The Endless Forest
Page 16

The little girls were asking questions, anxiety raising its head once again. Jennet clucked and comforted and began a story about a rain so hard it made the trees go hide.
“There,” said Nathan, interrupting his mother in his excitement. “There’s Uncle Ethan’s new house; he wrote to us about it, do you remember?”
It was a neat, well-built house with a satisfying symmetry. Lily could imagine her cousin Ethan there with no difficulty. What she couldn’t understand was why every house window as far as she could see down the main street was dark.
“Where is he? Where is everybody?” The only light was in the window of a building that was new to Lily, but must be the Red Dog.
She had had many letters from home about the changes in the village, but still the sight of an inn on the Johnstown road was a surprise. Another one of Ethan’s projects: an inn that catered to locals and travelers alike, with a tavern on the ground floor and rooms to let above. There would be an apartment for the innkeeper and his family. Then he had hired Charlie LeBlanc to manage it—a daring experiment, as her mother had written, but one that might eventually take a happy ending, not so much because Charlie showed a talent for innkeeping, but because his wife would. What Charlie lacked in ambition, Becca made up for.
The Red Dog was a popular place, one Lily had heard about a great deal in the letters that came from home. A lively place, her mother had written. Except not this day. The shutters were closed and everything seemed very still.
There was something very wrong.
Lily started when her father nosed his horse up right next to her, rain still coming off the brim of his hat when he turned his head. It was so good to have him near, she regretted being cranky about something as inconsequential as rain.
“We’ve got to get to high ground.” He raised his voice so it would carry, and then his gaze fixed on Lily’s mother, sitting with her arms around the twins.
“Boots, take the blackberry path, the one that starts from behind Ethan’s place. Move smartly. Carry the girls if you must.”
“Very well.” She caught Lily’s eye and gave her a firm, determined smile. “Who wants an adventure?”
The men went down to the village on horseback to see what help they could be, and the women and children abandoned the wagons and oxen where they stood. Simon left too, raising a hand to Lily before he turned his horse’s head and trotted off. He was glad to be here, among family, among the men, with serious work to do.
The women and children waded through ankle-deep snow water and mud that tried to suck the boots off their feet. The land behind Ethan’s house inclined sharply and then disappeared into the forest, where the trees gave the group some protection from the rain and wind. The path was littered with broken branches and last year’s sodden leaves. Wet snow fell from the trees in huge, unwieldy clumps.
It was a path Lily had walked hundreds of times in her life, and was full of memories: games, rivalries, feats of bravery, and utter foolishness. It was immediately familiar but strange too. At the top of the rise the woods would open up onto a clearing, and in the middle of that clearing she would see what some people still called the doctor’s place, though Richard Todd was dead many years and the whole homestead belonged to Curiosity Freeman.
And maybe that house would be dark too, and empty.
Lily shook herself to dislodge the image. They would stop first at Curiosity’s kitchen, where the fire in the hearth would warm them, and the teakettle would be whistling, and where Hannah and her family would be waiting, and little sister Birdie and Curiosity herself. Lily’s heart was racing in her chest, and it had little to do with the steep uphill climb.
She was concentrating on her footing and so lost in her thoughts that she bumped into Martha Kirby. They were stopped because at the front of the line Lily’s mother had stopped.
At first Lily wondered if her mother was trying to catch her breath, but then things shifted and she got a better view. Lily knew every one of her mother’s expressions; six years or sixty years apart from her made no difference. What Lily saw in her mother’s face was surprise and deep concern. Elizabeth Middleton Bonner, normally unflappable, was watching something happening in the village through a gap in the trees, and it frightened her.
The boys scrambled up to see for themselves.
“What is it?” the girls cried out. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s a flood!” Nathan shouted back, putting all his strength into the last word so that it seemed to echo. “The whole village—”
Jennet stepped in front of him and then they were moving again, faster now. Lily told herself she wouldn’t look when she came to that open spot in the trees, but it was no use. The village of Paradise had been her whole world for most of her life, and she could no more turn away from it than she could from Ma or Da.
There was enough light to make out the trading post, the school-house, the smokehouse, a half dozen cabins—houses, Lily told herself. These were proper two-story houses with glass windows and curtains. But there was something odd, something that made no sense.
Then she had it: Some of the buildings seemed to have moved around, like pieces on a chessboard. The trading post had been on this side of the Sacandaga when she was last home, but now it stood on the far shore.
Annie seemed to read her thoughts because she offered up the explanation.
“The whole village is afloat,” she said. “The hundred-year water Throws-Far told us about.”