The House on Creek Road

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Eleanor just raised her eyebrows and went back to sorting photos, smiling faintly.

Who could it have been? Liz wondered. Some rakish stranger, chugging down the road in a shiny two-seater roadster? A movie star, or some English aristocrat, or even the Prince of Wales, on his way to his ranch in Alberta?

It was clear Eleanor didn’t plan to tell them more, so Liz went back to leafing through the photo album on her lap. The Robbs took the same pictures every year. Children on ponies. Children leaning over cakes, blowing out three, then six, then eleven candles. The family sitting around the table at Christmas, everyone wearing new blouses or new sweaters, everyone with forks near their mouths.

Her hand stopped. There, at the bottom of the page, next to pictures of herself and Tom, was a small shot of Andy. “Grandma?”

“Hmm?”

“You have a picture of Andy.”

“Of course. He was a member of the family.”

Liz took a deep breath to ease the sudden tightness in her chest. “No one else thought so. Mom and Dad thought he was a mistake.”

“I’m sure they didn’t,” Emily protested. “They were just surprised.”

“He was a sweet boy,” Eleanor said. “I liked Andrew.”

Liz blinked a few times. They would be so embarrassed if she started to cry.

Eleanor set aside the photographs on her lap. “I think we’ve had enough sorting for this evening. Tea?”

Emily jumped up. “I’ll make it. I’ll even make toast.”

Stepping over boxes, Liz carried the album she’d been holding to the hutch cupboard. “Leave the boxes, Grandma. I’ll get them.”

“In that case, I’ll help your cousin.”

When she heard her grandmother’s footsteps in the kitchen, Liz reopened the album, easily finding the page with Andy’s photograph. He looked younger than she remembered. They had been sure they were all grown up, eager to jump into their lives, impatient with the restrictions put in their way. But his cheeks were smooth, still slightly rounded. It wasn’t a man’s face.

She hadn’t packed any pictures of him when she’d left Three Creeks. She’d gone quickly, hardly thinking, leaving most of her things behind. Andy was so much with her then, real and vivid, she never would have believed she’d need a picture to remember him. Somehow, unbelievably, the details of his face had slipped her mind. Whenever she’d tried to draw him after the first year, he’d looked like a stranger, someone observed in a crowd.

“Liz? Tea’s ready.”

“Coming!” She slipped the photo into the pocket of her jeans before putting the boxes and albums away.

CHAPTER FOUR

PAM AND EMILY HAD TOLD LIZ all about the new school, but she still went into town expecting to see the old one. It was a bit of a surprise to find a new cement-brick building stretching across the spot where the four-room schoolhouse, baseball diamond and maple grove had been. Inside, walking past the gym and the band room, standing at the front of Pam’s large, bright classroom, she didn’t even feel as if she was in Three Creeks. She could be in any town or city. Except that her niece was sitting a couple of arm-lengths away, looking at her with pride and embarrassment.

Liz held up a single piece of paper covered with tiny, hand-drawn squares. Inside each square was a simple pencil sketch. “This is the first draft of my new book, There’s a Dinosaur on Your Right.”

Jennifer and fourteen other children sitting at three round tables leaned closer. Kids loved the idea of a book in miniature, no matter how little detail was in each drawing.

“It looks like a comic strip,” one boy said, tilting his chair so it balanced on its back legs. He wore an Edmonton Oilers’ hockey jersey that reached halfway to his knees. Only the tips of his fingers showed at the end of the sleeves.

“Stephen,” Pam said.

He rocked the chair forward so all four legs touched the ground.

“It’s called a thumbnail layout. You can see why.” Liz held up one thumb so the children could compare her nail to the squares she’d drawn. “It’s a quick and easy way to find out if there’s enough going on in the story you’re planning.”

“You should call it a two-thumbnail layout,” Stephen said.

Liz smiled. She moved closer to the blackboard, where she’d lined up a series of larger drawings, the ones she’d brought to show her grandmother. The final paintings were with her publisher, but she thought the sketches of a ten-year-old heroine trapped in a subterranean world of dinosaurs would appeal to the children.

“After the two-thumbnail layout gives me an idea what will happen, I make a mock-up, also called a dummy.” She heard the expected giggles. “I draw bigger, more detailed versions of the sketches I’ve decided will do the best job of telling the story, with a few words added, so I can keep track of what I want to say on each page. Then I spread it all out like this to see how the story flows.”

Liz pointed to the first two sketches. “The story opens with a girl, ten years old, falling into a dark hole in the ground, so deep there’s no way out. She sees footprints. Huge, three-toed footprints.”

“Dinosaur tracks!” A dark-haired boy leaned forward, his elbows on the table, one foot on the floor, the other knee on his chair. He pointed at the third drawing. “And that’s a shadow of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.”

Pam spoke firmly from her corner of the room. “Sit down, Dave.”

He sat, without taking his eyes off the line of pictures.

“Why did I draw the T-Rex’s shadow, rather than the T-Rex itself?”

“It’s scarier,” Dave said.

“That’s right. Not knowing is always scary, isn’t it? We start with a dark hole in the ground, then the footprint. Both of those things are scary, but our heroine is sure there must be a reasonable explanation.”

“Until she sees the shadow,” Jennifer said.

“With that huge head and those little arms and those long sharp teeth and claws…we know what’s coming, don’t we?” Liz had placed the next drawing with its back to her audience. Now she turned it, so the kids could see the T-Rex close up and suddenly, the way her heroine did in the story.

“Whoa,” said Dave.

“These first three pictures build suspense and the fourth one delivers. Now our heroine has some problems to solve. Any ideas what those might be?”

“Not getting eaten,” Stephen said.

“Getting out of the hole.”

“Finding out what happened! How come there’s a live dinosaur down there?”

“Yeah, and how does it fit? T-Rexs are huge.”

Liz caught Pam’s eye. Now that their interest had been tweaked, it seemed like a good idea to let the children start their own projects. “Answering those questions gives us the plot,” Liz concluded, “and as the girl in the pictures solves those problems, we’ll find out what kind of person she is.”

Pam began distributing paper and pencils. Liz leaned against the desk at the front of the room, keeping out of the way while the children got settled. She couldn’t imagine starting a first draft with someone peering over her shoulder.

Stephen looked as if he could use some help, though. He slouched in his seat, twitching his pencil back and forth, knocking an eraser across his empty paper. After a few minutes, Liz joined him. “Having trouble getting started?”

He shrugged. “I don’t like make-believe stuff.”

She decided not to mention comics or movies or video games. “Your story doesn’t have to be fiction.” She held her pencil over his paper. “Okay if I show you something?”

Stephen nodded grudgingly.

She started by drawing a series of small squares. Inside one, using the first idea that came to mind, she sketched a man wearing jeans and a button-up shirt. She rolled up his sleeves to show he was hard at work. Inside the next square, the man crouched down, putting something small and oval into a concave spot in the ground.

“A guy planting seeds,” Stephen said.

The boy next to Stephen was watching, too. Liz had to think for a moment to remember his name. Jeremy. He was smaller than the other children, enough that he looked two or three years younger. “Hey, that’s Mr. McKinnon, isn’t it? My dad worked with him in the summer. Planting and stuff.”

“Your dad works all over the place,” Stephen said. “Odd jobs.”

Liz noticed a slight, protective recoil from Jeremy. “Good for him. That means he knows how to do all kinds of things.” The boy’s small body relaxed.

Tiny leaves unfurled in a third square, grew bigger in a fourth and snaked all across a fifth. Small fruit with vertical ridges appeared on the vines.

“Pumpkins,” Stephen said.

Finally Liz drew long-fingered hands carrying a large pumpkin, and the same hands pushing a knife through its shell.

Stephen leaned in. “Can I do that?” Pressing heavily on his pencil, he drew a pair of triangular eyes, a matching nose, and a crooked sharp-toothed grin. He smiled at the result, but Liz could see his interest was fading fast.

“I’ve never been a pumpkin farmer,” she said, “but I know what pumpkins look like and I know how to plant a garden—”

She could see when his idea hit. Stephen reached eagerly for a fresh piece of paper. “I’ll make a book about winning the Stanley Cup! I know what the rink looks like and the goalie and the uniforms—”

Jennifer muttered, “The refs, the penalty box—”

“I know what the Cup looks like, and I know what it feels like when you win.” He sat forward, feet tucked around the front legs of his chair. At the top of the paper, he wrote Chapter One and underlined it three times. He thought for a few moments, then added, by Stephen Cook, Three Creeks Elementary, Grade Five. This was underlined twice. Liz waited, but no thumbnail-size squares followed. Not even two thumbnail-size squares. He indented and began to write. My team made it to the play-offs…

He was out of his seat, she was sure, a fraction of a second before the lunch-hour bell rang. Faster than they would have for a fire drill, the children emptied the classroom.

JACK PULLED THE BOOK he’d just bought out of its bag. It was tall and wide, so he rested it against his truck’s steering wheel and slowly turned the pages, sometimes smiling at the illustrations, until he found the verse he wanted.

Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater…

Strange to hear a grown woman quoting a nursery rhyme as seriously as if it were Shakespeare.

Had a wife and couldn’t keep her, put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well…

Nonsense, he would have thought, the kind of rhythmic nonsense children enjoyed. Could it mean something, as Liz had suggested? What was a pumpkin eater, anyway? He’d heard of potato eaters. It was a derisive term for the poor during the 1800s, for anyone who couldn’t afford better food. Were pumpkins common when the rhyme came to be, or a rare luxury?

Peter put his wife in a pumpkin shell—in fact, he couldn’t keep her until he put her there. Did the shell represent a nice house, and was the wife unwilling to stay with him until then? She cared more for possessions than for love? Maybe he should pay more attention to the phrase couldn’t keep her. The pumpkin might be the back alley cardboard box of its day. It was the best Peter could do, but they were happy.

Or did it suggest a prison, maybe the Tower of London? Was Peter a well-known person, the Lord Mayor, or a king, with a wife who tended to stray? And why was any of that appropriate reading for children?

Jack slipped the book back into its bag and tucked it under the seat. Plenty of time to think about it during the drive home. He couldn’t tell Ned he was late for lunch because he was reading nursery rhymes. Ned already thought he was crazy.

He locked the doors of his truck and walked out of the shopping center parkade onto Princess Avenue. Lunch-hour traffic crowded the usually quiet street. As much as he loved walking through the countryside, the only human in sight or hearing, it was a nice change to see hurrying men with briefcases, mothers pushing strollers, teenagers laughing and jostling each other, certain all eyes were on them.

Brandon University was only eight blocks away, welcome exercise after the drive from Three Creeks. It stretched along 18th Street like the city’s centerpiece. Two beige brick buildings from the late nineteenth century were flanked by newer ones, including the Brodie Building, a glass and cement structure that housed the science faculty. The math and computer science department was on the first floor. Jack strode along, checking nameplates on doors until he finally saw Dr. Edward Hardy. Voices came through the open door.

“…and it runs in linear time,” a young-sounding voice finished. “So you can’t say all sorts run in Omega-n-log-n time.”