The Man in the Woods (22 page)

That’s it
, she decided. It was like having a rare illness that no one understood. She would have to spend years watching, listening, never concentrating for a minute on anything more than whether there were enough people around to keep her safe. And she would worry about Pinky, whom she’d dragged into this. Free Pinky, cocksure and unafraid. She tore the drawing down from the wall and shoved it into her wastebasket. For good measure she picked up the Hummel figurine and all the bottled-up fury came out again and she pitched it like a fast ball across the room. It bounced against the wall and began to play.

“Oh, shut up!” Helen growled, and she reached for it to stop the key. Once more her breathing came short, and she felt for the floor, as if the house and room itself were about to dissolve. After the music box had run through its tune, she wound it up again and replayed it to make sure. It wasn’t necessary. “The Happy Wanderer” was printed on the underside of the figurine.

Helen snatched the drawing from the wastebasket and flattened it out on her desk. She watched as the slightly distorted features grew together and became a face she knew well. There was pure joy in her voice when she said, “
I’m going to get you first.
”

Helen pulled on her winter parka. Holding the front of it open, she drew the telephone in against herself, muffling the sound of the dial. When a sleepy Pinky answered “Seafarer,” she said only one thing. “Come
now!
”

Twenty minutes went by with Helen waiting, unmoving, gazing through the bay window of the darkened living room at the watery street. At last across the road there were two blinks from the weak flashlight. She let herself out the kitchen way, closing the door painfully slowly. She ran around the front of the house, splashed across the puddles, and jumped on the back of Pinky’s motorbike.

“What? Where?” he asked desperately. “I had a terrible time getting out. I made my sister take the desk. I had to promise her ten things to make her do it.”

On the way Helen blessed the rain for keeping the streets clear of traffic. They had never gone downtown before on the motorbike. If the police picked them up ... She didn’t want to think what would happen if the police picked them up. Between snatches of explanation into Pinky’s ear she kept a sharp watch out for patrol cars.
It would be our luck
, she told herself,
to get stopped now.
Pinky made a sudden right turn, and she nearly fell off the bike. “What was that?” she asked, peering back into the downpour.

“Squad car,” he said, “cooping.”

He drove into a deserted parking lot in the middle of town. They walked, not letting go of each other’s hands.

The fire escape on the corner building zigzagged up five stories. One corner of the fifth floor was lighted. The rain beat down like a drum tattoo on the garbage cans in the alley and hid the noise as Pinky jumped like a basketball player and pulled down the squeaky iron ladder. Up the open gridwork steps they crept. For three or four minutes they watched him behind the iron bars and through a skewed blind of Perry and Crowe’s supply-room window.

Helen whispered, “Stubby Atlas knew what he was doing after all. He knew what was in those trucks.”

Barry worked steadily by the light of a single chrome lamp. The work table was covered with different Hummel figurines. The music boxes had been removed, and into the cavities where the music boxes went he sifted small amounts of white powder with a tiny silver scoop. Then he plastered gold Perry and Crowe gift stickers over the openings, placed the Hummel figurines in Perry and Crowe gift boxes, and addressed the label on each box after consulting a small red book.

After addressing each box he dropped it into a hopper marked
UPS Truck
and started in on the next. From time to time he wound up one of the little music box workings and whistled along with it.

Pinky did not stay. He went off down the stairs of the fire escape. He was gone for what seemed to Helen like an hour, and then suddenly he was back at her side, panting.

“Did you call the police?” Helen asked.

Pinky shook his head. “I called Brzostoski,” he said. “He called the cops. Told them there was a robbery in progress, fifth floor Perry and Crowe. Not to run the sirens.”

Barry’s body stiffened and then sagged when he saw the policeman. The officer hesitated. “Robbery in progress?” he asked, hand on his revolver. Pinky wrenched open the window and was in the room, pointing to a plastic bag of white powder at Barry’s side. “Look at it!” Pinky yelled. “Come over here and look at what’s in this bag and what he’s putting into those little music boxes!”

“You don’t have a warrant to come in here,” Barry snarled. “You need a search warrant!” He got up and placed a chair between himself and Pinky, for some reason.

Dear God
, Helen prayed silently,
please don’t make them need a search warrant!
The policeman strolled thoughtfully over to a green garbage bag that lay under the table full of Hummel figurines. Three other policemen walked quietly in through the door and watched him. The first officer ran his fingers through the powdery white substance and touched one to his tongue.

“You need a
search warrant
!” Barry screamed.

“Shipping Johnson’s baby powder out in these things?” asked the officer.

Soon there were ten other policemen in the room. One was Frank, Ryser’s chief deputy. He looked at Pinky first, then Helen, and then at Barry’s array of materials. He picked up the little red book. “Atlas’s,” he said. “Atlas’s father’s book with the addresses of all his drug dealer pals.” He shook his head. “How?” he asked them. “How did you find this. How?”

When Helen had no answer but a smile he turned to Barry. “And who the devil are you?” he asked.

“I don’t have to tell you that,” Barry snarled. “My constitutional rights—”

“Shut up, Barry,” said Pinky. “His name is Barry de Wolf,” Pinky went on. “Senior at New Bedford Regional. Big Shot. Birdwatcher. That’s probably how he found the cellar in the first place. Poking around the woods after blue jays.”

“Yeah?” said the policeman edging toward Barry. He picked up the little red book. “And how did you find this? Birdwatching too?” He waved the book in front of Barry before slipping it into his pocket. “A lot of interesting names and addresses in this book, de Wolf. Aren’t there? We’re going to put you and a lot of Chet Malinka’s good buddies out of business. How did you get it?”

Barry spat out, “My constitutional rights are being—”

“Okay!” said the policeman, grinning and holding up a deferential hand.

“He worked for Perry and Crowe this summer. Still does,” said Pinky casually. “He lifted it off Stubby, probably.”

“The moron lost it,” Barry snarled. “I never stole anything in my life.”

The policeman had dropped his hand to his side. He looked again at one of the Hummel figurines. “So Stubby knew what he was doing after all,” he said slowly. “He did want to rob the china and glass shipments. Sure he did. He could feed his habit and go into business on the side with what was in these little statues. You,” he said, pointing vaguely in Barry’s direction, “you found the dope in the cellar. All you needed was an outlet, some way to sell it without getting your hands dirty on the street. Must have been like a gift dropped from heaven when Stubby Atlas showed up for work with his dad’s addresses in his back pocket. Tell me, why does a boy with your brains and imagination go out and ruin his life like this? You’re not a minor, de Wolf. You’ll get at least twenty years, you know.”

Barry was led out by two policemen. Several more hovered over Pinky and Helen asking twenty different questions at once. Pinky began with Uncle Max. Helen followed with Lucy.

“Do you two have any idea how much this stuff is worth?” was the question asked most. A reporter in a dirty trenchcoat came in. Then another. “Can we get you anything?” they were asked again and again.

“Yes,” said Helen at last. “Call my dad.”

Ryser was dressed in old corduroys and a plaid shirt. Like all the others he looked into the plastic bag and ran his fingers through the powder and tasted it. He plodded over to Helen and Pinky. “As I’ve always said,” he began, coughing sheepishly, “the hardest thing about growing up is learning to admit you’ve made a mistake.” He looked down at his feet and shook his head in disbelief. “Nothing more I can say. Nothing I can do to thank you,” he added. Then he beckoned and called over two of the policemen by name. He unpinned the badge from each man’s shirt front and solemnly pinned them onto Helen’s soaking parka and Pinky’s still-dripping rain slicker, like medals.

The shiny silver badges were the first things that Helen’s father saw.

Helen rode home, sitting between her father and Pinky in the front seat. The motorbike took up the whole of the back of the station wagon. On one side she held Pinky’s hand. On the other she fell asleep against her father’s shoulder.

Helen woke enough to walk into the house under her own steam. Aunt Stella waited in a dressing gown. She said only “Shhhh!” her finger against her lips when Helen passed by. Her father pulled off her wet parka and led her to her bed, covering her with her quilt and kissing her as softly as a butterfly brushing her forehead with its wing.

Helen woke up hours later, in damp, uncomfortable clothes with a hard lump under one thigh. She undressed and put on her nightgown. In the pocket of her jeans she discovered the candle end she’d saved from Lucy’s cellar. She put it in a pin dish right in front of the ebony-framed portrait of Lucy and Lorenzo.

She lit the little candle end and watched as the wick took and the flame glowed. Next to the portrait was the older Lucy, the one in the Valdosta newspaper.
Should I write your story or not?
she asked herself.

Out of Lucy’s magnificent black eyes she tried to pry a signal. The signal was there. It came from across the divide of mortal time, from beyond the planets in the land of the dead. But whether the answer was yes or no, Helen couldn’t tell.

It’s up to me, isn’t it?
she said slowly to herself. She looked back at the picture of Lucy and Lorenzo that Mrs. Fairchild had pressed into her hands, her eyes, like the younger Lucy’s, filled with trust.

Enough wrong has been done, and enough right too, Helen decided. She pinched out the candle. Someone else could write the story.

Rosemary Wells (b. 1942) is a bestselling children’s book author and illustrator. Born in New York City, Wells was raised in New Jersey. She grew up in an artistic family; her mother was a ballet dancer and her father was an actor-playwright. “We had a houseful of wonderful books. Reading stories aloud was as much a part of my childhood as the air I breathed,” Wells recalls. “It was also the golden age of childhood, now much changed for my grandchildren.”

Her love of illustrating also began at an early age, and she started drawing at two years old. When she was older, Wells attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She married Thomas Moore Wells in 1963, and the pair lived in Boston for two years while she worked as a book designer for Allyn & Bacon, a textbook publisher. The couple moved to New York in 1965, when Tom entered Columbia University for his graduate degree in architecture, and Wells went to work for the trade publisher Macmillan. Her first book, an illustrated edition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 
A Song to Sing, O!
, was published in 1968.

Since then, Wells has published more than 120 books, including 7 novels. In her picture books, she pairs her delightful illustrations with humorous, sincere, and psychologically adept themes. She was praised in
Booklist
as having “that rare ability to tell a funny story for very young children with domestic scenes of rising excitement and heartfelt emotion, and with not one word too many.”
Kirkus Reviews
 touted her “unerring ability to hit just the right note to tickle small-fry funny bones.” The
Christian Science Monitor
called her “one of the most gifted picture-book illustrators in the United States.”

Among her bestselling picture book titles are
Voyage to the Bunny Planet
,
Noisy Nora
, and
Read to Your Bunny
. She is best known for the Max and Ruby series, which depicts the adventures of sibling bunnies. Many of her series also feature animal characters, including McDuff (illustrated by Susan Jeffers), Edward Almost Ready, Yoko, and the Mother Goose books edited by Iona Opie. In addition to her picture books, Wells has written several historical fiction and mystery/suspense novels for young adults.

In 2002, the Max and Ruby series was adapted as an animated television series, and has become a popular show for young children. Her picture book
Timothy Goes to School
was adapted for TV in 2000, and several of her other books have been produced as short films. Wells’s work has also been recommended on innumerable lists, including the
New York Times
annual Best Illustrated Books round-up and several American Library Association Notable Book lists. She has won countless awards, such as the Parents’ Choice Foundation Award and multiple School Library Journal Best Book of the Year awards.

In addition to being a prolific writer and illustrator, Wells is a keen advocate of literacy programs. She was a speaker for the national literacy initiative the “Read to Your Bunny” campaign.

Wells has two daughters: Victoria, who is now an editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, and Marguerite, an organic farmer who teaches at Cornell University. She also has five granddaughters: Zoe, Eleanor, Frances, Phoebe, and Petra. The girls are sources of unending fun and inspiration for the never-ending stories that come out of the Wells studio.