By the time we got back to the farmhouse, sunset had stolen all the heat out of the air. I was shivering. Robin trailed about twenty feet behind me, but when he saw the house, he stopped to stare, like he’d never seen it in the daytime. Now, I admit my house is a funny sight. Two walls are painted turquoise and the other two orange, because that’s what was handy. Both paints were rejects from someone else’s bad mix jobs—kind of like me.
At first Robin wouldn’t even come up the front steps. Instead he headed for the barn, sending the hens squawking in all directions. So I told him I was going inside to feed Chevy, and soup would be ready in a few minutes. When I peeked outside again, he was down by the barn, feeding the hens. I could see him smiling at them. But when I called to him, the smile disappeared.
Even when my mother had remembered to feed me, she was never much of a cook. So early on I’d figured out how to use a stove and grow a few vegetables. My soup wasn’t fancy, but the smell was enough to get Robin inside the house. He took the bowl off the table and curled up on the kitchen floor beside Chevy. He emptied his bowl even faster than the dog would have. I put a refill on the table, but he took it down onto the floor too.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
He shrugged. I asked his name again. Same shrug. I took the receiver off my wall phone. It’s a rotary type that earns me lots of laughs, but after a few tweaks, it works just fine. His eyes followed every move I made.
“Your family will be worried about you,” I said. “I better call the police.”
I was hoping to reach Jessica Swan. She’s a constable with our local detachment, and she has a soft spot for underdogs. She might know how to help this kid without dragging in her boss. But as soon as I said police, Robin lunged for the door. I grabbed his arm and dragged him back to the table.
“You can’t go out there. It’s cold. There are coyotes and bears looking for food for the winter.”
“Not scared.”
I looked at him. He glared back. He did seem scared, although not of the coyotes. “Are you lost?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Did you run away?”
He looked down. Didn’t answer. Now, I’m not much good at conversation. It was just my mother and me on the farm until she died, and I spent most of my childhood with imaginary friends. Sometimes I go all week without talking to anyone except turnips and goats. Now here I was with this kid in my kitchen, filthy and scared, but silent as a mule. I’d been there myself a few times.
I found a map in the drawer and spread it out. I traced some of the squiggly lines on the map. “This is Madrid County, where we are. Here’s my farm, and here’s Lake Madrid village, about three miles away. Over here is the woods where I found you.”
He squinted at the map like he’d never seen anything like it. I moved my finger farther away. “Over here is North Grenfield, up here Ossington County. Can you see where you live?”
He ran his finger across the words. I pointed to the biggest town in the area. “Here?”
He lifted the paper to peer under it, like his house was hiding somewhere underneath. I had a sudden brainwave. Maybe the kid had never seen a map before. I pointed to the town’s name. “Can you read this?” I asked.
“Read?”
I grabbed a pencil and printed the word ROBIN in big letters along the edge of the map. “What does that say?”
His eyes widened, and he reached for the pencil. “What this?”
He had an odd accent, like he didn’t speak English well. He didn’t sound French either. I told him it was a pencil. “You write with its tip.”
He tugged at the tip. “How it come out?”
“Like this.” I took a piece of charcoal from the fireplace and made a black line across the map. By now the map was becoming quite a mess.
He gripped the pencil in his fist, wrong way up, and tried to run it along the page. I turned it over and watched as he drew marks on the page. He began to smile as he scribbled and swirled. Not only had this kid never seen a map. He’d never even held a pencil!
Was he slow? Was that why he was wandering around lost in the woods? I remembered some old games my mother used to play with me, before she gave up hoping I’d be a doctor. I took two cherry tomatoes off the windowsill. “How many tomatoes are there?”
“Two.”
I added four more. “Now how many?”
“Five.”
“Count them.”
He pouted. I started with the first tomato. “One, two…Now you.”
“Three, four, five and five.”
I wrote all the numbers down. “Which number is five?”
He picked up one of the tomatoes. I pointed to the number four. I had to be sure. “Give me this many tomatoes.”
He picked up all six tomatoes and gave them to me, smiling as if he’d figured out the game. I counted them aloud and then pushed two back to his side. He ate them. In spite of myself, I laughed.
“You’re still hungry.”
He ate three eggs and four slices of toast. I was just beginning to think he was a bottomless pit when he laid his head on the table and fell fast asleep. I studied his smudged face and callused little hands. Now what? I thought. Call the police? This was more than just a missing kid. This was a mystery kid who could barely speak and had never even learned to count.
But he was still just a kid. It didn’t seem fair to haul him off in a cruiser in the dead of night. That had happened to me, more than once, and I knew how scary it felt. So I figured everything could wait until the morning, once he’d had a good night’s sleep in a warm bed.
I carried him upstairs to my mother’s old bedroom. No one had slept in it in fifteen years. Her room was just the same, if you didn’t count the inch of dust. Her velvet Elvis still hung on the wall over her bed. Her shiny, hand-tooled red cowboy boots still sat on the floor by her dresser. There was a dusty box of shotgun shells on the cedar chest, beside the outline of her shotgun in the dust. But I suspected the kid had slept in worse places. The bed was comfy, and he barely opened an eye when I tucked a couple of old blankets over him.
That’s when I noticed how filthy his sweater was. Dark stains smeared the front and cuffs. I touched them with my fingertips. They were dry and crusty. Mud? I sniffed. Sweat and barnyard manure. Carefully I pulled the sweater over his head, filled the sink with warm, soapy water and sank the sweater into the bubbles. The dirt softened. As it dissolved, it turned the water deep red.
I jerked back. A chill shot down my spine. The boy’s clothes were soaked in blood.
I scrubbed and rinsed until the water ran clear. I peeked in on him again before I went to bed. He looked peaceful. Unhurt. The sweater looked as if it had never been washed. The blood could have been there for years, I told myself.
So I climbed into my own bed and tried not to think about it.