Hearts Divided - Page 28/38

And this summer’s new hardcover, Caroline’s Journal, also to be published in August, is set in my own hometown, Seattle.

I hope you enjoy The Apple Orchard and, if the spirit moves you, the other books. Please drop by my Web site—www.katherinestone.com—anytime. I’d love to hear from you, too. My mailing address is Katherine Stone, P.O. Box 758, Mukilteo, WA 98275.

Thanks for spending time with Clara, Elizabeth and Nick.

With all best wishes,

To those who serve, and those who love them

Prologue

Sarah’s Orchard, Oregon

December 18

Twenty-seven years ago

His mom’s boyfriend, Dennis, was going to be really mad. So would Marianne, his mom. Dennis would take Nick’s being late out on her, too.

How many times, Dennis would shout, had he made it clear that if Nick wasn’t home from school by three-thirty, the house would be locked, the burglar alarm set, and Nick would have to wait outside until his mom and Dennis returned from work at 1:00 a.m.?

It wasn’t an idle threat. Since September, when Marianne and Nick had moved to Sarah’s Orchard to live with Dennis, Nick had spent five nights outside. Dennis didn’t care that Nick had an excuse for his tardiness. In each instance, the entire second-grade class—Nick’s class—at Orchard Elementary had been dismissed late. It wasn’t because of bad behavior, Nick had tried to explain. All five times there’d been something to celebrate.

Today’s celebration, a Christmas party, was worth whatever punishment Dennis chose to inflict. It didn’t matter how cold Nick would be by the time Dennis and Marianne returned. Nick’s teacher had played the piano, and all the second-graders had gathered round to sing carols. The students took turns singing verses. No one laughed when words were forgotten or the tune was off key.

Nick wasn’t sure his classmates even detected the discordant notes. He did. He couldn’t help it. According to his teacher, he had perfect pitch. He hadn’t known it before enrolling at Orchard Elementary. In fact, seven-year-old Nicholas Lawton hadn’t even realized he could sing.

But he could, and he loved it.

He’d sing carols tonight, he decided as he ran toward the house—two miles away—where Dennis was probably shouting already. He’d sing as he froze on the porch. His carols would be sung quietly and in the shadows. The neighbors mustn’t know he was alone every evening, Dennis had warned, whether he was guarding Dennis’s house from the outside or within.

That was Nick’s job, to make certain no one tried to break in while Dennis and Marianne were at the tavern where cocktail waitress Marianne served the drinks that bartender Dennis poured. Dennis made drugs in the basement of the dilapidated house on Center Street. Nick had never seen the lab. The door was always locked.

If not for his illegal enterprise, Dennis wouldn’t have cared when Nick got home from school. It wasn’t Nick’s comfort—food, shelter, warmth—that made him furious when Nick was so late Dennis had to leave before he arrived. Dennis wanted Nick inside, awake and watchful, ready to call the tavern should anyone approach.

Nick had made a number of such calls. Dennis had never thanked him, but he’d come home right away. He’d yelled at the uninvited visitors, and on two occasions, he’d waved his gun around until they left. Even when he’d stopped yelling long enough to sell drugs to the intruders, he’d warned them that any future transactions would take place only at the bar.

Dennis could’ve given Nick the code for the burglar alarm. That way, Nick could let himself in on the afternoons he was late, reset the alarm once inside and be close to the phone if he needed it. Nick wasn’t tall enough to reach the alarm panel. But if Dennis put a chair beneath it…

Nick made the mistake of suggesting to Dennis that he give him the code. Dennis laughed in a mean way, laughing at Nick for being so stupid as to imagine he’d trust him to begin with, much less trust that once he had the code, he wouldn’t simply leave the house and spend the evening elsewhere instead of “earning his keep.”

Nick was doing his best to make it home before Dennis locked him out. He was running as fast as he could. He didn’t even slow his pace as he neared the apple orchard for which the town had been named.

Nick knew the town’s history. All Orchard Elementary second-graders did. Their teacher believed it was important for them to know, and told the story in a fairy-tale way. Nick loved this story; he’d memorized its every detail.

Many years ago, the tale began, Dr. James Keeling and his wife, Sarah, moved from the big city, Portland, to what was then the farming community of Riverville.

The Keelings had an apple tree in Portland. Sarah treasured the tree and its apples. The tree was too large to be transplanted, but the cuttings Sarah took flourished on the small piece of Riverville farmland the town’s new doctor had purchased.

Apples hadn’t been grown in Riverville until Sarah planted her orchard. But they became the crop of Riverville, which was renamed Sarah’s Orchard in honor of the doctor’s wife. Sarah’s husband left a legacy, too. The Keeling Clinic. Renowned for its exceptional staff and unsurpassed expertise in any number of medical specialties, the clinic was a referral center for patients from coast to coast.

Sarah’s acre of apples had been a family orchard, not a working one, and that was how it stayed.

All the town’s orchards were beautiful when the apples were ripening and the leaves were green. But Nick thought the orchard that had been Sarah’s remained beautiful even after the fruit was plucked and the branches were bare.

He didn’t know what made the trees beckon to him on these wintry afternoons. He knew only that they did. Time permitting, he always paused to catch his breath against the orchard’s three-railed fence. And on the afternoons when he dashed out of the classroom the moment the dismissal bell sounded, there was time, once his breath returned, to sing a song or two.

Nick wished he could sing carols, even one carol, to the apple trees on this December day. Or, having made sure that Dennis and his mom had already left the house on Center Street, he could go back to the orchard and spend the evening here. It wouldn’t feel as cold—here. Somehow the barren trees would warm him.

But on the nights Nick was forced to keep vigil from the porch, Dennis would get tavern customers, drunken ones, to drop by. They were supposed to confirm that Nick was there—and that, as they approached, he demand to know who they were and what they wanted.

Nick ran past the orchard, stumbling—but not falling—as he took his eyes from the path ahead to the trees he wanted to see. In the distance he saw the farmhouse.

When the Keelings lived there, it had been painted white and teal—which, his teacher explained, was a blend of green and blue. The new owners kept the original color scheme until the end of World War Two. With the help of the entire town, the young bride painted it daffodil-yellow with butter-cream trim. She wanted it to look like a beacon, to guide her soldier husband home.

The soldier must have liked the beacon. The farmhouse was still yellow and cream, glowing to Nick even on cloudy afternoons.

Today, the house also glowed from within. All the lights were on. The eaves were adorned for Christmas, as were the apple trees that lined the drive. Those closest to the house twinkled white. Along the drive itself the trees were wrapped in lights the color of ripe apples.

For the past three weeks, Nick had noticed the strands coiled around the trunks and limbs. Until today, the Christmas lights hadn’t been illuminated when he ran by. It wasn’t twilight even now. But the trees were shining. The family was celebrating, too. It was a large gathering, Nick saw. The partygoers had overflowed to the porch, and the grounds.

They seemed to be searching. And shouting. Their shouts weren’t angry, like Dennis’s—or his mom’s previous boyfriends’.

These shouts sounded worried.

The road dipped, leaving the farmhouse and its noises behind. The orchard entrance lay ahead, at the bottom of the long, steep drive. The entrance was twinkling, an archway of red and white, and just inside, at the base of a lighted tree, was a sobbing child.

She wasn’t very old. Two or so. And she was really sobbing. The kind of hiccupping wails that only grew silent when it became necessary for her to breathe.

Nick had witnessed such sobbing before. Marianne’s boyfriend before Dennis had a two-year-old daughter who cried like this. Nick hadn’t been allowed to comfort her. She needed to learn not to cry, her father had said.

No one was forbidding Nick to comfort this sobbing girl. Without hesitation he ran to her.

“Don’t cry!” he implored.

She looked at him and immediately wailed.

She didn’t seem injured, although her holly-green tights had dirt stains at the knees. Nor did she seem cold; in her heavy Christmas sweater, she was probably warmer than Nick.

Maybe she was scared.

Maybe a carol would help.

“Jingle Bells” wasn’t Nick’s favorite. “A Midnight Clear” was.

But “Jingle Bells” might cheer her up, if she could hear his singing above her cries.

She could, and when she did, she stared at him. It was a bold stare and, at first, an indignant one—as if she’d been enjoying a perfectly good cry and how dare he make it end?

Then she smiled, beamed. Her stare had been one of surprise, he decided, not indignation. Surprise that what had felt like hopelessness could be vanquished by a song.

“You belong up there, don’t you?” he asked, glancing at the drive. “You’re the reason everyone’s searching. They probably figure there’s no way you could’ve made it this far.”

She didn’t say anything, but the smile disappeared and new tears threatened.

“Don’t start crying again, okay? I’d better carry you.” Assuming he could lift her.

She was a healthy toddler. He was small for his age. Very small, as Dennis—and others—never failed to point out.

She was heavy. Nick staggered a little under her weight. It helped when she curled her arms around his neck and hung on.

Nick began singing, and she joined in.

“‘Jingle bells,’” she crooned. “‘All the way.’”

Her jumbled lyrics were nothing compared to the tune she couldn’t carry.

But she had a happy voice, and the tears were gone. She’d obviously concluded that it wasn’t so bad, in fact fun, to be carried up the hill. She pointed to the twinkling branches overhead and giggled as she sang.

When they reached the crest of the hill and were spotted by a searcher who shouted the wonderful news, she was immediately surrounded by the kind of love Nick wouldn’t have believed existed if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

Whisked from his arms, the girl was held jointly by her weeping parents while the large circle of people who loved her wept, laughed and marveled that she’d wandered so far, so fast—especially since, or so they’d thought, they were all keeping an eye on her.

In moments, the toddler and her entourage were moving as one toward the farmhouse. Nick was halfway down the drive when he heard the male voice behind him.