Read Online The Man in the Woods by Rosemary Wells - Free Book Online Page A

in the chilly gloom, three pushing girls going in different directions between herself and Pinky. It really didn’t count as holding her hand of course. He was just trying to guide her through the crowd, and there was nothing romantic in both of them holding dripping hot dogs away from the bumping bodies. Still, she felt a peculiar lightness and happiness inside. She didn’t want him to let go of her hand. Then she heard it.
    Not far behind them someone was whistling, and her heart, or whatever it was in the middle of her that a minute before had felt like the inside of a star, now flopped over and turned to ice. Sweat beaded her whole body. Silvery, perfectly modulated notes, again like the tremulo of a flute, drifted over the clot of people chattering and pushing around her. Her hand slipped out of Pinky’s, and she stood pinned until the crowd moved again. Pinned as she had been under the stump in the woods, listening to the same tune and the same whistler with her pulse rattling like a freight train and her mouth as dry as sand.
    Pinky managed to grab her arm and pull her up the stairs to the daylight. “Listen!” she whispered. “Do you hear it? Do you hear it?”
    “Hear what? What’s the matter?”
    “Listen!”
    The whistling had gone off another way now, was lost somewhere in the vast inner ring of the stadium, but it could still be heard. Then it stopped.
    Pinky scratched his ear. “Yes, I heard it,” he said, “but it could have been anybody. Anybody could whistle that song.”
    “No. No. It was the same person. I’ve never in my life heard anyone whistle like that, Pinky. I want to find out who it was.”
    The kickoff for the second half sailed through the air. The press of people forced them down the steps and back into their seats. Pinky began wolfing down his hot dog. Helen held hers in her lap, as if it had turned to stone. “I can’t eat,” she said. “I’m too scared.”
    “Well, what are you going to do?” asked Pinky. “You can’t go prowling around the stadium waiting for somebody to start whistling.”
    “First of all,” said Helen, “do you believe me?”
    “Believe you?” he asked, evening out the mustard on his hot dog with one finger and wiping it on the underside of his jeans.
    “Do you believe me that it’s the same guy I heard in the woods?”
    “I guess so. I mean, you looked like a ghost, and you told me about it right away. It’s the same song for sure. You sang it to me. But what of it? Maybe it’s the same guy. But maybe the cops were right. It was probably the Indian the policeman mentioned or a jogger, and he whistles nicely, and he’s here at the game today. What of it?”
    Helen’s eyes followed the football players as they ran up and down the field, tumbling in heaps over one another. She had no recognition of what they were doing. “The Indian, a jogger, anyone else would have helped us out, Pinky. The only person who would have walked away from that accident is the guy who threw the rock. Stubby’s in jail. The rock thrower is here at this game.”
    Pinky crumpled his hot-dog wrapper and dropped it between his feet. “Holy Christmas night,” he said.
    The only reminder of Tuesday’s accident left on the highway was a swath of tiny ice-cube bits of broken glass. Helen coaxed some of it into a mound with her toe and squinted up the hill toward the woods.
    “It’ll be dark soon,” said Pinky. “Are you sure you want to go up there? Just to find a locket?”
    Wood asters, butterfly weed, and cornflowers, blue as the afternoon sky, danced innocently in the fallow light. Beyond the field were the scrub pines, their branches always half rotten and covered with hard lichen. As the hill rose, so did the height of the trees, until they became just a mass of faraway blackness, hiding ferns and rabbits, moss and mushrooms, like an endless attic filled with trinkets. And secrets.
    “My mother’s up there,” said Helen. “I know it sounds silly. But