“THINK I OUGHT TO go upstairs and talk to him?” Dr. Tuttle said. “It hardly seems right to open presents without him.”
Mrs. Tuttle sighed. “What a Christmas. First I can’t cook the turkey, and now this. I knew we should have volunteered at the Women’s Shelter.”
But just then the lights on the Christmas tree blinked on. And they didn’t blink off again. The furnace rumbled in the basement, and soon the radiators started to hiss.
“Maybe we can have a Christmas dinner after all,” Mrs. Tuttle said.
Dr. Tuttle asked John Henry to help him sort the remaining presents while Mrs. Tuttle returned to the kitchen. Though she didn’t bother preheating the oven, just getting the turkey into it put her in a better mood, and she decided to go upstairs and talk Tim into rejoining them. Tim didn’t answer the knock on his door. When she opened it, an icy blast greeted her.
A minute later Dr. Tuttle and John Henry were standing with her in Tim’s window, staring down at the dent he’d made in the snow. John Henry was amazed.
“Tim’s usually so chicken about jumping,” he said. “He’d never even go off the Cooleys’ hayloft.”
“Where on earth could he have gone?” Mrs. Tuttle said.
“Not far, I hope,” said Dr. Tuttle, closing the sash. “It must be close to zero out there.”
When they found Tim’s boots and parka in the pantry downstairs, they figured he couldn’t have gone far. Mrs. Tuttle suggested he might be sulking in the shed, but Dr. Tuttle came back from the shed shaking his head. He decided to call the police to tell them to be on the lookout for a runaway boy, but although the electricity was back, the phone was still dead.
“Darn thing,” he said, slamming it down.
“Let’s go after him, Trev,” said Mrs. Tuttle.
“Mm. We’ll need the chains.”
John Henry helped him put the chains on the tires, but Dr. Tuttle thought it best he not come along. “Someone should be home in case Tim shows up,” he said. “If he does, tell him … tell him …”
“Tell him we’re sorry,” said Mrs. Tuttle.
Left on his own, John Henry made himself a cup of hot cocoa with two marshmallows floating in it and took it into the living room and turned on the TV. There was going to be a football game on later, but at the moment the selection was pretty pathetic. He paused awhile on a documentary about climbing Mount Everest, but the description of the dangerous windchill factors near the summit gave him an uncomfortably guilty feeling, so he flicked to a bowling tournament. The house was getting warmer by the moment, and in spite of the regular explosions of bowling pins, his eyelids began to droop. He’d lost a lot of sleep last night, thanks to his late-night painting session in the sewing room.
The ring of the phone woke him. The bowlers had turned into figure skaters. He hit the mute button and picked up the receiver.
“John Henry?”
“Hey, Mom. The phone’s back.”
“Any sign of Tim?”
“Um, nope.” Checking his watch, John Henry was surprised to see that he’d slept two and a half hours. “No luck?”
“We’ve been all over the place. We called the Cooleys and the McDougals. All the shops and restaurants are closed. We went by the road up to Aunt Winnie’s in case he got it into his head to go up there, but there aren’t any tracks. Now we’re at the police station here in Williston.”
“Maybe he went into Burlington to catch a movie,” John Henry said—though he doubted Tim had the money for a ticket.
“It’s Christmas Day. The movie theaters are closed till later. Any other ideas?”
“Well, there’s that weirdo, J. J. Billingsly, from his homeroom. He calls him about math sometimes.”
“Thanks.”
“Ten-four, Mom.”
After hanging up, John Henry fished the soggy marshmallows out of his cold cocoa and ate them. Noticing the corner of the foil-wrapped painting peeking out from under his mother’s favorite chair, he felt an uncomfortable pinch of guilt and shifted his attention to the presents in his pile. Under what looked discouragingly like a book was a simple envelope with J. H. written on it in his mother’s neat script. The envelope wasn’t sealed. He pulled out a card with a scenic photo of Camel’s Hump, a nearby mountain, on the front. Inside, his mother had written: One new snowboard of your choice from Woods Sporting Goods—Love, Mom & Dad.
“Yes!” he cried.
He stuffed the card back into the envelope and reinserted it in his present pile. The present underneath, he noticed, was flat, wrapped in a page from the Free Press, with a bell-shaped tag that said: For my big-little brother, John Henry, Merry Christmas, Tim. Curious, John Henry slit the Scotch tape and pulled back the newspaper.
There he was! He carried the painting over to the window. As he studied it by daylight, he felt a clawing in his throat, as if he’d swallowed a beetle and it was trying to climb out. The painting—of him punting a football—was really cool. It made him look like a sports hero.
In the foreground of the painting was the split-rail fence, and what looked like a parade of ants crawling along one of the rails was actually a line of tiny letters that spelled out: This fence was built by John Henry Tuttle.