Jonathan
Where could she be?
Morning sun streamed over him through the mullioned panes as he sat folded into his bedroom bay window. Jonathon felt turned to stone. The eyes of his favourite baseball and hockey players stared down on him from posters that papered his walls. Photographs of his parents and grandfather sat on his dresser. He saw none of them. His mind’s eye snagged on the image of his mother, smiling at him, hugging, teasing him until the space between his ribs that held his heart smouldered.
Why hasn’t she called?
A movement in the lane beneath his window caught his attention. His dad, work backpack slung over his shoulder, moved quickly, as if he was late for work at their James Farm Produce store in the village of Dunston Mills. But when he glanced up at his son’s window, his face wrenched with an emotion that chilled the heat in Jonathon’s chest. The sight of that bleak expression yanked Jon back to the phone call his dad had made at breakfast time.
Jonathon had been sitting with Gramp at the table in the large farmhouse kitchen, but they could still hear his father’s voice in the hall.
“Hi Debbie…uh…could I please speak to Sarah?…Oh, she isn’t… She didn’t? She did what?!” The receiver hit the cradle with a bang and he’d seemed to stumble as he came around the corner into the kitchen.
“David? How is Sarah?” Gramp Matthew’s deep bass voice rumbled like thunder.
“Dammit, Dad, I don’t know!” The unexpected roar of his reply had startled them all.
Secrets of the Home Wood: the Sacrifice Description:
For Jonathon, the Home Wood that borders his grandfather’s farm has always been a source of mystery and dread. Strange half-heard rumours passed among aunts, uncles and cousins never quite add up.
More than twenty years ago, his father—when he was Jonathon’s age—was swallowed up by the Home Wood for more than a day and came back badly injured. That was when his grandfather forbade any family member from venturing back there.
And so when, from his bedroom window one morning, Jonathon sees his father once again cross into the Home Wood, he knows something is very wrong. Deceiving his grandfather, Jonathon sets out after his father and makes his way, for the first time in his life, into the woods.
What he finds there is beyond even his wildest imagination.
