The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 31

Lucinda knew she had been in less comfortable places than in the back seat of Edward Stillman’s expensive car, wedged between him and the large, frowning man named Deuce, but off the top of her head she couldn’t think of any that didn’t include live dragons.

As they slid onto Springs Road in the growing rainstorm, Stillman broke the long silence. “You know, I’m not as bad as Gideon makes me out to be,” he said. “ He’s the interloper, after all. And now that I think about it, if you’re related to Octavio then you’re far more closely related to me than you are to Gideon Goldring.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Lucinda didn’t really want to talk. Her stomach was so nervous and jumpy that she was afraid she might throw up at any moment.

“Please. I despise the way children talk today,” he told her. “ ’Whatever’-a lumpish word for lumpish ideas. Show a little respect for your elders, child. You might learn something.”

She had asked him to bring her, Lucinda reminded herself, and now she was stuck with him, so maybe it would be better not to make him too angry. “Sorry, Mr… Mr. Stillman, I’m just really worried. Are we really related?”

“Your grandfather was Octavio’s nephew. Your grandfather was also my cousin.”

“Okay, we’re family, I guess. But why do you want to hurt Gideon?”

Stillman made a noise of disgust. “Haven’t you been listening? He’s the one who hurt me! He stole what was most important to me in the whole world-Grace Tinker. Oh, and also my access to Octavio’s papers. Can you even imagine how frustrating it is for a scientist like me to not to have access his own uncle’s ground-breaking work?”

Lucinda didn’t know what to say. “Yeah, that does sound… very frustrating.”

“I grew up spending summers here, just like you and your brother. The farm was mine… or it should have been! Then Gideon Goldring came along and started weaseling his way into everything.” Stillman was angry now, his eyes narrow and his lips pale. “Do you want to see something?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but took out his phone and touched a button, then held it out to Lucinda. “Look. Look at this! Do you know who that is?”

It was a photograph of four people walking, two in the background and two in the foreground, all of them on the gravel driveway in front the main house at Ordinary Farm, a spot she could recognize easily even in an old picture. The two in the back were talking and looked very stern and businesslike-a younger version of what could only be Uncle Gideon and an older version of Octavio Tinker than she was used to seeing in the library portrait. There was something else strange about the picture as well, some nagging detail she couldn’t quite put her finger on. “Which one…?” she asked.

Stillman’s finger stabbed the screen. “There. Right in front. With Grace Tinker.” And indeed, now that she paid more attention to the foreground couple, Lucinda recognized Gideon’s lovely, brown-haired wife from the pictures she had seen in the parlor. The long-haired man walking beside her and apparently making her laugh was young and fit, dressed in slacks and sandals and a Hawaiian shirt…

“You,” she said quietly. “That’s you walking with Grace.”

“It certainly is,” said Stillman. “We were good friends since her childhood, and would have been more one day, but Gideon stole her from me.”

“Eww, wasn’t she like your cousin or something? That’s disgusting!”

He gave her an extremely cold look. “Cousin once removed. Perfectly acceptable. Do you want to know what’s truly disgusting, little girl? Gideon married her, then when he knew he could secure the farm for himself, he got rid of her.”

Lucinda thought of the misery she had seen on Uncle Gideon’s face when he talked about his lost wife. “I don’t believe he would hurt her-that he would do anything bad to her. He really loved her!”

“Hah.” Stillman shook his head. It was strange to look from the face in the picture to the face beside her. Ed Stillman was still slender, still handsome. Except for his gray hair he might have been the man in the picture, escaped from the past and dropped into the present like something out of the Fault Line. “Gideon Goldring never loved anyone but himself,” he said angrily. “If he cared for her so much, where is she? And why did he do everything on God’s green earth to keep the police from properly searching that property?”

Lucinda knew: because they would have found a lot of things no one had ever seen before. They would have found a hole into the past. They would have found monsters… “I don’t know,” she said. A thought had suddenly occurred to her: if Ed Stillman had truly been a favorite of old Octavio and his granddaughter, why didn’t he know about the Fault Line? Octavio Tinker would have had to work hard to keep it secret from a regular visitor, but he obviously had done just that. Had Octavio decided a long time ago that Stillman wasn’t trustworthy? “Gideon probably had his reasons to keep the police out, because I know he really loved Grace.”

Stillman looked at her in disgust. “He truly has you children brainwashed, doesn’t he? Oh, poor old Gideon! Everyone’s out to get him!” He stared at the screen of his phone and his face changed, softened. “So many years ago-Good Lord! I was here more than I was at my parents’ house-a lot more… ”

Another thing that had puzzled Lucinda suddenly revealed itself to her. “Who took that picture?”

“What?”

“If all of you are in the picture, even Octavio, who took it?” Because that had been back in the days before Mr. Walkwell or any of the other Fault Line people, hadn’t it? Had it even been a farm then, or just Octavio Tinker’s crazy house?

Stillman looked at her as though she had asked him to explain Santa Claus. “Who took it? What does that matter? Dorothea, probably-Grace’s cousin from back east. She lived on the farm for several years. There were always lots of people around in the old days-it was a joyful place, full of music and good conversation. Before Gideon took over.”

There are still lots of people there, Lucinda thought but didn’t say. It’s just they’re from the Ice Age and ancient Mongolia and places like that…

The driver now pulled over to the side of the road. The windshield wipers swooshed back and forth, but the rain was coming down so hard it didn’t make much difference. Lightning blanked the sky for a long moment. Lucinda could dimly see the front gate of Ordinary Farm appear a hundred yards away, but it had disappeared by the time the thunder finally came.

“We’re there, Mr. Stillman,” said the man behind the wheel. “Do you want to call the house again or something?”

“Call? What am I, a stranger?” Stillman laughed. “No, we’re going in, Cater. Drive through the gate.”

“It’s shut,” the driver pointed out.

“So?”

Cater gunned the engine.

“But there’s an electrical fence!” cried Lucinda, suddenly terrified.

Stillman laughed even louder. “Oh, goodness, do you think an electric fence is going to hurt us? In here? Girl, you could hose down this car with an AK-47 from close range and barely scratch it…!”

The car leaped forward and smashed against the front gate in a grinding explosion of metal poles and snapping wires. There was no shock, or at least none that Lucinda could feel, and an instant later they were through the outer perimeter, a few strands of fence still tangled in the bumper and dragging in the gravel as they headed toward the inner gate, where the trick would no doubt be repeated.

But what if the animals get out? she wanted to shout. What if the manticores get loose? It terrified her to think of those things with their long claws and weird, manlike faces roaming the countryside. But what could she say about it? She tried, “Gideon has watchdogs, Mr. Stillman-big, dangerous ones! If we… ”

Ed Stillman smiled and reached under his jacket, but this time instead of bringing out a cell phone he produced an ugly squared-off pistol, so flat and unreflective in the dim light of the car that she could hardly even see it. Still, it drew her eye like an evil magical object from a fairytale. “I wouldn’t worry too much about the watchdogs, young lady,” Stillman told her, “unless it’s their safety you’re worrying about. Because the explosive bullets in this baby would kill a rhinoceros.”

“We don’t have any rhinos on Ordinary Farm,” she said faintly as they swerved and spun through gravel, hurrying toward the farmhouse and whatever terrible craziness she’d set into motion.

“Well, that’s lucky for the rhinos, then,” said Edward Stillman, slipping the gun back into its holster. “Because I’m in a bad, bad mood.”