The Winter People (26 page)

“Put the camera down,” the blond woman said, her gun aimed right at Katherine. The two girls stood behind her, looking just as frightened as they had when she’d seen them through the window with the woman who was holding the gun.

As soon as she spotted the familiar bag and contents on the coffee table, she’d forgotten everything else—the gun, the girls in danger she was supposed to be saving.

“Is this someone you know?” the blond woman asked the girls.

“No!” said the older girl. “I’ve never seen her before.”

“Maybe she’s a sleeper,” the smaller girl said, clutching a beat-up rag doll tight.

What was Katherine supposed to say? How could she begin to explain her presence here?

But no. They were the ones with the explaining to do. They had Gary’s backpack.

Ask them
, Gary whispered in her ear.
Ask them how they got it
.

She clenched the Nikon tighter and waved it in front of them. “This was my husband’s. This is all his.”

“Put the camera down and step away from the bag,” ordered the blond woman, gesturing with her gun. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

“My husband’s name was Gary,” Katherine said to the girls as she set the camera back down on the coffee table, her voice cracking and desperate. “Did you know him? Did he come to your house, maybe?” Both girls shook their heads.

“He’s dead,” Katherine said, voice shaking. “He was here, in West Hall. Then, on his way home, there was an accident, the roads were icy and …” She was unable to go on, her thoughts jumbled, the pain and loss fresh and raw all over again as she looked down at Gary’s things.

“I’m sorry,” the older girl said.

The woman with the gun looked over at the older girl. “What’s the story with the camera stuff, Ruthie?”

“Seriously, I don’t know,” she said. “We just found it.”

“Found it?” Katherine asked.

The woman with the gun made a tsk-tsk sound, tongue against teeth, and shook her head. “These girls seem to have a talent for finding stuff that used to be owned by the dead and the missing,” she said. “So where’d you find the bag, girls—was it in the hall closet? Where you just told me there was nothing but the wallets?”

Ruthie shook her head. “It was in my mom’s closet. Upstairs. We just found it tonight. I don’t know why my mom had it. I tried turning the camera on, but couldn’t make it work.”

Katherine nodded. “The battery’s probably dead.”

“Will it still have photos stored?” the blond woman asked. “Could we put new batteries in it to check?”

“We can plug in the charger, get it going, and take a look,” Katherine said. “If no one’s erased them, it should have the last photos he took on it.”

The last photos Gary took. Katherine’s hands were trembling.

The woman nodded. “Let’s do that. I think we’re all a little curious.” She kept the gun pointed at Katherine. “I’ll take the bag and camera into the kitchen, and we’ll get the battery charging. While we’re waiting, you can tell us just who you are and how the hell you figured out your dead husband’s camera stuff would be in this house.”

“I’m not sure where to start,” Katherine confessed once they were all at the table. The blond woman had ordered the older girl to get them coffee and now sat with her gun pointed at Katherine. It was all very bizarre, being held at gunpoint while coffee was being served—“Cream or sugar?” the teenaged girl asked politely. It felt like she’d stepped into a scene from some art house film, the kind she and Gary might have gone to see back in college.

“At the beginning,” the woman ordered.

“Okay,” Katherine said, taking in a breath and trying not to think about the gun pointed at her chest. She began by telling how Gary was killed in a car accident, how she got the last credit-card bill, how that led her to West Hall.

“So you really moved to West Hall just because that was the last place Gary visited?” the older girl—Ruthie—asked, disbelieving. “I mean, no one ever moves to West Hall. Not willingly.”

“Don’t interrupt her,” the blond woman said, then gestured at Katherine with the gun. “Go on,” she ordered. “And don’t leave anything out. You never know what might be important.”

Katherine told them about finding
Visitors from the Other Side
hidden away in Gary’s toolbox, and Lou Lou’s telling her about Gary’s lunch with the egg lady.

“Egg lady?” Now it was the little girl who spoke, her eyes two huge brown saucers. “You mean our mom?”

So she’d been right! These were the daughters of the egg lady. But where was she? And what was her connection to Gary?

“I guess so. Lou Lou didn’t know anything about her—just that she sold eggs every Saturday at the farmers’ market. I went today looking for her, but she wasn’t there. Then I found pictures of your house in a book I picked up at the bookstore.”

“That Historical Society book? Oh God, Mom was so pissed that our picture was in there,” Ruthie said. “She tried to get them to take it out, but they’d already printed hundreds of copies.”

Katherine went on. “When I saw that picture of you three in the garden, I wondered if the gray-haired lady could possibly be the egg lady I’ve been looking for, so I decided to take a ride out. I parked by the road and came in on foot to get closer. I saw you holding a gun on these girls,” she said, eyeing the woman with the gun, “and knew I had to act.”

The woman laughed. “You did one hell of a job, lady,” she said.

The girls stared at her, wide-eyed. Katherine was sure she saw a trace of disappointment there.
You? You were our last chance! And look what happened
.

“But why would this lady’s photographer husband be meeting Mom at Lou Lou’s?” asked Ruthie. She rubbed her eyes, which had
dark circles beneath them. “And why does Mom have his bag? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“He had his backpack with him when he left the house the day he was killed,” Katherine told them. “It wasn’t in the car after the crash. I asked the police and paramedics, but no one remembered seeing it.”

There was silence. They all looked down into their cups of untouched coffee. The little girl clutched her bundled doll tight against her chest.

“So the camera will have a record of the last pictures taken?” the woman with the gun asked.

“Yes,” Katherine explained. “They’ll be stored there. Unless someone wiped it clean.”

“Well, let’s turn on the camera and check it out,” the woman said.

“What is it you think might be on the camera?” Katherine asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe a clue about where Alice Washburne has gone and what she’s done with the pages.”

“Pages?”

“Candace here thinks my mother has some of the missing diary pages of Sara Harrison Shea,” Ruthie said. “The written instructions for how to bring the dead back to life.”

Katherine replaced the charged batteries and turned the camera on. The others gathered around as she navigated the menu and pulled up photos onto the camera’s display screen.

“We’re in luck,” she said. “No one’s deleted them.”

She clicked quickly through the saved photos. There were a series of her sitting on Gary’s motorcycle, ones taken on their weekend trip to the Adirondacks two weeks before he was killed. She had on jeans and a leather jacket, her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and she looked so happy, smiling at Gary and his camera. She’d held on to the handlebars and pretended to be riding with the wind in her face, singing “Born to Be Wild.” Gary had laughed and said, “Be careful. You know I have a thing for biker chicks.”

There was one of her in front of the cabin they’d stayed in, and another beside a little roadside shop they’d stopped at, where Gary had bought the box of photos and papers—and the little bone ring
he’d given her—for seven dollars.
ANTIQUES AND ODDITIES
, said the sign.

To new beginnings
.

Katherine arrowed through to the next pictures: shadowy photos of pages of tiny, neat cursive.

“What’s this?” she asked out loud.

Ruthie squinted down at the camera. “It’s a diary entry, I think. Wait, I can zoom in. Look, there’s a date: January 31, 1908.”

Katherine scanned the first page:

“Oh my God,” Ruthie said, leaning in for a closer look. “I think it’s one of the missing diary pages!”

Katherine arrowed through to the next photo. “It’s a map of some kind,” she said. Crudely drawn, it showed a house, fields, and a path through the woods that wound up a hill and to the Devil’s Hand. All around the Devil’s Hand was tiny, illegible script. Below, taking up the bottom half of the paper, was another drawing: a network of lines and circles that could have depicted anything—a waterway or paths, perhaps? This, too, was marked with small, impossible-to-read notations.

“Let me see,” Candace said, grabbing the camera from her. “It’s the map showing the way to the portal! It has to be. Can you make it bigger?”

Katherine shook her head. “That’s as big as it gets on the camera. If you have a computer, we could enlarge it, even print things out.”

“We don’t have a computer,” Fawn reported. “Mom doesn’t believe in them.”

“Jesus
Christ
. Of course she doesn’t,” Candace muttered. She squinted at the display. “I can’t make out the writing,” Candace said, “but it looks like the portal is up at the Devil’s Hand. But what’s this at the bottom?”

“Some kind of blowup or detail of where the actual portal is, maybe?” Ruthie suggested.

“What other pictures are on here?”

Katherine showed her the button that advanced the pictures.

“Looks like more diary pages,” Candace said, squinting down at the screen. “Look at this! There’s even a picture of the original letter Auntie wrote Sara about the sleepers. But where’d Gary find them?”

“May I?” Katherine asked, taking the camera back. She scanned through the photos. The little black metal box and tintypes were in the background of some of the pictures Gary had taken of the journal entries.

“Two weeks before he was killed, Gary bought a box of old papers and photos at an antique store in the Adirondacks. He collected old photos—he was kind of obsessed with them. I guess it just so happened that pages of the diary were mixed in with the photos he bought that weekend.”

“And you never saw them? He never mentioned it?” Ruthie asked.

“No,” Katherine said, her mind spinning. “But he started to act odd. Like he was keeping some kind of secret. He was out of the house a lot and had lame excuses for where he’d been. I think …” Her voice broke off. “We had a son. Austin. He died two years ago. He was six.”

Her hands shook. She held the camera, Gary’s camera, tighter.

She remembered Gary holding her while she wept one night, saying, “I’d do anything to have him back. Sell my soul, make a deal with the Devil, but we aren’t given chances like that, Katherine. It’s not the way the world works.”

But what if he was wrong?

Katherine imagined it, Gary discovering these pages, probably thinking they were pure bullshit at first. But then, as he got more deeply into it and did research on Sara Harrison Shea, maybe he started to wonder,
What if …?

That’s what brought him to Vermont. The idea, the hope, that maybe, just maybe, there was a way to bring Austin back.

Sure enough, the next photos on the camera showed the farmhouse, barn, and fields. Then the woods. Close-ups of a path, of gnarled old apple trees, of rocks jutting up into the sky.

“He was here,” Ruthie said. “That’s the Devil’s Hand. It’s up on the hill behind our house.”

Gary had been here. Had visited this place on the last day of his life. She flipped through the pictures of the rocks quickly.

“Wait,” Candace said. “Go back.”

She arrowed back through.

“There,” Candace said, jabbing her finger at the screen on the back of the camera. “What does that look like to you?”

Katherine stared down. It was a close-up of one of the large finger-shaped rocks that made up the hand formation. Gary had taken the photo in low light, and it was hard to make out what she was seeing.

“There’s something there,” Ruthie said, pointing to what appeared to be a squarish hole just along the left edge of the finger.

“It’s an opening of some kind,” Candace agreed. “A cave, maybe? That map at the bottom of the page, it could be tunnels, right?”

“There’s no cave up there,” Ruthie said, moving closer for a better look. “Not that I ever heard of.”

The next set of four pictures were dark and blurry.

“Jesus, did he go down into it?” Candace said. “Is that why the pictures are so dark?”

“I can’t tell,” Katherine said. “Like I said, with a computer I could play around and enhance them so we could get a better look.”

“We don’t need a computer,” Candace announced. “Our next move is pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

They all looked at her, waiting. She still held the gun, but it was down by her side.

“We’re going into the woods. If there’s some kind of secret door or cave or something back there, we’ve got to check it out. Who knows, maybe that’s where your mother is; if not, maybe we’ll find a clue about where to find her. And if we can find her, there’s a chance she’s still got all the missing pages—not just the ones Tom and I found, but maybe the ones from Gary as well. Then we’ll all get what we want, right? I’ll get the pages, you girls just may find your mom there, and Katherine will find out what Gary did here in West Hall.”

“I don’t think—” Ruthie started to say.

Candace cut her off. “You don’t have a choice. We’re all going.”

“But my sister’s been sick,” Ruthie protested. “She has a fever.”

Candace glanced at Fawn. “She looks fine now. You’re well enough, aren’t you, Fawn? Don’t you want to go up into the woods and see if we can find your mom?”

The little girl gave an enthusiastic nod.

“We’re not leaving anyone behind,” Candace said, looking right at Ruthie.

Katherine knew Candace was right—the answers they were all seeking might well be out there, under those rocks. She thumbed through the last few blurry photos stored on Gary’s camera.