The Winslow Incident (41 page)

The ghost girl skittered around
Mr. Rhone. Aaron could tell that she was trying to distract him, to keep him
from finding his daughters.

“April May June.”

But he’s so close now
, Aaron saw
.

Though the ghost girl skipped in
front of him, trying to change his direction, she couldn’t stop him from
heading straight for the other girls, the ones who were still alive.

“July August . . .”

And then Aaron saw Sean. His big
brother was down by the bakery.

“Sean!” Aaron tried to call to him
and saw his own body convulse. “Help us,” he was finally able to whisper from
the inside out.

D
arting here, darting there—children
children everywhere. Stealing apples. Taunting.
How can I tend the orchard
when they won’t behave?
wondered Zachary Rhone.

All the while, the morning grew
hotter.
Am I in hell?
He looked straight at the sun and marveled at its
enormity
.

But that didn’t explain the heat,
not all of it. He placed one hand against a tree—its bark warm and rough
against his palm—and bowed his head, trying to collect his thoughts.

When he swiveled his head to one side,
he discovered something extraordinary:
The bakery’s on fire.

Bright orange flames shot out the
back window; smoke poured through the screen door.

Fire!
He swung the ax he’d been lugging around against an apple tree,
sinking the blade into soft rotted bark clear through the trunk. After the
treetop spilled to the dirt in a cacophony of cracking branches, he managed to
wrench himself free from the orchard’s grasp. “Let. Me. Go!”

Leaving the ax to the tree,
Zachary ran. On the way downhill he fell twice and scraped his chin in the dirt
once. “Put it out,” he panted. “Save it. My father left it to me—the only
good thing he left to me.”

When Zachary rounded the corner to
the front of the bakery, he found him.

Finally, he found him.

Funny thing was, Sean Adair stood
to one side of the entrance as if he’d been waiting for
him.

Zachary peered through the glass
door. Inside, flames curled in waves from the rear oven area, over the prep
counter, to the shelves in the storefront. The donuts and pastries on fire in
the display case reminded him of pinwheels.

He turned his back on the bakery
to face Sean. Incredibly, the boy said nothing about the fire, just stood on
the sidewalk with his legs apart and his arms crossed, as if Zachary had to
mind him, as if Zachary weren’t the boss anymore.

“The children are misbehaving,”
Zachary explained. “Anybody can see that.”
He wished he’d held onto that
ax.

“Not them.” Sean stared straight
at him. “
They
didn’t do anything wrong.”

He’s staring into my head
, Zachary realized.
Stop it! Can’t let him see in here.
Hotter
and hotter he felt.

“You knew,” Sean said.

Unbelievable!
Zachary thought. Insolent boy. And to think Zachary had
felt sorry for him because his old man had no control over himself. Only
Zachary felt out of control of himself too. “The bakery’s burning,” he told
Sean. “What should we do?”

“Did you know before I delivered
bread to my mom at The Winslow? To the Mercantile? The Crock?”

Zachary was shaking his head
rapidly back and forth.

“Did you know,” Sean leaned within
inches of Zachary’s face, “before I gave my little brother a fucking poison
apple fritter!”

“After that! I swear on my
father’s grave!” He shot a look over his shoulder. It was his father’s
establishment burning behind them.
Rhone Family Bakery since 1924
, said
the door. Suddenly suspicious, he pointed at Sean. “Did you start this fire?”

“Why didn’t you warn anybody?”
Sean ignored the question.

“We have a reputation to uphold,”
Zachary sputtered.

“Don’t you get it?” The boy put
his hands to his head as if his brains might leak out his ears. “Everybody in
the whole town is sick!”

“I couldn’t think straight,”
Zachary explained. “It’s impossible to think straight anymore.”

“If you’d warned people, things
wouldn’t’ve totally spun out like this.”

“This is your fault!” Zachary
screamed. “
You
delivered the bread. Not me!”

“I tried to tell you.”

“Tried to tell me? How do you
try
to tell somebody something, Adair? You either tell them or you don’t—no
try about it.”

“If you’d listened to me, none of
this would’ve happened.”

“I knew why you were sniffing
around.”

“Dammit, Zachary!” Sean put his
hands to his head again as if it hurt, then went quiet.

The bakery continued to burn
behind them. Hotter and hotter. Zachary turned and looked through the glass
door. Flames licked pine floorboards; paint boiled on the walls.

Finally, Sean asked, “Where’s
Melanie?”

Zachary ground his teeth hard
before responding in a low growl, “
Don’t
ask me that.”

With a look of disgust, Sean shook
his head. “You didn’t help anybody. Why didn’t you do something? Nobody but you
knew what was happening.”

“It was too late.”

“No! It wasn’t too late then.” He
gestured toward Fortune Way. “Do you know what’s happening out there
now
?”

“The bakery’s on fire,” Zachary
whined. “Do something.”

But Sean only continued to stare
inside his head; Zachary could feel him rooting around in there.
Get the
hell out!

When Zachary heard the glass door
behind him cracking, he finally felt it needed to be said, “My father didn’t
mean to poison those children.”

Looking confused, Sean cocked his
head. “What?”

“I know what it’s like to be
ashamed of your father. Nobody’d go fishing with me after that, nobody even saw
me anymore. A ghost. Until Melanie—” Zachary felt his heart coming apart.
“Oh, Melanie, my sweet Melanie.”

“Zachary, that’s got nothing to do
with what’s going on now.”

“It’s got
everything
to do
with it!” he screamed in Sean’s face and the boy took a step back. “My father
never meant to hurt anybody except those camp robber jays. They kept pecking at
the apples. They’d knock ’em off the trees then leave ’em to rot in the dirt.
‘A damn waste,’ Daddy said. What else could he do? He told Missy and me not to
pick any more apples, explaining that he’d sprayed the trees but good to teach
those little bastards a lesson and we were to stay out until next spring. ‘Do
you understand me?’ he said. Wasn’t his fault Missy didn’t understand anything
well enough to mind him. Especially because it was her share day at school so
she went into the bakery and asked him for a dozen donuts to take for the class
because she knew everybody liked donuts and nobody liked her because she was
slow. But Daddy said, ‘If they want donuts they can come in here and pay for ’em
like everybody else.’ And I saw she looked hysterical when she said, ‘I need
them! It’s my share day!’ But he refused, saying, ‘A man’s gotta make a living
and he sure as hell doesn’t do that by giving donuts away.’ ”

Zachary was weeping, choking on
fat tears. “Missy must’ve gone to the orchard after that because the next day
she snuck out for school with her basket full of apples. Then when her
classmates were hurting like the poisoned birds I was scared to tell anyone and
get her into trouble. I should’ve anyhow, because after it was over nobody
wanted to hear that my father had meant no harm to anything except those robber
jays. Not even our mother.”

He paused, wiping his wet face
with his hands. “Only by believing he’d meant to punish the children for
stealing apples out of his orchard could townsfolk make sense of the tragedy.
And it helped everybody cope to see him pay for it.”

He noticed that Sean’s face was
twisted up as if he were in some sort of pain. “What’s the matter with you?”
Zachary sniffed hard and hawked spit to the sidewalk. He’d expected no sympathy
from Sean Adair, desired none, only wanted the truth out in order to set things
right.

“I killed him,” Sean said.

“What?”
So hard to think a
straight thought anymore.

“I had no choice.” Sean passed a
shaking hand across his mouth.

From the heat and confusion,
Zachary swayed on his feet. “What are you saying?”

“We were across Three Fools Creek
from his cabin, and we dared each other to go over there. It looked quiet, like
he wasn’t around. Otherwise we never would’ve done it.”

“Done
what
?
What did
you do?” Without glancing over his shoulder, Zachary knew the fire was growing
larger, felt it reach the front of the bakery.

The boy trembled all over now. “He
had Hazel by the wrist so hard I heard her bone snap and she’s screaming and he
looks crazy as shit so I picked up a log and hit him on the head to make him
let go of her.”

Zachary retched, his stomach
corkscrewing and trying to make its way up through his throat, only there was
nothing left in him but the horror.

“We couldn’t tell if he was dead
or not,” Sean said quietly.

Zachary could barely hear him over
the fire.

“We didn’t wait around to find
out. After he let go of Hazel we ran back to town and told Sheriff Winslow and
he got Dr. Foster and when they came back from checking on him they wouldn’t
tell us anything.”

Feeling as bewildered and betrayed
as when his father had first been forced across the creek, Zachary hung his
head. “They led me to think he was done in by a bear.” Zachary had known there
were bear out in those woods; his father told him so during one of his rare and
uncomfortable visits to the old cabin.

“I had no choice,” Sean insisted
again.

“This is all your fault.”

“That was. This isn’t.”

“You need to make it right.”

“How am I supposed to make this
right?”

“You’ll take your share of the blame.
That’s how.”

They were silent for a moment,
listening to the fire consume the bakery behind them with a disinterest more
befitting a wienie roast.

Then the insolent boy said, “Look
at your hands.”

“Why did you have to say that?”
The force of it rocked Zachary on his heels.
I won’t look, he can’t make me
look.
He tried to wipe his hands clean on his t-shirt and saw the blood
there too, encrusted dark in white cotton.
Help me—whose blood is it?
Whose?

Zachary backed away from Sean. “They’ll
hang this on somebody. And it won’t be a Rhone this time, no sirree.”

“Don’t get so close to the fire,”
Sean warned.

“Never again!”

“Stay back, Zachary.”

“I’ve lost everything and I won’t
cross that creek too. No Rhone’s taking the fall this time.”

“You’re too close!” Sean yelled.

But it was too late—always
too late—and Zachary watched as his skin reddened and blistered.
I
never expected it to turn out like this.
He lunged for Sean.

“Don’t!” the boy cried as Zachary
latched onto his forearm and pulled. The impact of Sean’s blow against his
right temple left him momentarily stunned and he did let go. Then he grabbed
him again with both hands and this time didn’t let go even when Sean slammed
him in the eye and he was blinded on that side, nor when his teeth collapsed
into his mouth beneath the boy’s fist. The force of it hurled him back against
the door of the bakery, which imploded on impact, and Zachary fell inside in a
shower of frosted glass. Still, even then, he held on.

No air in the bakery, nothing to
breath but smoke, and Zachary felt himself burning alive in a fire fueled by
his own rage and remorse.

But Sean was there with him, at
least, so the anger quickly subsided and Zachary let himself think about red
curls and pink apple blossoms and porch swings and fresh laundry pinned to the
line . . . clean sheets and bright eyes dancing in a blue breeze.

A
rriving at the granite wall, Hazel finds that
Sean has erased
I’m Sorry—SA
.
In place of that, he wrote,
HW → SA
TFC X HRC
. She easily deciphers his message: Hazel Winslow meet Sean Adair
at Three Fools Creek across from Hawkin Rhone’s cabin.

She fights her way down the
overgrown path and hears the first helicopter as soon as she reaches the creek.
Squinting west, she sees the forest service chopper hovering over the bridge.
But that’s no matter to her right now. What matters is that she knows she’ll
find Sean here. What she doesn’t know is if she’ll find him alive.

She wavers at the edge of the
water—petrified. Every truth she’s ever known and every wild imagining
she’s ever had about this place play together in a symphony of terror. She
peers across the creek at the moldering cabin. What will she see when she gets
there? What if it’s an animal-mauled mess outside the cabin door, like when her
father found Hawkin Rhone? What if just a few locks of Sean’s brown hair
plastered to the rough-hewn logs are all that’s recognizable?