The Winter People (32 page)

“Don’t worry, the tunnel gets wider,” Fawn promised.

“Who’s worried?” Ruthie mumbled, pretty sure her heart was going to seize up at any second. Her elbows hurt from dragging herself along the rough stone.

Suddenly everything went black.

“What happened to the light?” Ruthie called, panic rising.

“I think it died?” Fawn called back. There was the sound of the flashlight being shaken, batteries rattling dully in the plastic case.

It was pitch-black now, darker than anything Ruthie had ever imagined—a darkness that seemed to go on forever.

This is what it feels like to be buried alive
, she thought.

“Never mind, just keep going,” Ruthie called out, trying to make herself sound brave.

Fawn was right, the tunnel did widen; but then it narrowed again. She closed her eyes tight, tried to trick herself into believing that it wouldn’t be dark when she opened them. Ruthie had to crawl on her belly, arms bent, as she used her elbows and toes to propel herself along. The tunnel itself went on for about ten feet at a steep decline after the flashlight went out. Her jacket and shirt rode up, and her stomach was scraped by the rough rock floor of the tunnel.

“Stop,” she said out loud.

“We’re almost there,” Fawn called back, her voice muffled. “I see light.” She sounded much farther away than Ruthie had imagined her.

Ruthie shoved her backpack in front of her, listened to the faint sounds of Fawn scrabbling along. When, at last, she dared to open her eyes, she saw the soft glow of flashlights ahead. A few more feet and Ruthie realized she could move to her hands and knees. A few feet beyond that and she emerged into a large, cozy chamber. Ruthie stood up tentatively, stretching, looking around. She shouldered the backpack and checked to make sure the gun was still in her jacket pocket.

Just don’t think about being underground
, Ruthie told herself.

Fawn held the flashlight out to her. “It works again. I guess I just didn’t have the switch on right. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Ruthie said. “You’re a very brave kid, you know that?” Fawn smiled up at her.

The glow in the chamber hadn’t just come from flashlights; there were oil lamps lit all around the room. And a room it was—there were shelves, a table, a wood-burning cookstove with a pipe leading up into a crevice in the rocky ceiling. A fire was lit in it, crackling and popping and almost making Ruthie forget she was in a cave beneath the Devil’s Hand. There was even a bed, piled high with old quilts, in a jagged alcove to the left.

The place felt strangely familiar.

Ruthie walked over to one of the sets of wooden shelves. There were jugs of water, sacks of flour and sugar, boxes of tea and coffee, tins of sardines and tuna, canned vegetables and soups, a bushel basket of apples.

Ruthie picked up one of the apples. It had no rotten spots.

“The lamps were all lit when I got down here,” Candace said. She held the gun out in front of her, scanning the room with her headlamp. There were three tunnels in addition to the one they had just come down, each leading off in a different direction, each dark.

“Ruthie, look!” Fawn squealed. She was over at the bed, holding a garish purple-and-yellow crocheted poncho.

“It’s Mom’s!” Ruthie said.

Fawn nodded excitedly. “She was wearing it the other night! When she disappeared!”

Ruthie stepped forward to get a better look at the poncho, then
froze when she saw what was sitting up at the head of the bed, beside the pillow.

Her old green stuffed bear—Piney Boy. Ruthie scooped up the bear and held him to her chest; a memory flashed back to her, cloudy and dreamlike. It felt familiar because she’d been down here before, in this room. She’d followed someone here.

She closed her eyes and let the memory take her further.

There was a little girl who lived here. But she wasn’t nice. She’d shown Ruthie something dark and terrible.

Later, her father told her she’d imagined the whole thing.

She looked around the room. It wasn’t possible, was it? How could a little girl be living in a cave under the Devil’s Hand?

“It’s yours, isn’t it?” Fawn asked. “From when you were little? It’s the bear you’re holding in that old picture.”

Ruthie nodded, still holding the bear tight, struggling to remember more from that long-ago day. What had the girl shown her?

“There’s something else,” Fawn said. “Under the bed.” She pointed. Clutching the bear in one hand, her flashlight in the other, Ruthie peered under the bed.

A purple-and-white ski jacket lay on the stone floor. It was torn and covered with brown stains—old blood.

“That’s like the one that missing girl was wearing, isn’t it?” Fawn asked. “Willa Luce?”

Ruthie nodded, turning away.

She thought of what Candace had said earlier, about her parents’ claiming there was a monster in the woods. A monster that killed Tom and Bridget O’Rourke—her birth parents. Where had Ruthie been when they were killed? Had she been witness to whatever happened to them? The very idea of this made her feel sick to her stomach. The cave walls seemed to be moving in closer; the air felt thinner.

“Alice Washburne!” Candace called, her voice echoing, hurting Ruthie’s ears. “I’ve got your children! Show yourself or I’ll hurt them!”

Ruthie set down the green bear, reached into her pocket to find the gun. She flipped the safety lever off and held her breath, waiting.

They listened for a minute. All they heard was the crackling of the fire and a dripping sound from someplace far off.

“I don’t like this,” Fawn said, stepping closer to Ruthie. “I don’t like it down here.”

“Me, neither,” Ruthie said, hand on the gun in her pocket.

Silence.

“Damn it,” Candace barked. She circled the chamber, peering down each passageway with her headlamp. She stuck her head down one and sputtered something Ruthie didn’t catch.

“What’ll we do now?” Ruthie asked, her eye on the gun in Candace’s hand. Surely she was bluffing. She wouldn’t hurt them. She’d keep them alive and unharmed to use as leverage when the time came.

“We’ll have to explore each tunnel, one at a time.”

Please, God, no more narrow tunnels
, Ruthie thought.

“We could split up,” Ruthie suggested. “Or maybe Fawn and I should stay here. In case my mom shows up.”

“No!” Candace spat. “We all go together.” She glanced around the cave, eyes beady and glinting. “Wait a minute. Where’s Katherine?”

Ruthie scanned the room, shone her light down the dark openings of the three tunnels.

“Damn it!” Candace bellowed.

Katherine was gone.

January 31, 1908

Auntie.

I blinked once, twice, three times, yet she still stood in my doorway, an actual flesh-and-blood being. Surely this was no spirit: she had form, substance; snow dripped from her clothes, and her body cast a long shadow behind her.

Gertie had run off as soon as she heard Auntie’s voice outside, probably gone back to the closet to hide.

Shep was by my side, growling low in his throat. Auntie gave him a look, and he slinked off, tail between his legs.

“Are you …” I stammered. “Are you one of them? Have you come back from the dead?”

Perhaps I had gone mad after all.

I still held Martin’s gun in my hands, gripping the stock so tight my fingers turned white. Auntie just glanced at it and laughed. It sounded like wild wind through a dry cornfield.

She was older. Her once raven-colored hair was now steely gray and in wild tangles, tied in clumps with rags and bits of leather. She had feathers and beads and pretty little stones woven into her hair. Her skin was dark brown and wrinkled. She wore a fox pelt draped over her shoulders.

“Would it be easier for you,” Auntie asked, “if I were a sleeper?”

“I …”

“Easier to believe you were right all these years, that I lay dead in the ashes of my home?” Her face grew stormy.

“But how? How did you survive?” I remembered the heat of the fire, the soot that rained down and covered us; how, in the end, there was nothing left but a few charred remains and that old potbelly stove. “I heard the gunshot. I watched your cabin burn to the ground.”

Auntie chuckled bitterly. “Did you think it would be so easy to kill me, Sara?”

I remembered Buckshot, his fur singed, taking off into the woods. Was he following Auntie?

“Kill me and leave my remains to rot in the ashes?”

I took a step back, suddenly frightened. “I tried to stop him,” I said, voice shaking. “I even tried going in after you once the house was in flames, but Father stopped me.”

Auntie moved forward, gave a disappointed shake of the head. “You didn’t try hard enough, Sara.”

“And you’ve been alive all this time?” I asked, disbelieving. “Where have you been?”

“I went home. Back to my people. I tried to leave my past behind, to forget all of you. But, you see, I couldn’t forget. Whenever I got close, all I had to do was look down at my hands.” Auntie removed her gloves, showing hands and fingers thick with white, gnarled scars. “I’ve got another on my belly, too, from your father’s shotgun. The wound got infected. It was a terrible mess.”

Auntie rubbed her stomach with her scarred right hand.

She raised her eyes to meet mine; hers were as black as two bottomless pits. “But sometimes the scars that hurt the worst are the ones buried deep down inside, isn’t that right, my Sara?”

I said nothing, my eyes fixed on her gruesome pale hands.

“I knew that one day I would return. I would return and keep to my word: you would pay. You would pay for what you and your family did to me. Turning your back on me, after all I did for you. I nursed you, brought you up as if you were my own child, and this was how you repaid me, by trying to burn me alive?”

“But it wasn’t me! It was Father. He was mad with grief.”

She smiled a sinister smile. “Madness is always a wonderful excuse, don’t you think? For doing terrible things to other people.” There was a little glint in her dark eyes. “To other people’s children.”

My heart went icy as a terrible realization bore down on me. “How long have you been back in town?” I tried to keep my voice calm.

“Oh, a little while now. Long enough to see your poor family struggle along. Your limping husband, who fights with the land rather than working with it. Your daughter. Your beautiful little daughter. So tiny. So delicate. So like you at her age.”

“Gertie,” I said, voice faltering. “Her name is Gertie.”

Auntie’s mouth twisted into a painful-looking smile. “Oh, I know. We knew each other well, she and I.”

I looked into her eyes, and at that moment, I finally knew the truth.

I took a step back, raised the gun, and aimed it at her chest.

“It wasn’t Martin.
You
killed Gertie.”

She cackled, throwing back her head. “The evidence pointed to Martin, though, did it not? His ring in Gertie’s pocket. The ring of mine he unearthed in the field. I don’t blame you for shooting him. I would have done the same.”

“I didn’t shoot him. It was an accident.”

Auntie laughed, showing pointed teeth stained brown.

“You put the ring there,” I said. “You took it from Martin somehow. It was you who left the notes that were supposed to be from Gertie.”

She smiled a wide and crooked smile. “My bright little Sara. My star.”

I stepped forward, pushing the barrel of the gun right against her chest.

She laughed, shook her head at me as if I were a foolish child once more. A little girl who simply didn’t know any better.

“Would it do any good to kill me now, Sara? Would it help to bring back all that I have taken from you? Your child? Your husband? Your brother and father?”

“You didn’t kill my father,” I said.

“No. He killed himself with drinking. Because he could not live with what he had done to me.”

I gazed into her eyes, so deep and black. Her eyes drew me in and held me, brought me back through time to when I was a little girl and would go down to the creek with her, hand in hand.

You are different from others, Sara. You are like me
.

Maybe
, I thought. Maybe I
am
like Auntie. Maybe I, too, am capable of murder, of revenge. Killing Auntie wouldn’t bring back all that she had taken from me, but it would be justice. I would kill Auntie. I would do it for Gertie. For Martin. For my father and brother.

But I was too late.

In one impossibly quick move, Auntie wrenched the gun from my hands, turned it around, and pointed it at my chest. I had forgotten her quickness and strength.

“Let’s go see if we can find your Gertie, shall we?” she said, as if I had a choice. “There are only hours left before she has to go back into the ground. I want to watch it happen. I want to see your face when the sad little phantom you brought back disappears forever.”