shed and fell across the dirt floor. Albert took out some of the food he’d bought that morning, and we ate. Finally, exhausted from the day, we lay down to sleep, without Emmy even asking for a story but with Puff on her hand, gently cradling her cheek.
My earlier resentment had passed, as it always did. Lying on my blanket beside Albert, I was happy to have him for a brother, though I had no intention of telling him so. I didn’t always understand him, and I knew that, more often than not, I was a bafflement to him as well, but the heart isn’t the logical organ of the body, and I loved my brother deeply and fell asleep in the warmth of his company.
* * *
IN THE NIGHT, Emmy had one of her fits. I heard the commotion and woke in an instant. She lay in a pool of moonlight, writhing, her jaw clenched, her eyes rolled up in her head, every muscle of her body quivering.
We’d seen this once before, Albert and Mose and me, on the Frosts’ farm, a few months after the accident that had killed her father and put Emmy in a coma. Everyone thought that when she came back to consciousness, she was fine. But several weeks later, when we saw her fall in the farmyard and begin to shake as if she’d been possessed by some terrible demon, Mrs. Frost had been forced to tell us the truth. Since the accident, on rare occasions, Emmy suffered these fits that resembled epileptic seizures but, doctors had assured her, were not. In fact, they had no explanation. The fits didn’t seem to harm Emmy in the least, and after she came out of them, she was just fine and remembered nothing. Mrs. Frost didn’t want this information broadly known, and she had sworn us to secrecy. As far as we knew, no one at Lincoln School was aware of Emmy’s condition. I thought that if the Black Witch had known, she’d never have wanted to adopt the little girl.
Albert held Emmy in his arms until the fit passed and Emmy opened her eyes. She looked dazed and said groggily, “He’s not dead, Odie. He’s not dead.”
“Who’s not dead?” I asked.
But Emmy closed her eyes immediately afterward and went back to sleep. We wrapped her in her blanket and laid her down.
Mose signed, Bad dream.
Which seemed the most likely explanation, and I wondered if the dream had been about DiMarco, and the bad part was that he wasn’t actually dead. I didn’t want to be a murderer, but even more I didn’t want DiMarco back in this world.
We all returned to our sleep.
* * *
AT DAWN THE next morning, a gruff voice woke us: “Trespassers.”
I sat up instantly, and so did Albert and Mose. Little Emmy didn’t seem to have heard.
“Goddamn trespassers. Come out of there, boys.”
The man was tall, awkwardly built, and held a shotgun in his hands. His face was like a diamond, a hard thing cut at sharp angles. He had a black patch over one eye. The other eye glared at us, and I recognized him from the mercantile in Westerville the day before, the man who’d bought an alarm clock.
Albert and Mose and I stood, but Emmy woke more slowly, probably the result of her fit in the night. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. When he saw her, the pig scarer stared as if he were seeing a ghost.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE WILD PIG scarer took the pillowcase that held everything of value to us.
“Barn,” he said and waved his shotgun barrel toward the beat-up structure.
Who argues with a shotgun? We filed out of the shed and walked ahead of him, keeping together. I held one of little Emmy’s hands, Mose the other. Albert took the lead, and like lambs to slaughter, we followed him into the dark of the barn.
The only piece of machinery inside was an old black Ford flatbed, the same kind of truck Emmy’s folks had owned and the tornado had thrown on its back. The place smelled of hay, although there were just a few bales in evidence. A whole array of orchard tools hung along the front wall, and hand tools hung from a pegboard above a workbench. In one corner, wooden pallets stood stacked higher than a man was tall. There was what looked like the remains of a large cider press against the back wall, broken into pieces