WILOMA AND WALDO OVERSLEPT, AND IT WAS AFTER TEN BEFORE they finished breakfast and headed for the dam. Wiloma wished she’d never touched the margaritas Waldo had ordered. Beyond the fact that she felt queasy now, and beyond the ridiculous ways she and Waldo had behaved, she disliked the film of irritability and suspicion the drinks had left behind. The day was beautiful, but the light hurt her eyes and made Waldo look pale and pouchy. He was as kind and thoughtful as he’d been throughout their drive, but now his kindness seemed calculated and she found hidden motives in his every word.
When they walked into the Visitors’ Center, he said, “Why don’t you let me do the talking?” Her first impulse was to say no; then she caught herself and wondered what she feared. There was nothing he could do legally to get her share of Brendan’s land, and she was long past the point where she’d give him something just because he wanted it. Except that her behavior last night seemed to prove she wasn’t— she’d been more susceptible to him than she would have believed. When she realized this, she also realized that it wasn’t Waldo she feared, but her feelings for him. She let him do the talking after all.
The woman at the desk was grumpy. “Up to no good,” she was saying to a young man who stood behind her. A group of rude kids had apparently just passed through and she hadn’t liked the looks of them. Waldo interrupted her complaints to greet her, and she turned to him with a brusqueness that made Wiloma’s heart sink. But within a few minutes, Waldo had charmed the woman completely.
He spread his maps out on her desk and told her how interested he was in the history of the reservoir; how his wife here—his wife? Wiloma thought—actually belonged to one of the old families from one of the lost towns; how they were hoping to find a piece of land that her family had once owned. Without ever mentioning Henry or Brendan, without ever giving the least impression that they were desperately seeking a runaway or that anything was wrong, he managed to convince the woman of the urgency of their quest. They’d come all this way, he said. They’d been thinking about this for ages. It would mean so much to them if they could just find this place ….
The woman responded warmly; Waldo was irresistible when he tried. The woman pulled books and maps from the shelves around her, called over one of her assistants, and bent over Waldo’s maps, listening to what he said. In half an hour she’d solved their problem as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle.
“Here,” she said, drawing pencil lines on the map that showed the valley before the reservoir was built. “The old Auberon farm was right around here.” Wiloma bent over the map and stared. That box outside the village of Pomeroy was where Brendan and her father had grown up and where Da and Gran had spent much of their lives. With a smile of triumph the woman pulled over another map, a new one with the reservoir in place. “If you compare these two,” she said, indicating various lines, “you can sort of imagine where the water lies over your family’s old place. The other parcel you were talking about is here.”
She moved her pencil north and east and pointed out a spot just beyond the blue lobe of water. “Of course, the village of East Pomeroy doesn’t exist anymore, and that land’s been incorporated by another township. But it’s right here, just outside this gate. There’s someone here who can tell you all about the area and what’s happened to it, one of our local historians. Marcus?” She turned to the man sorting photographs behind her. “Where’s Marcus O’Brian? Isn’t he supposed to be in this morning?”
“Called in a little while ago,” the man said. “He told me he’d run into an old friend, some guy he hadn’t seen since they were kids, and he was taking him up the east side to look at something. He’s not coming in.”
“Too bad,” the woman said to Waldo. “Marcus knows everything about this area—he’s really quite fascinating. You’d enjoy him. He’s almost eighty, and he grew up in the valley himself. He’s one of our living resources.”
Wiloma looked at Waldo. Almost eighty; almost Brendan’s age. Was it possible the old friend he’d met was Brendan? “You’ve been so helpful,” Waldo said. “Really. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You just enjoy yourself. Have a nice day.” The woman was flirting with Waldo, Wiloma saw, as if the two of them were alone. Waldo touched the woman’s hand and then began rolling up his maps. The woman pulled another, smaller map from a corner of her desk. “It’s easy to get where you want to go,” she said, indicating a route. “Just follow this.”
“Thank you,” Waldo said again, and they left. Outside he turned to Wiloma and laughed. “Wasn’t she something?”
“She gave you what you wanted.”
“What we wanted. Who would have believed it would be this easy?”
Off to the side, a few hundred feet away, the dam curved across the water like a huge sleeping snake. Wiloma couldn’t tear her eyes from it, and Waldo’s gaze followed hers. He said, “You want to take a look at that first? Before we head out?”
She shuddered, remembering the feelings it had raised in her last night. She remembered, too, what Christine had said—I have to see your uncle as soon as possible —but she hung back from telling Waldo about Christine or about why she needed to get Brendan home so quickly. She said, “Let’s just get this over with. I want to get Uncle Brendan away from whatever craziness Henry’s got going, and the sooner we get that van back to the Home …”
“You’re right. Let’s go.”
The woman’s directions were perfect, accurate down to the last turn, but still Wiloma was surprised when they took the final fork and saw the van parked there on the dirt road. She caught her breath as they drove up and parked behind it, and she was conscious of feeling a little cheated, as if the search hadn’t taken long enough.
“But they’re not here,” Waldo said. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s in the van.”
They climbed out of the car and looked around. A trail entered the woods and ran up the hill, and Waldo looked at the map the woman had given them and said, “I think your uncle’s land is up there.”
Wiloma looked into the trees. Her uncle’s land—and near it, touching it, must be her father’s land and the cabin in which she’d been born. She leaned back against the Saab, momentarily unable to breathe. She remembered this land, she remembered everything about it. The cabin sat high on the ridge back along its length, and in the winter the water had been visible through the leafless trees. A narrow path ran down from the ridge, through the flatter land to the shore, and where the shore jutted out in a small point there was an old wood dock on which she and her mother and Henry had sat. There were turtles under the dock. There were small silvery fish that swam in schools. In the woods there were violets and larger flowers her father had named for her when he’d come home: lady’s slippers, columbines. The trees were dotted with oval woodpecker holes.
Waldo walked over and put his arm around her waist. “You okay?”
She struggled to speak. “It’s just … It’s just …”
“I know. It’s beautiful here. No matter what happens, you shouldn’t sell this. It’s your family’s home.”
This surprised her so much that the tightness eased in her chest. “I know,” she said. “I know every inch of this place—I know just what it looks like up there. But I didn’t expect you to realize what it means to me.”
He shrugged and picked at some mud that had dried on the car. “I’m not such an asshole. Not all the time.”
“Why did you drive me here?”
“You seemed like you needed some help,” he said, but then he dropped his eyes. “Okay, I was maybe a little interested in this place, what you and Henry were planning to do with it, and I was thinking maybe there was a way I could be a part of whatever you did. And also I was afraid maybe you’d want to give your share to that church of yours, and I wanted to keep you from doing anything foolish. The kids ought to get this someday, not some group of fanatics.”
She let that last comment pass. “I’d never give this away. This is important.”
“So was the place in Coreopsis,” Waldo said quietly.
“I didn’t give that to anyone,” she snapped. “I let Henry use it. How was I supposed to know …” She sighed. “You’re right. That was a mistake.”
“That’s all I wanted—to be sure you didn’t make another.”
She moved away from his arm, fighting the urge to lean into him. “You don’t need to worry. I’m not as stupid as you think.” There were lines on the ground near the van, she saw—parallel lines like the tracks of snakes.
“Look,” she said. They walked over and inspected the tracks, which led from the van to the gate and then vanished.
“Brendan’s wheelchair?” Waldo asked.
“Must be.” She patted her hair and tried to gather herself together. The entire secret to life, she remembered from her Manual, is not to be distracted. Focus on what’s important. “Let’s go.”
But above them, in the distance, they heard whistling. Just a few notes, the fragments of a tune—loud, broken, cheerful. “What’s that?” Waldo said.
Wiloma looked up and behind them. She couldn’t see anyone, but she would have known that whistle anywhere—that was Henry, who let out unconscious peeps and chirps when he was happy and thought he was alone. He had done that even as a little boy, when he’d been all she had to cling to.
“Henry’s up there,” she told Waldo. “That’s his whistle. He must have Uncle Brendan with him.”
“There’s no way. You couldn’t get a wheelchair up that path. And anyway, these have to be Brendan’s tracks.”
“Maybe so. But that’s Henry up there.”
Waldo looked up the hill and down the road. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go find Henry. You follow the wheelchair tracks and find your uncle. We’ll meet back here. Okay?”
“Okay,” Wiloma said, although the idea of being separated dismayed her. She watched Waldo vanish into the trees, and then she turned down the road and walked past the gate.
The road was rough, dotted with puddles and rocks. The snakelike tracks vanished and then reappeared and then vanished again. A flicker flew past with a whir of wings, and a flock of chickadees rose from a witch hazel at her approach. She walked quickly, intently, trying to focus on her uncle, and she was rewarded when she came around a curve. The trees thinned and then stopped abruptly at the edge of a clearing, and in the distance, where the clearing opened onto a pebbly bit of beach, she saw her uncle next to a man who was pushing a rowboat into the water. A dock stood nearby, and a shed next to a group of other boats. She supposed this was a place from which fishermen set out. A dog pranced between Brendan and the man putting in the boat, and she thought she recognized it as Bongo.
She opened her mouth to call out to her uncle, but a noise distracted her. Behind her, from the ridge, she thought she heard voices calling, and she turned and ran her eyes along the trees. From this clearing—oh, she remembered this, remembered how she’d been able to look up from here and see the cabin winking through the forest—she could see the whole length of the ridge, angling back from the reservoir. She saw the trail carved along the top, and a flash of blue she knew to be Waldo’s shirt. That was Waldo yelling, calling her—or perhaps he was calling Henry. That flash of white, there, farther out along the ridge—was that Henry?
She waved her arms over her head, hoping to attract the attention of one or both of them. She heard more shouting—Henry? Waldo?
“ … doing here?” she thought she heard, and then “What?” She strained her eyes and ears. That blue flash was Waldo, moving very quickly now, and the white flash standing still was Henry. And they were not, either of them, calling to her. They were shouting at each other.
She closed her eyes for a second. “Idiot!” she heard.
The word carried down the ridge and across the clearing to her, but she couldn’t tell who had yelled it and she turned her back on both men. They were hopeless, useless. She took three cleansing breaths and fixed her eyes on the place where her uncle sat. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. The wheelchair was empty, outlined against the reservoir and the floating green islands, and from the point across the small cove to her left she thought she heard still other voices calling. The rowboat drifting away from the shore had two men in it, and a dog.