The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (2 page)

Alan was startled into silence.

“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”

“There isn’t much to say. It was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

He looked down at his feet. “It was in March—just a lousy accident.”

She slumped down into a chair and toyed with her glass of juice. She said, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He remained standing, annoyed with himself for letting his feelings show. “How about your folks?”

“Mommy and Daddy were murdered.”

“Oh, man!”

“You don’t need to worry. I’ve got used to it.”

He took a deep breath. “I’d been on a school skiing trip. It was snowing a bit but it wasn’t any kind of a snowstorm. Dad and Mom were coming to pick me up. A special treat in a chopper. Dad was an experienced pilot. He wouldn’t have taken any risk. A bunch of us, school friends, we wanted to get one more run on the slopes. I look back and I think it was a really stupid thing to do. I keep thinking, what if we hadn’t gone back for that last run? A kid named Rudy Forrester broke his leg. It was a really bad break, with his shinbone poking out through his skin. Mom and Dad—they had to take him to the hospital about thirty miles away. They were supposed to come right back for me.”

The silence between them lasted several seconds.

“All my life, well, I guess I was your typical American kid. You could say I was one of those laid-back guys. To tell you the truth—!” Alan’s right hand suddenly came up and he slapped it against his head, like he somehow wanted to just smack sense into it.

She jumped to her feet and grabbed at his arm. “Please, Alan! Don’t do that. Don’t blame yourself.”

His brown eyes grew distant. “I guess . . . I guess I was some kind of a stupid jerk. The kind of kid who just goes through life without really thinking all that much about anything.”

She held onto his arm, almost hugging it to her. “What happened to them? Was it an accident?”

“That’s what the wreck report said. They made a big thing about the fact it was snowing—and the fact Dad wasn’t familiar with the area. But he was a really good pilot. I just don’t buy it.”

“You don’t think it was an accident?”

“My grandfather, Padraig, doesn’t think so. He’s downright paranoid about it.”

“What? He thinks it was suspicious?”

“I know it sounds kind of crazy. But that’s what he thinks.”

She took him into a large sitting room, with its big chintzy lounge suite and dark mahogany furniture. The strange tower came off it on one corner, and there was an upholstered window seat so you could sit in there and look out into the garden. There were photographs on
the walls of waterfalls and safari shots of lions, zebras, elephants and crocodiles. In between the photographs, Alan saw rusty iron spears and big wooden clubs. He looked at pictures of a younger Kate with her parents outside single-story buildings with white walls and red-tile roofs. They were surrounded by palm trees and colorful tropical plants. Kate’s parents looked slim, medium height. Her father was black-haired and her mother was red-haired, like Kate herself, but a lighter, more golden, red. There was a boy, who looked younger than Kate, with the same red hair.

She brushed her finger over the glass in the frame. “My brother, Billy.”

“And all that’s what—some kind of medical mission?”

“It was a Belgian Catholic Mission, with a school and a small hospital. Mommy was the matron of the hospital and Daddy was the doctor. They worked in the Democratic Republic of the Congo all of the time I was growing up. Billy and me, we lived here with Uncle Fergal and Bridey.” Her green eyes filled with longing. “We used to really look forward to going out there and joining Mommy and Daddy for the long holidays. The mission was close to the gorilla forest. There were palm trees on the grounds and all sorts of fabulous plants. Right outside our bungalow was a giant aloe plant that sent up seed flowers as tall as a tree. Then, when they seeded, the whole plant just withered away and died. Sister Marie Therèse, she was like the Bridey over there. She had such a sense of fun. She used to tell us stories of
what the patients did behind the doctors’ and nurses’ backs. They still believed in spells and potions. She called them
les petites feticheurs
! I loved the Africans too. They needed so very little to make them happy. Mommy used to say that the best smiles she ever saw were African smiles.”

Alan saw that the living room was like a mirror image of the living room back at the sawmill. Bridey and Padraig had each made a shrine to happier times.

“What happened, Kate?”

Her head jerked and her eyes darkened. “There was a lot of trouble going on. There were enough bad people locally already without others coming out of Rwanda. Mommy and Daddy had been told to leave. But they knew if they abandoned the hospital the mission would have been finished. And they thought they were safe because they were a hundred miles away from the border.” She hesitated, blinking a little fast, still staring at the photographs.

“Good thing you weren’t there!”

“I was there and so was Billy.” Kate inhaled and her nostrils dilated. “Sister Marie Therèse saved me. She was in charge of the kitchen gardens. We were out there gathering vegetables when we heard the trucks drive in and then the shots and the screaming. I wanted to run back but she stopped me. There was a . . . a kind of pit. An underground store where she kept yams and stuff. She pushed me into it.” Kate sniffed and rubbed at her nose. “I hid there all through it.” He could see she was
doing her best to fight back tears. “I was still there when government soldiers came around, I don’t know how many days later. They found me in the pit. They . . . they told me the rebels had killed them all . . . everybody . . .”

“Oh, God. I’m . . . I’m really sorry . . .”

“I had counseling. I couldn’t bear to go out. I couldn’t face meeting people—nobody. Not even my friends.” Kate’s face was flushed and her eyelids were blinking so fast they were fluttering. She looked very different from the girl who had pushed him out of the way of the swans.

He touched her shoulder and spoke softly. “C’mon, Kate. Let’s go explore the garden.”

She scampered back out through the door, half running. He gave her a little space to recover her composure. When he caught up with her he found himself standing at the top of a gentle slope of lawn leading down to the open river. Alan followed her gaze across the forty yards of reed-strewn water to the Green, and beyond that, to the mountains, which were so close you felt you could put out your hand and touch them. He realized that they were standing almost exactly opposite the place he had been fishing, but closer to the big fork in the river.

“A good thing Bridey wasn’t watching us earlier!”

Kate managed a nervous laugh. “Bridey would have needed binoculars. But if she had, she’d have had a heart attack.” She was hurrying on again. “Come on—I told you there was something I wanted to show you!”

“Show me what?”

“You don’t know about BSBI.”

“What’s that?”

“The Botanical Society of the British Isles. I’m helping them with a project on rare and threatened plants.” She stopped in front of a small tilled piece of the garden, right by the water, about as far away from the house as it was possible to be. It was divided up into tiny beds, each about a foot square, separated from its neighbors by uneven rows of bricks. He guessed that Kate had laid out the bricks.

“You see?”

The beds were empty except for one.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Go on! Take a closer look!” Kate squatted down, so he did the same. He saw a flower that looked a bit like a dandelion. The label read “Irish fleabane (
Inula salicina
)—rare. K.S. Clonmel, Tipperary.”

“K.S.—that you?”

She nodded, proudly. “It’s on the threatened list. I’m waiting for the seeds so I can send them to the gene bank people in Dublin.”

“Huh!”

She glanced across at him with a wry smile. “If you’re really interested, maybe you could help me.”

“I know nothing about this stuff. If you hadn’t told me what it was, I’d have looked at that plant and I’d have seen a weed.”

Kate’s eyes turned to the Comeragh Mountains, to the forests that clambered over the lower slopes. “I just
knew it was fate. Your grandfather’s woods cover half of those foothills. There are bits of the old original forests up there on the slopes. Bogs, even!”

From the chatter of words she had flung into the air like seeds, Alan’s mind plucked out one more curious than all the others:
fate
.

The Blooming

Mark Grimstone was glad he had agreed to keep his sister company while Mo was looking for crystals. They had scouted a few rocky fields before cutting in to explore the dense woods off Dungarvan Road. After three-quarters of an hour of walking through shadows and being bitten by midges, they came out into a natural clearing, with a white rocky scarp at one edge. Mo went to investigate while Mark passed a moment or two looking around him, swiveling on the heel of his left sneaker. Her squeal of delight meant a discovery had been made.

Mark sat in a patch of grass, lounging back against a heather-covered outcrop, whipping at insects with a switch of ash and wondering why the Reverend Grimstone, his adoptive father, had brought them to the Irish backwater of Clonmel.

Grimstone would play his usual games, pulling in the more gullible locals—those hoping for salvation from their personal demons—into his rituals of head-touching and shouting their sins aloud. This was all in a day’s work for Grimstone’s style of hellfire and brimstone. But why Clonmel? Mark couldn’t fathom it. He gave up trying and slumped back against the outcrop, watching his sister search for treasures against the sun-bright scarp of pearly rock.

Mo was happy poking around among the crystals, or finding something that caught her eye in a single flower head or an insect scuttling among the stems and roots. She’d take ages examining her finds before sketching them into her album. Mark dropped his head, plucking a battered harmonica from the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. His fingers caressed it, as if the feel of it was comforting, and he played a few riffs to while the time away. His eyelids never completely closed, but he relaxed into a daydream, lulled by the peacefulness of the woods and the image of his sister searching for crystals. As he drifted, he began to lose track of time. Only when he noticed that his face and forearms were getting sunburnt did he swear aloud, causing Mo to lift her head.

“Mo! You might have warned me the sun shifted.”

“I—I’ve guh-guh-guh . . . guh-got the cuh-cuh-cream.” Her stammer worsened because he was annoyed with her.

“Oh, it’s alright! I’ll come and get it.”

He climbed back up onto his knees, rubbing the irritated skin of his face and arms. And now he saw, with a start of alarm, that they were not alone. A man was watching them from the far edge of the clearing. Dressed in worn jeans and leather boots that were laced to just below his knees, he was as lean as a scarecrow, with a face that looked like a weather-beaten mask pulled tight over a long bony skull. It was with a thrill of alarm that Mark noticed his eyes. They were an intense bright blue, so luminous that even from a hundred feet away they seemed to glow with an inner source of light.

Suddenly the man stepped out of the shadows and, with a long-legged amble, he closed in on Mo.

She abandoned her backpack and notebook and, scuttling over to Mark’s side, she clutched his arm so fiercely he winced with pain from his sunburned skin.

“Are you aware this is a private wood?”

The words were spoken in a bass growl. And now that he stood over them, they could see the stranger was as tall as a door.

“We’re sorry! We didn’t know we were trespassing.”

“English it would seem, judging by your accent.”

“Stop buh-buh-buh-bullying muh-muh-my brother!”

The old man’s cheeks were lined with vertical wrinkles so deep they could have been gouged by a chisel. His eyes, swiveling from Mark to his sister, were like searchlights.

“You don’t much resemble brother and sister.”

Mark muttered, “We’re adopted, if it’s any of your business.”

The tall man paused a moment, as if to reappraise Mo anew. “And your names, if you please, without the boldness?”

“I’m Mark Grimstone and this is my sister, Mo.”

“Yes, and if I’m not mistaken, you must be the brood of the visiting Reverend Grimstone?”

“You’ve met him?”

“Met him? I certainly have not. Nor would I ever wish to do so. Just what do the pair of you think you’re doing in my wood?”

“My sister is interested in crystals.”

The man gazed down at Mo, focusing the intense blue eyes on her cowering shape. “It was crystals then you were drawing in your notebook?”

Mo nodded glumly.

“Well then, go and fetch it. Show me your drawings.”

Mo ran to fetch both her backpack and the notebook. She handed the book up to the stranger.

The man plucked some iron-rimmed glasses out of the breast pocket of his shirt. His gnarled hands thumbed through the tiny pages and the blue searchlights passed over the drawings and words. His frown turned to curiosity. “Strange and potent images, for all that they are in miniature! And these words that go by them, if words they might be at all, are in no language that I recognize.”

“Mo writes in a language of her own.”

The old man shook his head. “Why would a child go to such extremes?”

“So nobody else can read it.”

The blue eyes were softer now as they confronted Mark’s own. The obvious question lay in the air between them. But the old man was prudent enough to leave it unasked. Instead he turned back to the notebook and carried on browsing. Suddenly he stopped, his finger tracing one of the images. Whatever the old man had seen, it was enough to turn him from the book to Mo, studying her with the same intensity of scrutiny he had previously focused on the book.

“Perhaps your presence here is not without purpose?”

Mark was curious as to what the old man had seen in Mo’s notebook. He was still eyeing Mo, with intense interest. “Sure you’re as elegant as the famous boy pharaoh.”

Mo lifted up her hazel eyes to confront his blue. “Cuh-cuh-cuh-can I have muh-muh-my notebook back, please?”

“On a condition! Will you be so good as to show me what it was you were so busy sketching by the white rock?”

He held the notebook low enough for her to point out her most recent drawings and secret writings, which covered two pages. Then he studied the pages again through the iron-rims, glancing from her drawings to the white rock and back again. He whistled.
“Well now—aren’t you the most remarkable creature. Here I recognize quartz and pyrites, here purple amethyst and ultramarine turquenite. You have the geometry of their structures—that’s a fact. But you’ve captured something deeper than any ordinary eye might see.”

Mo flushed.

“And did you plan to take away some crystals in your satchel?”

It took Mo a second or two to recognize he meant her backpack. She shook her head vigorously. “That wuh-would be suh-suh-suh-stealing.”

“Not if I were to give you permission. An artist of your skill demands that much respect. So take what you will of them. Explore my woods wherever you will, or must.” He returned the notebook to Mo.

Mo nodded her thanks, although her whole body was trembling.

“A final question. How long have you been here, in Clonmel?”

Mark answered, “A little over a week.”

“Yet still time enough for one gifted with such vision. Tell me, Mo Grimstone, have you been surprised by what you’ve observed here?”

Mark said, protectively, “What kind of question is that?”

“Let your sister answer for herself, if she has a mind to.”

Mo gazed back up at him again. “Whu-whu—?”

The tall man leaned closer to Mo, so he could see the true expression in her eyes. “Take your time to find the words. I’m interested to know what might have captured your attention.”

“In nuh-nuh-nature?”

“In nature maybe—or in the nature of things?”

“Nuh-nuh-nature is buh-buh-buh . . .” Mo shook her head, frustrated in her attempts to express the word.

Mark hissed, “I’ve had enough of this. Just leave her alone.”

A huge hand descended over Mark’s left shoulder. “Patience just a moment longer. Leave her room to speak her mind.”

“. . . buh-buh-blooming.”

“Nature is blooming?”

Mo nodded.

The tall man held his face close to that of the girl a moment longer before he straightened up and gazed about himself at the ring of trees.

“These woods are a confusion of trails and half-trails. Will you be able to find your way back the way you came?”

“Of course we will.” Mark turned as if to walk away, but Mo put her hand on his sunburned arm.

“Your sister is perhaps not so sure?”

Mark sighed. “Okay. So why don’t you show us the way out?”

The old man looked down at their anxious faces and abruptly turned on his heel, his long paces already
creating such a lead they had to run after him. He called back over his shoulder without breaking stride. “Oh, I think I’ll do better than that. I’ll escort the pair of you to meet a matching pair of scallywags. You might find you have mischief in common.”

Kate’s notion of fate had come to interest Alan a lot more over the days that followed that first meeting by the river. The loss of Mom and Dad had certainly made him wonder about fate. But he wasn’t sure he believed in it. At least not the superstitious notion of it that Kate and his grandfather had in mind. Over the ten days since then he had enjoyed getting together with her at the sawmill. They had agreed to a daily ramble, planning a route the night before. So far they hadn’t saved any threatened plants from extinction, but they had found a fleabane that was heading toward vulnerable and a cudweed that, if it wasn’t threatened, was still kind of interesting, at least to Kate. Enough to plant two more beds in the garden of the Doctor’s House.

Then, sometime in the middle of all this, Kate had clapped her hands and exclaimed, “We need to get better organized!”

“What do you mean—like some kind of place of our own?”

She clapped her hands. “A den!”

He had talked to his grandfather about it, and only yesterday Padraig had finally agreed that they could
use the former dairy, a detached red-brick outhouse in the shade of a dilapidated old pear tree that was peripheral to the main house and the sawmill complex of buildings. And today, after Kate had arrived, they went to have a good look at the place, finding it filthy, with outdated wiring and old lead plumbing, and chock-full of garbage.

Alan pulled a face. “Boy—what a mess! It looks like it’s been abandoned for half a century.”

But Kate was more enthusiastic. “We’ll just have to put off rambling for a few days and get it sorted out.”

They had only just begun clearing things out when Padraig came striding in off the slopes with two strangers in tow: a slim flaxen-haired boy with a bad case of sunburn, and a girl with strikingly bronze skin and shoulder-length dark brown hair. The boy looked fifteen or sixteen, maybe the same age as Alan and Kate, but the girl looked more like twelve or thirteen.

“Company for you!” Padraig tossed the comment into the air and was gone.

Kate was as surprised as Alan at the appearance of the two strangers, who were peering curiously at the cluster of buildings that stood back from the road, including Padraig’s plain two-story Victorian house, built of the same liver-colored bricks as the dairy, and the labyrinth of corrugated iron sheds, surrounded by piles of logs. Padraig’s return to work was announced by the high-pitched scream of an industrial wood saw.

“Hi!” she said, smiling. “I’m Kate.”

The youth blinked at her, looking embarrassed. “Hi!” he said. “I’m Mark and this is my sister, Mo.”

“And that’s Alan.” She waved to where her newfound American friend was lounging against the trunk of the pear tree.

Alan lifted an arm in greeting.

“You’re English—over here on vacation?” Kate enquired.

“We wandered into the woods and got lost. The old man found us and brought us back here.”

Alan shoved himself off the tree and came to stand next to Kate. “He’s my grandfather, Padraig.”

“You don’t sound local either. You’re American.”

“Yeah, I’m American. Padraig is an O’Brien, my mother’s father. Or I should say was—my folks are dead.”

“Mine too,” Kate added. “We’re both orphans.”

Mark looked as if he didn’t quite know what to say to that. He exchanged glances with Mo, whose eyes widened. Kate thought she had amazingly beautiful eyes, pearly hazel in color, and nothing like the blue eyes of her brother. They appeared lambent against the bronze tones of her skin.

“Whu-whu-whu-what you suh-said about being orphans?”

Kate blinked, taken aback by Mo’s stammer. “It’s true. We’re both orphans. But, well, you know, it was a lot more recent for Alan—only months ago.”

Mo’s eyes shifted fleetingly to Mark, but they returned to look directly at Kate. Her face was tense, her
look questioning as she added, “Muh-Muh-Mark and I, wuh-wuh-we’re . . . adopted.”

Alan exclaimed, “What? Like you’re not really brother and sister?”

“Oh, I can’t believe this,” Kate implored. “Don’t tell me—you’re not saying that you’re orphans too?”

Mark shrugged. “We think we are. But we don’t really know if we’re orphans or not.”

“You don’t even know—sure that’s awful,” muttered Kate.

“We’re used to it.”

Alan groaned. “I can’t believe this. It’s all getting like too much of a coincidence!”

For several moments an uncomfortable silence pervaded the company. Then it was Mo who was the first to break the tension, shoving past Mark to peer into the outhouse. Her gaze took in a jumble of old furniture and pieces of outdated woodcutting equipment. The place stank, as if generations of cats had used it for a toilet. “So whuh-whuh-whuh-what are you planning?”

Alan shoved a clump of brown hair off his brow. “We’re going to make the dairy into a den.”

Mark and Mo couldn’t fail to notice that, under his bangs, Alan had a red triangular birthmark in the center of his forehead.

Kate added, “And we could do with some help.”

Mark seemed to be the last of them to shrug off the tension. Judging from the look on his face, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to spend the rest of the day shifting rubbish.

Mo appeared to read her brother’s mind. She said, “Cuh-cuh-can’t we help them, Mark? Oh, cuh-cuh-cuh . . . c’mon.”

Alan nodded up to the ceiling where there was an antiquated electric light fitting. “Looks like we’ve got juice. And there’s an old porcelain sink over there. So we’ve got water too, if maybe just a cold faucet and lead-piped, so definitely not drinkable. This place used to be a real dairy, back whenever. You’ve got to watch the floor because it slopes away to the corner where you see the sink. But hey! We get the junk shifted and we’ve got space for stuff, like maybe a table and chairs and even a phone line.”