The Winter People (25 page)

“Take a look,” she said, handing Candace the flashlight to let her see for herself. Candace got down on her hands and knees and shone the beam around in the empty space. Ruthie looked around for something heavy she could hit Candace on the back of the head with while she was in this vulnerable position. All she saw were a couple of flimsy umbrellas. How hard did you have to bean someone to knock them out?

“And there was nothing else back there?” Candace asked, her voice full of suspicion.

“Not a thing,” Ruthie said.

Candace came out of the closet, shone the light on Ruthie. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, now, would you?”

“Candace, I swear,” she said. “All we found was those two wallets sealed up in a Ziploc bag.”

“Hey,” Candace said, looking around. “Where did your sister go?”

Fawn hadn’t followed them to the closet.

Candace stalked back down the hall into the living room, Ruthie following. Fawn wasn’t there. Candace hissed out an angry breath.

“Fawn?” Ruthie called. She wouldn’t try to escape, would she? Ruthie pictured Fawn running through the snow with a fever, dressed in her overalls and socks, trying to go for help. The nearest neighbors were a couple of miles away, and very few cars ever came down the road this far. Only people going out to the Devil’s Hand, and no one would be going there on a night like tonight. Fawn would freeze to death before she could get help.

She thought of little Gertie, wandering off into the woods and falling into the well.

Is that where they’d find Fawn?

Ruthie breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the thump of feet on the stairs and looked over to see Fawn coming down, cradling Mimi the doll.

“You are not to leave my sight,” Candace snapped. Her face was quite ruddy now, damp with sweat. “Do you understand?”

Ruthie clasped her hand firmly around Fawn’s, determined not to lose her again.

Fawn nodded rapidly. “I just went to get a blanket for Mimi,” she said, showing Candace her doll all swaddled in an old baby blanket. “She’s sick, you know. She’s got a fever. I had to give her medicine. I’m sick, too.”

Candace forced a smile, though it was clear her patience was wearing thin. “Sorry to hear that, kiddo. But from now on, you stick with us, okay?”

“I promise,” she said, smiling real big. Fawn’s smile could melt an iceberg. You just couldn’t help smiling back, no matter how mad you were.

Candace rubbed her face, and let her shoulders slump. “Do you have any coffee?”

“Coffee?” Ruthie said. The woman was holding them hostage, and now she wanted refreshments? “Um, sure. I can go put a pot on.” This might be her chance—if she could just get into the kitchen alone for a minute, she could call for help, grab a knife … something.

“We’ll come with you,” Candace said, following close behind. “I don’t want to lose anyone else tonight.”

Candace sat down at the table and watched Ruthie measure and grind the coffee and start the machine. Fawn settled in at her usual place, the chair across from the window, Mimi on her lap.

Ruthie joined the others at the table, sitting beside Fawn. Fawn took Ruthie’s hand and held it tight in her own. Fawn’s hand was hot. She probably needed Tylenol again.

Candace stared at Ruthie. “When’s your birthday?” she asked.

“October thirteenth.”

Fawn tugged on Ruthie’s hand, guiding it down to her doll, who was resting on Fawn’s legs, still all bundled in a thick blanket. Fawn pushed Ruthie’s hand against the doll. There was something hard there, under the blankets.

“And how old are you?” Candace asked.

“Nineteen.” Ruthie pulled back the blankets slightly, gingerly feeling the outline of the object. She put all her energy into keeping her face blank.

The gun.

Fawn had gotten the gun from its hiding place in their mom’s room and wrapped it in the blanket. Ruthie carefully pushed the blanket back into place.

“You’re the spitting image of your mother, did you know that?”

Candace said to Ruthie.

Fawn laughed and shook her head incredulously. “Ruthie doesn’t look
anything
like Mama.”

“That’s because Alice Washburne is not her mother.” Candace let her words drop like bombs, watching their faces as the dust settled.

“The O’Rourkes are my real parents,” Ruthie said quietly. It wasn’t a question. Her hand was resting on the blanket-covered gun.

She’d known the truth since she first saw the photo at Candace’s, hadn’t she? Felt it deep down.

It was funny, though—when she was a little kid, she used to have fantasies about Mom and Dad not being her real parents; she’d imagine a rich couple, a king and queen of some far-off country she’d never heard of, coming to claim her as their own and ferry her off into the life she was meant to be leading, a life that didn’t involve cleaning out the chicken coop and wearing hand-me-down clothes. But now that she had finally gotten her wish, it didn’t feel like a magical new beginning. It felt like a punch in the gut, hard and heavy.

“Like I said, you’re a smart girl.”

Fawn clutched Ruthie’s hand tighter.

“Which makes you … my aunt?” Ruthie wasn’t sure what else to say.
Pleased to meet you, actual blood relative
—that didn’t seem appropriate.

“I don’t get it,” Fawn whispered, looking from Ruthie to Candace.

“It’s confusing, isn’t it?” Candace said, giving Fawn a sympathetic look. “To explain, we’d have to go way back, to when Tommy
and I were kids. We lived here, in this house. After Sara Harrison Shea died, the house was left to her niece, Amelia Larkin. It stayed in the family. Tommy and I are the great-great-grandchildren of Amelia.”

Ruthie took this in. She was a blood relative of Sara Harrison Shea. Whether Sara had been a madwoman or a mystic, there was a piece of her inside Ruthie.

“When we were kids, we found hiding places all over the house—the one in the hall closet, one in our parents’ bedroom floor, several here and there behind the walls, and one in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, right over there,” she said, pointing at the cabinet that held the mugs and glasses. “That’s where we found the missing pages from Sara Harrison Shea’s diary, including instructions for how to make a sleeper walk again. She’d copied them from the letter Auntie had left for her.”

“What’s a sleeper?” Fawn asked.

Candace’s eyes grew big and wolfish. “A dead person brought back to life.”

Fawn bit her lip. “But that’s not real, right?” She looked at Ruthie.

“Of course not,” Ruthie said, but Fawn looked frightened, unconvinced.

“Like aliens?” Fawn asked.

“Yeah, like aliens,” Ruthie said, smiling what she hoped was a reassuring smile at Fawn. She turned to Candace. “So you had these missing pages all this time?”

Candace held up her hand. “Not so fast. Let me finish. We had the directions, but there was still a part missing,” she explained. “There was a map telling where to go to do the spell, and we couldn’t find it anywhere. Our parents had cleared so much out of the house, hauling off box after box to junk shops, wanting to rid themselves of everything associated with crazy Sara. So Tommy and I knew
how
to do it, but not
where
to do it. Sara’s papers said there was a portal somewhere close to the house, perhaps even in the house, and that, for the spell to work, you had to go to the portal. But without the map or a description, we were out of luck.”

“So what did you do with the pages you’d found?” Ruthie asked.

“We hid them away. Then, when we were adults, Tommy took charge of them. He promised they were worth a great deal of money, even without the map, and once he found a buyer, we would split the profits. He had a friend he’d met in college who dealt in antiquarian books and papers.…”

“Our father!” Ruthie said.

“Yes. James Washburne. Tom and Bridget arranged to meet James and his wife, Alice, here at the house one weekend, sixteen years ago. They were going to show them the diary pages and try one more time to find the portal. Then the pages would go up for auction, and we’d all be rich, according to Tommy.”

“So what happened?” Ruthie asked.

Candace shook her head, pursed her lips tight. “Tommy and Bridget were killed.”

“Killed?” Ruthie gasped. In just a few short minutes, she’d been given new parents, then had them taken away again. “How?”

“Alice and James claimed there was
something
in the woods that got them—a monster of some sort that dragged their bodies off.”

Fawn’s whole body went rigid.

“There’s no such thing as monsters,” Ruthie said, taking her little sister’s hand firmly in hers and giving it a squeeze.

“I agree completely,” Candace said. “In the beginning, I was in such a state of shock that I accepted their story. I wasn’t exactly convinced that there was a
monster
, but I thought maybe there had been a terrible accident. But over the years, I’ve come to see the truth. I can’t believe how stupid, how naïve, I was.”

“The truth?” Ruthie said.

Candace nodded. “Isn’t it obvious? James and Alice murdered my brother and his wife to get the pages. They knew what they were worth and wanted them all for themselves.”

Ruthie shook her head vigorously. “My parents aren’t killers!” This idea was more absurd to her than the idea of a monster out in the woods.

“Think about it, Ruthie. Couldn’t anyone become a killer if the stakes were high enough?” She was silent for several seconds. “If you want proof, you don’t have to look far. Here I am, threatening two
young girls, one of whom is my long-lost
niece
, with a
gun
, so that I can find those damn missing pages.”

“What do you want them so badly for?” Ruthie asked. “You don’t actually believe they work, do you?”

Candace laughed. “No. But there are plenty of other people out there who
do
believe. People willing to pay a great deal of money. Money that I, in turn, will pay the fanciest lawyer I can find to get my son back.”

Ruthie nodded. It made sense now and worried Ruthie—Candace was clearly an unstable woman with nothing left to lose and everything to gain. “So you really think my mother has these missing diary pages?”

“Yes, I believe so, though your parents always claimed the pages were lost the weekend that Tommy and Bridget were killed. But I’ve been waiting patiently over the years, sure the pages would surface one day—that your parents would try to sell them. Which is what I think might be happening now. I think that maybe, for some reason, your mother has finally decided the time is right. Maybe she’s already sold them. It’s possible she took the money and ran.”

Fawn shook her head. “She wouldn’t leave us.”

“Fawn’s right,” Ruthie said. “She wouldn’t. I can believe that if she did have the pages she might try to sell them, but I think if she was doing it, she’d be doing it for us.” Ruthie thought of her mother’s promise to help with college next year—was this her big plan, to take the one thing of value she had and sell it so Ruthie could go to the school of her choice?

“Maybe you’re right.” Candace shrugged. “Or maybe your mother tried to sell them and something went wrong. I must admit that, when you showed up at my house and told me she’d disappeared, I was … surprised,” Candace said, plucking at a strand of her hair. “Alice was very committed to staying here, to raising you as her own child. Both of your parents were. I promised them I’d stay away, would let them raise you, and would never tell you about your real parents. We all decided that was what was best. There was nowhere else for you to go. My husband—my ex-husband—he didn’t want an extra mouth to feed, and he just wanted it all to go
away. He never … approved of how close I was with Tommy, I see that now. And James and Alice wanted to stay on here, to watch over the hill and make sure whatever creature it was they believed lived there wouldn’t harm anyone again. They were … caught up in the mythology of it all. In Sara and the sleepers. They felt like they’d been led here—like they were part of something bigger than themselves.”

Ruthie thought of all the warnings her parents had given her over the years:
Stay out of the woods. It’s dangerous up there
.

Was there something up there in those woods?

She remembered the uneasy feeling of being watched she so often had out there; finding her father dead with the ax clenched in his hands; being carried down the hill when she was a little girl, told it was all a bad dream.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a crashing sound from somewhere in the back of the house. Candace pulled out her gun and jumped up so fast she nearly knocked the table over.

“Where’d it come from?” Candace asked, eyes huge and frightened. She held the gun in both hands, pointing up toward the ceiling.

“The bathroom, I think,” Ruthie answered.

Candace started to leave the kitchen, then turned back and looked at the girls, who were still in their seats. “Come on,” she insisted. “We stay together.”

They raced to the bathroom and found the window broken, glass and melting snow covering the tile floor. There were drops of blood splattered here and there. Fawn grabbed Ruthie’s hand, held it in a bone-crushing grip, her own small hand hot and surprisingly strong. Her other arm was wrapped tightly around Mimi—still swaddled in the blanket, gun tucked inside.

“Stay behind me,” Candace hissed. Slowly, she followed the puddles and drips of blood down the hall and into the living room. Ruthie kept Fawn behind her, listening hard for sounds, but only hearing her own heart pounding. As irrational as it was, one thought kept bubbling its way to the top of her frazzled brain:
It’s the monster. The monster is real, and it’s here, in the house
.

“Hold it right there,” Candace said, raising her gun.

A woman stood, bent over the coffee table, holding in her
hands the Nikon the girls had found in the backpack earlier. She was tall, thin, and very pale, dressed in paint-splattered jeans and an expensive-looking coat. Blood leaked from the thin black glove on her right hand.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, holding out the camera. Her voice was cracked and broken, and her eyes were full of tears. “
Where did you get this?
”