Fall from Grace Read Free

Howe Sound from Horseshoe Bay, just northwest of Vancouver. The ferry had docked at Langdale, a village at the southern end of the forty-five-mile-long strip of British Columbia that is known as the Sunshine Coast.
    Among the vehicles heading away from Langdale that bright day in June lurched an elongated pickup truck, the back of it loaded, the load covered with a tarpaulin.
    After Langdale and Gibsons Landing, the road wound inland through countryside occupied by people on acreages. There were horses in some of the pastures, and chicken coops near some of the houses. On some of these properties old car bodies and chunks of unidentifiable machinery lay about. There were swing sets in some of the yards, and tires hung from tree branches, and from behind the wobbly fence fronting one piece of property an ancient dog, irritable with toothache or stomach distress, barked at the slowly passing traffic.
    The highway wended northwest from Gibsons, carrying its burden of traffic toward Sechelt, and about halfway between the two villages it made an abrupt ninety-degree turn and headed directly for the sea. But a gravel road continued northward. To the right a long, narrow strip of cleared land bordered the gravel road, backing up against a forest that spilled quickly upward to cover the flanks of a low-flung mountain. In the middle of the clearing, a building stood behind two old gas pumps, long since disconnected.
    It was a small, rectangular, wooden building with a sharply peaked roof. There were little windows in the gables, and underneath the one facing north another piece of roof stuck out, like an eyeshade. In the long roof that looked toward the gravel road was a dormer with two tiny side-by-side windows, and in the bottom part of the roof, where it angled and the pitch became less steep, there were three skylights, one in the middle, one at each end.
    A glass wall wrapped around the building on two sides; from the road, it looked like a greenhouse with a second story.
    On this sunny afternoon the traffic, vehicle by vehicle, lurched up to the turn in the highway, lumbered dutifully around it, and aimed itself west, at the Pacific Ocean.
    All but the pickup truck.
    When it reached the corner, the pickup continued forward onto the gravel road, crunched along until it got to the building, swerved off toward the old gas pumps and came to a halt between the pumps and the glass-walled house.
    For a while it just sat there. Then the driver’s door flew open, and Herman Ferguson got out.
    â€œAnnabelle!” he hollered. He wore a white T-shirt through which a mat of dark chest hair could be seen. He wasn’t very tall. He was wiry, unshaven, and had a lot of thick black hair. Two of his teeth were missing. Sometimes, when he got excited, he made a whistling sound when he spoke.
    â€œCome on here, you guys,” he yelled to the children who had appeared around the corner of the building. “Where’s your ma? We’ve gotta get this thing unloaded.”
    Bowlegged and cocky, he strode to the end of the truck, where he hoisted himself up and started undoing the ropes that connected the tarp to the sides of the vehicle.
    The oldest child, a girl, was nine. She had blond hair tied in a dispirited ponytail. Pieces of it had come loose and were hanging around her face. She was wearing baggy jeans that wouldn’t have stayed up on her skinny frame except for a cord drawn through the belt loops and tied firmly around her waist. On top, she wore a short-sleeved pink T-shirt.
    The boy was eight. He was called Arnold, and he had his father’s hair, thick and black, so black that in the bright sunlight sometimes it looked dark red.
    The smallest child was a girl, also blond, who was six, almost seven. Her hair was cut so short that it was hard for some people to tell she was a girl. She could run very fast and she climbed trees very nimbly and her name was Camellia.
    Her sister was called Rose-Iris.
    Annabelle