Free Dreamwood by Heather Mackey

own, and he helped her down off the stool.
    â€œTake her home,” he told Pete, speaking in a low voice, man to man. He thrust something into Pete’s hand and clapped him once on the shoulder. “And buy yourselves some candy or something.” He glanced once at Lucy. “It’ll make her feel better. Scare stories,” he muttered, shaking his head again. Then he turned back to the bar.

I ’m sorry about your pa,” Pete said on the ride back from Pentland.
    Lucy sat beside him, sucking on a horehound drop, a bag of hard candies on the seat between them.
    â€œOh, he’s not dead,” she told him in a sticky voice. “No, sir.” Not William Darrington. She looked off to the side of the road: the sickening, stupid endless forest. The giant trees dripped cold drops of condensed mist onto her head (for of course she’d forgotten to bring a hat), making her even more miserable. He wouldn’t have come all the way up here and written her a letter saying he didn’t know how he would manage
without his trusted assistant
if he was only going to go off and die.
    And then she was crumpling: forehead, mouth, eyes, all folding like a bent accordion. But she wasn’t going to cry. She rubbed her nose so hard her nostrils stung.
    The candy shattered into bittersweet shards, which she crunched angrily before reaching for another.
    Life without her father. This was a cliff’s edge that she approached full of dread, peering over it for a hasty, sickening glimpse of the abyss beyond. What would she do?
    â€œWell,” Pete said and flicked the reins unhappily. Something was eating him, too. “Guess I got to tell Pa there’s Rust on the land next to ours. Billups is our neighbor. What do you bet we’ll be next?”
    She didn’t know what to say. The Knightlys had seemed strained and worried when she’d arrived. She realized they could face disaster.
    Lucy rubbed her sticky fingers on her dress. She’d lost a glove somewhere in the wagon. She’d have been punished for such carelessness at Miss Bentley’s. Now she rather hoped it never turned up—in the current darkness of her mood, she felt like tossing the other glove, too. “Does it spread that fast?”
    Pete looked down at the reins in his hands. “Faster and faster. Like it’s speeding up.”
    It was strange to think the massive kodok trees were vulnerable. They rose like towers over the fern-filled glens.
    â€œBut your father’s a lawyer,” she said, remembering what Able Dodd had said about Gordon at the train station. “You don’t depend on the forest, do you?”
    Pete’s cheeks were sucked in as if the air had been let out of him. “Pa made some bad investments.” He looked worriedly over at her. “I think they were counting on selling the land to pay their debts.”
    Then the Knightlys were in trouble. Lucy picked awkwardly at the buttons on her blue wool dress. “There’s bound to be a way to fix it,” she said. “You heard them back there—my father said he’d found a cure.”
    â€œUh-huh,” Pete replied. He took a candy from the bag but crunched it without much energy. “Too bad he didn’t get a chance to tell anyone what it was.” He gave a heavy sigh.
    Whitsun and Snickers made their steady way down the road. Lucy took another candy and hunched her shoulders against the drippy mist. If her father had said there was a cure, then a cure most certainly existed.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    As it turned out, Pete needn’t have worried about telling his parents they might have Rust on their land.
    In the time they’d been in Pentland, Rust had already been discovered in the Knightlys’ trees.
    Lucy and Pete walked in the front door to find a scene of chaos. Able Dodd thrust past them carrying a yoke and two large oilskins, which gave off a strong stink of fish.
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