Last Safe Place, The (30 page)

* * * *

Billy Whitworth stepped back and surveyed his work. It looked pretty good, if he did say so himself. The picture of a kid with owl glasses holding up a fish—looked like a trout—was a garden-variety photograph. Billy’d had to work hard to give the picture some character.

Because the St. Elmo’s Fire sign above the kid’s head was rustic, Billy had selected faux barn wood for the frame—it was rough-cut and looked like the sun had bleached it to a chalky gray. Then he’d used a red mat, so the kid’s red shirt would “pop.” All he lacked now was cutting the nonglare glass.

Billy looked at his watch. Though it was only 4:30, today was Friday and he intended to sneak out early. He and some friends were going down the Yough—the Youghiogheny River—tomorrow. It was a two-hour drive and then they had to set up camp. He’d brought his sleeping bag and tent to work with him in the trunk of his car.

Setting the picture off to the side of his workbench, Billy cleaned up the scraps of red mat material. He’d finish the picture Monday morning, take it to UPS by lunchtime. He already had the label ready: Gabriella Griffith, c/o Phillip and Natalie Griffith, 4650 Old Boston Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15227. The boss hadn’t said anything about this being a rush job. The picture would be delivered by the middle of next week.

Billy flipped off the light and headed for the back door.

Ty sat on the edge of his bed trembling in the gray light of dawn, his sheets tangled and sweaty. His pillow had flopped on the floor when he jerked upright in bed, screaming. But he must have screamed only in his head, not out loud, because his mom didn’t come running. His
real
mom. Not the monster with the melted zombie face.

Ty had to bite his lip to keep from bursting into tears. He wanted to dash into his mother’s bedroom, crawl into bed beside her and cuddle up snug and warm, hide from the monster who was after him. Not the real one, the man in black they’d escaped in Pittsburgh, but the dream one who had come to him in South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma and now here in Colorado.
And who would come to him no matter where he went for the rest of his life!
The monster with a ruined face and arms outstretched to grab him and tear him apart, rip him open with its dagger-sharp teeth and—

The boy grabbed hold of the thought, wouldn’t let himself go there. He gritted his teeth and held on tight, tears streaming down his face. Gradually, the nightmare images faded and his breathing slowly returned to normal. He picked up his pillow, straightened the sheets and got back into bed. He’d lie there for a little while—didn’t dare go back to sleep!—then get up and …

When Ty’s eyes popped back open it was mid-morning. The cabin was silent. His mother had already left to go into St. Elmo for supplies.

Ty padded down the stairs and found his grandfather lying on his bed staring at the ceiling.

“Ty?” The old man kept staring at the ceiling, didn’t look at him. “Got a headache.” It was a weak whisper. “Sound … hurts.”

Ty backed out of the room and closed the door quietly. Seemed like Grandpa Slappy’d had a headache every day this week. Must be the altitude.

His mother wouldn’t be back until the middle of the afternoon so he had plenty of time to go to the overhang. Not that he intended to stay there all day. He remembered how his mother had said she and his uncle always went back to the chalet before noon because of the afternoon storms and he planned to be all the way back down here to the cabin by then.

He’d gotten seriously scared the first time a really bad storm hit the mountain. It was a couple of days after he got stung by that bee. The wind whistled in the trees, made an awful wailing sound. The rain pounded on the roof. And the lightning! He’d never seen lightning that close; it struck
all around the cabin. Ty didn’t intend to
ever
be outside in the open when a storm like that came up. He wasn’t some bonehead, wasn’t terminally stupid.

He and P.D. didn’t bother to go to the creek and then angle through the forest along the back side of the meadow. He went straight across the meadow to the path up the mountain and through the bristlecone forest to the chalet. He didn’t have to carry colored marbles in his pocket anymore when he came here because he knew the trail well, could find his way around in the maze formed by the trees that surrounded the chalet. In fact, he’d even taught P.D. a game to play there. On the command “hide” the dog would bound off into the bristlecone forest and hunker down under a low limb or beside a rock and not move until Ty came and found him.

But Ty had brought a pocketful of marbles today. He and P.D. were going to venture out beyond the part of the forest he knew. Today, they were going to the overhang to look for geodes.

Technically, he wasn’t being disobedient. His mother had never told him he
couldn’t
go to the chalet. By the same logic, he wasn’t breaking any rules by venturing out under the overhang, either, except the rules of basic common sense. That overhang was mean-looking. One huge flat rock—like it wouldn’t fit in his school gymnasium!—stuck out from the mountainside like a popsicle stick. It looked to Ty like the only thing holding it up there was a pile of rocks on the far end—and not a big pile of rocks, either. He remembered the comment his mother said his grandmother had made—that it had been hanging there like a gazillion years so there was no reason to believe it’d suddenly drop. But it sure did
look
like it was about to drop, like it was barely balanced up there at all.

Ty forgot all about the overhang, though, as soon as he got close enough to it to see what lay in the small clearing below it. Not directly under the overhang, but definitely in the flight path of the rock if it ever fell was a pile of boulders the size of Volkswagens. But these boulders weren’t like the others he’d seen all over the mountain. For one thing, they were all about the same size and shape and it looked like somebody had set them there on purpose, arranged them to form what looked like a giant igloo. And it also looked like that same somebody had built steps beside the igloo. Rocks formed a natural spiral staircase that wound around the side of the igloo to the top, which was probably twenty feet off the ground.

Before Ty could say a word, P.D. bounded up the steps like a mountain goat, stopped at the top and sat down, like he was looking at something. He turned back toward Ty and barked. A single yap—his happy bark, his come-see-what-I-found bark, and his plume of a tail brushed back and forth across the rocks so furiously you could actually see the dust fly up.

Ty followed P.D. up the steps. When he got to the top he saw that P.D. was sitting beside a crevice, a hole. You couldn’t see it from the ground, but the rock pile was hollow. There was an empty space between the boulders. Only it wasn’t empty. Right in the middle, eight or ten feet below him, was a lone bristlecone pine tree, growing all by itself in the center of the igloo.

Ty took off his glasses, cleaned the lenses on his shirt, replaced them on his nose and studied the tree. Again, he wished he’d paid more attention in science class. But even with his limited understanding of the plant and animal kingdom, the boy knew enough to wonder how a tree could grow in there at all, how it got enough sunlight. Down in a hole like that, it couldn’t have gotten more than a couple of hours a day—right around noon.

Then he noticed something else strange about it.

“That Jesus tree’s not twisted up and ugly like the others,” he told P.D. “It’s … pretty.”

The tree was about twelve feet tall, with a straight trunk and limbs that stretched out from it in every direction as perfectly formed as an artificial Christmas tree. The limbs on the other bristlecone pine trees were all bent the same way, all pointed downhill like road signs showing the direction the wind blew.

That was it!

“This tree’s not twisted up because the rocks protect it from the wind and snow,” he said, and P.D. listened attentively to every word. “Maybe they’d all look like this if somebody built a wall around them.”

Ty sat down, dangled his feet into the crevice and looked at the tree. He reached over then, picked up a pebble and engaged in the universal activity of little kids. One after another, he chucked pebbles into the hole and watched them disappear into the shadows. It wasn’t as much fun as tossing rocks off the cliff face in front of St. Elmo’s Fire. But whenever Grandpa Slappy was around, he wouldn’t let Ty go anywhere near the cliff, said he’d fall off and break his neck.

While Ty sat there tossing rocks, the crevice gradually filled with light as the sun marched up the sky. Pretty soon, Ty could see dust motes in the shaft of sunlight that lit up the tree like a spotlight.

Sunlight! It must be near noon. Ty didn’t realize he’d sat there so long—an hour and a half, maybe, and hadn’t looked for thunder eggs at all. How had he spent that much time throwing pebbles into The Cleft?

The Cleft. Yeah, that was a good name.

That’s what he’d call it. “We gotta go, P.D.,” he said and looked anxiously at the blue sky he knew could turn grey and stormy in a heartbeat. As he hopped down the stairs and headed back to the chalet and the trail to the cabin, Ty felt a stab of loneliness. He had nobody to tell about finding The Cleft. It must have been wonderful to grow up like his mother had, with a twin brother to do and share everything with. No wonder she missed Uncle Garrett so much.

He turned and looked over his shoulder and determined to come back tomorrow to search for thunder eggs.

Beneath the overhang, where a rock the size of a house had been balanced all these many years, waiting for just the right moment to fall.

CHAPTER
14

A
GATHA
W
IZNIUSKA EAGERLY RIPPED OPEN THE PACKAGE
forwarded from Old Boston Road in Whitehall to the house on Cedar Boulevard in Mt. Lebanon—which was coming up in the world, for sure! But she was disappointed by the contents. Wasn’t a thing inside but a framed picture of a curly-haired little kid holding up a fish, and not a very big fish, neither. She stuffed the picture back into the box but didn’t tape it up or anything. Let that goon put it back together when he came by to get the mail. Aggie had too much to do as it was, trying to run Bernie’s whole operation until he decided to come waltzing back in here and ask her, “How yinz doin’, heh?”—making fun of her Pittsburgh accent.

And when he did, she was going let that little chrome dome have it! Vanishing like he done. Here in the office on Friday moaning about all the postings on Rebecca Nightshade’s fan page and nowhere on the planet the following Monday. And today was—she looked at the calendar—July 16, so he’d been gone three full weeks! Oh, she knew it had something to do with the fake disappearance of the author and her security guard, knew Bernie’d spring the stunt sooner or later and the three of them would show up with reporters all around and video-cams rolling.

But in the meantime, Aggie had to hold down the fort.

She glanced over at the framed picture on the wall of Bernie with his arm around Garrett Griffith of Withered Soul.

“Would it have killed yinz to throw a girl a warning, heh?” she asked the image.

The office door opened and in walked the suit-and-tie goon. He was all nicey nice, of course, but any fool could see his shoulders straining at his shirt and the bulge of a holster under his coat. Agatha Wizniuska didn’t fall off a turnip truck yesterday.

“No bills or nothing like that,” Aggie told him. “Just this.” She held out the picture. “I don’t s’pose yinz know when they’re coming back. I need to talk to Bernie about—”

As soon as he got a good look at the picture, the man snatched it out of her hand, turned on his heel and practically ran out of the office. Him so polite and all—didn’t even close the door behind him.

* * * *

Theo didn’t even realize what he’d said until the words were already out there in the air and he couldn’t call them back.

It was Cornelius’s fault. Had to be. That danged tumor messed with his life more every day. It made him so dizzy sometimes he had to hold onto the furniture to keep from falling down. Gabriella’d noticed a couple of times and he’d explained it away, said it was the thin mountain air everybody harped about all the time. But the headaches that stabbed into his skull without warning hurt so bad they actually blinded him, couldn’t see his hand in front of his face for hours at a time! He had one yesterday morning. Ty had come into his room but he didn’t think the boy had noticed. If he had, Theo sure couldn’t claim
that
was caused by the altitude.

And Cornelius was stealing his hearing, too, what little he had left. He’d lost every speck of it in his left ear ’fore he left Pittsburgh and now it came and went in his right ear, blinked on and off like a Joe’s Beer Joint sign. And that was something he couldn’t lay off on the thin air, neither. Sometimes, he’d lie awake at night wondering if losing his hearing meant that soon’s he closed his eyes it’d be all over and he’d wake up in Heaven. And he’d wonder if he ought to leave. There might still be time to serve that eviction notice. He figured “good as new” was a stretch, but being able to continue breathing in and out on a regular basis for a few more years wasn’t too shabby.

Couldn’t do that, though. Seemed like that boy needed him more every day. He’d just have to put up with Cornelius being ornery and hope his number wasn’t ready to be punched just yet.

There was one symptom, though, that had just come on recent, a new way Cornelius was messing with him. That rascal had given him a loose mouth, had somehow broke down walls that’d been securely in place for years, caused him to say things he couldn’t believe’d ever fall off his own tongue.

This was one of those times.

He was sitting on a tree stump a few feet from the bank of Piddley Creek—
facing
the creek, of course, with his back to the cabin and The Huge. That’s what he’d named the empty space out there in front of the cabin that was too big and deep to get his mind around. He wasn’t any more used to it now than he’d been that first day when he climbed out of the jeep about to wet himself from scared. But he’d figured out how to cope. He didn’t look at it, pretended the cabin was a thumbtack that stuck a National Geographic poster of a mountain to the sky.