Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 92 of 150

Ben and Chilly Willy pushed the cart into the pines above the fork. The wheels ground on stone. Every rut threw a bang up through the canvas that Ben felt in his teeth. Six men at the mill. No buyer. One handcart too loud and too slow for the ground ahead. If he kept pushing it up the trail, the mill men would run him down before the sun cleared the ridge. He stopped in a hollow and put his hand on the canvas. "We can't keep the cart." Chilly Willy wiped his face. "Then what carries it?" "Something that doesn't leave a track a child could read." Ben looked north. He needed a house, a barn, any door that opened. He remembered a low stone building Eileen had once named in passing. A hall marked by twelve. A woman who kept it. They cut east off the track and pushed the cart the last half mile through needles. The hall stood alone in a clearing. Small. Square. Six windows, each a different color of glass. A sign above the door read ONE DOZEN HALL. Ben left Chilly Willy with the cart and knocked. The door opened on a girl in a white apron. A flower sat behind her ear. She looked at Ben's boots, then at the canvas shape in the trees behind him. "You have twelve," she said. Not a question. Ben's stomach turned. "How do you know that." "I've been one short a long time. It pulls." She stepped back from the door. "Bring it in. Leave the cart. The cart is what they hear." He brought Chilly Willy up. They carried the chest between them across the sill. Anna Conda shut the door behind them and slid a bar across it. The room smelled of beeswax. On a shelf sat eleven small carved beads in a row, each a different color, each shaped a little different. A twelfth notch waited empty at the end. "That's not what I have," Ben said. "I know what you have." She did not look at the chest. "I don't want it. I want one piece of it. The stone cup. You keep the rest." Ben's throat worked. "It's a set. Twelve. That's the whole point." "Eleven is dead to me. Twelve is dead to you if the mill men catch you at dawn." She nodded at the back wall. "There's a door behind that curtain. Goes down to a cellar under the road. Comes up in the pines a mile north. No cart. No noise. You walk out with what you can carry." Ben looked at Chilly Willy. Chilly Willy said nothing. Ben set the chest on her table and worked the seal. The cup went into the empty notch on her shelf. Ben closed the chest with eleven pieces inside and shouldered it alone. Chilly Willy took the cart back down the track to draw them off. Ben went into the cellar door and the mill men never heard him leave.