Page 72 of The Bad Weather Friend

Benny said, “Mother?” She was supposed to be on a one-year around-the-world adventure with Jubal.

“Your stepfather is dead,” she announced. “My inheritance is less than I expected. We are no longer able to afford Briarbush. I have disenrolled you from the school, and we must leave now.”

Although Benny had become accustomed to a life path marked by sudden switchbacks and hairpin turns, he wasn’t ready for this. “But I can’t,” he objected. “Things are happening here. Important things. I have friends here.”

Naomi smiled at Jurgen and Mengistu, but it was such a cold and brittle smile that Benny would have been horrified but not surprised if her lips had cracked apart like fractured ice and fallen off her face. Her coat wasn’t tailored from the skins of a hundred and one Dalmatian puppies, but she had a new villainous quality that was darker than the indifference with which she had often treated him. For the first time, his mother reminded him of Grandmother Cosima.

“I’ve already packed everything in your room, Benny. Omar has put your bags in the trunk. I have an appointment thisevening in San Francisco. We must leave at once. Be a good boy and get in the car.”

“I have friends here,”Benny said plaintively. He’d never had friends before. He’d never really understood what true friends were like until he met Jurgen and Mengistu. Now, after less than three months, he was being taken away from them. He needed to cast his lot with them, risk being eaten by bears, cougars, and heavily bearded degenerates in order to earn a new home in Arizona.

Omar, the black-suited chauffeur, had gotten out from behind the wheel and had come around the limousine as if willing to handle Benny like baggage. A squat, muscular specimen with a beetling brow, he looked as if he ought to have tusks.

Unmoved by her son’s plea, Naomi tapped one foot impatiently on the cobblestones. “Say goodbye to your friends and get in the car.”

How terrible it was to be young and dependent. How hopeless it seemed when those who had custody of you knew little about you and didn’t care to learn more.

Benny couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye. He saw unshed tears in Jurgen’s and Mengistu’s eyes, and his vision blurred, a monumentally embarrassing development. Boys of their age must never admit to the capacity for tears let alone shed them. They stared at one another, struck speechless by the suddenness, the awfulness, the injustice of this development. Benny was seized by the irrational fear that, if he said goodbye, he would never see them again, that the word would be a curse and they would die in the forest. So then if he didn’t say goodbye, if they didn’t exchange any words, not one, and didn’t hug one another and didn’t shake hands, maybe they would all survive; perhaps years from now, insome far place, when they least expected it, they would find one another and revive their friendship.

Benny climbed into the limo and slid across the seat, and Naomi got in and sat beside him. Omar closed the door and went around the car and settled behind the wheel.

They drove away.

Benny did not look back.

As the driveway descended from the high meadow into the forest and the gatehouse appeared below, lightning flashed-flashed-flashed so bright that it might have been the announcement of an impending judgment of all things. The crack of thunder was immediate, as if Earth’s core were rended pole to pole. In the dazzling storm flares, the trees cast off layer after layer of shadows that seemed to be blown away by a sudden and ferocious gale. Mere wind-driven raindrops rattled against the limousine roof and windows as if they were hard bullets of hail.

This wasn’t a day when two boys should engage in a seventeen-mile battle against Nature and all her armory. Nor was it a day when they dared to delay. Benny yearned to be with them.

ONE LAST STOP ON THE JOURNEY TO JUSTICE

As Spike drove away from Palazzo del Coniglio, where F. Upton Theron sprawled dead of a heart attack in the drawing room, Benny Catspaw was amazed that the memory of a lengthy Briarbush incident could pass through his mind in great detail during the two or three minutes he and his companions took to return to the Ford Explorer and cruise off the property. If he’d decided to write a book about the adventures of his youth, typing just the account of his last day as a student at Briarbush would have required a week.

Because he had visited the school five years after the rainy morning when his mother had taken him away, he knew that Jurgen and Mengistu hadn’t shown up for dinner that day. When Marshall Cho, one of Mrs. Baneberry-Smith’s worker bees, reported seeing them hiking into the woods, they were declared missing. In spite of the valiant efforts of sixty-two trained search-and-rescue specialists, no trace of the boys was found. The wilderness they faded into covered more than twenty-two hundred square miles in which a handful of small towns lay at great distances from one another. Most of the terrain was forbidding. Much of that vastness was so remote, the searchers could have labored half a year, seven days a week, and not visited all the places where the bones of two boys might be moldering. Such endeavors were expensive and couldn’t go on forever. The search was called off after ten days.

Benny preferred to believe that his friends had survived and been taken to Arizona by the nice uncle, who somehow acquired for them new identities. He liked to believe they were happy intheir new lives. There were more than a few things Benny liked to believe that weren’t likely to be true, but he believed them anyway.

Curiously, as they drove out of San Clemente toward the Pacific Coast Highway, one thing Benny had recently begun to hope might be true now became manifestly true, yet initially he found it harder to believe than that Jurgen and Mengistu miraculously survived. The believe-it-or-not moment began with the need to rename the rabbit.

From the back seat, where she sat with the Flemish giant in her lap, Harper said, “I’m not going to keep calling her Arabella. It’s a stupid name for a rabbit as cute as she is.”

“Call her Snowball,” Benny suggested.

“She’s not cold. She’s snuggly warm.”

“Is she sweet?”

“She’s very sweet.”

“Then call her Sugar.”

“Not quite.”

“Sugarpie.”

“No.”

“Sugarplum.”

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