The Winter People (22 page)

A group of teenagers were gathered in front of the back doors, sharing a bag of maple cotton candy and laughing; they all looked nearly identical in their tall boots and bright ski jackets. She passed
a wooden-toy maker, a table from a local apiary selling honey and mead, piles of root vegetables and squash, coolers full of hand-stuffed sausage, a display of sweet rolls and breads, and a table of Unitarian Universalists doing a quilt raffle.

The vendors Katherine talked to didn’t seem to know a thing about the woman with the braid except that she was the egg lady and she knit beautiful warm socks. Katherine stopped to ask a woman in the corner who was spinning wool into chunky brown yarn.

“Oh, you mean Alice? I don’t know where she could be. She’s here every week. Never misses a market.”

“You don’t happen to know her last name, do you?” Katherine asked.

The woman shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t. Brenda Pierce, the market manager, would know, but she’s gone to Florida to be with her dad for open-heart surgery. Check back next week. I’m sure Alice will be here. I’ve never known her to miss a market.”

A
lice,” Katherine said, back in her apartment, holding the tiny doll she’d fashioned yesterday from wire and papier-mâché.

“I may not have found you, but at least you have a name now.”

She’d given the four-inch-high doll a long gray braid (embroidery floss) and dressed her in tiny blue jeans. She wore a bright sweater that Katherine had crocheted from turquoise and yellow yarn.

Katherine set Alice down in her box and went into the kitchen to find something to eat.

Alice, Alice. Go ask Alice. Alice down the rabbit hole.

Where are you, Alice?

She’d have to wait. She’d go back to the market next week—surely the egg lady would be back by then. If not, she’d talk to the market manager, get Alice’s last name, maybe even her phone number, if she got lucky.

She heated up some soup and made a cup of coffee. Outside, the late-afternoon sky darkened, and snow was beginning to fall more steadily.

After finishing her meager meal, Katherine dug around in her
purse for her cigarettes, pulled one out, and lit it. She noticed the paper bag under her purse: the book she’d picked up yesterday.

She slid it out and opened it up. The first page showed a map of West Hall in 1850. The page opposite it showed West Hall in the present day. There were a few more streets, new churches and schools, but, really, Katherine was surprised at how little had actually changed. The town green was right where it always was, gazebo in the center.

Gary would have loved this, the maps and photos pulled together to show the history of a town.

She flipped through and found photos of Jameson’s Tack and Feed, Cushing’s General Store, the West Hall Inn with its stained-glass windows. Next to all of these were photographs of the same buildings in the present day: the sporting-goods store, the antique shop, Lou Lou’s Café, the bookstore. It was odd, how recognizable each building was still, though the signs outside had changed, the roads were paved, and there were sidewalks with benches where hitching posts once stood.

Katherine took a drag of her cigarette and continued to page through the book. Here was a team of horses pulling a giant roller to flatten the snow along the roads, and beside it, a present-day picture of the town garage with two huge orange snowplows. Here were two photos that showed different generations of the same family collecting maple sap, one with tin buckets, the other with miles of plastic tubing. Next came a dirty crew of men outside a sawmill that was now a craft gallery; then a sepia-toned photograph of rows of children with serious faces standing in front of a one-room school-house, and beside that a photo of the current school, West Hall Union, a low brick building built in 1979.

She turned the page and came to a photo showing a group of young men and women on a plaid blanket, with a huge rocky outcropping behind them: five stones rising from the earth.
Picnic at the Devil’s Hand, June 1898
, read the hand-lettered caption. Beside it, a photo of the same rocks, the woods behind them taller and denser, and without picnickers:
The Devil’s Hand today
.

She flipped to the next page. A white farmhouse with a long driveway, a barn behind it, and plowed fields off to the left. In the
corner, more hand-lettering:
Harrison Shea house and farm, Beacon Hill Road, 1905
.

Katherine set her cigarette down in the ashtray and reached into her bag again for Gary’s copy of
Visitors from the Other Side
. She turned it over to compare the farmhouse Sara stood in front of to the one in the picture from the new book; they were a match.

She looked back down at the book of photographs, her eye on the opposite page:
Harrison Shea house, present day
. The house looked nearly identical: same black shutters, brick chimney, and front steps. The barn still stood, but the fields were overgrown, the woods closer. Just to the left of the driveway, in the front yard, a woman and two girls tended a large vegetable garden. The photo was taken from the road, and it was hard to make out too many details, but the woman, bent over, had a long gray braid and wore a brightly colored shawl.

Katherine’s heart pounded. Was her mind playing tricks on her? She blinked and looked over at her worktable, where the Alice doll sat waiting in a tiny version of Lou Lou’s Café. Then she turned back to the photo in the book, squinting down, half expecting that the woman with the braid wouldn’t be there—that she’d imagined it. But there she was, hunched over next to a little girl in overalls and a taller girl with dark hair. Could this woman between them with her head bent down possibly be Alice, the egg lady?

“Beacon Hill Road,” she said out loud, flipping back to the front of the book, where the maps were. There it was. You just had to follow Main Street west out of town, take a right on Lower Road, which took you over the brook, and then the next right was Beacon Hill. On the 1850 map, there was only one farmhouse drawn, though left unlabeled, about halfway down Beacon Hill Road before it intersected with Mountain Road. Just to the north of that single house on Beacon Hill Road was a hill, and at the top of the hill were the words
Devil’s Hand
.

She checked the modern map and found Beacon Hill Road in the same place, and there, on the hill beyond, the Devil’s Hand. Mountain Road was now Route 6, of course.

It might be a wild leap, but it was something. And, aside from waiting until next week to try the farmers’ market again, she really didn’t have any other ideas for tracking down the egg lady.

She glanced out the living-room window; it was fully dark now. How was she going to know if it was even the right house? Wouldn’t it be better to wait until morning, to do this in the light of day?

No
, she decided, reaching for her bag and keys. This was perfect, really. She’d drive out there, and if she found the right house, she’d go and knock on the door, tell them she’d gotten lost in the bad weather, or had had a little car trouble. Find out what she could that way. Maybe it wasn’t even Alice’s house, but belonged to some other woman with a long gray braid.

One way to find out.

She stood up and went to the closet to get her coat.

It was an uneventful morning, which put Ruthie on edge—everything felt normal except for the absence of her mother, looming over everything like a hazy film, giving the whole day a blurry, unreal feeling and a bitter saccharine aftertaste.

It was Saturday, and though Ruthie thought about going to the farmers’ market to sell eggs in her mother’s place, she decided dealing with all the questions she’d get wasn’t worth the hundred or so bucks she’d make. Buzz was working at his uncle’s shop and wouldn’t get off until late.

The girls spent the morning puttering around the house, peering anxiously out the windows, Ruthie willing the phone to ring. Ruthie washed the dishes. Swept the floor. Fed the chickens and collected eggs. Kept the fire in the woodstove burning. She did all the things Mom would do, and did them as Mommishly as she knew how. Fawn followed Ruthie from room to room, never letting her big sister out of her sight. She hovered right outside the bathroom door when Ruthie went in to pee.

“I’m not going anywhere, you know,” Ruthie told her.

Fawn shrugged, but continued to shadow Ruthie’s every move.

At least a dozen times, Ruthie decided she was going to call the police, but every time, she stopped herself at the last minute. What if her mother and father
were
involved somehow with the O’Rourkes’ disappearance? What if that crazy lady in Connecticut had already called the police about Ruthie showing up on her doorstep? And she
would have to tell them about the gun, right? There was no way it was licensed or legal. And Fawn—they would definitely take Fawn away, wouldn’t they? No way they’d leave Fawn in this house with illegal guns and no one but Ruthie to care for her. And still she clung to the idea that her mother would just show up, with a perfectly good explanation—“I’m so sorry I worried you, but …”—and God, she would be furious if Ruthie had caved and called the police.

Tomorrow morning
, Ruthie promised herself. If her mother wasn’t home by then, she’d call the police for sure. First thing.

They made a stew with beef from the chest freezer in the basement—Ruthie had been relieved to see there was enough meat in there to last them for months. There were still plenty of potatoes and onions down in the root cellar, too.

But they couldn’t go on like this for
months
, could they? As the day crept by, Ruthie allowed herself to wonder what would actually happen to them if Mom never returned. There was nearly two hundred dollars in the coffee can in the basement. Not much, but they wouldn’t need much. There was no mortgage on the house—really, they just had to pay for food, utilities, gas for the truck, supplies for the chickens. Ruthie knew she could run the egg business on her own. She had always resented all the work she was forced to do in their huge vegetable garden, but she knew they could get a lot of food out of it—she and Fawn knew how to start seeds in the spring, how to construct a trellis for the peas, when to harvest garlic. Mom had taught both girls to bake bread and can tomatoes and beans. Ruthie could get a part-time job in town. They’d get by. If they had to, they’d find a way.

But they wouldn’t have to, would they? Surely this would all be over soon.

The stew simmered on the back of the woodstove, filling the house with a delicious, comforting smell that made Ruthie miss her mother even more.

By midafternoon, Fawn’s fever was back. Ruthie gave her more Tylenol and set her up on the couch with her dolls and coloring books.

“How you feeling, Little Deer?”

“Fine,” Fawn said, face flushed, hair damp. She had a funny, glazed look in her eyes.

“You just take it easy, okay? No going outside. Try to drink lots, too.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Fawn said, feeding a sip of imaginary medicine to Mimi, who also had a fever.

“Mimi should take it easy, too,” Ruthie said, making the doll a little bed out of a pillow, with a kitchen towel for a blanket. This pleased Fawn, who insisted that Mimi needed a pillow, too, and Ruthie used a ball of her mom’s fluffiest yarn to make her one.

Outside, the wind whistled through the trees, pushing the snow in great drifts. Ruthie curled up in the big recliner under one of her mother’s bright afghans and read
Visitors from the Other Side
. Sara’s book gave Ruthie the creeps, big-time. She kept looking over her shoulder, sure she saw movement in the shadows. What bothered her most was the idea of little sleeper Gertie in what was now her mother’s bedroom closet. The same closet her mother had nailed shut.

Toward the end of the book, Sara revealed the origin of the hidey-holes Fawn and Ruthie had found:

Ruthie glanced over at her sister. She was on the couch, bandaging her doll’s leg. Poor Mimi, first a fever, now a broken leg.

“I told you not to go into the woods,” Fawn whispered to Mimi. “Bad things happen to little girls who go into the woods.”

Fawn looked up, saw Ruthie watching her. “Will you play with me?” Fawn’s eyes reflected the firelight from the glass-fronted woodstove.

“Sure,” she said, setting down the book. “What do you want to play?”

“Hide-and-seek.”

“Can’t we play something else? Dolls or cards or something?”

Fawn shook her head, then lifted up Mimi, who shook her head as well, the scratched button eyes looking right at Ruthie.

“Mimi will only play hide-and-seek. She has a new favorite place to hide.”

“But last time, I couldn’t find you.”

“So maybe try harder,” Fawn said, grinning impishly.

“Okay,” Ruthie sighed, “but if I say I give up, you have to come out. Deal?”

“Deal,” Fawn said.

Ruthie covered her eyes and counted out loud. “One, two, three …” she shouted, listening closely, trying to hear which way her sister’s footsteps went. Down the hall.

She thought of Sara and Gertie playing hide-and-seek here in this house. How good little Gertie was at hiding. And Sara must have been good at hiding, too. At hiding papers, at least.

“Ten, eleven, twelve …”

She heard the closet door in the front hall open, then close. But Fawn did stuff like this to fake her out, to lead her the wrong way. She was a clever kid. Too clever sometimes.

“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Ready or not, here I come!”

She rose from the couch, listening hard. The fire popped. The cat thumped down the stairs, coming to see what all the noise was about.

“Where’d she go, Roscoe? Did you see her?”

The cat rubbed against Ruthie’s leg, gave her a
m-m-mur-r-r-l?

Trick or not, she went right for the hall closet, pulled the door open, pushed aside the jackets and coats, and pawed through the jumbled pile of boots and shoes on the floor.