I cried. I don’t want her to think I’m lame as well as fat.’
The boy wasn’t exactly thin, but hearing him call himself fat in that sadly accepting voice had a shaft of anger shooting through Art.
‘She won’t think that,’ he said, because he knew his daughter. She didn’t judge people by their appearances. ‘But if we get down before she gets back, she won’t even know.’
‘How will I get down?’
Good question. There wasn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre. ‘Do you think you could move down a step, while I stay in place?’
He heard the sound of swallowing. The shaking was still pretty pronounced. ‘I’ll try.’
‘Good boy,’ Art said. He didn’t usually bother with positive reinforcement with Toto. But with this kid, he had the feeling it was required.
After what felt like ten hours, but was probably only ten seconds, they’d negotiated one rung down.
He lavished the boy with more praise, the relief loosening his tongue more than usual. The stillness of the summer air seemed eerie as Art waited to hear the boy’s mother crashing through the undergrowth ready to issue an injunction. But as they spent an eternity inching their way down the ladder, one tortuous rung at a time, until Art could finally step onto the ground – the sound never came.
Good girl, Toto. She must be escorting Ellie to the Clubhouse via Plymouth.
‘You can let go now, Josh.’ Relief surged through him as he grabbed the boy round the waist and lifted him the rest of the way down. ‘Well done.’
The boy huffed, and then to Art’s astonishment wrapped his arms tight around Art’s midriff and buried his head against his sternum.
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you so much.’ The words were muffled against Art’s overalls. ‘You saved my life.’
Containing his surprise – Toto had never been a big hugger – Art cupped the boy’s shoulders to ease him back. ‘No thanks necessary. You saved yourself.’
The boy loosened his hold to gaze up at Art. He had a dusty green smear across his cheek and red indentation marks on his forehead. Truth be told, he looked a mess, but then he smiled. His eyes were hazel, with flecks of green in them, and his round face was impossibly young and open, but, in that moment, Art could see the resemblance to his mother — which was weird, because Art was fairly sure he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d seen Ellie smile her real smile — as opposed to her tight smile, or her sarcastic smile, or her you-are-such-anarsehole smile.
But that rare real smile had been exactly like her son’s. It had made her eyes shine, as if someone had lit a furnace behind them.
‘I didn’t think I could, but I did, sir.’
‘Yes, you did.’ Art patted the boy on the shoulder, relieved when Josh let go of him. ‘But you don’t have to call me “sir”. It makes me feel a hundred years old.’
The furnace behind the boy’s eyes flared and he giggled. The childish chuckle made Art feel for a moment as if he were lit from within too.
And that’s when he heard the sound of someone charging through the forest, from the opposite direction to the farmhouse. That would be Ellie and Toto, back from Plymouth.
‘Josh, Josh, are you OK?’
Ellie catapulted from the wooded path that led down to the millpond. Her hair flew out behind her where it had escaped its knot. Even Toto, who was fast as a whippet, was struggling to keep up with mother bear come to rescue her cub.
Josh stepped back out of his arms as Ellie rushed past him to grab her son’s shoulders. ‘Thank God you’re safe.’ She stroked his cheek and then touched the abrasions on his forehead. ‘What happened to your face?’
‘It’s OK, Mom. It doesn’t hurt.’
A blush had suffused Josh’s cheeks.
Ellie was totally overreacting, and she was embarrassing the boy. Her son was twelve, not two. Art figured it was none of his business, though, as she crushed Josh to her bosom, running her hand over his hair. She peered at the treehouse, then fired a glare at Art that could laser stone.
‘What was he doing up there? He’s afraid of heights.’ Her glare travelled back to the treehouse. ‘And that thing’s a bloody death trap.’ Then the glare hit Toto. ‘What were you trying to do, kill him? Or just humiliate him?’
Toto shook her head, her eyes popping wide, but remained mute. Art figured she had to be in shock, because his daughter was usually incredibly hard to shut up.
‘Mom, I wanted to go up there,’ Josh offered in Toto’s defence. ‘It’s a clubhouse and it’s cool.’
Maybe the boy was scared of heights, but he only seemed embarrassed by his mother in full Valkyrie mode. Art gave the boy points for bravery, because the woman looked ready to commit murder.
The killer glare shot back to him. ‘Why does it not surprise me that your daughter is as much of a sadist as you used to be?’
Crap, she’d just made it his business.
*
‘Chill out, Ellie.’
‘Chill out?’ Ellie hissed, the obese gymnasts ready to explode out of her ears.
This man and his vicious little minion had nearly killed her son. Not to mention taken her on a trek across most of Wiltshire when she was so exhausted she was ready to faceplant for a week.
She’d chill Art Dalton right into the freezer cabinet if he wasn’t careful.
‘I will not chill out. And the name’s not Ellie, it’s Eloise to you.’
His brows wrinkled. Fine, maybe it sounded a bit pompous. She didn’t care.
‘OK, Eloise.’ He rolled the name off his tongue as if it were the punchline to a particularly unfunny joke. ‘There’s no need to flip out.’ He swung a hand towards Josh, who had wriggled out of her arms and was standing beside Art’s evil minion. The two children edged closer to Art, as if he were the sane dependable adult in this scenario.
‘The boy’s safely on terra firma.’ Art’s patient tone made her want to kick him exceptionally hard, somewhere extremely soft. ‘He made the decision to go up there and he got himself down without too much help from me. Toto came to get you as soon as she knew there was a problem. So whatever you’re accusing her of, you’re wrong.’
‘She came to get me and then took me on a guided tour of Wiltshire to bring me to a tree that I know is only five minutes from the farmyard.’
She was getting light-headed again, her lungs aching from the effort to hold back the tortured breaths of her outrage.
They’d done to Josh exactly what Art had done to her all those years ago, Art and the other commune kids. A couple of days after she’d arrived they’d told her she needed to be
