Coldwater Revenge James Ross (best fantasy books to read TXT) 📖

rooms had been in the south wing on the opposite end of the house. Tom was surprised and pleased that he could still navigate the steep passageway without turning on a light or stepping on a creaky board.

Moving quietly along the uncarpeted hall, lined on one side with built-in bookshelves and on the other with six pane, waist-to-ceiling windows, he looked outside and spotted a pair of state troopers pacing the gravel circle. If either of them had looked up, they would have seen him.

The short spur at the end of the hall and the door at its end opened onto the familiar, daisy yellow bedroom with a crow’s nest view of the lake. Three occupants of the White House had come and gone since Tom had last been in this room. He stood for a moment wondering if he might have acted differently on his last visit, if he had known it was going to be so long before he returned.

The room had changed, of course. Gone were the rock star and Women in Science posters, replaced by delicate watercolors and spare ink drawings. But the ambiance remained the same: piles of books and music disks lay everywhere around the overstuffed chair by the dormer window. The sagging four-poster bed gave a familiar wood and metal squeal when he sat on its edge. He picked up the volumes piled on the wicker nightstand: Kipling, Nabokov, a biology text titled Mean Genes and behind them a small pen and ink drawing—almost certainly in Susan’s own hand—of an altar-like rock surrounded by trees and grass.

Tom stared long and hard at the drawing, then lifted it to his face. A strip of blanket peeked from behind the rock and several immature plants fronted it. A stiff, brimmed Smokey the Bear hat anchored the blanket. Tom’s heart accelerated and his breath shortened. You son-of-a bitch, brother.

After a hurried inventory of the room-–looking for what he didn’t know, he pocketed the drawing and hustled down to the library.

Dr. Pearce had been meticulous in his organization of that part of the family book collection that most interested him. Fiction, being largely his wife’s preserve, was scattered among various shelves in the sun room, main sitting room and in the upstairs hallways. Non-fiction, scientific and reference works were gathered in the library and music rooms and organized there by subject and author.

Tom sat with the Peterson Field Guide and the Newcomb Guide to Wildflowers, flipping pages and comparing what he saw there to what Susan had recorded in her drawing. Only when he heard the sound of tires crushing gravel, did he remember Joe’s warning that Paulie Grogan’s troopers were looking for him.

Taking the drawing and reference books, he hustled back to the pantry. Footsteps crunched gravel on the other side of the wall as he passed through the music room, followed by silence as whoever it was stepped off of the path and came to peer through the window. From the game room, he watched a jacketed torso move sideways along the row of windows toward the cypress hedge.

Hurrying down the hall, he arrived back at the pantry just in time to turn the bolt on the outer door. Then retreating to the recess of the covered staircase, he watched as a pair of uniformed trousers rounded the hedge and came down the path. Backing deeper into the stairway, he listened to the sound of a handle being turned and a door shaken in its frame. Sensing but not seeing the figure appear at the window over the steel sink, he moved higher still. The figure tried the window, too. But it was cranked tight.

A torso-shaped shadow moved across the pantry floor and then disappeared in the direction of the shoreline. When it didn’t return, Tom stepped from the covered staircase and approached the window. The man had made his way down the lawn to the boathouse and stopped there to speak with someone fiddling with the satellite dishes on top of the trailer. Tom looked closely at a profile he had not seen in a dozen years, and then not often. But he was pretty sure it was Joe’s former deputy. When Grogan left the trailer and disappeared into the boathouse, Tom returned the house key to its hiding place and then slipped away to look for a half-remembered rock in the woods above Coldwater Lake.

* * *

Forests may be timeless, but they are not changeless. Small trees grow big, big trees die and fall. Grass clearings become populated by shrubs and saplings that block out the sun, kill off the grass and return the clearing to woodlot. Where Tom stopped at the end of an overgrown dirt track, nothing looked the same as he remembered it. How long had it been? Twenty years?

Two listing pillars still marked what had been almost a century ago the entrance to the Barrows estate. The main house that stood at the top of the hill facing west toward the lake had burned to the ground in a mysterious fire shortly after the 1929 Crash. He and Joe had discovered the ruins while still in grade school and had claimed it for themselves and their friends by right of conquest.

The hill was smaller than he remembered. It took less than an hour to climb, not the half day it once had. But the geography was the same. The hill still rose high above town and lake. The distant school fields lay where they always had. Only they seemed closer now.

Joe had said that he ran into Susan while he was out taking inventory of the new spring plantings on Watermelon Hill. Maybe he did. Maybe he changed the locale of the story for good reason. But the rock in Susan’s drawing was here, not there—on the opposite side of town from Joe’s story and too close to civilization for illicit, commercial horticulture.

There was no mistaking the rampart of the make-believe fort where he and Joe had held off