Ross shook his head slowly. "I don't think I should. I think I should settle this here and now."
"Maybe that's what he's hoping you'll try to do. He said he wasn't alone." She paused to let the implication sink in. "Leave it for another time. Let's just go home."
"I don't like that old man," Bennett muttered, her thin face haunted as she pulled Harper close. "What was he talking about, anyway? It was hard to hear."
"Scary man," her daughter murmured, hugging her back.
"Scary is right," Nest agreed, ruffling the little girl's parka hood in an effort to lighten the mood. Her eyes found Bennett's, and she spoke over the top of Harper's head. "Mr. Gask thinks we have something that belongs to him. He's not very rational about the matter, and I can't seem to persuade him to leave us alone. If he comes to the house again, don't open the door, not for any reason."
Bennett's mouth tightened. "Don't worry, I won't." Then she shrugged. "Anyway, Penny said he—"
She caught herself and tried to turn away, but Nest moved quickly in front of her. "Penny? Penny who? What did Penny say?"
Bennett shook her head quickly. "Nothing. I was just—"
It can't be, Nest was thinking, remembering the strange, wild-haired girl at the church. "Penny who?" she pressed, refusing to back off.
"Leave me alone!"
"Penny who, Bennett?"
Bennett stopped moving, head lifting, eyes defiant. She brushed at her lank hair with one gloved hand. "Get over yourself, Nest! I don't have to tell you anything!"
"I know that," Nest said. "You don't. But this is important. Please. Penny who?"
Bennett took a deep breath and looked off into the distance. "I don't know. She didn't tell me her last name. She's just a girl I met, that's all. Just someone I talked to a couple times."
"Someone who knows Findo Cask?"
Bennett flicked her fingers in a dismissive gesture. "She says he's her uncle. Who knows?" She fumbled in her pockets for her cigarettes. "I don't think she likes him any more than we do. She makes fun of him all the time."
"All the time," Nest repeated, watching as Bennett lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Like all last night, maybe. Because that's who you were with. "What did she say about Findo Gask?" she asked again.
Bennett blew out a thin stream of smoke. "Just that he was leaving town in a day or so and wouldn't be back. Said it was the only thing they'd ever agreed on, him leaving this pissant little town." She sighed. "I just thought that meant we probably wouldn't be seeing him again because he'd be gone, that's all. What's the big deal?"
Ross was staring at both of them, eyes shifting from one to the other.
"Does Penny have wild red hair?" Nest asked quietly.
Bennett's gaze lifted. "Yeah. How did you know that?"
Nest wondered how she could explain. She decided she couldn't. "I want you to listen to me, Bennett," she said instead. "I can't tell you how to live your life. I won't even try. It's not my job. You're here with Harper because you want to be, and 1 don't want to chase you off by giving you a lot of orders. But I won't look the other way when I think you're in danger. So here it is. Stay away from Penny and Cask and anyone you think might be friendly toward them. You'll have to trust me on this, just like I have to trust you on some other things. Okay?"
"Yeah, okay." Bennett took a last drag on her cigarette and dropped it into the snow. "I guess."
Nest shook her head quickly. "No guessing. I know a few things you don't, and this is one. These are dangerous people. Penny as much as Gask. I don't care what she says or does, she isn't your friend. Stay away from her."
Ross glanced past her to where they were bringing up Ray Childress from the bayou. "Maybe we ought to get back to the house," he said, catching her eye.
Nest turned without another word and started walking. Maybe we ought to dig ourselves a hole, crawl into it, and pull the ground up over our heads instead, she thought. Because not much of anywhere else is looking very safe.
But she kept the thought to herself.
CHAPTER 17
They had crossed the park road onto the flats and were starting for home when Nest changed her mind and told the others to go on without her. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but she felt a compelling need to visit the graves of her grandparents and mother. She hadn't been up that way recently, although she had intended to go more than once, and her encounter with Findo Gask lent new urgency to her plans. There was a danger in putting things off for too long. Ross, Bennett, and the children could go back to the house and get started on decorating the tree. Everything they needed was in labeled boxes in the garage. She would catch up with them shortly.
Bennett and the children were accepting enough, but Ross looked worried. Without saying so, he made it clear he was concerned that Findo Gask might still be somewhere in the park. Nest had considered the possibility, but she didn't think there was much danger of a second encounter. The park was full of families and dog walkers, and there would be other visitors to the cemetery as well.
"This won't take long," she assured him. "I'll just walk up, be by myself for a few moments, and walk back." She glanced at the sky. "I want to get there before it snows again."
Ross offered to accompany her, rather pointedly she thought, but she demurred. He would be needed to help with the Christmas tree, she told him just as pointedly, nodding toward Bennett and the children. Ross understood.
She set off at a steady pace across the flats until she reached the road again, then began following its plowed surface west toward the bluffs. The sky was blanketed with clouds, and the first slow-spiraling flakes of new snow were beginning to fall. West, from where the weather was approaching, it was dark and hazy. The storm, when it arrived, would be a big one.
A steady stream of vehicles crawled past her, going to and from the parking lot. Some had brought toboggans lashed to the roofs of cars and shoved through the gates and back windows of SUVs. Apparently the word hadn't gotten around yet that the slide was closed. There were sledders on the slopes leading down to the bayou, and kids ran and cavorted about the frozen playground equipment under the watchful, indulgent eyes of adults. Futile efforts to build snowmen were in progress; it was still too cold for the snow to pack.
Watching the children play, Nest was reminded how much of her life had been lived in Sinnissippi Park. When she was little, the park had been her entire world. She had known there were other places, and her grandparents had taken her to some of them. She understood that there was a world outside her own. But that world didn't matter. That world was as distant and removed as the moon. Her family and friends lived at the edge of the park. Pick lived in the park. Even the feeders appeared to her mostly in the park. The magic, of course, had its origins in the park, and Gran and the Freemark women for five generations back had cared for that magic.
It wasn't until the summer of her fourteenth birthday, when her father came back into her life, that everything changed. The park was still hers, but it was never again the same. Her father's deadly machinations forced her to give up her child's world and embrace a much larger one. Perhaps it was inevitable that it should happen, later if not then. Whatever the case, she made the necessary adjustment.
But even after growing up and moving away for a time, even with all she had experienced, she never lost the sense of belonging that she found in the park. She marveled at it now, as she walked down the snow-packed road in the wintry gray light—the way she felt at peace in its confines, at home in its twenty acres of timber and playground and picnic areas. Even now, when there was reason to be wary of what might be lurking there, she did not feel threatened. It was the legacy of her childhood, of her formative years, spent amid magic and magic's creatures, within a world that few others even knew existed.