Otherwood Read online

  1 the queen of the wood

  1 the storm

  2 creepy bent

  3 bootlegger

  4 the deadfall

  5 elly rose

  6 the preservation society

  7 the ravine

  8 the compass

  9 the crossing

  10 fox

  11 free-range

  12 spotster

  13 the mushroom man

  14 ancient history

  15 cherry pie

  2 gone

  16 detective roode

  17 dana

  18 ptsd

  19 real

  20 not gone

  21 no such thing

  22 dr. missou

  23 slippery

  24 lies

  25 atlanta

  3 the lady of the lake

  26 school

  27 the referendum

  28 stakes

  29 stony fingers

  30 birthday

  31 pie

  32 grimpus

  33 deluge

  34 crushed

  35 plus fours

  36 bruised

  37 secrets

  4 the notebook

  38 good-bye

  39 bones

  40 all wet

  41 kayak

  42 there is more

  43 book of secrets

  44 it’s a boy

  45 the bunker

  46 the truth

  47 what if

  5 thirteen

  48 birthdays

  49 no mushrooms

  50 the food court

  51 clogs

  52 two malls

  53 gravestones

  54 party

  55 cherry pie

  afterword

  acknowledgments

  Years later, people still talked about it.

  It came out of nowhere, they said.

  Middle of the day.

  Black as night.

  Sideways rain.

  Trees bent and twisted like blades of grass.

  Stuey had been just eight years old, but he remembered the storm as if it were yesterday.

  Thunder you could feel in your belly.

  “Everybody in the basement! Now!” his mom shouted.

  Grandpa Zach rushed outside to close the windows on his writing cottage.

  “Daddy!” Stuey’s mom called after him.

  “I’ll be fine,” Grandpa Zach yelled back. He ducked into the cottage just as the first hailstones came hammering down. A clap of thunder left Stuey’s ears ringing. His mom slammed the door and hustled him downstairs to the basement.

  “Grandpa will wait out the storm in his cottage, Stuey,” she told him shakily. “He’ll be okay.”

  When the thunder finally stopped, Stuey and his mom came up from the basement. Outside, it looked like another world. Trees stripped bare. Grass littered with leaves, twigs, and shingles. Melting hailstones big as fists. Hundreds of sheets of yellow paper scattered everywhere.

  The roof of the guest cottage was gone, torn off by the wind.

  They found Grandpa Zach on the floor behind his desk, curled up, arms wrapped around his belly as if he was hugging himself. Around him were scattered yellow pages covered with his handwriting, his crabbed and spidery script bleeding from the rain.

  Gramps’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the sodden pages. Wet gray hair straggled across his cheek.

  “Stuey, go back to the house,” his mother said.

  “Why?”

  “Just go.”

  Stuey remembered that day the way he remembered nightmares — a sort of horrific slide show, one awful image piled on top of another. He went back to the house, carrying with him the knowledge that Gramps, his best friend, was gone. The shock was so sudden and complete that he couldn’t even cry. He didn’t cry then, nor at Grandpa Zach’s funeral three days later.

  He couldn’t bear to touch the emptiness.

  According to the news, it hadn’t been a tornado but straight-line winds with multiple downbursts — angry clouds firing air cannons at the ground. The cottage had taken a direct hit.

  Half a mile away, in the middle of Westdale Wood, a second downburst had toppled five tall cottonwoods to create an enormous deadfall, but no one had been there to see it.

  The day before the storm, Stuey had discovered the fairy circle.

  Stuey lived with his mom and Gramps at the end of Ford Lane, in the largest and oldest home in Westdale, a three-story house so big they used only half the rooms. The house was gray. Battleship gray, Gramps called it. Stuey’s bedroom was on the third floor overlooking their small apple orchard.

  Their house had been built by Stuey’s great-grandfather. Stuey’s mom had grown up there. Grandpa Zach had lived there his whole life.

  The other six houses on Ford Lane were newer, normal-size homes on smaller lots. There were no kids his age. Stuey’s best friend, Jack Kopishke, had moved away last summer.

  With nobody in the neighborhood to play with, Stuey mostly hung around with his mom and Gramps, or went off by himself to explore.

  On the far side of the orchard was a meadow, and beyond the meadow was Westdale Wood — one square mile of towering oaks, wildflower-carpeted glades, glossy waist-high stands of poison ivy and mayapple, prickly tangles of gooseberry, nettles, burdock, blackcaps, raspberries, and wild grape. There were deer and rabbits and wild turkeys, raccoons and foxes and mink. Butterflies and hornet nests. Cicadas and mosquitoes. Boggy places that would suck the shoes off your feet. Mossy, boulder-strewn ravines. Impenetrable thickets of buckthorn. Stuey had explored only a small part of it. He had never been to the other side.

  That morning, while Gramps was in his cottage writing and his mom was in her studio painting, Stuey wandered off through the apple orchard. The apples were tiny green nubbins. Most of them would be wormy when they got bigger. Gramps didn’t believe in spraying the trees. “Bugs have to eat too,” he liked to say. When autumn arrived they would salvage enough good apples for the three of them.

  Stuey crossed the orchard and waded through the tall grasses of the meadow. On the far side of the meadow stood a grove of white-barked poplar trees. Stuey usually avoided the poplar grove — the trees grew too close together, and the gaps between them were choked with underbrush. But on that day he noticed a narrow deer path leading into the grove, so he followed it. He had gone only a few yards when he came upon a treeless circle of grass.

  The circle was about thirty feet across and brilliant green. The grass hugged the ground, as if someone had been mowing it. Stuey dropped to his knees and ran his hands over the velvety surface.

  He stood up and walked across the circle. His faint footprints lasted only a few seconds before the tiny blades of grass sprang back to erase them. He looked around at the ring of tall, slender poplars pressing in as if they were spectators.

  It felt magical.

  Stuey left the grove and ran back to Gramps’s writing cottage. The old man was hunched over his desk, puffing on his pipe and filling another yellow page with his memories. Even though it was a warm summer day he was wearing the ratty wool cardigan he called his “smoking sweater.”

  “Gramps, come see! I found a fairy circle!”

  “A fairy circle, you say?” Grandpa Zach capped his fountain pen.

  “In the poplar grove!”

  “Fairies in the poplars?” He chuckled.

  “Come see!”

  Grandpa Zach tapped the ashes out of his pipe and set it on his pipe stand. He pressed both hands on his desk and stood up. He adjusted his sweater and his saggy gray pants.

  “Fairies in the poplars,” he said again, shaking his head. “What’ll they think of next?”

  Stuey led him out of the cottage and across the meadow to
the poplars. He had to stop and wait a few times because Gramps was really slow. They followed the path into the grove and came to the circle of green.

  Grandpa Zach laughed, and his laugh turned into a cough, as it often did. He cleared his throat and said, “It’s an old golf green, Stuey. The tenth hole, if I’m not mistaken. This whole woods used to be a golf course, you know.”

  “I know, you’ve told me: ‘The biggest and best golf course in the state.’”

  “That’s right. Built by your great-grandfather. My pop.”

  Grandpa Zach’s father, Stuart Ford, had built Westdale Country Club back in the 1930s. Rich people from Minneapolis and Saint Paul would drive their fancy cars to play Westdale’s tree-lined fairways, its suede-smooth greens, its white-sand bunkers. Gramps had told that story often. But the golf course closed a few years after World War II.

  “There were twenty-seven greens like this back in the day, but I imagine the rest have all been overgrown. Out in those woods you might still find a few patches here and there.” Grandpa Zach bent down and ran his hand over the grass. “This is a special kind of grass called creeping bent.”

  “Creepy bent?”

  “Creeping bent.”

  “I like creepy bent better,” Stuey said.

  “It is a little creepy.” Gramps stood up, knees cracking, and regarded the white-barked trees surrounding them. “It’s almost as if they’re protecting the green. Poplars like sandy soil, and this green was once surrounded by sand traps — Pop always called them bunkers. You dig down under these trees and you’ll find pure white sand trucked all the way from New Mexico.”

  He shook his head sadly and looked down at the soft green carpet beneath his feet. “Now the woods are devouring the past. When I was not much older than you, I used to practice my putting here.”

  Stuey pictured Gramps as a boy, standing on this very place. It was so far away, yet so close and real it sent a shiver up his spine.

  “Times change, Stuey. Before it was a golf course, this was a marsh. You know Barnett Creek? Just north of the highway?”

  Stuey nodded. He and Jack Kopishke had caught crayfish and tadpoles there.

  “Well, there used to be a branch of the creek that flowed south. Where we’re standing now was all water, mud, and cattails. Pop dammed up the south fork back in the thirties and drained the land on this side of the highway. He built our house, and Westdale Country Club.” He looked around with a wistful expression. “I don’t believe there are any fairies here, Stuey. But there might be a ghost or two.”

  “Ghosts?” Stuey’s voice quavered. He didn’t really believe in fairies, but he wasn’t so sure about ghosts.

  Grandpa Zach grinned. “Got you!” he said.

  Stuey grinned back, relieved and feeling kind of silly. Gramps liked to kid around. But suddenly the old man’s smile collapsed and he looked away.

  “Do you know what ghosts are, Stuey? I’ll tell you. They’re secrets haunting the memories of the living. So long as we carry their secrets, they refuse to leave. They wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “To be forgotten. My father has been gone sixty years, but”— he tapped the side of his head — “he’s still here. He never left.”

  That night at dinner, Grandpa Zach drank a bottle of beer. He didn’t drink beer often, but when he did, he always ended up talking about the old days.

  “Back in the twenties,” he said, “your great-grandfather was a bootlegger.”

  “Is that like a pirate?” Stuey asked.

  “More like a smuggler,” Grandpa Zach said. “Alcohol was illegal back then — this was during Prohibition. Pop was sneaking whiskey over the border from Canada. Everybody knew he was doing it, but the old man was smart. He never got caught.”

  Stuey’s mom said, “Daddy, are you sure you want to drag out our family’s dirty laundry?”

  “It was a long time ago,” Grandpa Zach said.

  “Not long enough.” Stuey’s mom stood up and began clearing the table.

  “So, my great-grandpa was a criminal?” Stuey said.

  “Well . . . technically, yes. But when Prohibition ended he got out of the smuggling business and went legit. He used his money to build Westdale Country Club. Chances are the golf course would still be there, but one night, just before sunset, Pop was out on the course playing a few holes all by himself, and he disappeared into thin air.”

  “Disappeared?” Stuey stared wide-eyed, looking for a sign that he was kidding.

  “Daddy!” Stuey’s mom came back in from the kitchen. “You’ll give him nightmares!”

  “No he won’t,” Stuey said.

  Grandpa Zach chuckled, then coughed. He took a sip of water, cleared his throat, and waited for her to go back to the kitchen with another armload of dishes. As soon as she left he leaned closer to Stuey.

  “He disappeared, Stuey. And he wasn’t the only one. A man named Robert Rosen disappeared that same night.”

  “Was Robert Rosen a bootlegger too?”

  “No. Robert Rosen was a lawyer.”

  “My dad was a lawyer.”

  “There are lots of different kinds of lawyers.” He glanced toward the kitchen. “Your father was a corporate lawyer. Robert Rosen was a district attorney. He chased after criminals, and he’d been after your great-grandfather for years. Rosen claimed that Pop was still a crook, but he could never prove it.

  “Their legal battle went on for years. Most everybody in Westdale loved your great-grandfather. He was a real charmer. He gave big donations to all the local causes. He turned a mosquito-ridden marsh into the most beautiful golf course in the state. But a few people resented him because of his past — they thought he was just a crook with money. That was what Robert Rosen thought. Then, that one night, both of them disappeared.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Nobody knows. Rosen’s wife said he’d gone to the club to talk to my father. His car was parked at the clubhouse, and one of the groundskeepers said he saw Rosen walking out onto the course. Some said that Pop murdered Rosen, buried the body, and ran off to Mexico. Others said the opposite. All we know for sure is that neither of them was ever seen again.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I was only seventeen then, just a kid. I used to imagine he was out there someplace, looking for a way home. Sometimes even now I feel him looking over my shoulder.”

  “But why would he want to murder that guy?”

  “I’m not saying he did, Stuey. But there was a lot of bad feeling. Robert Rosen was an educated lawyer from a well-to-do Jewish family back East. Pop never finished high school. He fought his way up from nothing, and sometimes he cut corners. He resented educated people like Rosen, and Rosen had no respect for my dad or what he’d accomplished. It was like they came from different worlds, and neither one of them was willing to accept the other. I think those two men hated each other so bad they just hated themselves out of existence.”

  Stuey’s mom came in and said, “Stuey, don’t listen to him.”

  “Hatred is a powerful force, Annie,” Grandpa Zach said. “Hatred combined with lies and secrets can break the world.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I think you’ve been spending too much time on your book. You’re just picking at old scabs.”

  “It’s history, Annie.”

  “Your history, maybe.”

  “That’s right. And my history is your history, and your history is Stuey’s history.” He turned to Stuey, bristly eyebrows coming together over his long nose. “We’re all connected. My father might be gone, but he left something of himself behind. You spend enough time out in those woods, you’ll see him.”

  “Stop filling his head with rot, Daddy.”

  “Don’t Daddy me, Annie. The dead live on in our memories. I remember the last time I saw my father like it was yesterday. He’ll haunt those woods until the day I die. I watched those trees grow up on Pop’s
grave.”

  “You mean he’s buried in the woods?” Stuey asked.

  “Who knows? It’s the last place he was ever seen. He might still be floating around out there.”

  “Is that why the golf course closed? Because of ghosts?”

  Grandpa Zach shrugged. “The past doesn’t go away just because we want it to. If there are ghosts we’d never know it because real ghosts look exactly like real people.”

  “Have you seen them?” Stuey asked.

  Grandpa Zach closed his eyes, and when he opened them he seemed to be staring at something far away. “I’ve seen people who are gone,” he said. “If they weren’t ghosts, then I don’t know what they were.”

  “Your grandfather is being ridiculous,” said his mother. “There are no ghosts.”

  The old man’s eyes snapped back into focus. He forced an unconvincing smile onto his face.

  “Your mother’s right, Stuey. There are no ghosts. The golf course closed because Pop spent most of his money building it, and the rest on lawyers defending himself from Robert Rosen. We kept it open for a couple years after Pop disappeared. I think Mother expected Pop to walk in the door at any time with that big smile on his face. Boy, would she have let him have it! But Pop never came back, and there were a lot of debts. In the end, the county took the golf course because we couldn’t pay the property taxes. All they let us keep was this house and the ten acres it’s sitting on.

  “When I was younger I thought that one day I’d make a pile of money and buy the land back. That’s what Pop would have wanted — to keep it in the family. Maybe you can do that, Stuey.”

  “I’ll be a bootlegger!” That sounded like the coolest thing ever.

  “No you won’t,” his mom said.

  “A bootlegger and a murderer!” he said, just to bug her.

  “Honey, we don’t know that anybody killed anybody,” his mom said. “All we have is a sixty-year-old rumor being kept alive by an eighty-year-old crank.”

  “I’m only seventy-nine,” Grandpa Zach muttered.

  “Well, you’re acting like you’re six.” She picked up their water glasses and went back to the kitchen.

  Gramps looked after her and sighed. “I’ll always wonder what would have happened if Robert Rosen hadn’t followed Pop out onto that golf course that night. Every time we make a decision there’s a fork in reality, an infinity of possibilities. There are many worlds, but we can only know the one we live in. Maybe in one world my father killed Rosen, and in another reality it was the opposite. Maybe there are worlds where people are still out there hitting golf balls.”