THE MUD–SPATTERED BULLDOZER rested on its crawler tracks, a sleeping giant on a rumpled blanket of dirt. Less than a quarter of a mile away stood the five mighty oaks of Alfheim. Fourteen-year-old Matt McCormack dashed across the construction site. He bent down to squirm through a length of plastic pipe that lay stretched over the soil. Then he raced toward the excavating machine. Matt's father, Charlie, stood at the edge of the forest with a roll of blueprints under his arm. "Matt!" he shouted. "This isn't an obstacle course. I hope you're not going to do what I think you're going to do!"
Matt ran past the wide-toothed bucket and the jointed arm of the steel behemoth and scaled the bumper. Matt had brown, sparkling eyes, like his mom, a round face like his dad, and a pair of oversized ears which he hoped he would grow into. Growing was something that Matt had thought a lot about lately, as he was a little shorter than many boys his own age. Windmilling his arms, Matt leapt into the air. He landed on his heels in the dirt. Dirt! Glorious, filthy, incomparable, dirty, dusty dirt. "Sorry, Dad!" he yelled. "What did you say?"
"Nothing. I just want you to set a good example for Becky. Don't give her any ideas."
Becky, the older of Matt's sisters, was nine. She brushed straw-colored hair from her high forehead, and squinted into the sun. Then she frowned, apprehension flickering in her pale eyes. She lingered nervously on the concrete walkway that led to the McCormacks' new house. Up and down the short block were ten new houses, all nearing completion, waiting to be sold. Tiny spears of grass sprouted from the straw that covered the yard. Becky eyed the grass cautiously. It would take a lot more than her brother's ideas to get her to play in the dirt. "Dad," Becky called, "Mom says you can come in and make some sandwiches, if you want to eat. We're getting pretty hungry."
"Okay, honey. We'll be right in," he answered.
Matt was arranging a row of traffic cones. "Come on, kiddo," his dad said, "you're going to need to get cleaned up before you set foot in Mom's new kitchen."
"But, Dad," Matt complained, "I'm just gonna get dirty again!"
"I know. But can you wait until we've been in the new house for at least a week until you trash it?"
There had been a lot of changes for Matt's family in the year since his grandmother passed away. After working out the details of Grandma's will, Charlie suddenly found himself the owner of twelve hundred acres of undeveloped woodland in rural Pennsylvania. Only, this part of Pennsylvania wasn't so rural anymore, as suburban sprawl had spread its tentacles into forests and pastures, claiming land for tidy developments with names like Glen Acres and Rocky Springs Estates. Nobody but Grandma had known that she even owned the land, and no one could have ever guessed that she was sitting on a potential gold mine.
Poor old Grandma McCormack. After her husband, Jim, and daughter, Anna, disappeared in the woods back in the 1970s, she left the country house and took her son, Charlie, to live in Pittsburgh. Eventually Charlie grew up, got a job in construction, married a girl named Jill, and started a family of his own. They got an apartment on the second floor of an old brick building on the South Side. Space had been pretty tight back then; Matt and Becky had to share one tiny bedroom. The nearest tree was a scrawny maple, sucking up nutrients from a patch of soil next to the trash can at the end of the block. Money had always been in short supply. So when Grandma died and left Dad the property, it was clear that the time had come for a change.
Soon the McCormacks were living in a brand-new house in what was going to be a brand-new neighborhood, carved into a piece of the family property. Sylvan Estates was Charlie's project, and he was involved in every aspect of construction, from digging the foundations to installing kitchens and painting walls. Even though he hired crews to do the work, he still enjoyed the labor of seeing a job through from start to finish. Matt and Becky were now suburban kids, with a new sister, Emily, they could be proud of. If somebody could really be proud of a toddler who never seemed to do anything but cry and poop and get into trouble. Their mom was always telling Matt and Becky that their baby sister was an unexpected treasure. But Emily kept Jill so busy and tired that she never had time to do the things the kids thought a mom ought to do — like fix their lunch. "Dad, I'm tired of peanut butter," said Becky, as she slathered a slice of bread at the kitchen table. "Can't we have something different tomorrow?"
A toilet flushed, and Matt clomped into the kitchen from the powder room, wiping his hands on a paper towel. He dropped onto the chair next to his sister and tossed the damp towel onto her lap. "I love it here," he grunted, picking up a sandwich and taking a giant bite.
"Mom!" cried Becky. "Matt threw his dirty towel at me!"
"Hey, Matt," their father intervened, "just because you've discovered you like to play in the dirt doesn't mean you can act like a pig."
Charlie stood by the edge of the counter, chomping on his sandwich. He downed the last of his coffee from a plastic cup. Then, humming absently to himself, he tossed the cup into the garbage and wiped bread crumbs into the sink. "You take the high road," he started to sing, "and I'll take the low road, and I'll get to Scotland before you, for me and my true love will never meet again, on—"
"Daddy, why do you always have to sing that song?" Becky complained. "It gets into my head, and it won't go away."
"Sorry, Becky. It was a song my father used to sing to me when I was a kid. Sometimes when I'm out in the field, the tune just pops into my mind and stays there all afternoon. I didn't know it was contagious, though!"
Matt furrowed his brow. "I don't even know what it's about. What's a high road?"
"I don't have any idea," Charlie said. "Listen, kids, I'm going to have to go into the city this afternoon. I've got to lease some new equipment to replace the machines that broke down. I need to have a talk with our guy at the bank, and then I've got an appointment with a Realtor. There's still a lot of unpacking to do here at home, and I expect you to help your mom."
"But, Dad," said Matt, "I'm tired of unpacking. I wanted to do some exploring and see what it's like around here. Once school starts, we won't have time to do anything."
"Go play for a while," Jill called from the next room. "Emily's going to have a nap and I don't want you in the house making a racket. But stay out of the construction site. You could cut yourself or step on a rusty nail and get tetanus. Just … just stay in the yard, okay?"
"Not the yard," Charlie said. "You'll crush the seedlings and we'll have to start the lawn all over. Ours is the first house we've totally finished, so we want it to look perfect."
"What's tetanus, Dad?" asked Becky.
"I don't know. Some kind of disease. You probably have had a shot for it anyway."
"They used to call it lockjaw," Jill whispered, slipping into the kitchen. Emily had fallen asleep in her arms. "It's an infection. In the old days people with tetanus would get so stiff they could barely move, and eventually they wouldn't be able to open their mouths or move their joints. Then they died. It's very serious."
"There are shots for it, now," Charlie said. "Jill, why do you say things like that? You're going to scare the kids to death."
"Charlie, will you be back in time for dinner?"
"I hope so, but just in case," he said, turning toward his son, "you're on macaroni and cheese duty!"
Matt and Becky waved from the porch as their dad backed his truck out of the driveway. "Well," Matt asked, "what do you want to do? I set up an obstacle course in the field. I could ride my dirt bike around the cones, and you could time me and see how fast I am!"
"We're not supposed to go over there," Becky warned, squinting at the line of trees beyond the field. "Besides, the woods give me the creeps. Isn't that where Grandpa Jim and Aunt Anna disappeared?"
"Yeah," Matt answered, "so what? That was a long time ago. Before we were even born. But I'm not even talking about going into the woods. Just that field, right there!"
"But what happened to them? Did they die?"
"I don't know." Matt shrugged. "Nobody knows. All they ever found was the pickup truck. Come on, Becky, please? I don't have anybody else to do anything with!"
"I want to get my dolls unpacked," Becky said. "You could help!"
Matt rolled his eyes. He couldn't wait until the development was finished and some more people moved in. With all the new houses, there would have to be at least one family with a boy more or less his age. "Listen," Matt argued, "you heard what Mom said. She gets mad if Emily doesn't have a nap. Come on, let's just hang outdoors. We could even play hide and seek, if you want. You always liked that back in the old neighborhood!"
Matt scanned the construction site for good hiding places as he loped across the dirt. "Stop!" cried Becky, trailing behind him. "I'm gonna tell Mom!"
"I'll hide first!" shouted Matt. He took his sister by the shoulders and stood her with her back to a muddy boulder. "Okay, count to fifty."
Matt dashed around the claw of the broken-down excavator and clambered up a ladder to the cab. He imagined for a second how much fun it would be to get into the excavator and drive it around. But even if he had the key, and even if he had been old enough to drive the thing, the machine was broken. In fact, none of the construction equipment was working. Charlie had said that he was having a run of bad luck. A few days earlier, when his workers went to uproot a few of the big old trees that formed a line across the field, the machines began breaking down. One by one, something went wrong with a motor, or an axle, or an electrical system. Nobody on the crew could figure out what was going on, so work had to be shut down. Charlie said that when you hit a streak of bad luck, you just had to ride it out. But Matt realized it was hard to ride out something that wasn't moving.
Becky finished counting to fifty, then looked to her left and right. "Here I come!" she cried, then took a cautious step forward. She crept around the giant shovel, gingerly stepping over the tread tracks, and turned into the shadow of the bulldozer where Matt was hiding. "Bombs away!" he shouted, and leapt into his sister's path.
Sploosh! Matt's feet came down in a puddle, left over from a recent thundershower. Mud splattered everywhere. Becky burst into tears, and as Matt took a step forward to quiet her, his sneaker came off in the muck. When he lifted his right foot, he lost the other shoe as well, and he stood there in wet, muddy socks. "Serves you right!" cried Becky, wiping away her tears and giggling.
"Okay," Matt grumbled, pulling off his socks and giving them a toss. "You can't fight mud. Come on," he said, looking around for some place drier. "I'll race you to the top of that hill!"
Next to an excavation hole a giant heap of soil rose from the ground, and Matt charged up the side. With each step his feet pressed deep into the dirt. "You'd better come down, Matt," Becky warned, but Matt was unstoppable. That is, until something jabbed into the heel of his left foot, and a stab of pain shot up his leg.
"Owww!" Matt cried, flopping onto his back. "Owww, what the …" He peered at his foot, looking for the rusty nail or bit of sharp metal or broken glass that must be lodged there. But what he saw sticking out of his skin was the pointed heel of a small, glittering shoe, nearly two inches long. A drop of blood fell onto the dirt. "What is it?" cried Becky. "What's wrong, Matt?"
"Nothing," Matt answered, as visions of amputations, lockjaw, and death raced through his mind. "I just stepped on a — on something sharp, that's all."
Matt squeezed both sides of the little shoe with his thumb and forefinger and pulled hard. The heel was narrow, and it was lodged deep. Matt thought maybe it went into his bone. He twisted it a few times and the spike came out. "Stupid," he muttered. "Stupid doll thing."
Matt slipped the shoe into his pocket, with the heel facing out. He struggled to a sitting position. Then he slid down the dirt heap to the ground and, keeping his weight on his good foot, brushed soil from his jeans. "Come on," he said. "I want to go inside."
"But, Matt," Becky whined, "I haven't had a turn to hide yet!"
"Look, I got hurt," Matt snapped. "I cut my foot. Mom will be mad at me if she finds out. Promise not to tell, and I'll … I'll help you unpack your dolls, okay?"
"I promise," Becky said, trailing behind as Matt limped up toward the house.