Lost Children of the Far Islands (8 page)

“I love you, Dad,” she said into the quiet of the car.

“I love you too, Gussy,” he said without taking his eyes away from the road.

“What’s going on?” she asked him. “I mean, really.”

“Not now, OK, honey? I need to focus on getting us there.”

“Fine,” Gus said shortly. She turned her face back to the window, determined not to speak to him again until he was ready to explain some of this … this craziness. It was too much. Gus was angry and frustrated. And she had to admit, she was curious too. Even as she was thinking this, she slid into sleep, an uneasy, shallow sleep populated with wolves and schools of frightened fish and the unending sound of the sea in her ears.

Gus woke with a start. Her father was reaching over her to unhitch her seatbelt. “Let’s go, everybody,” he said.

“Are we there?” Leo asked sleepily.

“No,” their father said as he scooped up Ila, who was clearly unhappy at being uprooted. “We’re going to stay here tonight and finish the drive in the morning.”

They were in a dirt parking lot. In front of them was a small green building made of wood, with a front porch on which there sat a rocking chair. Behind the little house, in a semicircle set back almost to the woods, sat more cabins, each with a porch light shining into the deep night. A sign on the door said
Ring bell on the right
.

Their father rang the bell, tentatively at first, and then with more force. After some time, a woman came to the door. Her face, which was pinched with sleep and irritation at being awakened, softened when she saw Mr. Brennan with Ila sleeping in his arms.

“Late night for such little ones,” she said sympathetically. “Well, come on in and I’ll get you a key.”

They followed her into the small office. Something moved in the corner and a large black dog unfolded itself from a blanket on the floor. It came to Gus and pressed its nose into the backs of her legs. She patted its head absently while she leaned her other arm on the counter. The dog took a long, luxurious sniff, and then suddenly his whole body stiffened and he backed away from Gus, growling.

“What is it?” Gus said, reaching her hand out to the dog. He crouched against the far wall, alternately growling and barking, his hackles raised all along his back.

“It’s OK, boy,” Leo said, stepping toward the dog. The dog crouched and whined in fear and then began barking again, high and shrill and sharp.

“Charlie!” the woman shouted. “Charlie!” But the panicked dog ignored her.

“Stay back, Gus,” their father said. “You too, Leo. Give him space.”

The woman came around the counter and dragged the still-barking dog outside by his collar, shutting the door behind her. She was back a minute later.

“Well, goodness me,” she said to Gus. “Whatever did you do to that dog?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Gus said indignantly.

“I’m just teasing you, love,” the woman said. “But honest to God, I haven’t seen him like that in fifteen years. I didn’t know he could still bark. Must have something on your clothes, I guess.”

Gus’s father shot her a look that said
Behave
.

“Fine,” she muttered. “But I didn’t do anything.”

“One night, please,” their father said. “We’ll pay cash.” In the ledger, he wrote the name
Will James
in a strong, round hand totally unlike his usual scrawl.

“OK, Mr. James,” the woman said. “You can have cabin eight. It’s just out back of here—pull right up to the door.”

“Thank you,” he said. “It has been a long day.”

He sounded totally normal—not like someone who had just signed a fake name on a ledger at a motel in the middle of nowhere, Gus thought sourly. They followed him to the car, pulled out their backpacks, and stumbled into cabin eight.

Their father carried Ila into the tiny bedroom where the three children would sleep. The cabin smelled like wet swimsuits left too long in a bag. Gus and Leo sat yawning on the couch, which was covered in a hairy plaid material. Their father came back out.

“Off to bed,” he said. “You can sleep in your clothes. We’ll get an early start.”

As she slid between the chilly sheets, Gus could see their father through the half-open bedroom door, standing in the hallway. Guarding them, she thought.

“Gus,” Leo whispered. “How late do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. Past midnight?”

“But it only takes two hours to get to Pop’s. If it’s past midnight, we’ve been driving for at least four hours.”

Gus tried to answer Leo but found that she was just too tired. Instead, she breathed in the air from the open window, cool and faintly tinged with the smell of salt and something else, something green and sharp.
Maybe seaweed
, she thought sleepily. And then, taking one more deep breath of the lovely sea air, and with all of her questions still circling around in her brain, she fell fast asleep.

When Gus woke up again, the bedroom door was closed. The only light in the room was coming from a small night-light plugged into the wall. And there in the dim glow, next to her bed, was a creature, something like a large brown weasel.

The creature was sitting up on its haunches, and it was speaking to her.

I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming
, Gus thought frantically. The weasel, or whatever it was, twitched its large, bushy tail in what was clearly impatience. It was far too big to be a weasel, she realized. Standing on its hindquarters, it was almost as tall as Ila. Its thick, reddish fur smelled like that of a wet dog, one that had taken a good long roll in rotten seaweed.

“Come, come,” the creature said. “Get up, stupid little girl.”

Gus had opened her mouth to scream, but when the creature called her
stupid
, the insult wiped out her fear. Gus was very sensitive about her brain, as anyone would be with Leo for a brother. “I’m in eighth-grade math,” she whispered furiously.

Leo interrupted whatever the creature might have said by waking up and saying very quietly, “Gus. Shut up.” Then, speaking even more quietly, he said, “That’s a mink. Don’t move, Gus. Just stay still. It’s probably rabid—”

The creature turned and said crankily, “I am most certainly
not
rabid. What is it with you two? We do not have a lot of time, you know, and this is not easy for me either. And for your information, I am not a mink. I am”—and here the creature stretched itself up proudly to its full length, swishing its furry tail from side to side as a balancing aid—“a sea mink.”

“Extinct,” Leo sad flatly. “Eighteen ninety-four.”

The creature dropped down on all fours and looked balefully at Leo. It had small, rounded ears, which it pinned back in a very clear show of displeasure. “Do I look extinct to you?” it demanded.

“For goodness’ sake,” Gus burst in. “It doesn’t matter! I mean, whatever-it-is is talking, Leo! I don’t think—”

“The last sighting of a sea mink was in 1894, in New Brunswick,” Leo said desperately. His face was very pale, and he looked at Gus, not at the creature, who was beginning, very slowly, to arch its back.

It stretched and hissed, and then, quite suddenly, standing in front of them was a small, elegant-looking man in a dark overcoat. He yawned and gave a little bow, smiling at the children, who sat with their mouths hanging open.

“The Bedell,” he said, and bowed, a very deep and formal sort of bow. “At your service.”

As he straightened back up, Gus turned on her bedside lamp and took a longer look at him. He was small, not much taller than Leo, and enveloped in a long coat
that reached all the way to the ground. He was wearing woolly gloves with the fingertips cut off. His fingernails were long and curved over themselves. They seemed to glow with a faint pink light, like the insides of oyster shells. His face was smooth and unwrinkled, with high cheekbones and large, dark eyes.

“You must be Leomaris, and you are Gustavia,” he said, shaking their hands in turn. The parts of his fingers that were not covered by the gloves felt freezing and slightly damp, as if he had been washing in cold water just before he arrived. He spoke with a very slight accent—French, Gus thought, but not quite. He sounded a bit like the lobstermen from Nova Scotia who sometimes came to Maine in the winter to sell their hauls. His speech, however, was far more precise and formal than the Canadian lobstermen’s.

“And my, oh my,” the man said, turning to Ila, who was wide awake and sitting up. “Just look at you, little one.” She smiled up at him, and then slipped off her cot and crossed the room to climb into bed with Gus. Sitting there with the warm weight of Ila against her, Gus decided not to be afraid.

“Mr. Bedell,” Leo asked, his voice quavering slightly. Leo clearly had not reached the same conclusion as Gus about the little man. “Um, not to be rude, but were you just an
animal
? And why are you … what …” He stopped, clearly frustrated, and, leaning over, he picked up his glasses from the bed stand and shoved them on his face. “Why are you here?” he said more steadily.

“I am here for you, of course!” he said. “I am taking you to Loup Marin.”

The twins looked at each other. “Loup Marin?” Leo asked.

“Well, of course,” the Bedell said impatiently. “Where the Móraí waits for you. She is the Watcher there,” he added helpfully.

The children stared at him in silence.

“You are Folk,” he said. “Your mother is Folk, and so you three are as well. It is time for you to come home.”

“Folk?” Gus said. “What in the world is that?”

“
Who
is that,” the man corrected her. “You and the boy are approaching the doubled year. Your power, therefore, is growing.”

“The doubled year?” Leo said.

The Bedell looked at the three of them again and sighed like an exasperated teacher with very slow students. “Anyway, here I am, and here we are, and so on, so forth, etc., etc., and we must get a move on, yes?”

“We can’t just go off with a …” Gus couldn’t think of what to call this strange visitor, so she dropped it. “We can’t just
go
,” she said lamely.

The man looked at her, and all the jolliness was gone from his face. “There is very little time,” he said. “The wolves are on the trail. Your father did well to drive you in circles all night—he almost lost me, and that is saying a lot. But if I can find you, the wolves can too. With your mother ill—Oh yes,” he said, noticing Gus’s startled expression, “I know all about your mother. Anyway, she
has done as much as she can do. The only thing left to do is run.”

“What if we don’t?” Leo asked. He wasn’t being belligerent. Leo never held grudges, and anyway, he looked more fascinated than annoyed now by their odd visitor. He was just being Leo, and that meant gathering all the facts that were there to be gathered. “What if we stay here, and go to Pop’s tomorrow with our father?”

“I doubt very much you will ever arrive,” the Bedell said, his nose twitching in an agitated sort of way. “The King’s wolves will find you, just as sure as a flounder is flat.”

One foot (bare, and covered in fine brown hair) jerked in the air as though trying to find something to scratch.

“This is America,” Leo said. “We don’t have kings.”

“And this is Maine,” Gus added. “We don’t have wolves, especially not wolves who go around
killing
people!”

“Your mother will certainly die as well,” the little man continued, as if neither of them had spoken. “She has used up all her strength trying to hide the three of you.”

At the man’s words, an image of their mother swept over Gus, one of her before the illness, laughing at the dinner table at one of her father’s silly jokes—
Where does the king keep his armies? In his sleevies
! She suddenly missed her mother, needed her, more than she could stand.

“Don’t you talk about our mother,” she said angrily. Ila whimpered as Gus tightened her arms around her.

The little man stood with his hands held loosely
together in front of the lapels of his coat, the way a squirrel sitting on its haunches holds its paws, looking at Leo and then to Gus and Ila and back to Leo again.

“Who is this ‘king’ person anyway?” Leo said.

“Has no one told you anything?” the man said impatiently. They all shook their heads. “Yes,” he said, “I am afraid that your father—”

And with that, the door burst open and their father came in, his hair in wild disarray, his face tight with fear.

“What is it?” he said sharply. Then, as he took in the three of them sitting up on the beds, his shoulders sagged and he heaved a sigh of relief. “What are you guys doing up?” he said in a quieter voice.

Barely daring to breathe, Gus peeked over toward the Bedell. The floor was bare, save for a small puddle of water where the man had been standing. Gus could smell a faint odor of wet dog and seaweed coming from under her bed. Pushing Ila off her lap, she swung her feet over the edge of the bed.

“Um, Dad—” Leo began, but Gus cut him off.

“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “We’re just worried, you know, about stuff.”

Her father’s face softened. “I know, Gussy,” he said. “But you need your sleep, OK?”

He came over to the bed and scooped up Ila. While he tucked her into her cot, Gus swung her feet energetically. They hit something soft and furry and, still thinking about her mother, she kicked backward as hard as she could. There was a muffled squeak from under the bed.