Winterwood

by Shea Ernshaw

  Yet, it was not her fault.

  She had lost the silver locket her true love had given to her, so she went into the woods where all lost things are found. She roamed the forest, kicking away rotted leaves and smooth black stones, in search of it. She slept in the trunks of trees. She wove stonecrop flowers around her wrists. A year later, when she finally emerged, strands of her long raven hair had turned bone white and dirt was clotted under her nails, but there was no locket clutched in her hand.

  For the remainder of her life, Emeline continued to search the old house—inside teacups, behind books, and under the floorboards. Each night she shook out her bedsheets, in case the locket had slipped between the cotton.

  She lived to be an old woman, long white hair to her ankles, trailing her through the garden where she dug up marigolds and vanilla leaf and wild ginger, certain the locket would be found among the roots. Emeline never knew her shadow side, her Walker magic, her nightshade—it eluded her, just like the locket.

  On her deathbed, Emeline Walker clasped the hand of her little sister, Lilly, and said, “Ah, there it is.” And went still.

  How to Unravel a Knotted Mind:

  Toss heated salt water out an upstairs window.

  Clasp hands around a circle of freshly tilled spring soil and spit over your left shoulder.

  Don’t bathe for three nights in a row. On the fourth night, drink a glass of golden turmeric milk, braid your hair tightly down your back, and sleep with no socks.

  NORA

  Music vibrates through the trees—tinny and muffled.

  I follow the sound, the bass thumping through the hard, frozen ground, voices rising in laughter. I’m nearly halfway down the string of boarded-up summer homes, almost to the marina, when I reach the origin: the old Wilkinson place, with its large wraparound porch, thick log walls, and two peaked bay windows overlooking the lake. It’s one of nicest log homes on Jackjaw Lake, and the Wilkinsons only visit twice every summer. They bring their three dogs and five kids and too-loud friends. They have barbecues and parties late into the night, and the adults get drunk on dark red wine and laugh at the same jokes they tell year after year.

  Now, under a cocoon of snow, the house is buzzing again.

  My feet carry me up to the front porch—as if still in a dream—my hands push open the front door that’s been left slightly ajar, and my eyes absorb the sway of boys crowded inside. I shouldn’t be here. But my heart betrays my mind.

  Oliver might be inside.

  And if he is, I don’t know what I’ll say. Maybe I’ll scream and thump my fists against his chest. I’ll tell him he lied; I’ll tell him he killed someone that night and kept a pocket watch hidden in his coat. Or maybe I’ll turn and leave, unable to find the right words. But I need to see his face, the gentle curve of each eye, the kindness I once saw in them, and maybe I’ll know. I’ll really see. A monster. A villain. Or the boy I remember from the trees.

  I clench my hands at my sides and step through the doorway.

  Nearly the whole camp is here. Boys hold wineglasses and champagne flutes filled with dark liquor. To my right, several boys play a game of flip-cup on the dining room table, shouting loudly. Drunk. A fire burns brightly from the massive fireplace to my left, logs haphazardly tossed onto the flames, too close to the salmon-colored living room rug—the edges already singed.

  I slip past a group of boys, and no one seems to notice me. Already too intoxicated. Standing atop the coffee table is a boy wearing a green wool blanket as a cape, shouting about how his dad swore he’d only have to stay at the camp for two months but it’s been six. His eyes glaze over me, but he doesn’t seem to register the girl among an ocean of boys. My feet knock into empty beer cans littered across the floor, and a portable stereo sits on a long table beneath a window, blaring country music from some distant radio station—powered by batteries or maybe a windup crank at the back.

  The boys have broken into the Wilkinsons’ summer home.

  And they’re going to destroy this place.

  The air buzzes against my ears with heat and laughter, and the scent of spilled beer is nauseating. The flickering candlelight throughout the room creates the illusion of human ghosts climbing up the walls. Long spiny arms and legs. Insect people.

  I scan the faces but don’t see Oliver. And maybe he wouldn’t come here, with all these boys from camp, if they really aren’t his friends. Unless he lied about that, too. About everything. A lump lodges itself in my throat and I feel sick, standing among all these strange faces. Boys I don’t know.

  One of them eyes me, a boy in a green shirt with blond hair and a nose ring. He’s standing only a couple feet away, his mouth sagging open, and he looks like he’s trying to speak but his soupy mind can’t form words.

  I shouldn’t have come, I think suddenly. This was a bad idea.

  I start to turn away, to weave back through the crowd, when I see her: Suzy. And my stomach sinks.

  She staggers toward a set of stairs and grips the railing, leaning against it, smiling. She’s drunk. And the same rush of guilt pours through me.

  I bite down on the urge to flee, and instead cross the room toward her, threading through the crush of boys. The boy in the green shirt and nose ring winks at me but still doesn’t speak—his voice lost to the booze. Another boy with freckles, smoking a cigar he surely pilfered from the house, arches his eyebrow at me and says, “Hey, moon girl.” A few others glance my way but don’t say anything. Maybe they’re afraid of what I might really be. That the rumors might be true.

  Suzy’s cheeks are flushed pink when I reach her, and in her hand is a silver beer can. She sloshes a little onto the floor when she sees me, pushing away from the stair railing. “You came,” she says flatly, as if I received an invitation—foil-embossed card stock delivered in the mail, covered in glitter. Please join us for a winter bash at the Wilkinsons’ home. Just let yourself in, because we sure will.

  “You guys shouldn’t be here,” I say. “This is someone else’s house.” It’s not what I intended to say, not at first. I meant to apologize. Or say something about not knowing who to trust, about sleepless nights and finding the watch and that I didn’t mean to say she wasn’t my friend.

  Still, Suzy grins widely—already forgetting our earlier fight. “Who cares,” she answers.

  “The camp counselors are going to find out,” I add. “They’ll realize most of the boys are missing from their cabins.”

  Suzy’s loose, mushy smile doesn’t break, her eyes watering with drunken happiness, and she laughs. “The counselors don’t care what the boys do,” she says, tossing a hand in the air. “It’s not like they can kick them out of camp—we’re all stuck here.”

  Her eyes drift closed and whip open again. She frowns at me, like she just remembered how mad she is, that I’m the last person she wants to talk to.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” I say quickly. “I shouldn’t have said all those things. I’m just—”

  A boy bumps into me, spilling dark liquid from a red cup onto my shoe. “Sorry,” he mutters, glaring at me like it was my fault.

  He staggers away, toward the kitchen, and I turn back to face Suzy. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” I say.

  She raises one sharp, pointed eyebrow, and I realize how tired she still looks, lids wanting to slip closed. “You mean, you’re just trying to figure out if your boyfriend is responsible?”

  I breathe and look away from her, out over the crowd of boys. Someone is singing along to the music and his voice isn’t half bad, if it weren’t for the hiccups punctuating every few lines. “A boy is dead, Suzy,” I say, swiveling back to her. “And someone is responsible.”

  Her mouth goes slack and she leans against the railing again. “Accidents happen,” she says, and she takes a long swig of her beer.

  “What do you mean?” I step closer to her, breathing her alcohol-tinged breath, which is masked only slightly by her floral perfume. But she shakes her head and
turns away, using the railing for balance as she wobbles up the stairs. “Suzy!” I call, but she’s already reached the top and disappeared down a hall.

  Accidents happen. It’s similar to what Rhett said at the bonfire.

  I glance back to the front door, still open from when I came inside. I should leave, go back home, lock the door, and wait for the snow to thaw—for the road to open and for everything to go back to normal.

  But I don’t. I climb the stairs after Suzy. I go deeper into the house.

  Maybe she does know what happened.

  I pass two open doorways, bunk beds lining both rooms. A place for kids to pile into on balmy summer nights.

  Muffled voices carry down the hall. The low chatter of boys talking.

  I pause beside the last door, pressing myself up against the wall, listening.

  “Your girlfriend’s drunk,” someone says from inside the room. Jasper, I think. The boys from the bonfire are here. He sounds far away from the doorway, though, across the room.

  “Shut up, man,” Rhett answers. And I hear Suzy make a sound from her throat, like she’s offended.

  “She shouldn’t be here,” Jasper adds.

  “I’m not his girlfriend,” Suzy snaps finally. “And I can go wherever I want.” She sounds wasted and I can imagine the boys’ faces, sneering at her, rolling their eyes.

  “You’ve told her too much,” Jasper continues. I can hear footsteps and I wonder if he’s moving toward Rhett. A warning or a threat, perhaps. “She just runs and tells everything to that witch friend of hers.”

  “I haven’t told her shit,” Rhett barks.

  There’s more movement from inside. It sounds like someone shoves someone else. They don’t even trust one another, I think. They’re starting to crack, lines being drawn. Secrets wedged among them. They can’t stop talking about it—the fear rooted inside them now.

  “Stop!” Suzy shouts, and she must step between them because everything falls quiet.

  “You guys are only making it worse,” another voice interjects. Lin, probably.

  Someone lets out a deep exhale and then there’s the sound of someone sitting, the depression of springs—probably a bed.

  “We just need to wait it out,” Rhett says, but his voice sounds tight, strangled in his throat. Like maybe he doesn’t believe his own words.

  A lull falls over the room, and I press myself closer to the wall, straining, unsure what’s happening.

  But then someone finally speaks—Lin, the timbre of his voice like strings on a violin stretched too tight. “They’re going to find him eventually.”

  Another long pause, as though everyone is too afraid to break the silence.

  Suzy clears her throat, but it still sounds cracked when she speaks. “You guys know where Max is?”

  There is a low, desperate undertone of grumbles. One of the boys says something I can’t make out, a hush of words like he’s afraid the walls will hear. Or a girl hiding in the hall.

  “It’s only a matter of time until the counselors find him,” Lin continues, maybe in response to what I couldn’t hear. “He’s not hidden that well.”

  This is the thing they’re keeping secret. The thing they’ve avoided. But now Lin has said it out loud.

  My heart begins beating like a drum, thwap thwap thwap, and I press my nails into the wall behind me.

  “They’re not going to find Max,” Rhett answers, his footsteps crossing the room, like he’s moving away from the others, toward a far wall. Maybe he’s looking out a window.

  Max. His body, his corpse, tucked away somewhere.

  Hidden.

  “I can’t get in trouble for this,” Jasper says, his tone an equal measure of fear and threat.

  “None of us can,” Rhett answers.

  Jasper makes a balking sound. “It’s different for me. My dad will kill me if he finds out. This was my last shot, coming here. I can’t…” His words break off.

  “It’s the last shot for all of us,” Lin offers up. The boys who are sent here to the Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys aren’t away on a winter holiday. They aren’t here because it’s a reward or a brief escape from public school and curfews. They’re here because they’ve already screwed up. They’ve already made a mess of their other lives. This is supposed to be the place where they get righted, set back on course. Fixed. But not if a boy winds up dead. And not if they’re to blame.

  “There’s nothing we can do about it now,” Rhett answers, his footsteps crossing the room again. Pacing maybe. “It already happened.”

  Another voice mumbles something so low I can’t make it out. I wish they would talk louder, I wish I could just step into the room without being seen.

  And then their tone changes.

  “I still hear things at night,” Lin says softly, as if he were facing the floor when he says it.

  “That’s what happens when someone drowns,” Jasper snaps, his voice so high it sounds like it might break, as if his mind were fraying along seams. “They fucking haunt you because they’re pissed.”

  Drowned.

  Drowned.

  Drowned.

  Haunt, haunt, haunt.

  My heart is now in my nose, and I can barely breathe. I have to tell my lungs to inhale, to exhale, to not make a sound.

  Max drowned. In the lake? Broke through the ice? My head throbs and the blood pumping through my veins feels too loud, a crush inside my ears. I should leave, slink down the hall before they hear me, find me, discover me spying.

  “Shut up,” Rhett says, and I hold a hand over my mouth, to silence my own breath.

  “I can’t sleep,” Lin argues. “I can’t take it.”

  More unheard words, and then Suzy’s voice rises above the others, her inflection strange—covert. “Nora says she found Oliver in the woods.”

  I feel my eyebrows pinch together—unsure why she’s saying this. Why it matters.

  “She said he was there for the last two weeks, hiding or something.”

  “What?” one of them says, Rhett maybe.

  The music downstairs pauses suddenly, then starts up a second later with a new song. There are shouts from below, someone arguing. A drunken disagreement.

  One of the boys on the other side of the wall says something else I can’t make out, and then I hear the shuffle of feet, the lazy tread of three boys and a girl walking toward the door.

  I waited too long.

  Rhett steps through the doorway, and for a second I think that if I don’t move, maybe they’ll walk right by me, they’ll think I am only a shadow pressed against the wall. Only a ghost. But Rhett jerks and his eyes bore into me.

  “What the fuck!” he exclaims.

  And in the next second, Jasper is shouldering past Rhett and grabbing my arm. “She fucking heard everything we said.” Across Jasper’s left cheek is a bright-red gash, the place where the tree limb sliced him open at the bonfire.

  Rhett squeezes his temples with his hands. “Shit.”

  I yank my arm back, but Jasper grabs me again, harder this time. Fingers pinching my skin. “Don’t touch me!” I shout, my body stiffening, resisting, but he’s too strong and he forces me into the room.

  Moonlight glints through the window onto a bed neatly made with an embroidered patchwork quilt. The room is cold, as if there were a draft, but the window is closed.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Rhett repeats, pacing across the dark room, his voice like shards of glass, slicing me open each time he speaks.

  Suzy stands in the doorway, and I flash my eyes to hers but she won’t look up, her arms crossed over her chest, like a bird with its wings folded in on itself, shielding her eyes from mine.

  But Rhett glares at me like I’m an animal caught in a trap—which is exactly what I am. Trapped. I hold my arms at my sides, rigid as a girl who will bite and claw her way out of here if she has to. A girl with teeth to tear away flesh.

  “What did you hear, moon girl?” Rhett asks, taking a half step closer to me, his
eyes concealed in shadow, as if he’s deciding my fate.

  “Nothing,” I say, my voice defiant.

  “She’s lying,” Jasper snarls, still holding my arm, his tall frame towering over me. “She heard us talking about Max. She’ll tell the cops when the road clears.”

  I squint up at him, a thorn pricking at my temples.

  Rhett rakes a hand through his dusty-blond hair, looking for answers in the dark corners of the room. He shakes his head at me and takes a step back, toward the door.

  “We can’t trust her,” Jasper adds, his gaze now on Rhett.

  My eyes sweep to Suzy again and then to Lin—wearing his big puffy coat with the hood pulled up, even inside—and I wait for one of them to say something, to interject, to tell Jasper to let me go. But neither of them will look my way. They’re afraid of Jasper and Rhett, their eyes sunk to the floor.

  “You’re staying in here,” Rhett says, his pupils like black bottomless holes, “until we figure out what to do with you.”

  I move toward him, but Jasper still has a hold of my arm. “You can’t lock me in here!” I shout.

  Rhett’s shoulders draw back. A cold pallor washed over his face.

  “Rhett,” Suzy says finally, stepping farther into the room. “She doesn’t know anything.”

  But Rhett turns on her, only a few inches from her face. “Do you want to stay in here too?”

  “No,” she answers. “But you can’t do this.”

  “Watch me,” he replies.

  For a moment, Suzy blinks up at him like she might say something else, like she might shove him in the chest and yell for me to run. But then her gaze falls away, not meekly, but in understanding—she knows there’s nothing she can do. She’s outnumbered. My heart sinks. And when Rhett steps back through the doorway, he grabs her by the hand and pulls her with him.

  He’s already made up his mind. And he’s going to leave me in here.

  Jasper releases my arm and slips quickly out into the hall with the others, just before Rhett pulls the door shut with a hard thud.

  The room dips into darkness.

  I run to the door, fumbling for the knob, nails scratching against the grain of the wood. But it’s too late. I pound on the door, I try to yank it open, but the door only bends slightly. They’ve locked it somehow, secured it shut to keep the witch in her cage.