“I should go back,” Casey Templeton muttered to himself. “I could do it tomorrow.” But he kept walking through the dark, empty streets as a cool fall breeze changed rapidly to a cold winter wind. Then he stopped and put down his flashlight. “Oh, what the heck!”
Casey zipped his coat, pulling up the collar so snow wouldn’t get down his neck, then tugged his knitted hat over his forehead. He patted his pockets for gloves. No gloves. It wouldn’t take that long, he reassured himself, and then he would be done with this necessary chore.
It wasn’t the bitter wind that made Casey hesitate, or even that he was scared … exactly. There were things going on lately that made almost everyone uncomfortable, things people couldn’t understand. Things that had turned the safe, comfortable town of Richford, Alberta, into a place where fear reigned.
Why pick on Mr. Finegood and his family? Casey thought as he trudged into the gloom. And why do such ugly things to the Olbergs? I just don’t get it.
He crossed the silent railway tracks. The towering grain elevator beside the tracks loomed dark and unfriendly. He hurried past it and almost ran until he reached the last street on the north edge of town, a street where the new houses were less and less complete as he got nearer the final streetlamp. A heavier snow had begun to fall. He wished now he had told his brother, Hank, where he was going, or had left a note or something. As it was, nobody knew, and the farther he got from home the more uneasy he felt.
At the last streetlight he turned and glanced back. All was still. His footprints in the snow disappeared in shadowy retreat beyond the golden glow of the light. If the snow kept up, his footsteps would completely disappear and there would be no trace he had walked this way. Never mind. Once he had realized where he had lost his dad’s antique pipe, he had promised himself he would go back to the Old Willson with Two Ls Place and get it. Casey always tried to keep vows, even to himself, especially to himself, like now. He would rather get the pipe no matter what happened than face the music if his dad noticed it wasn’t in its glass case. Now, as he trudged through the swirling snow, he cast his mind back to the sequence of events that had brought him here.
Once again, here in Richford, Casey was the new kid and on the outside. It never really bothered him anymore not being accepted right away. It was a lot better than, say, a kid like Bryan Ogilvy, who had lived his whole life in Richford and was such an outsider that the other kids totally ignored him. Bryan was just there. Even most of the teachers hardly ever talked to him. Casey couldn’t understand why everyone was so mean to Bryan, so he went out of his way to say hello to Bryan whenever their paths crossed, which wasn’t often because Bryan didn’t play any sports or belong to any clubs and faded away after school. But Bryan and Casey both liked science, and they had teamed up on a science project.
Casey had learned a lot about the new kid role, knew you never let them know you were lonely. You just did your own thing and played it very, very cool. A way to become an insider would always come up if you didn’t push, if you stood back, listened, and bided your time. Take today for instance. He had heard Kevin Schreiver and Terry Bracco talking when he was in the little storage closet putting away the basketballs after gym. Casey had been at the school long enough to know that Kevin and Terry were the kind of guys he would like for friends.
“I got six cigarettes now,” Kevin said. “How about we go to the Old Willson Place right after school?”
“Sure, we gotta try smoking sometime, but I have to walk Butch first,” Terry said.
“Bring Butch along,” Kevin suggested. “Tie him up while we smoke.”
Casey kept quiet until they were gone. While he waited he planned. He would dash home after school, get his dad’s fancy old pipe, fill it with tobacco from some of Hank’s cigarettes, and be out at the Old Willson Place sitting on the porch, smoking the pipe by the time Kevin and Terry got there with Butch. It worked perfectly. He could tell they were impressed with him sitting there gazing off into the woods, pipe in hand. They didn’t need to know what a terrible time he’d had lighting it and that he’d really taken only one puff. They didn’t even take out their cigarettes, just said they had come out to the old place to look around.
Inside the Old Willson Place, Casey pulled a big bottle of Sprite and a package of chocolate chip cookies from his backpack. The three sat on piles of grubby pillows in the living room and started in with the stories about Mr. Clarence Wilberforce Willson with Two Ls, as he always pointed out to everyone. Lucky there were no Willsons with only one l in town, thought Casey. They would have suffered a terrible inferiority complex. Clarence Willson was still Richford’s most famous citizen, though he had been dead for more than eighty years. Both the local library and the high school had been named after him.
Kevin and Terry had a lot of stories about the Willsons, but Casey had some they had never heard because Casey’s great-grandfather had been a typesetter for Mr. Willson’s Richford Weekly Mirror way back in 1900 or something. The stories from those days had been passed down to the newest generation of Templetons. Sure, Kevin and Terry knew about the body that had been found in the attic whose door had two heavy pieces of wood crossed over it and nailed down to keep people out, but they had never heard that three of Old Willson’s babies had died of scarlet fever on three mid-April days in 1906. The terrible loss had driven Mrs. Willson into a deep depression from which she never recovered. Casey said it was her ghost that walked the grounds on those three mid-April days each year.
As he pulled open the drapes covering the living-room windows to get more light, it crossed Casey’s mind that they seemed new compared with the stained and faded pillows they were sitting on.
“Time to get back.” Terry stood and brushed dust from his pants. “You want to come over to the Rec Hall later, Casey? Kevin and I go there Friday nights.”
“Thanks a lot,” Casey said. “Can’t tonight, but maybe another Friday, okay?” Never seem too eager. That was the secret. Let them get the idea you were worth waiting for.
“Sure,” Kevin said. “Let’s go.”
It must have been when they were standing up that the pipe he had put in his coat pocket had fallen among the pillows.
It was just plain luck that his parents had gone out to Jim Bailey’s house to play bridge right after supper. Hank and Casey had cleaned up the kitchen — a job you did if there were four boys in the family and your dad was in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Might as well get used to a little KP, boys,” his father always said. “Your mother works hard enough making the meals.” KP? Nobody in Richford except some old war veterans probably knew that it stood for “kitchen police,” that it meant you got to do everything in the kitchen and leave it “like nobody lived there,” as his father was fond of saying.
Hank was at his computer. He was always at his computer. He had won the whole setup — computer, printer, scanner, and about a dozen games — at the draw at the new grocery store in the “big” new mall. Big? Well, it was for Richford. But, hey, Casey had seen malls almost as big as the whole town of Richford — like West Edmonton Mall. Now that was a mall — biggest in the world, they said. But nobody in the family had ever won anything there, and here was Hank, not two months in Richford, and he had won first prize in the draw. A person had to be sixteen to enter. That left Casey out by two years.
Casey had been born long after Hank when nobody in the family had expected there would be another baby. After three sons, Jake now twenty-four, Billy twenty-one, both at university, and Hank eighteen and a half, his parents likely wished, when they knew there was going to be another child, that it would be a girl. But instead along came Knightly Charles (after his two grandfathers’ middle names), always and forever after to be called KC, then Casey, white-blond and blue-eyed from day one. For about a week at each new school, people called him Knightly, and for some strange reason that suited Casey just fine. But once they got wind of his nickname, he was Casey to everyone.
Since the death of Hank’s girlfriend, Cindy, two years earlier — she had been sick only two days when she died of meningitis — Hank had only two things he cared about: his twenty-year-old Harley-Davidson motorcycle and his computer. Casey heard his parents arguing over it all the time. His mom usually said something like, “Colin, nagging isn’t going to help. Hank’s still hurting. One day he’ll remember that there’s more in life than the Internet and the Harley. Trust me.”
They had all liked Cindy a lot. She was tall, with masses of honey-coloured hair, sparkly dark brown eyes, and a great smile. She was smart and fun and so easy to be with. They didn’t talk about it much, but they missed her.
Casey knew if he said good-night and went up to his room, Hank would hardly take any notice. So he did just that. Hank muttered something but didn’t even turn around. As Casey tucked his pillow under the duvet in case Hank did check on him in bed, he wondered how much time he would need to find his dad’s pipe and get back. An hour and a half, two hours max should do it. He went quietly downstairs, picked his coat and hat off the hook, put on his boots, took his dad’s flashlight, and silently opened and closed the back door. Standing on the porch for a minute, he waited to see if Hank had heard anything. Then he headed off. It was starting to snow a bit, and the sky had the reddish cloudy cast it had when a heavy snowstorm was brewing.
He had heard all about the red snow sky on the Prairies, and how some years, heavy snow began falling as early as the first week of October. It seemed as if this would be one of those years.
There wasn’t much about the Prairies winter, summer, spring, or fall that he hadn’t heard before from his parents. And they had finally gotten their wish to come back to Richford, “Paradise on the Prairies,” their hometown.
“Don’t know where I’d call my hometown,” Casey muttered now as he continued to trudge through the snow to the Willson Place. He went over in his mind the six or so places he had lived so far. He was sure of one thing. He didn’t want to go back to the last one — Edmonton. There were too many bad family memories back there. He recalled the day his dad had gone off to Afghanistan in the first rotation of a Canadian commitment under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Mounties’ role was to help train new recruits for the Afghan national police. Casey’s father had done a similar tour of duty in Bosnia in the 1990s. In Afghanistan, though, his dad had been seriously injured by an improvised explosive device embedded in a country road. Although he had fully recovered, the incident had played a part in his early retirement.
And now Richford, the paradise his parents had remembered so fondly, wasn’t so great anymore. Now the Finegoods, the only Jewish family in town, had had a pipe bomb thrown at their store window, and Mrs. Olberg’s sister-in-law, Maria McKay, a Gypsy from Romania, had been knocked down and almost run over when she was crossing the street near where she lived. A van with smoked windows, which witnesses said had its licence plate taped over, left her on the road and roared away as a bunch of leaflets were tossed out its window. Casey’s mom had picked up one. It listed reasons why Gypsies shouldn’t be allowed to exist, never mind live, in Richford.
Casey couldn’t explain why he felt compelled to get his dad’s pipe back tonight. It wasn’t as if his father was overly strict with Hank or Casey. It was more a feeling that Casey had of not wanting to let his dad down, especially since his father was such an upright kind of guy who never seemed to make a false move or do anything just for the fun of it.
Actually, Casey now thought, he didn’t really know his father all that well. His dad had been gone for so much of his life. Walking on, he considered that fact and wondered if he was a stranger to his father, too. Casey would have bet that his dad didn’t know what he liked to read or listen to. Correction. His dad had to know what Casey listened to because he was always telling him to turn his music down. And Casey figured his father must have guessed by now that he loved to read fantasy. Likewise, Casey knew his dad liked biographies since he dragged them home from the library by the armful. And both of his parents liked jazz and classical music.
Hank was always telling Casey he should relax around their father the way Hank did, but somehow he couldn’t. He was always doing something his father didn’t approve of, or if his dad did approve, he was doing it the wrong way. Maybe, he thought now, one day he would do something right.
Casey had tried last week. He had thought he would surprise his dad by reorganizing his tool bench, but the favour hadn’t been appreciated. Oh, well …
He remembered only vaguely when the Templetons had lived for four years in Regina. All the boys were at home and their dad worked downtown. They saw him every night at supper, and though Casey had been just a little kid, he could still picture his dad hitting fly balls to his older brothers and shooting baskets with them. Not with Casey, though. Never. He couldn’t think of a time when they had even gone for a walk together.
Casey thought how different his relationship with his mother was. She was always there for him and drove him all over the place so he wouldn’t miss a single swim meet. His mother went to all the PTA meetings at every school he had ever attended, and what was more, she loved and understood him and gave him a little slack. Casey wished his dad were a little more lovable and a little less perfect.
When he got to the edge of the field near the Old Willson Place, he looked across it and stopped cold. A faint light shone from the old house’s window, the window whose new drapes he had opened after school. As he watched, the light moved and went out.
It took all his courage to start across the field, but he soon halted again to shine the flashlight on his watch. He had already used up twenty-five minutes. Hurrying didn’t help. He couldn’t go any faster because of the deep furrows. Up, down, up, down — the field seemed endless. Walking sideways didn’t help, either. His legs weren’t long enough to step up and over the furrows, and twice he sat down heavily astride humps of frozen earth.
Then walking suddenly became easier. He had made it to the tree-lined road leading to the house. Not far to go now. Casey switched the flashlight to his right hand and pushed his left hand deep into his coat pocket to warm it. He had done quite a few dumb things in his life, but nothing as dumb as this. Hoping to glimpse the Willson gate, Casey held the flashlight as far as he could to his right. At the very moment he caught sight of the gate, his foot hit something unyielding on the path and he fell heavily into the snow, his flashlight cartwheeling away.
Casey lay stunned for a moment, then sat up and slid over to a dim halo of light under the snow a metre or so ahead. He turned the flashlight back to see what had tripped him. Casey could make out a lump in the snow but couldn’t see what it was. He shone the light up higher. Above the snow were the tops of a pair of hiking boots, jean-clad legs, a heavy dark jacket with a high collar, and … nothing. Nothing? Casey leaped up. Now he could see a man’s head tilting so far back over the hinge edge of a wide chain-link gate that the face was thick with snow.
Pulling at the man’s sleeve, Casey said, “Hey? Sir?”
The man’s head swung slowly forward onto his chest. Before Casey could move away, the body fell against him, taking him down with it.