“Is he drunk?”
April had never seen Sadie’s eyes get quite so wide or heard her voice sound quite so curious.
“No. Not drunk,” Tim said, dropping the sword to the cellar floor. It crashed and clanged, but April didn’t care about the noise. Colin and Violet were surely in bed by then. Smithers was probably in the library with his nightly glass of port. Maybe Ms. Nelson was back from Evert’s and maybe she wasn’t, but it felt like April, Tim, and Sadie were the only three people in the universe. Four if you didn’t forget the unconscious man. And April couldn’t possibly forget about him.
None of them were even breathing hard, which meant Sadie could have a future in the body moving business, but now that Gabriel was back in his cellar, the problems seemed even bigger and bleaker and . . . well . . . bloodier than they had when he was lying on the rocks. Because getting him off the rocks was one thing. Keeping him alive was another.
“Here.” Sadie held up a lantern, sending soft yellow light across a mangled body.
His legs lay at a weird angle, and the bloody towel covered his chest. Had it not been for the ragged sounds his breath made, April might have thought that it was too late—that he was already dead. But he wasn’t. And it was up to April to keep him that way.
“Okay. We need something to disinfect the wound. And a needle and thread. Does Smithers have a first aid kit somewhere?” April looked up and, numbly, Sadie nodded.
“Great!” April pressed against the wound because they had to stop the bleeding. “Great. I’ll go—”
But Sadie was already saying, “April, this man has been stabbed! We have to tell someone. He needs a hospital.”
“No!” April wasn’t shouting. It was just that the cellar was super echo-y and the mansion was too quiet. “We can’t tell anyone,” she said, calmer then.
On the crate, Gabriel winced and turned away from the light.
“He could die,” Sadie pleaded, because Sadie was rational. Sadie was smart and good and logical. So April needed a smart, good, logical reason why they shouldn’t do the obvious thing.
“No. He won’t. He can’t die,” April said.
“How can you be so sure?” Sadie pleaded.
Then Tim brought the light closer to the face on the floor and said, “Because he’s already dead.”
“No.” Sadie started shaking her head. Or maybe she was just shaking. “That’s . . . This is . . . He’s . . .” Then she looked around the dim, empty cellar and lowered her voice like she didn’t want anyone to overhear. “That’s Gabriel Winterborne! You really found Gabriel Winterborne? You weren’t—”
“No. I wasn’t lying.”
“But you found Gabriel Winterborne! How? Where? How?”
April thought about the smoky museum and the way the dark figure had floated toward her like a dream. “It’s more like he found me. And then I tracked him down here.”
“When?” Tim asked, but April had the feeling it might have been a trick question. “Was that why you were out wandering around that first night? Is that why you left Violet alone?”
But April didn’t have time to deal with one mostly dead man and one half-angry boy. “He was hungry. I started leaving him food and stuff.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Sadie sounded hurt. But she wasn’t bleeding, so Gabriel was still their biggest problem.
“He didn’t want anyone to know he was back, okay? I don’t know why, I just know—”
Sadie turned to Tim. “We have to go get Smithers. Now!”
There’s no way to know what would have happened next if a hand hadn’t flown through the air and grabbed Sadie by the collar, pulling until she was face-to-face with the not-quite-dead man.
“Tell anyone I’m down here, and you’d better hope I die.” Gabriel’s voice was raspy, but the words were clear, and Sadie’s eyes were the size of dinner plates as she watched him drift out of consciousness, his knuckles still white on her shirt.
“See?” April said softly. “He’s been in hiding for ten years. He’s been down here for weeks. He could have walked upstairs anytime, but he didn’t want Smithers to know. He didn’t want Ms. Nelson to know. He was desperate that they not know. I think he’d rather die than tell them. You want to trust a grownup, right?” April asked, and Sadie nodded. “Well, I do too. So I’m choosing to trust him.”
“But we can’t let him die,” Sadie said one more time. “We can’t. We—”
“We won’t.” Tim sounded so sure. “He’s not going to die.”
“You don’t know that. The sword could have cut an artery,” Sadie said, but Tim was pulling back the towel. A little blood oozed out, but it wasn’t flowing like it had been.
“April, did it bleed steady, or did it come out in bursts, like it was being pumped?” Tim asked.
April had to think for a moment. “Steady.”
“Then it didn’t hit a major artery. If it had, he would have been bleeding in time with his heartbeats. Besides . . .” Tim started but trailed off, rethinking whatever it was he was about to say. Which wasn’t at all good enough for Sadie.
“Besides what?”
Tim shrugged. “He’d be dead by now.” Tim pressed the towel back into place. “So the stab wound won’t kill him, but an infection could. And we have to warm him up. Slowly.”
“Tim, you don’t know that,” Sadie said.
Tim was on the floor, balancing on the balls of his feet as he crouched over Mr. Winterborne’s body. He didn’t look at Sadie as he said, “You two are good at sneaking food and making inventions. I’m good at sewing up people no one wants to take to the hospital.”
“But how—” Sadie started.
He pulled back the collar of his shirt, and even in the dim light, April could make out the ragged line on his shoulder, not far from where Mr. Winterborne’s own scar would be. “Knife.” Then he pulled up his jeans and pointed to the scars that covered his shins. “Broken bottle.”
When he reached for his sleeve and started to reveal yet another story that April knew he didn’t want to tell, she blurted, “Tim, stop. You don’t have to.”
He looked back at the man on the ground, and when he spoke, the words were low but heavy. “Not everyone has a parent who’s going to come looking for them, April. Some of us hope we’re never found.”
Then there was nothing but the sound of dripping water and the deep ragged breaths of the man who wasn’t quite as dead as he wanted the world to believe.
“Okay.” Sadie looked at Tim. “What do we do?”
For the next hour, Sadie and April worked together while Tim went to get supplies. They had to cut off his coat, but his shirt practically fell apart under their touch, and Mr. Winterborne moaned but didn’t fight them at all, even though he must have been in terrible pain.
“I’ve never seen scars like that,” Sadie said at one point, but April had no idea which scars she was talking about—there were so many.
Tattoos ran in a line down his side, words April couldn’t read. A puzzle she couldn’t solve.
“What do you think they mean?” Sadie asked, but April just shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
“Where was he all these years? Why did he come back now? What’s he so afraid of?”
“I don’t know.” April was shaking her head. She was so scared, but she couldn’t say it—couldn’t show it. She was still mad at him for breaking into their room and scaring Violet and taking her key. But she was going to be way, way madder if he died.
So April let Tim douse him with alcohol, then carefully sew the wound. She watched as Sadie rigged up a heater and covered Mr. Winterborne with blankets. Together, Tim and Sadie nailed big sheets of plastic over the parts of the cellar where the drafts were the worst.
But April . . . All April did was hold Mr. Winterborne’s hand.
And pray.