You idiot, Harris thinks. “Yes, well, I suppose it’s possible.”
“Sir, I’m here only because I believe that we can be of mutual benefit to one another. My employer, R.J. Holt of New Brunswick, has an interest in locating your brother, who’s taken something of his. And we’d like your help in finding him.”
“I’m listening.”
“We suspect your brother is making his way west, possibly to you. So all I need is for you to let me know if, and from where, he contacts you. You do that, and your lavatory habits will remain forever unremarked.”
“Alive or dead, I highly doubt my brother wants anything to do with me, Mr. Lomax. But if you hold to your word, regardless of whether I hear from him or not, you have yourself a deal.”
“That settles it,” Lomax says, rising to his feet and shaking Harris’s hand. “I’ll drop by your offices next week.”
“For what purpose will you drop by my offices, Mr. Lomax?” Harris asks. “We’ve reached an understanding. You provide me with your details and I’ll alert you if my brother contacts me.”
“Oh, sure,” Lomax says. “Still, I’ll nip by your offices next week, just to see how things are progressing. Good afternoon, Mr. Greenwood.”
After he’s gone, Harris remains seated on the wide stump for some time, his eyes stinging in the pungent sea breeze. It will be hours before he can draw an easy breath.
STORM CELLAR
THE DAY AFTER Detective McSorley and his men search her farm and scare Everett and his child off, Temple wakes early. Normally a fountain of idle chatter, Gertie is silent while she prepares the percolator as though it’s a holy sacrament. Yesterday Gertie tearfully confessed that one of the men had spotted her fetching Everett’s envelope of pay from the lockbox before handing it to him. Gertie hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but after McSorley left, she discovered the lockbox had been jimmied open. The group of men who did it took no more than what was owed them on payday, but they did it because they resented Everett receiving his money early. They then walked into Estevan to drink cheap whiskey and swim in the water tower. But the damage was done, and while the money was lawfully theirs and they were right to expect equal treatment, Temple still banned them for life for disobeying her.
After McSorley unsuccessfully searched the farm, he begrudgingly accepted that the child reported on her farm was in fact her sister’s. The detective was, however, correct about one thing: the coming weather. Over breakfast the sun only manages the faintest bruise of orange behind the tide of dust gathering in the south. By ten o’clock, the butterflies and grasshoppers are fidgety, clacking suicidally against the windowpanes of the house as if trying to shatter the glass to seek refuge inside. By noon, the oddly chilly wind is forceful enough to flutter Temple’s eyelids against her eyeballs. It seems to blow from every point on the compass—not in gusts, but steadily, as though from a fan. The sky purples throughout the afternoon, and by the time her farmhands are on the porch for supper, a lacerating dust is throwing buckets and feed sacks against the siding of the house, while out in the distance an inverted mountain, black as coal, races directly at them like a highballing train.
The temperature plummets and an eerie, greenish light falls as Temple and her men leave their plates where they are and rush to unhitch the livestock so they don’t strangle. With that done, Temple and any men who haven’t already run off make for the storm cellar beneath the library. She watches the windmill pump detach from its housing above her well near the willow and take to the sky as though lifted by invisible wires. As they pull closed the storm doors, she’s wracked by the sudden fear that she’s locking Everett and Pod out, even though she knows they’ve already escaped west. If only she could rescue at least some of her library’s most valuable books—those handsome volumes of Dante with the wildflowers pressed between every second page, or that copy of the Odyssey that Everett had risked leaving out for her to find in the library—but there’s too little time.
Shut in the storm cellar, Temple feels the very atmosphere convulse. She’ll learn later that by the time the cyclone reaches Estevan proper it measures a full country mile wide, dragging its helical blade like a plow over a fifty-mile stretch of earth before it will finally dissipate. The devouring wind takes grackles, chickens, prairie dogs, cows, crows, and jackrabbits—creatures domestic or wild, it doesn’t matter—into the air, and batters them against the other things wheeling there. Telegraph lines snap, automobiles roll and crumple, rail cars rise from their tracks and twirl lazy circles like wingless airplanes. Granaries become dervishes of boards and nails, and most of the area’s trees are yanked from the ground as easily as one pulls a ripe carrot.
She hears her house go first: a crackling bedlam of shattered timber and glass thrown in a hundred-foot radius. When the vortex approaches the church, she feels the air pressure drop and hears the glass explode inward above her, a million shards of shrapnel thrown across the library’s dusty floor. When the roaring cone touches down on the library, she hears the roof removed with a tremendous screech of pulled nails and an almighty sucking whoosh. Then comes the uncanny sound that Temple Van Horne will surely never forget, not in all of her life: ten thousand books drawn up into the sky, all at once.
A RETREAT
BEFORE WAKING HIM, Harris gently blindfolds Feeney with a silk necktie. He then spends nearly an hour clumsily aiding his describer with his dressing, and after that they’re driven to the harbour where they board Harris’s schooner, crewed by men he’s hired just for the day, men of no association with Greenwood Timber whatsoever.
As per Harris’s instructions, the ship cuts across the inlet, passes Port Browning, then bears north. Gulls squawk and salt spray dampens their faces. “Tell me what I’m looking at,” Feeney says midway through the voyage in a pitch-perfect imitation of Harris. And Harris proceeds to conjure the picturesque seascape of his imagination in his best Irish lilt.
After some hours they drop anchor and are rowed to the small jetty in a sheltered bay, which Harris knows is invisible from the inlet.
“What do you see?” Harris says, removing Feeney’s silk blindfold when they step from the rowboat.
“A forested island. Green and lush as any I’ve laid eyes on. Where Douglas firs poke their delicately needled fingers into the clouds.”
“Rockefeller hadn’t even bothered to name this place before he sold it to us,” Harris says as they leave the jetty with their bags and supplies while the rowboat departs. “Before the English conquered it, the local Heiltsuk called it Qanekelak, which I’m told means “shapeshifter” in their language. I considered naming it after you, though that would draw undue attention. So I’ve gone with my second choice: Greenwood Island.”
“Inventive,” Feeney says, before they set out upon a deer path no wider than their shoulders.
“Well, look at this,” Feeney says, after he’s led for a half hour.
“Describe it to me, Liam,” Harris replies.
“Amid a glade of fir, cypress, and cedar, upon a low rise,” Feeney narrates as they come to a stop, “sits a cabin, overlooking the sea, its rough-milled siding still pink and unsilvered by the sun.”