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I go out to the porch, close the door softly behind me, and pull out my terrible old phone. It’s late. I don’t care. I scroll to the only number I’ve ever called more than once.

He picks up on the second ring. “Holt? You okay? You never call.”

I look at the dark trees. I take a breath.

“Brody,” I say. “I need help.”

There’s a long silence on the line. Then my friend laughs, a big, booming gargoyle laugh that rattles the speaker.

“I’ve been waiting a long time to hear you say that,” he says.

“Are you going to help me or not?”

“Buddy,” he says. “I’m going to help you so hard. And you still owe me forty bucks.”

CHAPTER 11

RAISE THE ROOF

WREN

I wake up on Holt’s couch at dawn with a crick in my neck and a blanket tucked so tightly around my feet that I look like a burrito.

Holt is gone. The cabin is quiet, and his truck isn’t in the yard.

I make coffee in his ridiculous giant mug, the one that holds about half a gallon, and take it out to the porch steps. Then I unroll my plans across my knees and do the math again. It’s the fifth time since yesterday. Guess what? The answer hasn’t changed.

Ten days. No road, no digger and no crew.

How do two people carry a whole trail through a forest by hand? They don’t. Not unless one of them is Paul Bunyan, and even Paul had an ox.

My throat goes tight and my eyes start to sting. Okay. One good sniff. I’m allowed one. I wipe my nose on the sleeve of Holt’s flannel, because it’s right there, and because he’ll never know.

So the trail opens late. Maybe it opens in spring. Families will still come, and it’ll still be good. And I’ll be in Oregon counting wetland birds while some other girl stands on my Lookout and sees what I saw.

Gah. That thought hurts worse than my shin did.

Then a sound rolls down the valley. It’s slow and heavy, whump, whump, whump, like a giant beating out a rug.

I know that sound. I hear it over Holt’s roof every time Brody drops in for poker.

I’m on my feet with coffee sloshing over my fingers when Holt’s truck bounces into the yard. He leans out the window. He’s muddy to the elbows, and he’s smiling, with both tusks out.

“Get in,” he says. “You need to see this.”

There are about sixty people at the washout.

I stand at the edge of the creek road with my mouth hanging open like a cartoon. Dale is there with shovels. The ladies from the bakery are there with three urns of coffee.

The man in the fishing vest is there, still in the vest. And half the monsters in Screaming Woods are there too, the ones I’ve only ever waved at in the grocery store.

A lizard man from the hardware store has his tool belt on. A werewolf in a high-vis vest is directing traffic. A very pale man in a very large hat is standing under a very large umbrella, carrying four bags of concrete like they’re throw pillows.

On the town side of the gully, the lumberyard truck is parked as close as it can get. And overhead, slate gray and the size of a small airplane, is Brody.

He’s got a bundle of planks slung underneath him in a cargo net, and he’s flying them right over the washout and the treetops, straight toward the south loop.

“He’s been at it since five,” Holt says. “Twelve loads so far.”