The Tree Beasts Page 3

  Sam was about to park the pickup truck when she said, “I can’t do this right now. Please, let’s just go back.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Victoria nodded quickly. “I’ll call Miss O’Malley later and explain.”

  Sam waved to the people on the lawn then pulled away with everyone at the vigil, their faces softly lit, staring at them.

  “We’re going home,” he said to Nat and Katie in the seats behind Victoria and him.

  “Why?” Nat asked.

  “I want to see the candles.” Katie tried to open the car door. Victoria unbuckled her seat belt, grabbed Katie’s hand, pulled it away from the door handle and settled it in her lap.

  Sam reached over and squeezed Victoria’s hand gently. She squeezed back.

  When they arrived at the house, Sam went straight upstairs with Nat and Katie to make sure they got ready for bed, even though it was a little early, while Victoria went into the living room.

  Tender white orchids – sympathy blooms for a boy no one was certain had really died – were browning in their vase. She touched and smelled them, but they had already lost their scent.

  Paul wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be.

  ***

  The next morning Victoria went into the kitchen to make coffee and caught sight of Paul’s seizure medication bottle pushed back on the counter. She took her phone with her, walked into the bathroom and shut the door.

  “Are there any updates on Paul Gold? I’m his mother,” she said when a policeman answered.

  “I’m sorry to say I don’t think we have anything new for you. How are you, Mrs. Gold?”

  Victoria ignored his question. “Could you check again, please? Has anyone called in with new information?”

  “Let me get the records. Hold on.” She heard him typing into a keyboard then sighing. “Mrs. Gold …?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Only one call is logged in the report.”

  “Who?”

  After a pause, he said, “The gentleman, the jogger, who made the call that day.”

  “I thought a woman – Julian Bloomfield’s nanny, Agostina-something – called first.”

  “Do you mean Ms. Goto?”

  “I think that’s her,” Victoria said.

  “I remember we interviewed her at the park, but she didn’t call us.”

  “There was only one call? Because I heard her calling you.”

  “Seems like she didn’t, ma’am. It says right here on my screen that a man who was jogging and stopped to assist you called us to the park. Maybe you were mistaken. I’m sorry for the confusion.”

  “No, that’s all right. It’s not your fault …” Victoria hung up and raced into the kitchen. The small Blackthorn Island telephone directory was on the countertop. She waved Nat off when he asked what she was doing and searched under ‘B’.

  Victoria dialed, and a woman picked up. “Bloomfield residence. Hello?”

  “Is Agostina there?” Victoria asked.

  “Agostina is no longer living here.”

  A chill ran through Victoria’s body.

  “Who’s calling, please?” the woman said.

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. It’s my first day working as the nanny here.” The woman paused. “Who is this?” she said, rather sharply.

  Victoria ended the call before the new nanny could ask her anything else. Agostina hadn’t called the police that day at the park, and she had left the island.

  Chapter Four

  At first the phone never stopped ringing – relatives and friends wanting to know how they were doing. Then people just stopped calling.

  And one chilly weekend morning in October, not quite a year to the day Paul went missing, Victoria and Sam asked Nat and Katie to sit in the living room with them. Victoria said that although they had rented their current house for eight years, the landlord had died suddenly and his family wanted to sell it quickly. They had to move to another place.

  “We don’t want to go,” Nat and Katie said at once.

  Sam spoke for Victoria. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “But Paul won’t be able to find us if we’re not here,” Nat said.

  Sam turned from them and wiped his eyes.

  “Don’t cry, Daddy.” Katie reached up, trying to touch his face.

  “My kids.” He reached over to hug them together. His body shook with each breath.

  ***

  A month later, they were settled in a small old farmhouse Katie’s dad and mom had picked out, smaller because they were one less. Her dad bought her mom a painting of a lighthouse at an estate sale, with the keeper watching straight out, and hung it over the fireplace. In the glass kitchen cabinet, there was a picture frame with uncooked macaroni painted gold glued on its border, an art project of Nat and Paul’s, with a photo of Paul in his school uniform. Her dad had wanted to pack it away for good during the move but her mom and Nat had fought to keep it. And in her dad’s new garden, a small rosebush bloomed, shooting right up through the snow to the surface, just as it had done in his old garden after Paul disappeared.

  “What do you think they are?” he asked them at dinnertime one night. “Other than roses.”

  “I think they’re a gift from Paul,” Katie said. “They’ve got to be. They’re the same colour as the one Mom gave him. Who else could be doing it?” She took care not to upset her mom, who had just managed to return to work after a year, but they still had to be careful around her.

  “What else?” Nat corrected Katie.

  “That’s enough.” Her dad glanced at her mom.

  All three of them stared at her, waiting for her reaction.

  “It’s fine, Sam,” she said. “I don’t know what to believe. They were in the garden at our old house, and now they’re here.”

  “They followed us,” Nat said.

  “Please don’t get rid of them,” Katie said.

  “I never have,” Sam replied. “And I don’t plan to anytime soon.”

  Later that night before Katie went to bed, she caught her dad watching the roses through the kitchen window, like he was hoping to catch someone planting them there.

  The next evening Nat ran a high fever. Her mum took her hand from his forehead, used the phone and told him and Katie that since their doctor had already gone home for the night and Sam was still at work, they would have to take Nat to the hospital.

  ***

  It seemed no time at all before they passed through the emergency room’s automatic doors and went into the building with her mom holding their hands. She walked up to the front counter and checked Nat in. The woman behind the desk gave Victoria a short nod and they sat and waited for a while.

  They called Nat’s name. Katie and Nat stepped with their mom into a large room where beds were divided by blue curtains. Nat’s doctor let Katie try out her stethoscope. Katie tucked it into her T-shirt and the metal was cool against her chest as she listened to the sound of her own heart. She could hear two doctors talking in the next curtained-off area.

  “He isn’t conscious,” one doctor said.

  “What happened to him?” the other doctor asked.

  “He was abandoned and appears to have been abused. He’s around ten years old.”

  Maybe they were talking about Paul. Katie saw the curtain move and could hear them leaving together. Her mom was talking with Nat’s doctor, and Katie sneaked under the curtain to the next bed.

  She stood at the edge of a dark-haired boy’s hospital bed with metal railings on the sides. He had a delicate face and swollen lips. Katie’s nose started itching and she leaned forward a little toward the white bed, almost like in a dream.

  Katie’s toes curled in her sneakers. A heat that had begun in her feet traveled up her body into her chest like heartburn then went to her forehead where it stopped and continued to warm her as though she had a mild fever.

  The injured boy’s puffed-up mouth opene
d, and a very faint purple mist slipped out, swirling around Katie’s head and into the side of her face before she could duck and run from it.

  Katie smelled baby powder and flowery soap. Her skin was a little damp and she was wrapped in something soft, snuggling against Victoria’s chest as her mother rocked gently in her father’s favourite chair. Every time Victoria leaned in close, cooed and smiled at her, she laughed.

  “How clean you look after your bath,” Victoria whispered, and it was like Katie was really a baby again with her mother talking to her.

  Katie continued to feel and see moments starring her, like in a slideshow or video. It was as though her mind and all of her senses were in the past while her body stayed where she was in the hospital.

  One image was from the time when she was six years old. It was around Christmastime in the old house. She’d been hunting for her piano practice sheet music . It should have been on the glossy wooden bench in the entrance hall. Maybe the sheet music had been blown off the bench when her dad had opened the front door to leave. Katie knelt to search under the bench. She reached under it, moved her hand around then heard Paul giggling somewhere down the corridor.

  She ran to search for him, but he must have snuck into the entrance hall, because when she returned to where she had started, the sheet music was back on the bench. Paul walked up to her, laughing so hard he was bent over and clutching his little stomach. Katie didn’t laugh or even smile and Paul kissed her cheek to apologise.

  Another memory came to Katie. Around that same time, she was sitting on the couch in the living room watching a Christmas film with Paul and Nat. Her mom allowed them to laze around all week because they were on break from school for the holidays. Katie started to get hot and asked the boys to pause the film. She walked into the hall and saw her mother’s hand raising the temperature on the thermostat. The house was already so warm. Katie heard her younger voice whine, “It’s too hot.”

  Her mum glanced at her, and with a smile said, “I want to make sure Paul’s warm enough. He gets cold so quickly. He feels things in a different way to us.”

  Katie peered up at her mom. Her mother wore her hair in a youthful braid going down her back. Her mom’s eyes were bright and her skin smooth. “He’s more special than us?”

  “In a way he is, sweetie,” her mum said.

  “How come?”

  “He feels things more than we do.”

  In the next image, Katie was seven and it was the evening before Paul disappeared. All five of them were eating an early supper by the crackling fire.

  “I like eating sitting on the floor,” Paul said.

  But her dad had forgotten to open the fireplace flue and suddenly the entire room was filled with thickening smoke.

  The smoke detector sounded, and the whole family began to leave the room, until Paul simply pushed the fireplace screen aside. Her mum gasped as though she was worried Paul would crawl in and hurt himself, but he flipped the handle to open the flue. Her dad and mum, Nat and she had praised Paul, and he was thrilled to have made them so proud of him.

  “Can I get a bike?” Paul said.

  Her mom turned to her dad, as though she were seeking help with what to say, then looked back at Paul. “We’ll think about it.”

  Her mom gave Paul, then Nat and her, one of the big hugs she gave to them all the time before Paul went missing. Katie smelled the lavender scent on her mother’s sweater and felt its soft fabric against her face.

  The thin strand of purple smoke faded away, and the memories stopped coming to Katie as suddenly as they had arrived. She was eight years old again and back in the large hospital ward, peering down at an unknown boy in a white bed, with her mother and Nat in the next curtained area. A strong clementine fragrance surrounded her.

  The machines the boy’s chest and forehead were attached to through long, thin white wires started beeping endlessly. The small computer box on a stand with wheels showed a flat line. An alarm blared and a heavy-set nurse rushed in.

  “What are you doing here?” she shouted at Katie.

  Another hospital worker in a white uniform came in and walked Katie out of the curtained area and handed her off to her mom.

  “I didn’t know where you went, Katie.” She could hear a sob caught in her mom’s throat. “You scared me.” Her mom stroked a lock of hair away from Katie’s face.

  “Please, Mrs. Gold, we need to move your son to another area. Come with me,” Nat’s doctor said. She took the stethoscope from Katie.

  They went to an examination room farther down the corridor, where Nat was diagnosed with strep throat and sent home with a prescription. Katie felt she would vomit by the time they made it back to their parking spot or when they got home, if she could hold it back for that long. She was sure she had done something terrible to the boy in the hospital bed. But some of what happened had been good because her mother had held her and she had seen Paul again.

  Victoria helped Nat and her get into the back seat. She asked Katie to hold her tote bag then got in and started the engine. Katie clung to her mom’s bag, as though somehow it would keep her in a better place, take her back to before Paul’s disappearance.

  Katie stared out the window on her side as her mother drove. The wind was picking up and the leaves were blowing on the trees like the orange feathers of a huge bird. She rolled down the window, and her face was struck by a warm breeze and the sultry odour of an approaching storm bringing heat to the damp and chilly autumn.

  ***

  The night Katie came home from having seen that boy at the hospital, she was in her brass bed, trying to fall back to sleep after nearly throwing up in the bathroom. The windows were shut because of the storm, and the room had turned uncomfortably warm and had an unpleasant, stuffy smell, while the tree branches outside swung hard with the wind and scratched the house.

  The door creaked open all on its own and she sat up. Floorboards cracked and moaned with the wind, as though someone were tiptoeing across them. She smelled something sweet and sharp, orangey, like someone had just ripped the skin off a plump clementine.

  A shape – shadowy and small – was hovering in a dark corner of the room, a little too near Katie’s bed.

  What was it? She gasped and pulled her blanket up toward her eyes. If she moved even the slightest bit out from under the too-warm bed where she was sweating or stuck out an arm or leg, it could reach out and grab her. It was so close.

  Katie was about to scream for her father when she saw its face.

  She moved the blanket. “Nat, how did you get in my room without me seeing you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Stop trying to scare me, Nat.” The heat under the covers was stifling, though she couldn’t bring herself to move. She was sweating but her hands and feet were cold with fear.

  The shape moved away from the wall and came even closer to Katie’s bed. She pulled the blanket over her eyes again so that she couldn’t see.

  “Nat, you’re scaring me.” Her voice sounded so small. She saw a flash of blue and gradually pushed the blanket down to peek at the thing.

  By Katie’s bed was a body that was little-boy shaped but with flesh like clear frozen water under the same blue parka Paul had worn on the day he’d gone missing.

  She looked up at something that reminded her of Nat. Well, what he’d been like about a year ago – Paul’s face from when she’d last seen him at the playground. It was so bright that it glowed.

  What she was seeing was impossible. If Paul had come home, he would have come in through the front door and their parents would have known about it.

  There was something inside his icy chest, a red object shining through. His small heart. Not beating. Katie looked away. Was this really happening?

  She peeked up at him. “Are you real? What happened to you? How are you here?”

  He stared at her blankly. Katie remembered Paul as a friendly, warm boy and this being – was he still a child? – this icy thing next to he
r bed felt empty. When he opened his mouth, no words came out, just a muffled sound. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. The police had found them.

  “Did a stranger take you?” In school they had learned not to talk to strangers, but Paul talked to strangers all the time.

  Katie shivered. “Tell me.”

  He stood there, breathing cold air on her face. She tried to touch his ice fingers, hold his hand, but he moved back with a puzzled stare. Paul had loved being hugged by her.

  “I thought of you today,” Katie said, and with her arms tingling and her fingers shaking, her eyes stayed locked on him.

  He pointed to his face and Katie reached out to him. He stepped back and patted the side of his head and she touched her temple.

  “Paul, what are you trying to tell me?”

  His body broke apart into hundreds of clear, ice-like beads that rose up and hovered above her bed and started cracking all at once. They remained suspended above Katie’s bed. Glass. If all the fast-splintering beads rained down on her head at once, they could cut up her pajama-clad body.

  “Paul. Paul, what’s going on?” Katie could see all the little crystalline pieces above her quickly forming into a small, transparent globe that appeared as delicate as hand-blown glass, with a tiny light burning brightly inside.

  The glass bubble dropped down to Katie’s eye level and stopped. She reached out and tapped it, found it was cool and hollow. Surely she had to be dreaming, and she closed her eyes to make it all go away. She opened them again just as the bubble pushed through her bedroom door and she heard a faint sound farther down the hall.

  Katie had expected to wake up the next day to the noise of her dad sweeping up shattered glass. But when she finally rose, the house was quiet. She opened her door and peeked down the hall. Sunlight was trickling in through the lace-curtained windows, but nothing glittered on the polished wood floor.

  Chapter Five

  Katie didn’t see Paul again for seven years. Sometimes she wondered if she had dreamed the whole episode of him visiting her on that one night. Occasionally she could almost forget it had happened at all. Yet every night before Katie got into bed, she checked the corner of her room for Paul.