa in the front parlor and surveyed what she had done. “Not bad,” she said. She checked her watch. “Ten forty-two. We open at eleven. Len should be here any minute.”
“Do you need me anymore?” Nickie asked.
“No, no,” said Crystal, waving a hand. “You go off and play.”
“Okay,” Nickie said. “I just have to get some stuff from upstairs first.”
Crystal nodded. She reached for a spray bottle and squirted a fine mist at a potted fern.
Nickie dashed up the stairs. Poor Otis, poor Otis; if he’d made a puddle on the floor, she wouldn’t say a single scolding word. She burst through the door at the top of the stairs, closed it behind her, flung open the nursery door, and there was Otis scrambling backward, yelping and squealing with a desperate tone in his voice. He’d been standing right there, she could picture it, nose to the place where the door would open, waiting for her. She s
canned the room. Only one small puddle, which she quickly mopped up.
“Okay, Otis,” she said, “just a couple more minutes. I’ll be really quick.” Otis jumped up and down beside her leg. “I know you’re hungry, but we have to get out of here first. You have to be incredibly quiet.”
She hooked Otis’s leash to his collar and wound it once around his muzzle so he couldn’t bark. Then she picked him up and carried him down the hall and down the stairs. She paused at the second floor, listening for Crystal. Heard nothing. Went down the next flight to the door that led to the hall behind the kitchen. Listened again. This time she heard voices.
“Looks great!” said Len’s voice. “You do, too.”
“Well, thanks! You’re such a sweetie.”
That was Crystal. They were by the front door, Nickie thought. Good. She darted into the kitchen, grabbed an apple and a muffin from a bowl on the table, opened the door to the back garden, and shouted, “Bye, I’m leaving! Good luck!” Before anyone even answered, she shut the door behind her and took off.
It was not a beautiful day for a walk. Gray clouds hung low and dark in the sky, and the air was cold enough to bite. Nickie had on her warmest jacket and a thick knitted scarf around her neck and a knitted hat that came down over her ears, and she was still chilly. She’d warm up as she walked, probably, but it would be nice if the wind would die down. She snuggled Otis’s head up under her chin.
At the end of the block, she went around the corner, turned onto Fern Street, and started up the path that led in among the trees. A few yards along, she stopped and set Otis down on the ground. Instantly, he pulled the leash tight, making a beeline for the base of a tree, where he lifted his back leg and sent a stream of pee against the bark. “Good boy,” said Nickie. Suddenly she felt happy and free. The cold didn’t matter. The woods stretched before her, mysterious, unexplored. No danger of running into the dog-napping Prophet out here, or any of her spies. And if there was a terrorist wandering around in the woods—well, if she saw him, she’d just hide, that’s all.
So they hiked, Nickie striding along on legs that felt strong and glad to be exercised, and Otis zigzagging across the path from one fascinating smell to the next. The ground crackled underfoot—icy dead leaves, brittle twigs, dirt hardened by cold. In all directions stood the endless ranks of gray-brown tree trunks, their bare branches making a dense weave that reminded her of the crosshatched writing on the old letter. Wind rattled the branches against each other, and here and there a few last rags of leaf fell down.
It was a little after eleven o’clock. In a while, she’d find a place to sit, and she’d eat the muffin and the apple she had with her. But now all she wanted to do was walk, and walk fast.
The trail wound back and forth, always sloping upward, but never very steep. Most of the time, all Nickie could see was the deep forest on both sides, but after a while she came to a clearing where the trees thinned out on the downhill side, and she could look down the mountain and see the roofs of the town below. It looked small and peaceful from here. No people were visible. She tried to make out which house was Greenhaven, but she couldn’t tell. It made her a little sad, this view of Yonwood, the place where she had been sure she wanted to live. In her imagination, it had been so perfect—peaceful and beautiful, safe from the troubles of the cities. If someone had told her then that Yonwood was working to battle the forces of evil by building a shield of goodness, she would have been happy to hear it. Those things were exactly what she wanted. How strange that it could all turn out so differently.
She walked on. It wasn’t a steady walk, because Otis had to stop every few yards and thrust his nose beneath a bush or into the leaf litter that covered the ground. Some spots were so interesting that he had to snuffle in them for quite a while. During these times, Nickie stood still and gazed around her. Birds flitted among the branches, twittering in a muted way. Overhead, clouds moved slowly across the sky, so the forest was sometimes in shadow, sometimes in sunlight. When the sun shone down, crystals of frost and patches of ice glistened like glass.
When she’d walked for an hour or so, she started thinking it was time to rest, and time to eat. She looked for somewhere to sit down. A few yards farther on she came to a fallen tree that lay alongside the trail, covered in a tangle of brown stickery vines and furred with green moss along the top. She tore the vines away to make a clear space, and she tied her end of Otis’s leash to the stump of a branch sticking up from the log. Then she sat down, took the muffin and the apple out of her paper bag, and ate them both, except for the last chunk of muffin, which she gave to Otis. She crushed the paper bag into a ball and stuck it in her pocket.
That was when she heard the footsteps. There was no mistaking them—firm and steady, a tramp, tramp, tramp that came from above her on the trail, not far distant. Nickie’s heart started racing. Could she duck behind a tree? Crouch down behind this fallen log? But Otis had heard the footsteps, too, and after a moment of cocking his head and pricking up his ears, he let out a string of loud barks. So there was no use hiding. Whoever was coming would have heard them already. He would come around the bend in a moment and see them, and Nickie would just have to hope that if it was a terrorist or some other sort of wild person, he would have more important things on his mind than a girl eating lunch.
So she sat frozen on the log and waited, and in a few seconds the person came around the bend, and it wasn’t a terrorist; it was Grover.
“Hey!” he cried when he saw her. He stopped and stared. Then he made a face of extreme horror, pulling down the corners of his mouth and making his eyes bulge out. “Aaaaaiiieee!” he yelled. “It’s a terrifying terrorist! And a savage monster! Save me, save me!”
“Stop that,” said Nickie. Relief swept through her, and she grinned.
Otis bounded over to Grover and stood up against his legs, and Grover stooped to pet him—with his left hand, because his right hand was bundled up in a clump of clothes. When he came closer, Nickie could hear the hum of the bracelet: MMMM-mmmm-MMMMM-mmmmm.
“Can I see it?” she said.
“Five dollars per view,” said Grover.
“Come on.”
So he unwrapped his wrist, and the noise came out loud and shrill in the cold air. Nickie peered at the thing. “It’s awful,” she said. “You can’t break it with a rock or anything?”
“Not without breaking my arm, too. I tried.” He wrapped it up again. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s the open house today,” Nickie said. “I have to keep Otis away. Not just because of the open house, but the Prophet, too.”
Grover sat down on the log. “Why?”
Nickie told him what Mrs. Beeson had said. “It’s tomorrow. She’s going to take all the dogs away.”
Grover responded to this by rearing backward and nearly falling off the log, as if knocked off balance by astonishment. “I am stunned,” he said.
“Me too,” said Nickie. “You don’t think she could be right, do you? That dogs take up too much love? Which should go to God?”
“I don’t think so,” said Grover, sitting up straight again. Otis sniffed at his wrist, which hummed faintly. “I really don’t think so.”
“But Otis is all right because nobody knows about him. Hardly anybody. You do, but you wouldn’t tell, would you?”
“Nope,” said Grover. He rumpled Otis’s ears. “Guess what?” he said.
“What?”
“I saw the terrorist.”
“Not really,” said Nickie. “Did you?”
“I did.” He told her about the bear. “It was an albino,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it was, because I’ve never heard of a white bear. Except polar bears, and there aren’t any in North Carolina.” He looked thoughtful, and a little sad. “I told it to go away,” he said, “for its own good. People here don’t like things that are different.”
“Was it beautiful?” Nickie said.
“Not really. It was sort of dirty-looking. It had smu
dges on it. And it was limping.”
“Were you afraid?” Nickie asked.
But Grover didn’t answer. He was staring into space with his eyebrows raised. “I just thought of something,” he said.
“What?”
“The broken window. I bet it was the bear. Put its foot through the glass.”
“You mean at the restaurant?”
“Right. Snatched up that chicken and snagged the napkin with a claw, I bet. And that blood. She said it was an R, but I always thought it was just a blot. It was bear blood. Bet you anything.”
He explained, and Nickie listened. “Bear blood,” she said wonderingly. “No one guessed.”
They sat without talking for a few moments. The bracelet hummed beneath its wrappings.
“You have to get that thing off you,” said Nickie. “What are you going to do?”
Grover stood up. The wind was blowing harder now, and dark clouds were coming in from the east. “It doesn’t matter about my snakes, I guess. I can let them go. I studied them a lot already. And in the summer, when I leave, I was going to let them go anyway.”
Nickie looked up in surprise. “You mean you made enough money?”
“I will,” said Grover. “I made ninety-seven words out of ‘Sparklewash for Dishes.’ That ought to be enough to win.”
They walked back down the trail together. Grover talked about albino animals most of the way—how rare they were, how he’d never heard of an albino bear before, how some people had considered them sacred in other times and places. Nickie listened with half her attention. A sadness had come over her. She was sad that Grover probably wasn’t going to win his contest and go on his expedition, and she was sad that Greenhaven might have a new owner by now, some stranger who wouldn’t love it as she did. She felt tired, and sad, and cold.
Overhead, the clouds had gathered and darkened, filling in the whole sky.
“Looks like it’s going to snow,” said Grover.
CHAPTER 26