CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Ben Findley stared at the tray of food that still sat where he'd left it on the table in the little room beneath the barn.

It was untouched.

He hadn't really expected anything different, not since he'd come down here late last night to find the room empty. That, too, had not been unexpected, but still he'd gone over the barn carefully, inspecting everything. Everything had been as it should have been. The door to the tack room, as always, was barred from the outside. The planks that formed the siding of the barn were as solid as ever, despite their appearance from the outside. Upstairs in the loft, the door was still nailed shut.

Yet despite the fact that the security of the barn did not appear to have been breached, Nathaniel was gone. He was gone, and he had not come back.

Findley picked up the tray and, balancing it expertly on one hand, used the other to steady himself as he climbed the ladder out of the tiny cell. He left the barn, not bothering to lock it, and quickly crossed the yard.

Inside his house, he put the tray on the sink and stared idly at his little kitchen. A puddle of coffee had spread across the kitchen counter, and he automatically moved to wipe it up before the stain could penetrate the butcher-block top.

He and Nathaniel had made that top together, and he wasn't about to let it be ruined.

Impulsively, he decided to inspect the entire house, and he began moving slowly through its few rooms, examining everything, making sure everything was in the perfect condition he had always maintained.

The interior of the little house was in remarkable contrast to its ramshackle exterior. The hardwood floors gleamed under his feet, their mellow oaken planks polished to a soft glow. The walls were lined with leatherbound books, stored in cases he had built himself, all the joints carefully dovetailed so that as the years went by they would remain as true as they had been the day he and Nathaniel had put them together.

The furniture was sparse. Two chairs-one his, the other Nathaniel's, for the times, much more frequent than Charles Potter had ever suspected, when Findley had felt safe enough to have Nathaniel inside the house.

At times, Ben Findley had wondered if he'd begun taking a perverse pleasure in keeping the interior of the house in such perfect contrast to its exterior, but deep inside he knew he had not. It was just that he liked things to be right, and over the years he had come to want them to be as nice as possible for Nathaniel.

At first, of course, it had not been for Nathaniel at all.

It had been for Anna.

For a long time after that night when Nathaniel was born, Ben Findley had hoped that Anna Hall would finally leave Amos and come to live with him. Him, and Nathaniel.

He had fantasized in those years, picturing the light that would come into Anna's eyes when he told her that their son was alive. That fantasy had kept him going those first years, after Jenny had left him.

Even twenty years later, he could clearly remember that night. It was the night Nathaniel had been born, and Charles Potter had brought the baby to him, meeting him in the field, while a storm howled around them.

"Amos thinks he's dead," Potter had told him that night. "I made him think so, or he might have killed him. He knows the child's yours." He'd handed the blanket-wrapped infant to Ben. "Amos thinks I'm burying him. I'll stay here for a while, in case he's watching."

Ben had peeled a corner of the blanket back, and gazed down into the face of the son that Anna Hall had borne him, the son that his own wife had never been able to conceive. "What about Anna?" he'd asked, but Potter had shaken his head.

"I don't know. It was hard, and she thinks the baby's dead." Then he'd met Ben's eyes. "He's yours, Ben. Yours and Jenny's."

Except that Jenny hadn't wanted the child, wouldn't even look at it.

"Anna's?" she'd demanded. "You expect me to raise a child you had by Anna Hall? Never! Never, Ben!"

That night, she, like Mark Hall, had gone away.

Unlike Mark, she had never come back.

And so Ben had begun to raise the child himself, hoping, at first, that Anna Hall would one day recover from the child's birth and walk again.

He'd hidden the child, knowing that he had no reasonable explanation for its being there, and slowly, over the years, his life had changed.

For a long time, he'd whiled away the time by preparing the house for Anna, but when he'd finally come to accept that Anna was never coming, he hadn't stopped working on the interior of the house.

By then, he was doing it for Nathaniel.

Nathaniel became the sole focus of his life. Ben Findley became consumed with the need to provide whatever was necessary for the little boy who was growing up in his house.

What was needed for Nathaniel was isolation, for isolation meant safety. So Ben constructed his shield, and made himself into the town recluse, the rundown appearance of his farm discouraging most visitors, his surly facade-a facade that had finally become his true personality-repelling those few who braved the tangle of overgrowth of the yard to knock on the peeled and weathered boards of the front door.

It had worked. Years ago, people had stopped trying to be friendly toward him, and he had ended up being as trapped as Nathaniel within the limits that he had set for them.

The limits had been simple: No one must know, or even suspect, that Ben Findley was not living alone.

At first it had only been temporary. When Anna came, they would bring Nathaniel out in the open, and live as the family they were.

But Anna hadn't come.

Instead, she'd retreated to her wheelchair, and soon moved away from the little house where the two of them had loved. She had wiped Ben Findley from her life.

Ben had resented that, and he knew that there had been times when he'd taken Anna's rejection of him out on little Nathaniel. Sometimes, for no reason at all, he'd found himself punishing the child, beating him.

But as the years wore on, he'd come to care totally for the boy. And so he'd raised him, isolating himself along with Nathaniel. He'd done what he could to make Nathaniel's life comfortable, and if it wasn't enough, Ben was sorry.

He knew the boy was peculiar, but he also knew there was nothing he could do about it. Nathaniel's oddness, he was sure, was only a result of his isolation.

And he'd taught the boy, taught him everything he knew. What he did without in the way of human companionship, he tried to make up for with books. Ben clothed Nathaniel, making the boy's garments himself; buying clothes in Prairie Bend was out of the question, and doing it through the mails was equally risky. Catalogs would begin coming, catalogs of children's clothes and toys, and the woman at the post office would begin to wonder why Ben Findley was getting such things. And if she wondered, she'd talk, and then she'd want to know. So he took no risks.

Still, Ben knew it hadn't worked. Nathaniel was different from other children, ill-equipped to deal with the world. There had been times when Nathaniel had seemed to drift off into a private world of his own, and Ben had been unable to reach him. It was as if he'd been listening to voices only he could hear. But it didn't happen often, and he always came out of it. And there had been the other times, the times when the children-what his cousin Amos had always called "Nathaniel's children"-had been born. Those nights, Ben had sometimes heard Nathaniel in the barn, moaning softly, almost as if he were in pain. Sometimes he'd tried to comfort the boy, but he'd never been able. Nathaniel had never even seemed aware of his presence.

By the mornings after those terrible nights, though, Nathaniel had always seemed to be all right, and Charles Potter-still the only other person who knew of Nathaniel's secret existence-had maintained that the odd spells meant nothing.