Wilderwood Ch. 06

"I've heard this part of town called that, by Chris mostly, but I always figured he was just bragging. I didn't know it was official."

"It's not, but people do call it that." Emma waves a hand idly and dips another fry into the sauce. "Half the people in here right now probably work at up at the Mill, or at some other business that's connected to it. The Lakes are more important to this part of town than the Wilderwoods ever will be, because of the Mill, but Chris could walk in here right now and nobody would recognise him. Or us."

"So you're saying I should relax."

"I'm saying, " Emma holds out another sauce dipped fry to me, "you should relax, and eat your fries."

She grins as I lean forward and snag the fry with my teeth, feeling her fingertips brush momentarily against my lips as I do. She's stroking my leg with her foot under the table and I really want to lean forward and kiss her. Like any other guy might kiss his girlfriend.

I don't though.

= = =

I've got my arm loosely around Emma's shoulder when we leave the diner a little later. The sun has gone down while we were inside and my sister takes a few deep breaths of the cooler night-time air.

"Want to go for a walk before we head for home?"

"Here?"

I take another look around. On one side of the road the houses start to thin out and the trees grow denser. On the other side of the road is mostly fenced off industrial units and warehousing, a lot of which look unoccupied. It's not exactly scenic.

Emma slips her arm around my waist and I go along with her as we cross the road and start walking up the hill. Neither of us say much for a few minutes, and as we ascend the hill it gets a lot quieter, except for when a car or a truck passes by.

"We should do this more often, " says Emma eventually. "Just hang out at a diner or go and see a movie or something. Do all the regular girlfriend/boyfriend stuff."

"Yeah."

"It's not like everyone knows who we are, " my sister continues. "Like in the diner. Noone knew us in there."

"Yeah."

Emma falls silent again and we walk a little further. It's darker now, up here, with Wilderwood Forest looming on the far side of the road, and the streetlights on this side are increasingly widely spaced and isolated from one another.

"I figured it would be different when we got upstate, " Emma says eventually. "We wouldn't have to tell everyone you were my brother. We could say we were cousins or something. Distant cousins."

"People would still find out, eventually."

"I know, " my sister replies, "but it would take longer."

"Yeah."

Emma stops walking and slides out from under my arm. She stands facing me, though there's so little light from the nearest streetlight far behind us, or the next far ahead, that I can only see her in shadows.

"Something's bothering you, " she says, "and it's not college, or Dad. So what is it?"

She's right, of course. It's been on my mind ever since the drive out to Conway. It's not college. It's not Dad. I don't even know exactly what 'it' is, but I know enough to be afraid, for both of us.

"So what is it?"

As she asks the question a car comes up the road on the other side of the street and for a moment her face is lit up by the beams of the headlights. I look into her brilliant green eyes.

"What are you really thinking about?"

= = =

"You want some coffee?"

Huh?

I'd been watching my Dad and Morgan walk up the main street to the storefront where the cars were parked, but now I saw Henry coming out of the store again with another mug in his hand. I hadn't seen him move from his chair while Dad was talking to Morgan, but then I'd only been watching them.

He held up the mug. "You want some coffee?"

"Uh, sure."

"Brewed fresh." He filled the mug and since I figured Dad would be a while I sat down in the other chair, across from where Henry was sitting.

I took a cautious sip. It was strong, but smoother than I'd expected. I don't imagine we'd serve it at the cafe, but it tasted okay. I took a longer drink and nodded appreciatively over at Henry, who just grunted and nodded across the forecourt to where the vending machines were lined up.

"Better than you'd get out of them things for sure."

He leaned back in his chair and looked out across the forecourt, or maybe beyond it to where the ground fell away steeply at the edge of the depot, down to the forest below.

"Didn't take you for a Wilderwood, " he said slowly. "When you were here last."

So he did remember me being here.

"Reckoned you and Miss Emma had more of an understanding. That's what I thought when I saw the two of you."

He didn't say it in a sly or insinuating way, just a statement of fact.

"Recognised your sister of course. Ain't seen her since she was so high, but she's got the real Wilderwood eyes and no mistake."

"I don't have green eyes, neither does my Dad."

He looked sidelong at me.

"'Ain't so common on the male side, so that's no matter. Nathan don't have them either, nor his daddy before him."

"His daddy? You knew my - " I needed to take a second to work it out " - my great grandfather?" It didn't sound likely, since great-uncle Nathan is something like 80 years old, but I still wanted to hear what he had to say, since there's not actually much said about our family, despite the elevated status of the Wilderwood name.

He didn't answer directly. "Richard's sister, Jane, now she had the Wilderwood eyes, just like your sister does. Richard didn't, nor Joseph neither as I heard it. 'Course I was only a little 'un when I'd see them up at the big house when their swell friends came visiting.

"All those big cars, " he said it almost like he was talking to himself, and a gave a little smile at some old and fond memory before he turned back to me. "Come from all over the state, they did, and out of state too."

I guess maybe the sight of an out of state licence plate had been a big deal at one time.

"He did a lot for this town, old Richard did." He chuckled. "My own daddy worked for him back in the day, down in the valley."

"He was a... forester?" I don't know why I thought that, except that so far as I knew there was nothing much down in the valley, so I'd figured that it must have been something like that.

"Forester?" Henry chuckled again. "My daddy didn't know one end of an axe from the other. He knew how to drive though, 'n used to tell me how he'd drive your great granddaddy's whisky 'long the old road that led through the Wilderwood. Reckon he did more'n just drive too, but he never did talk much about that side of things."

My friend Chris can recite his family history back to the Revolution. So can just about everyone else I know who's part of one of the old families. We're different. Me and my sister were never really encouraged to learn our family history, other than if it came up when we were being taught the history of the town at school.

Which didn't include the fact that my great grandfather was apparently a bootlegger.

"'Course things were different in those days, and the Wilderwoods never did much care what other people thought of 'em. Even those as knew what was going on, then and later, didn't say nothing as worth mentioning."

Henry paused then and sipped his coffee, looking at me over the rim of the mug like he was deciding whether to continue.

"Don't reckin nobody said nothing to you neither, I'm thinking."

I shook my head.

"'Course this is all long before you come along." He nodded to himself. "Your daddy himself weren't more than a baby when James Sr. come back to Wilderwood. That would've been '71 or thereabouts."

I took another second to work that out. James Sr. would be my grandfather.

"Came back? I didn't know he'd ever left."

"That he did. Went to college upstate and never did come back until such times as old Richard looked set to be leavin' this world. 'Course Richard had his own ideas about that and didn't pass until '73. Kept James waitin' a sight longer than he'd ha' liked."

I thought about Dad and Uncle Nathan, and how the Wilderwoods seem to spend a lot of time waiting for each other to die. Only there was something in what he'd said that didn't make sense.

"Nathan was the older brother, " I said. "My granddad wouldn't have expected to inherit the Hall anyway."

Henry shook his head.

"James was the elder, by three years or four I reckon, an' had every reason to believe he'd be the one inheritin'. Only Richard had different ideas an' when he passed he left the big house and all that went with it to Nathan. James didn't get not one red cent that I know of." He rapped his now empty mug on the table. "That's the truth of it, and I don't know as James and Nathan ever spoke more'n ten words to one another from that day 'til the day James died."

He fell silent after that and I didn't say anything either. I'd noticed before that people in town, especially older people, seemed to know as much of the Wilderwood family history as I did and maybe more, so I had no reason to doubt what Henry was saying. In fact the more I thought about it the more it made sense.

I'd never really known my grandfather. He'd died when me and my sister were still kids, but sitting there taking all this in it occured to me that it was only after he died that we started going up to Wilderwood Hall. I don't think we'd even met Uncle Nathan before then.

What really hit me though was realising that this was why we lived in the suburbs and not up on Hamilton Hill. We had the Wilderwood name, but we weren't in line, and in small towns like this, among the old money families, that's what matters.

All of a sudden Dad's reluctance to talk up the family history, and his falling out with Uncle Nathan, made a lot more sense.

Henry poured himself some more coffee. "'Course in time James did okay for himself in business, much like your dad. Wasn't the same though, I'd reckon. Like how Wilderwood House ain't Wilderwood Hall, if you catch my meaning."

I didn't. Some people said Wilderwood Hall, some said Wilderwood House, but they were always talking about the big house on the outskirts of town. The way Henry said it was like he meant two different places, but I had something else I wanted to ask that was more important than trying to decipher his turn of phrase.

"Why are you telling me this?"

He gestured with his mug at the billboard across the way. "Reckon your daddy is stirring things up that are best not stirred. Too much history 'round these parts and all best left alone. That's how old Richard saw it and I'd ha' said Nathan thought the same only maybe he don't."

He paused again and turned his head to look up toward the main street. I followed his gaze and saw Dad had come out of the storefront and was standing by the cars, talking to Morgan. As we watched Morgan walked back inside, and Dad turned and started coming back down the road toward us.

Henry turned back to me and lowered his voice.

"People been here, see, and asking questions that don't want answering. Reckon if you are a Wilderwood as I'm thinking then that's a thing you ought to know."

"People asking questions? About us?"

"Real fancy fella. All dressed in black like a preacher only never saw no preacher wearing gold." He chuckled. "Or sunglasses on a cloudy day."

It had to be Alex Trowley he was talking about. I already knew he was a conspiracy nut who was convinced that the town was hiding some unthinkable secret, but I'd always assumed he was talking about satanists or aliens or something else that was really out there, like how he claimed the Newley Institute runs mind control ops for the CIA.

I'd also always figured that if he found out about me and my sister it would be by accident, while he was looking into something else. Like his thing about Emma's friends being witches and conducting rituals in the Wilderwood. That wouldn't have led him out here to Conway though, so the only reason he'd be out here asking questions was if he knew I'd been out here with Emma.

Which made no sense, seeing as we'd only been seen by a few people while we were out here, and none of them were likely to be talking to Alex Trowley.

Thinking about it later I should have asked if Henry meant 'us' as in me and my sister, or 'us' as in the Wilderwood family. It could've been either, but it was too late to ask since Dad was now walking across the forecourt.

"Hey, Henry, " he said, smiling. "He's not been giving you any trouble, has he?"

Henry shook his head, slowly. "Not a bit of it, Mr. Wilderwood. Very fine young man you have here indeed."

"Sure." Dad walked over to the pumps and started filling up. "You've probably already met my daughter Emma, right? I guess she's been out here a few times since she got her bike."

The old man made a big show of scratching his head.

"No, " he said eventually. "Reckon I would've remembered that. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for her of course, if she passes this way."

"She's hard to miss."

= = =

"So what is it?"

People asking questions? About us?

Emma's face is lit up by the beams of the headlights of the car coming up the hill behind us. I look into her brilliant green eyes.

Her Wilderwood eyes.

"What are you really thinking about?"

"Us, " I say.

I take my sister in my arms and hold her close. The car passes by, taking the light with it, and the shadows close in around us again.