IT WAS AN unusually fat letter, and James took it to his room to open it. Sitting on his bed, he tore off the flap and took out several newspaper clippings and a short letter written on notebook paper.
One of the clippings was from a Sacramento paper. It was about the recent return of Henry Jarrett, prominent local contractor, after a hospital stay in South Tahoe. Jarrett, the paper said, had been admitted to the hospital in late September following a hunting accident, which had occurred when his fifteen-year-old daughter, Diane Jarrett, had been struck by a golf ball, causing her to accidentally discharge the high-powered rifle she was carrying at the time. According to the article, the bullet, after having passed through her father’s left foot and a hardwood floor, struck a valuable hunting trophy in the room below. Apparently the trophy, the stuffed head of an Alaskan moose, had been permanently damaged, but Jarrett it seemed, would eventually be almost as good as new.
The article didn’t offer any explanation of the rather peculiar fact that Diane Jarrett had been struck by a golf ball while she was standing in the middle of her own kitchen. Jacky wasn’t implicated. For that matter, neither were James and Griffin. Griffin hadn’t been mentioned in any of the articles about the Jarrett accident, and James hadn’t been mentioned in any articles at all. In spite of the fact that he’d gone to considerable lengths to see that it turned out that way, there were times when he couldn’t help feeling a little left out.
The other articles were all about Griffin’s disappearance and subsequent reappearance at her parents’ summer home near the village of New Moon in the Sierra Mountains. As far as the public knew, she had gotten there entirely on her own and for reasons that were entirely her own. It hadn’t been too difficult to arrange.
Griffin’s letter, written in her now-familiar curly backhand on the back of what seemed to be an aborted English assignment, mostly concerned the future. In his last letter, James had said something about the stag’s temporary safety; and apparently Griffin thought he had implied that the Jarretts’ would go after him again next year.
“I don’t think they will,” her letter said. “I told Diane about the talismans while you were downstairs talking to her father. She didn’t believe me then, but I think she does now. And besides, I don’t think they’ll want something around to remind them of what happened—not even a record-breaking trophy.”
She just might be right about that. He certainly hoped so. Hoped the deer was safe. There had been no mention of it in the papers, so no one else would know. And Mr. Jarrett himself had said that probably the deer would be valueless as a trophy after this year. So there was reason to be optimistic.
The rest of the letter was about next summer. Griffin wanted to know if his parents had decided yet about renting the Willowby cabin again. In his next letter he would make it clear that he was definitely planning to be in the New Moon area whether his parents rented the cabin or not. He could always get a job in New Moon.
There was still a bulge in the middle of the envelope—a bulge that turned out to be a small flat oval of soapstone with a hole drilled in one end and an overall pattern of strange hieroglyphics. One of Griffin’s talismans.
Collapsed on the bed with the talisman in the palm of his hand, he lay for a long time with his mind freewheeling. Suddenly, for the first time in months he began to feel a poem coming on. The first few lines wrote themselves. “To give tomorrow to a king | Tie it with ribbons to his crown | A talisman’s a future thing…”
What came next was going to take some careful thought.