The Winter People (8 page)

This was all, obviously, a big mistake. Their mother would turn up at any moment, and they’d all have a good belly laugh about the idea that she, of all people, would go missing.

Ruthie spent nearly an hour searching the house, yard, and barn, but found no sign of her mother. Though her boots and coat were missing, the truck was still in the barn, keys tucked in the visor. There were no footsteps in the snow (of course, it was entirely possible that there had been and they were now buried).

Ruthie stood in the barn, gazing helplessly around at the broken-down lawn tractor, stack of summer tires, screen doors and windows, sacks of chicken feed. Nothing was out of place. Everything seemed normal.

She closed her eyes, pictured her mother looking at her over the tops of her drugstore reading glasses, her gray hair pulled back in a braid, one of her chunky hand-knit sweaters on. “Part of the trick to finding a lost thing,” her mother once told her, “is discovering all the places it’s not.”

Ruthie smiled. “Okay, then. Let’s find out where you’re not.”

Ruthie walked around to the back of the barn to check on the chickens. They were in a big wooden coop with an enclosed run of wire mesh. She unhitched the gate, walked through, and unlatched the coop.

“Hey, girls,” she whispered, voice low and soothing. “How was your night, huh?” The chickens gave anxious little coos and clucks. Ruthie tossed them cracked corn from the bucket outside, made sure their food and heated water dispensers were full.

“You didn’t happen to see where Mom went, did you?”

More clucking.

“Didn’t think so,” she said, backing out of the coop.

She left the barn and looked out across the yard, into the woods. It had snowed more in the night, covering the yard in a flat moonscape of white.

Ruthie mentally ticked off all the places her mother was not: the house, the yard, the barn, the chicken coop. And she didn’t take the truck.

“Mom!” she called as loud as she could. Ridiculous, really. The snowy landscape seemed to absorb all sound; it felt as if she were yelling into cotton batting.

Ruthie looked across the yard to where the woods began. The idea of her mother traipsing off into the woods in the dark of a winter’s night was absurd—as far as Ruthie knew, her mother
never
set foot in the woods. She had her set routes for chores—paths led to and from the woodpile, the barn, the chicken coop, the compost pile near the vegetable garden—from which she never deviated. Her mother believed in efficiency. Going off the path, exploring, aimless walks—these were wastes of time and energy that could be better spent on keeping warm, producing food.

But still, she might as well rule out all possibilities, however unlikely. She headed back into the barn, grabbed a pair of snowshoes, and strapped them on.

Slowly, reluctantly, she crossed the yard and headed for the woods. Like it or not, she was going to have to do it: pass by the place where she’d found her dad.

O
nce, the whole area north and east of the house and barn had been open farmland, but now it was grown over with poplars, maples, and a stand of white pine. Over the years, the woods had been encroaching on the house and yard, moving closer bit by bit, threatening to overtake their little white farmhouse. The trees were too close together, it was harder to navigate here, the path a tangle of roots and saplings and large rocks poking through the snow to catch her snowshoes. Their land was covered in rocks; it never ceased to amaze Ruthie, the way they would surface each spring in their yard and garden, countless wheelbarrowfuls that they dumped out in the
woods, or piled up on the stone wall that ran along the eastern edge of the yard.

Ruthie had always hated being in the woods and had rarely come out this way, even as a young child. Back then she had been sure that the hillside was full of witches and monsters—an evil enchanted forest straight out of a fairy tale.

It didn’t help that her own parents encouraged her fears, telling her stories of wolves and bears, of bad things that could happen to little girls who got lost in the woods.

“Could I get eaten up?” Ruthie had asked.

“Oh yes,” her mother had said. “There are things in the woods with terrible teeth. And do you know what they’re hungriest for?” she asked with a smile, taking Ruthie’s hand in hers. “Little girls,” she said, gently gobbling at Ruthie’s fingers.

This made Ruthie cry, and her mother pulled her tight.

“Stay in the yard and you’ll be okay,” her mother promised, wiping Ruthie’s tears away.

And hadn’t she gotten lost in the woods once, back when she was very little? She struggled to remember the details. She remembered being someplace dark and cold, seeing something so terrible that she had to look away. Hadn’t she lost something, too, or had something taken? The only thing she was certain of was that her father had found her, carried her home. She remembered being in his arms, her chin resting on the scratchy wool of his coat, as she looked back up at the hill and towering rocks they were moving rapidly away from.

“It was just a bad dream,” her father had said once they were back home, smoothing her hair. Her mother made her a cup of herbal tea that had a floral aroma but a strange medicinal undertaste. They were in her father’s office; it smelled of old books, leather, and damp wool. “It was just a bad dream,” her father repeated. “You’re safe now.”

Snowshoes gliding over the top of the snow, Ruthie crossed the overgrown field behind the barn and found the seldom-used path that led up the hill to the Devil’s Hand. She took a deep breath, stepped into the trees, and began following the narrow path. She was surprised by how easy the path had been to find—for some
reason, the way had been kept clear. The brush and branches were recently trimmed. By whom, though? Surely not Ruthie’s mother.

She carefully scanned the woods on either side of the path for her mother’s orange parka, footprints, any clue at all. There was nothing.

Ruthie moved on, step by step. The path grew steeper. A squirrel chattered a warning from a nearby maple tree. Off in the distance, she heard the drumming of a woodpecker.

It felt crazy, coming out here so early in the morning, hungover, going on less than five hours of sleep. She wanted to turn back, and let herself imagine doing just that: she would go home and find her mother there, safe in their warm kitchen, waiting for Ruthie with a cup of coffee and cinnamon rolls in the oven.

But her mother was not waiting for her at home. She thought of Fawn, imagined her asking, “Did you find her?” and Ruthie knew she had to keep looking. She couldn’t return to Fawn until she’d looked everywhere, even up by the Devil’s Hand.

Ruthie followed the steep path for ten minutes, then came to the abandoned orchard, row after row of apple and pear trees bent and broken, branches tangled together, leaning like old people wearing shawls of snow. The neglected orchard had brambles and skinny poplar trees growing up between the rows where once there had been neat paths. Ruthie’s father had tried, for a time, to revive the orchard—carefully pruning each tree, spraying for bugs and blight, cutting back all the scrawny wild saplings—but the only fruit they ever got was malformed and too bitter to eat. It fell to the ground and lay rotting there, food for the deer or occasional bear who wandered through.

Ruthie stopped to catch her breath and had the sudden sense that she wasn’t alone.

“Mom?” she called, her voice high and strained.

She scanned the trees, looking for any sign of movement.

Snow thudded off the branches of one of the apples trees, making Ruthie jump. Had something else moved, something deep in the shadows? She held her breath, waiting. The stillness made her ears ring. Where had the birds and squirrels gone?

There were no tracks of any sort—not even a snowshoe hare, chickadee, or field mouse. It was as if she was all alone in the world.

R
uthie didn’t often let herself think about what had happened to her father.

A little over two years ago, he had been out cutting firewood and didn’t come back for supper. Ruthie went out to look for him just as it was getting dark.

“Silly old man can’t keep track of the time anymore,” her mother had said. “Doesn’t have the sense to pay attention to his own stomach rumbling, either, evidently.”

It had been a damp fall, and the ground was slick with mud and rotting leaves. She slipped several times on her way up the path, slamming her knees down on the rocks, getting scratched by thorns.

She’d found him just north of the orchard. There was a neat pile of cut wood ten feet away with a saw beside it. He was lying on his side, his ax clasped firmly in his hands. His eyes were open but strangely glassy. His lips were blue.

Ruthie had taken first aid at school, and so she dropped to her knees and began CPR while screaming herself hoarse, hoping her voice would carry all the way down to the house. She pushed and pushed for what felt like hours but may only have been minutes, elbows locked, counting fast under her breath—
one-AND-two-AND-three-AND-four
—like she’d done on the plastic dummy in class. At last, her mother came, then rushed off again to call for an ambulance. Ruthie continued the chest compressions until the West Hall Volunteer Fire Department ambulance crew arrived. Her arms and shoulders were shaking, muscles spent, but still she kept going, until her mother gently pulled her away.

It was when she was on her way back out of the clearing that she noticed it: her father’s boot prints in the mud, impressions of the last steps he would ever take. But there, beside them, was another set of tracks, much smaller.

She asked Fawn about it later. “Did you go up in the woods to see Daddy today?”

Fawn shook her head hard, hugged her doll against her chest.
“Mimi and me don’t go in the woods. Not ever. We don’t want to get eaten.”

Ruthie got a chill now, thinking of her little sister’s words, her mother’s long-ago warnings.

“Mama?” Ruthie’s voice came out squeaky and little-girl-ish. She hurried through the orchard, doing an awkward shuffle-run in the snowshoes now. The apple and pear trees ended, and Ruthie continued uphill, into the dark forest. The beech, poplar, and maple trees looked more skeletal than ever, bare and coated with fresh snow. She was sure she could feel eyes looking back at her as she climbed up, the trail growing steeper.

Her parents had always warned her about hiking up here alone: too many places to break an ankle. Once, her father had found an old well, way out in the woods, past the Devil’s Hand—a hidden circle of stones that went down so deep he claimed he couldn’t see the bottom. “I dropped in a stone, and I swear I never heard it hit.”

Some said there was a cave where an old witch lived. That was supposed to be where the boy in 1952 had gone in and never come out. When his friends came back later with help, they couldn’t even find the entrance again—just a blank face of rock where the opening had been. When Willa Luce went missing last month, a search party had combed through these woods but found nothing.

Everyone in town had a story about the Devil’s Hand, and though the stories differed in detail, one fact remained the same: it was an evil place, and bad luck to go there. Kids went on dares, sometimes even spent the night, bringing along a few six-packs for liquid courage. Buzz and his friends went up to smoke pot and watch for UFOs.

Ruthie’s skin prickled. She couldn’t shake the feeling she wasn’t alone out here.

“Hello?”

Stupid, she knew, but she moved faster anyway, trying to get the search over with. She’d go up to the rocks, then circle back.

She was out of breath by the time she reached the Devil’s Hand, partly from the effort of the climb, but mostly because she was moving so damn fast—she wanted to get this done.

The huge dark rocks jutted up from the ground as if they’d grown there, sprung up like jagged mutant mushrooms. There were
five stones—the five fingers—jutting up from the earth, leaning back as if the hand were open, waiting to catch something (or someone, she thought). The stones that formed the palm were low and covered with snow, but the taller ones stuck out, looking to Ruthie not like fingers but more like dark, pointed teeth.

My, what big teeth you have
.

All the better to eat you with, my dear
.

Standing in the shadow of the tallest stone—the central finger, which rose nearly twenty feet into the air—she yelled for her mother one more time. “Mom!”

She waited, listening to the sound of her own breath until it seemed so loud it was as if the forest were breathing with her.

Ruthie tightened the straps on her snowshoes and hurried back down to the house, slipping and sliding, falling several times; she moved as quickly as she could, trying to ignore the sense that she was being chased.

D
id she take the truck?” Fawn asked.

Ruthie shook her head. She’d stopped back at the coop after putting the snowshoes away and grabbed some eggs from the nesting boxes. She carefully took them from her pockets and set them on the counter. She was cold, exhausted. Her legs and lungs burned from her snowshoe adventure up the hill.

“Where’s Mom?” Fawn asked, chin quivering, eyes damp and bulging like a frog’s.

“I don’t know,” Ruthie admitted.

“Shouldn’t we call someone?” Fawn asked.

“What, like the police? I’m pretty sure you can’t even report a missing person until they’ve been gone for twenty-four hours. She hasn’t even been gone for twelve hours. And Mom would freak, Fawn. You know that.”

“But … it’s so cold out there. What if she’s hurt?”

“I looked everywhere she could possibly go. There’s just no way Mom’s out there. I promise.”

“So what do we do?” Fawn asked.

“We wait. That’s what she’d want us to do. If she’s not back
by tonight, maybe we call the cops then, I’m not sure.” She ruffled her little sister’s hair and gave her best it’s-going-to-be-okay smile. “We’ll be fine.”

Fawn bit her lip, looked like she was about to start crying. “She wouldn’t leave us.”