The Winter Place Read online

  “What?”

  The stranger pointed at the camera slung over Axel’s shoulder. It took Tess a moment to realize that the finger he was pointing with was one of only three on that hand. The stranger had been badly mangled, and the ring and pinky fingers of his left hand were missing entirely. Hard to fake that with makeup.

  “It’ll cost you,” the man said. “We have a booth for that. You need to get tokens.” He flashed them a smile, and wow, was it ugly. His mouth was thin and stretchy, and his teeth . . . It’s hard to describe them. They were clean and even. But they seemed to vibrate slightly. They looked like they wanted out.

  Axel, for his part, was totally unfazed. “What makes you think we want your picture?”

  The stranger smiled again, and Tess wished he wouldn’t. “Not mine,” he said. “Hers.” He nodded at the dark patch of woods, and there it was—not it, she. The brown bear. She was lying down in the shadows, her big head resting on her front paws. She did look sulky.

  “Oh,” Axel croaked.

  “That is, more or less, the desired effect,” the stranger said, with a pixie-dust wriggle of his three fingers.

  “Are you her trainer?” Axel said.

  “I can’t say that, no. I haven’t the temperament for hoops or balls, and I’m afraid that she doesn’t, either. I’m just a lowly Keeper.” The stranger said this word like it was some kind of official title. He even gave a little bow and doffed his cap, revealing a single lick of red hair on his otherwise bald head.

  “But you’re her keeper, right?” Tess said. “You know that she escaped?”

  “Escaped?” The Keeper jabbed his walking stick into the crook of his elbow and clapped his hands once. “Escaped would imply that I get a vote in where she goes or what she does when she gets there.”

  From inside the woods the bear got up onto her haunches and seemed to moan, or growl. Axel took a step back, cupping the camera in his free hand. Tess saw that he was trying to be discreet about adjusting the settings, flipping open the flash.

  “Well, she came right into our yard,” Tess went on. “She could have hurt somebody.”

  “You’re telling me,” the Keeper said. “Old girl is a monster.” Then, to the still grumbling grizzly: “Quit it, you drama queen.” He removed his fedora, took a mantislike step into the woods, and batted the bear across the muzzle with it. Amazingly, she didn’t eat his face. She behaved neither the way a wild bear would nor the way a tame one should.

  Axel’s broom fell away as he lifted the camera and snapped a picture. But no sooner had he taken it than the Keeper reached over and snatched the camera away.

  “Hey!” Axel sounded more surprised than anything else.

  “I said no pictures.” The Keeper was calm but plainly annoyed.

  “That’s our dad’s camera,” Tess said.

  “Trust me, he won’t miss it.” The Keeper brought the camera up to his face, seeming to puzzle over it.

  “He’s a knight of the realm,” Tess said, her cheeks warming. “He’ll get you kicked out of the faire.”

  “Some realm,” the Keeper said. Then, without any warning whatsoever, he lifted the camera high above his head and let it drop. It landed on the embankment with a heavy, glassy crunch. For a moment, Tess and Axel just gawked at him.

  “You’re going to break it!” Axel shouted. He scooped up his broom and swung it at the Keeper. To Tess’s horror, the ragged head caught the strange man directly across the face. Everything went quiet. The Keeper stared down at them, and Tess made ready to grab Axel and sprint for the house.

  “Good reach,” the Keeper said. For a moment it looked like his face had turned red. But it wasn’t just him—the whole roadside was bright and blinking. Tess glanced back at the road and saw a police car driving up, very slowly, cherry top whirling. It turned down the dirt driveway to the A-frame, where it stopped. Someone must have called to complain about the bear.

  “I’m going to tell them what you did,” Axel said.

  “Be my guest,” the Keeper said, unfurling his mangled left hand in the direction of the police cruiser. A pair of officers had gotten out, walking slowly toward the front door of the A-frame. They took such tiny steps.

  “You think I won’t?”

  “I’m sure you will,” the Keeper said. “Have at it.”

  Axel hesitated, maybe reluctant to leave his sister alone with this crazy person. Behind the Keeper, in the shadowed park, the bear let out another groan. She stood, quite suddenly, on her hind legs. “Hey, now,” the Keeper said, sounding nervous for the first time. The bear groaned again and then rolled her haunches so that her front paws landed to one side. She spun around and charged deeper into the woods, away from her keeper, lost in the firefly-dotted depths of the park.

  “Stupid thing,” the Keeper said. “She’s going to get lost.” Then he turned back and gave them one last look. He reaffixed his hat to his broad, ugly head, then picked the camera up off the embankment and tossed it to Tess. The view screen blinked and sizzled—the thing was definitely broken. “It was nice to meet you both,” the Keeper said. “And I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Axel virtually hissed. “You can’t just wreck our dad’s camera and then say sorry.”

  “That you had coming,” the Keeper said. “What I’m sorry for is everything else. Everything that’s about to happen to you.”

  And with that cryptic bit of garbage, he took his walking stick in hand and bounded jauntily into the woods after the bear.

  4

  The Fortune House

  The two policemen had reached the front door and were tapping on it gingerly. Axel cut through the birches and then around the A-frame, coming right up behind them—a young officer and an older one, both in strange, dark blue uniforms. These were city cops, Axel realized, not the troopers who normally patrolled town. The bear must have covered a lot of ground.

  “Hey, you just missed them!”

  The men spun around. The younger one had his hand on his belt, not six inches from his holster. Stupid, Axel thought. Not them—him. He knew better than to sneak up on city people.

  “Whoa, kid. You shouldn’t . . .” The older officer looked flustered. He glanced at his partner, and it seemed like they were having a silent argument over who would speak next. The older one finally gave in. “Do you live here?”

  Axel nodded impatiently. “Listen, they’re just in the park, but they’re getting away.” He pointed across the road, into the murk of the woods, still flickering with siren light.

  “Who is?” The younger officer glanced into the evening. It was plain to see that he was still half spooked.

  “The bear,” Axel said. “She’s with her keeper, but I don’t think he knows what he’s doing. Also, he broke my dad’s camera!”

  The officers looked at each other and had another long stretch of talking with their eyebrows. “I don’t know about any bear,” the older one finally said. “But I do need to talk to your mom—I mean, Mrs. Fortune. Is she home? Is this the Fortune house?”

  Axel stared at them both. Police coming up from the city, asking for his mother, not knowing enough not to. Axel’s own knowing started that very moment, but for the next few minutes he’d resist it.

  “Our mom is dead,” Tess said. She’d appeared in the middle of the driveway, her arms hanging slack at her sides, the camera dangling so low that it grazed the gravel under her feet. “But this is the Fortune house.”

  “That’s your sister?” The younger officer said, his voice creaky. He seemed to have had enough of kids appearing out of the darkness.

  “My name’s Tess.” Axel’s sister sounded weirdly hesitant—like her name was somehow up for debate.

  “He’s getting away,” Axel said. “The bear is, too.”

  “Okay, now,” the older officer said, nodding like he was listening. But he wasn’t—his attention was on Axel’s sister. “Are there any adults in the house, young lady? You have any other brothers or sisters?” Then, as
a little aside to Axel: “Mind that’s not a question you should normally answer to a stranger, all right? We’ll just make an exception this time.” As though Axel were growing younger under this nice old dude’s gaze. The officer had started out talking to a ten-year-old, and now Axel was maybe six or seven to him, tops. All the proof he needed that something was wrong. Wrong in a new kind of way, as big a kind of wrong as had entered his life since he was a baby. Still, he kept himself blind to it.

  “We have a neighbor,” Tess said, her eyes a little cloudy, the muscles of her face loosening. “Mrs. Ridgeland. She lives just . . .” Instead of saying where, Tess simply pointed up the road. Her finger was shaking. Her whole arm was shaking.

  “That’s fine,” the older man said. “All right. Rick is going to go and get her. How about that, Rick?” He looked at the younger officer, who nodded.

  “Why do you need Mrs. Ridgeland?” Axel said.

  “I’m James,” the older officer said, stepping down off the front stoop and holding out his hand for Tess to shake. She didn’t. “Do you mind if I come inside for a minute?”

  “It’s open,” she said.

  “Well, all right.” James smiled, the effort behind it plain enough to see. He stood there for an awkward moment, and when it became clear that Tess wasn’t going to give him more of an invitation, he returned to the front door and swung it wide. Rick, the jumpy young officer, was already back inside his cruiser. The siren light spun silently as he pulled off the shoulder, back onto the county road.

  “I said, why do you need Mrs. Ridgeland?” Axel was getting annoyed now.

  “Why don’t you come on inside?” James said. “We can talk in here.”

  Tess was the first through the door, pausing for a moment to grip the frame. James and Axel followed. Inside, the house smelled of butter and of burning. A greasy film of smoke hung about the light fixtures on the ceiling. “Oh dear,” James said.

  “There are pies in the oven,” Tess said, her voice flat. “We forgot them.”

  “Shouldn’t leave the house with the oven on,” James said, sort of to himself. He went from window to window to air out the A-frame. When he opened the oven, a hefty belch of smoke slurped out. Waving a pot holder in front of his face, he retrieved the two pies and dropped them in the sink with the water running. They sizzled like doused campfires. Tess lowered herself onto the couch. Axel wanted to shake her. He wanted to be big enough to shake this old police officer, too.

  “Doesn’t anybody give a crap about the bear?” Axel all but shouted it.

  Tess just looked at him. She was crying, now—God, why was she crying? It was more a sound than anything else, like awful hiccups caught between her belly and her throat. Like she was choking on the air. It made Axel so angry. The bear was getting away, and Tess was just sitting there and the cop was condescending to him the exact way every stupid adult always condescended to him. His sister reached for him, but Axel pulled away.

  “Honestly, son, we haven’t heard boo about any bears.” James coughed a little as he exited the kitchen. He saw what was happening with Tess and sat down next to her. It was only now that Axel noticed how sad the man looked. His eyes were red and wet, too, but also hard. “I can ask around, though. You say you saw a bear, and I believe you. Sounds like something that should be looked into.”

  Nobody said anything more, and a clean night chill slowly filled the house. Before long they could hear the crunch of tires on the dirt drive outside. Mrs. Ridgeland pushed her way into the A-frame before the younger officer had even unbuckled his seat belt. She was still in her pajamas and robe—she hadn’t even bothered to put shoes on. James stood to greet her, but she went right past him, setting on Axel. She took the boy into her arms and virtually carried him over to Tess and glommed her into the embrace as well. Axel could feel the shudder of Tess’s crying, thrumming through the trunks of Mrs. Ridgeland’s arms. But all he could think was: How could they? How could they tell her before they told us? He’s our dad. He’s ours, and they told her first.

  An accident. A crash on 690, eastbound into Syracuse. The barest of bare bones, and it’s all they got. The police persuaded Mrs. Ridgeland to unlatch from the children and then spoke to her for a good long while. As though Tess and Axel had been rendered deaf—as though they’d slipped out the open doors and windows with the rest of the smoke. Though, to be fair, they’d all but done so. Axel had never seen his sister like this. He’d seen Tess cry, sure, but only once or twice. And even then it was just a few neatly controlled tears, a perfect distillation of a particular moment of anger and frustration. But this was something else, horribly alive and unselfconscious. Axel, on the other hand, felt anything but alive. It was almost as though he’d been ejected from his life and was watching this whole maudlin scene unfold on high-definition television. It was strangely comforting. As though, if things got too bad, Axel could simply change the channel.

  Over at the kitchen table Mrs. Ridgeland was telling the police about how Saara, Axel and Tess’s mother, had died a decade ago. The children had no aunts or uncles that Mrs. Ridgeland knew of, and no grandparents, either. At least none who ever visited. She thought it was a safe enough guess that any family they had were either dead or else not on speaking terms.

  “We have a grandfather,” Tess said, her bleary eyes turning to the bookshelves. There was a picture of Grandpa Paul right there in the middle, just as rangy as their dad but older and more used up. He was sort of smiling, sort of squinting, seated in a canvas camp chair on the edge of a clear pond, the skin on his shoulders pink and peeling. He wasn’t smoking in the picture, but you could tell from it that he was a smoker. “He lives in Florida,” she said. “He’s afraid to fly. We visit him.”

  “That right, honey?” Officer James said. “You know where in Florida?”

  Tess didn’t answer right away. She and Axel had been to their grandpa’s actual house—if you could give such a name to a single-wide trailer with only occasional electric and plumbing—only a few times. It was on the outskirts of a little town called the Boils, named for the warm freshwater springs that burbled up deep in the juniper prairie of the Ocala reserve. The trailer didn’t exactly have a street address, and what’s more, their grandpa liked to move it from time to time. He said it was to change up his view, but even Axel knew that it was more to change up his neighbors. Grandpa Paul could be a hard man to get along with, as evidenced by the fact that their dad got along with basically everybody on the planet except for him.

  “Not exactly,” Tess said. “I know his number.” She took out her phone and read it aloud. Rick, the younger of the two officers, stepped into Sam’s study to call. He emerged less than a minute later, mouthing “out of service” to James and Mrs. Ridgeland.

  “He doesn’t have a lot of money,” Axel said. He hadn’t quite articulated this before, to himself or anybody else, but wow was it ever true. He thought of his granddad, groomed and quaffed whenever they met, reeking of aftershave and effort, wearing clothes that sometimes still had outlet-store tags on them. Axel supposed they’d live with him now, and that was as weird a thought as any. It rivaled the backyard bear in oddness.

  “Nothing to worry about,” James said. “We’ll find a way to get in touch with him. Until then, is there anyone else? Somebody closer by?” He waited, looking at Tess.

  How could it be possible that the answer was no?

  It was decided in very short order that the kids would go home with Mrs. Ridgeland. She and the two officers waited by the front door while Tess and Axel emptied their backpacks of schoolbooks and stuffed in their pajamas and their toothbrushes. Axel felt strange as he wandered the house, as though he had just minutes to save a few possessions before evacuating the area, the A-frame a loss, doomed to be consumed by a forest fire racing down on them from the hot heart of the leafless park. He made one last stop to drop some more food and water into Bigwig’s hutch before closing the door to his bedroom for what would be exactly the second-to-last time
.

  “Do you two have any questions?” Officer James asked once they were all packed.

  “Not about . . . just . . .” Axel sensed it was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself. It wouldn’t leave his head. “About the bear. I want to know if somebody is going to go look for the bear.”

  The adults just stared at him.

  The angels in Mrs. Ridgeland’s yard blazed white one by one as they caught the high beams and fell back into nothing when the cruiser passed them by. Tess was still crying when she stepped out of the car, but it had cooled now to a sort of teary daze. Mrs. Ridgeland and Axel got out as well, and the sound of their doors shutting seemed loud enough to knock the trees over. Officer James lowered his window and explained that someone from Social Services would be around in the morning, to work out a better arrangement until next of kin could be located. Mrs. Ridgeland said that the children could stay with her as long as they needed to.

  The cruiser backed cautiously down the drive, and Mrs. Ridgeland fumbled with a big ring of keys. She led them through that cramped hallway and into a sitting room swollen with yarn and construction paper, old photographs spilling out of open boxes on the floor. “You two probably aren’t hungry,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, “but you should try to eat something all the same.”

  Axel nodded. He was actually starving. The pies had immolated, and he hadn’t eaten a thing since the sweet barrel pickle he’d bought at the court-of-foods that afternoon.

  Mrs. Ridgeland waited for another moment and, getting no indication either way from Tess, she said: “I’ll see what I can find. After that, we’ll sort out a place for you to sleep.” She was talking mostly to herself now, fading in the direction of the kitchen.

  The children sat silently on opposite ends of a little love seat facing an enormous picture window. Mrs. Ridgeland’s giant, copper-plated telescope was set before the window. It made about as much sense as the angels cavorting out in her yard. Axel thought, once again, of the bear. It was out there too. “Dad is gonna flip when we tell him about it.” It was only when Tess turned to stare at him that Axel realized he’d said this aloud.